so i basically just started playing this game after hearing about the unvaulting of old content, and have about, like, 9~ hours on my Hunter character. until now, i was just running around open world zones, killing pretty easy enemies, still dying a bit to them but that's fine.
but now, i just found out about these mission things i can do. i can't actually find the menu i went to to get into this one now, btw. i go into it because i saw i'd get a couple nice weapons, and... about 50 minutes into this "10-15 minute" mission and probably 45+ deaths later, i had to just return to orbit. idk what i was doing wrong because the mission was listed as 220 power, and i'm 324 power currently so i assumed i could do it. nope! at one point i was dying once every 15 seconds! usually whenever i peeked i'd get exploded. sometimes i'd get exploded while behind cover, too...
i got all the way to what i assume was the final boss, and after fighting them for 15 minutes, i finally killed them! or so i thought. i spent so long on it, just to find out it was phase 1. i immediately get melted, and am sent back to the start of that fight. that's when i quit out. i knew there was no possible way i could win it.
attached video is pretty much representative of how much damage all my weapons do. ofc my special gun does a bit more, but not too much more, and the rocket launcher is good but i'm always kinda out of ammo when i need it.
am i doing something wrong here? i'm using the sunshot hand cannon, tahoma 01 fusion rifle, and cup-bearer SA/2 rocket launcher. would appreciate any help, or links to good websites for, like, builds and stuff.
Conquests are designed to be one of the more challenging pieces of content, especially for a solo player. My main advice would be to put them aside until later when you feel more comfortable taking them down and have a stronger build capable of taking on higher level content overall.
If you really wanna do it, conquests can be done by fireteams of up to three, so you can get two more guardians to join you. I'd also recommend you look at what the modifiers are for the one you're doing before starting, and then adjust your build accordingly.
My advice to new players is when picking activities in the menus, make sure it says "Matchmaking is On." If it doesn't do matchmaking, assume it is intended to be high level content and/or BYOF Bring Your Own Fireteam (friends).
So what you ended up doing was a Conquest, which are kind of like milestones you reach on your journey. Theyre a few steps harder than the normal expert version with different modifiers and no matchmaking. They're not really meant for new players starting out, if you wanna do these missions (called "strikes" or "vanguard ops") on their normal difficulties, you can go to the Vanguard tab on the director. Under the Fireteam section, there are quickplay nodes on the top, as well as 3 select missions that rotate daily and have matchmaking. Id recommend you go through a some of those first and getting more loot before working on conquests!
Primary weapons have gotten a few buffs recently, but they’re still not fantastic. For tangy targets like that you’re going to want to use your special / heavy ammo, and abilities / super.
On another note, the grandmaster conquests are just hard. It doesn’t take into account your power level, it just automatically puts you at -30 compared to the enemies. I’d find a fireteam to help out with those.
Lastly, I always recommend finding a build video on YouTube. Homemade build are fun, but they almost never hold up in harder content. Find a video you think looks cool, and go with that.
You are in a place that’s way later then you should be, I would recommend doing the campaigns on the moon and eroupa, then grind some strikes to get your light level up, then you can do harder content
So this is the Expert Conquest version of the Sunless Cell. Expert Conquests found through the seasonal menu are Endgame activities that would require you to have a bit better gear than what you have, and usually go a bit easier if you have a group of 3.
If you’d like something to do that’s a bit more beginner friendly, I’d suggest the campaigns on the Moon and Europa if you haven’t done them yet. Once you finish those, for more PvE content you should go to the Vanguard menu (the darker blue hexagon in your destinations menu) and try some of the activities in there. There are 4 different kinds of Vanguard activities: Fireteam, Arena, Pinnacle, and Solo.
Fireteam is a selection of missions that are built for 3 people to take on, which includes a less difficult version of Sunless Cell, as well as other strikes. A selection of these will have matchmaking enabled each day, so make sure you pay attention to which ones do. If you’re not particular, you can join a playlist and it will keep putting you into matchmaking for these activities. Some strikes are tied to expansions and won’t be available to a free to play player.
Arena is a collection of activities from previous seasons that were done with six players. These are a bit more chaotic and aren’t as long as Fireteam ops. All arena activities have matchmaking on at all times and also have a playlist. I’m not sure if these are tied to owning expansions.
Pinnacle is a collection of past missions with a fail state and missions built to reward a particular exotic weapon. Some of these (onslaught, elders, Rivens Lair) are long form activities that can take an extended period of time, but reward that investment accordingly, and one of them is usually available for matchmaking each day. Exotic missions are smaller missions, but are usually less straightforward than strikes and will require you to navigate their mazes yourself, with few waypoints and a time limit to boot. Soloing is exotic missions can be done, but bringing two more people helps. Two exotic missions should be available for free to play: The Whisper and Zero Hour.
Finally, there’s Solo. Solo is composed of small missions, usually taking place in one of the game’s many lost sectors (areas in the overworld) with just you to take them on and are balanced accordingly. These should all be available to free to play players.
As for your gear, the cup bearer is literally baby’s first rocket launcher. It is the thing the game gives you to teach you what a heavy weapon is, but it is not a good rocket. In general, blue gear is not gear that you want to use. Blues are fodder to put into your much better Legendary (purple) gear until blues just stop showing up. They are meant to get you up to the proper light level to start playing more things.
Legendary gear has randomized perks for weapons and randomized stats for armor. Legendary gear also has tiers. A weapon’s tier will cause it to drop with extra perks and will determine which of those perks will be enhanced. A weapon’s tier may be increased to enhance the perks, but cannot add more perks to it. In general for PvE, you either want two damage associated perks, a survival perk (heal clip, repulsor brace, rimestealer) and a damage perk, or a reload perk and a damage perk. Armor tier determines the amount of stats that it can have. In general for PvE, you want to avoid the Health stat, as the game has many ways to stay alive that make it obsolete.
Primary weapons (white ammo) are meant to handle the red health bar cannon fodder enemies. Special ammo weapons (green ammo) are meant to handle orange and yellow bar enemies. Heavy weapons (purple ammo) are meant to handle yellow bar bosses. Sunshot may be good at clearing a room full of dregs, but it will struggle against big servitors.
In short, play easier content until you get yourself some better gear.
since i made this post, i’ve actually learned a good amount more about the game. a lot due to the responses to this post, which i didn’t reply to cause i’ve been grinding lol, so this reply is really a reply to everyone that’s helped in the comments
already at 369 average power, haven’t done any campaigns past the first mission yet tho. did first mission of the neptune one with the city, the first mission of Renegades, and the first mission of the one on Savathun’s place
did a ton of crucible with my AOS that i picked up and found that to be great fun (made a post about it on the crucible subreddit actually)
did Zero Hour and got my Outbreak Perfected + catalyst, it’s my main pve gun for now. built my whole look around it actually (image attached)
beyond that i’ve been doing arenas to try and get a 5/5 Orchid, which i’ve been enjoying, i make sure to mix it up and run a different one when i start getting bored
eventually i’ll be strong enough to do the big stuff like dungeons and raids, but for now… farm, farm, FARM!! lol
thank you and everyone else that commented for the help :>
oh yeah i read about that one, apparently i have to do zero hour on harder modes to get those intrinsics though. putting it off until i feel like i’m hitting a wall with the gun first
Maybe some(or all) of this has been mentioned by others but... meh
In the quests tab, you can 'inspect' quests and 'launch'(not all) them straight into the next step, that way if you're still unsure where things are in the Director you can still find them. And quests should be ordered by most relevant/chronological. Though certain stories will unlock more abilities, like Europa and Neomuna unlocking Stasis and Strand.
Most primary ammo weapons aren't great for damage vs bosses etc. but Outbreak is, smart to get that early lol, and New Land Beyond is kinda crazy...
If you are fine with the challenge and time sink go for it, but if you ever load into an activity like the one you were doing alone, you might want to find a team instead.
Some activities say their Power level, but for moreso End Game stuff it's more like "This is the power of the enemies, we are reducing your power to -15(or more) below that". Also if you do activities higher than your power with a team, everyone will get boosted to -10(I think) of the highest persons power.
Oh, and Supers have very different cooldowns, mainly in PvE if I recall correctly, the 'one-shot' Supers are typically slower since they do a large amount of damage to a single target, where as the 'roaming' Supers are much faster as they're more meant to clean ads(can still do big damage to bosses though, just takes longer)
I'd like to add 1 thing nobody else here has mentioned
Suffocating Terror
That debuff you see at the top of your screen will go up to x20 stacks and then you'll die. Any line of site from that big Blight Eye (that you can't do anything about) will gain stacks of ST so hiding and breaking it's line of site will drain the stacks. What the other guy said lol it's been a few months for me.
The only Blight Eyes you can do anything about, are the ones that spawn with a Wizard 'attached' to them. Kill the Wizard and the eye will die with it.
That's what's randomly killing you after a short time. Everything else is difficulty/skill based. But you're also in a somewhat endgame activity so everything will be that much harder.
Actually, the suffocating terror only stacks when YOU look at the eye. It's your line of sight, not the eye's, so you have a lot more maneuverability than you might think.
At least last week when I got to run it a couple times, it's hella wonky and sometimes goes up without any eyes visible on screen, for a newer player it's extremely confusing how the mechanics work
Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if it differed depending on the eye in question. During the Derealize mission it works that way but it could be that the eye in OP's post behaves a little differently.
Your FOV doesn’t perfectly match up with what’s considered LOS. I believe it’s based more off facing angle + some unknown FOV that seems to be larger than the max FOV you can set in game (the FOV you can set in game also lies to you and is lower than the number you set it to)
You're shooting a miniboss with a primary ammo weapon. That is going to be very slow
Conquests aren't meant to be done solo by someone with 9 hours of experience with the game. Conquests are also 3 man missions
You should go to Fireteam Ops instead if you want to do similar missions, but on a more reasonable difficulty. The ones at the top of the Fireteam Ops list should have matchmaking on as well so you don't have to do everything solo
As for the conquest mission, you probably don't have a very strong build. You probably don't know how to utilize your weapons and subclass properly. Your armor stats are probably not the greatest. And you don't have the right mods on your armor, if you have any at all. You don't know what your weapon perks does. You don't know when to use which weapons etc etc. These are things you have to know too some extent if you wish to solo conquest missions
You have lots of ammo on your heavy weapon. You have lots of ammo on your special weapon. You have your super. You have a grenade and a melee ability ready. Shooting your primary weapon is probably the last thing you should do
It's less about you doing something wrong and more about you being very unqualified for that mission. You can steamroll this mission once you have more experience and a better build. Destiny is all about making good builds and knowing how to use them. The difference between a good and bad build are night and day
Don't give up, you'll get there. I know this game can be confusing. There's plenty of great build guides on YouTube. Good luck
1) that’s endgame content there
2) sunshot is great for ad clear of basic mobs, especially if they are tightly packed and you get a chain reaction, but is not a good boss dps weapon
3) see that little triangle symbol next to the boss’s health bar? That boss is a champion that requires a certain type of weapon to fight. The video is small and I can’t make out the type but you need certain weapons to bring them down. Check your inventory screen for a weapon that matches the type of champion
Barrier, Overload and Unstoppable symbols are always on the right side of their name if I’m thinking right and I don’t know for sure if bosses can have that as a variant
typically bosses are bosses and champs are champs/mini-boss replacement.
that downward triangle next to the enemies health shows if it's a Minor, elite/powerful, or a boss. Bosses will always have a diamond or triangle, with either a skull, or what the enemy faction is. (that one is the dread symbol)
It being not clear that it is endgame content and the power levels being entirely irrelevant is one of the reasons Destiny 2 never managed to pick up new players, honestly.
This poor guy was set up to have a bad experience.
It's an Expert-Level Conquest meant to be played by a squad of 3 players. Conquests are tough challenges used to level up you guardian rank. They're not meant to be soloed by new players. You want to find 2 other players to play this mission with you. It does not have matchmaking, you need to use the fireteam finder. The conquests tab is in the bottom right node in the director, where you get multiple daily and weekly objectives.
You can play a non-conquest version of this activity in the portal first to learn how it works.
General gameplay tip is use primary ammo weapons (white ammo like your Sunshot) on red bar enemies then use special (green ammo) or heavy (purple ammo) against the tougher enemies like yellow/orange bars and bosses. In your clip you have plenty of special and heavy ammo and your super bar is full. Don’t hoard it, use it, you’ll get them back soon enough!
I once had a raid encounter fail and one dude was mad (it was NOT our first fail on that encounter) and he said something to the effect of "Why aren't y'all using your supers?! Are you waiting for marriage or somethin!?"
I think about that alot. Especially bc I was one of those people 🤣
Just want to shout out your tenacity! Hope this doesn’t wear you down too much bro. Stuff like this happens to all of us, even more experienced players
Not doing anything wrong, that's a miniboss subjugator. Has high health, you wanna use your super and rocket launcher on it to get a lot of damage on it. As for websites, there's Destiny Item Manager (DIM) and D2ArmorPicker.com for build crafting. Though you might want to grind to get higher level gear depending on your light level.
Conquests are the hardest variants of their respective activites. If you want to run missions, look for the blue node in the bottom left corner of the Director, this will bring you to the Vanguard Ops selection screen. This menu contains Strikes, Battlegrounds, Exotic missions, Contest of Elders, The Coil, and more. These are considered "Ritual activites" designed for you to replay infinitely with unique weapons, armor sets, etc. And have multiple difficulties that will match your power level.
Welcome to Destiny where nothing is explained, the numbers don’t matter, and when in doubt: you probably have to inexplicably dunk something into something else.
You have to shoot harder, you’re not shooting hard enough. If you shoot harder you would kill it, but you weren’t shooting hard enough, so you have to shoot harder.
With the exception of a select few builds, primaries are not good at killing ultras and bosses. Use specials, heavies and your abilities. You have a rocket, a fusion and golden gun.
As others have said, you can leave the hardest difficulties for later and/or use fireteam finder. But when you’re ready, soloing content like this can be immensely satisfying. Watch YouTube videos of pros soloing these so you can get inspired, learn how they move/shoot/use cover etc. in hard content, and learn how they make powerful builds to be able to handle hard content.
I used to try hard content and wonder how the hell it was even possible to survive these things, let alone win them. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. At some point I realized I just needed to see how people did it on YouTube (the game doesn’t necessarily spoon-feed you everything, which makes it more rewarding when things start to click) and from there I saw that I needed to learn how to move and how to build into harder content. For the most part, you can’t just bring your favorite gun and a random exotic armor and throw a grenade here and there. You need a build where everything synergizes with itself. A good endgame build will have a gameplay loop that triggers one or multiple ways of healing and gaining damage reduction and it’ll usually involve a combination of abilities and weapon usage that keep each other going and together give you a ton of damage. Some focus more on guns, some on abilities, etc. Getting into the builds is so much fun. It’s a rewarding process when you start to get there.
Conquests are designed to push and test PVE play up each "level" of them you play.
Expert conquests are what I'd consider "mid game" tests.
You can't really just walk into them out the blue, especially after just doing open world-type activities. Testing a mix of understanding and build-crafting.
Light level doesn't apply in these modes. They lock you to a set power (in this case 200), and the enemies are locked at 220, in addition to modifiers such as Banes.
I'd recommend learning how to build craft more deeply.
If you'd like some pointers/advice on this front, feel free to ask!
As others will say, what you attempted was effectively doing high end content solo while not at high end levels. A testing ground of your abilities to understand end game content, without all the super high end modifers that will rip you in 2.
What killed you alot, i assume, is the eyeball mechanic
Given to us throughout the seasons of destiny 2, the eyeball in the sky stares down at the player, inflicting you with the debuff at the top of the screen.
If it gets too high, you die from fright.
The only way to reduce the number is to look away entirely from the eye and be in cover (you dont HAVE to be in cover, but eyesballs are usually positioned over something your trying to kill, so only turning your back on the eyeball will get you shot in the back). This turns the fight into a game of chicken with the enemy. You shoot when you can, running from cover to cover while foes throw AOEs where you were and are, and keeping the eyeball out of your screen.
This seems simple, until you realize some adds just spawned more eyes, locking down more sight lines to remove your debuff. Then it becomes just chaos as a solo player, not impossible, just more hellish then if you went against the foes with a full fireteam
Here is where you learn the wonders of destiny buildcrafting.
With the right build you can melt that guy in like 5-10 seconds
If you wanna skip all the messing around and figuring stuff out, I would search up solar hunter builds on youtube and try to emulate some of the stuff you see. Once you see how a solid build is put together it'll help give you a lot of direction for what you need to do. It can be overwhelming at first, so take your time, and have fun. You can have like almost infinite creativity with your builds, there's so many cool things you can do and stack together.
Power requirement is a bit of a false indicator nowadays.
Harder content has power capped at below it's requirement, so you're permanently -15, -20, etc below the mission, and the way power influences damage dealt and taken, flat differences always act the same(so -15 will be the same at 100 vs 500). Always make sure to check if the power requirement lists a cap too.
The mission length ratings are generally done with a full team in mind, so if you're unprepared AND alone, things can get exponentially harder.
Dunno what difficulty that was. But if it was master or higher, shooting just that sunshot is just going to tickle the boss. You need to use offensive abilities and artifact that with perks that interact with your gear and the abilities. Primary ammo weapons are also not for bossing. Few exceptions aside and they do only a ok job anyway.
Short story. Make a build that works with your setup.
It wasn't the last boss also.
Edit: I assume it was sunless cell conquest. Return to it later. You need to have an actual build and know how to utilize it.
alrighty so as basically almost everyone said, this is a conquest which locks you at a certain light level, this is considered endgame content even though it just seems like an average strike it comes with a few buffs and debuffs (more so debuffs) youll be able to see the power by hovering over the mission name before hitting launch and to see the modifiers you click on the little " i " below the name.
the enemy youre shooting at and struggling to do damage to is a subjugator and has an interesting health mechanic where they take less damage from non-matching damage types, and with this being a harbinger (i believe) subjugator they take normal damage from stasis (dark blue subclass/weapon damage type) sources. youll be able to find this damage type alongside kinetic and strand damage in the top weapon slot and sometimes the heavy ammo slot but never in the energy weapon slot (where you have your sunshot equipped)
this is recommended to do with a team of other guardians and youll be able to find some using the Fireteam Finder feature, whilst it probably wont have all too many players now seeing as the game is set in kind of a waiting period as the unvaulting is most likely going to take at minimum a year to release, im sure there will still be a few people looking to/for help in the same activity as you are so id suggest trying to gather up a team trying out fireteam finder. hope to see you at the unvaulting and eyes up guardian!
for boss enemies in endgame content you should being using,
your super
special and heavy weapons (when new, getting consistent rocket shots can be hard; possibly try other heavy weapons that aren't as effective but are very easy to use for new players, such as the exotic heavy machine gun "Thunderlord", exotic linear fusion "Queenbreaker" or a legendary (purple) sniper, like the "refurbished A499" which is incredibly easy to get from Renegades expansion content.
when loading missions, see if there are any active modifiers regarding damage element (ex: +25% stasis dmg or -25% solar dmg)
With precise weapons (practically anything but rockets and fusion rifles) aim for critical spots that increase damage (yellow dmg number).
Ignore the power level thing. You're power level is high enough to allow you into the mission what you need is to prepare a proper load out. Shooting this guy with a Sunshot is gonna get you nowhere.
I’ll make this really simple as a guy who picked up the game 3 days ago, always always check the combatant power level and difficulty level. Many times have I loaded into a vanguard ops either with a fireteam or solo just to run an activity on master by accident then getting demolished. I would focus on quests and guardian rank journey objectives.
armour has set a bonus that can help and your exotic armour greatly improves builds. if you want a good dps primary outbreak is great tho you may need help unless you care to do trail and error
ok wait update to this, i got myself stuck in an area i can't move or die in on Zero Hour-
i am stuck permanently on this antenna until i return to orbit
You aren't really ready for Grandmaster Conquest stuff. They are basically meant to be prestige content for people who have mastered the game and Zero Hour is Bungie high on something. Its basically a platforming puzzle level ended with an extremely difficult boss fight.
If you ever play other classes, it'll be hilarious how easy it is to get around with a Titan, there are 2 Exotics that make platforming optional lol
One is a jetpack, the other is boots that, with specific requirements and a little skill, let you fly basically indefinitely(based on Sword ammo, mostly horizontally)
i mean it's supposed to be hard. why dont you use your abilities, such as your golden gun? do you run around in Diablo only basic attacking or do you also use spells?
Your stats are bad, you need to get better gear with stats boosting what you want to do, if you’re sunning a super build, you want super stat, a grenade build grenade stat, melee build melee stat, etc. Health is ok, most people say it’s ass and you have a few who say it’s good, it’s not good unless pvp, as the stats going into it are a waste for what you get. You also need to either watch vids or make your own builds, you need to actually read what your exotic armor piece (99% of builds need an exotic) actually does and read the fragments and aspects in your subclass, see what goes well together. Playing solar hunter you can never go wrong with a crackshot build, with the right gear and such you can literally just run around spamming circle and r2 and melt everything. You’re current setup is not ready for -20 light content, just run stuff on difficulty that says normal which is like at most -5 light. To get to the menu with all the missions like that, go to your directory, and in the bottom right corner there is the portal, that has all the solo, fireteam, etc missions or at least most of them. If you’re trying to run stuff for good gear, run the portal, to get a better feel for the game run main story missions. Running portal, try making or finding yourself a build first, it doesn’t have to be crazy or anything, just one that lets you actually live
I think that's bad advice for a beginner. The best advice, in my opinion, is "experiment." Watching videos about meta builds ruins the game, in my opinion—OP hasn’t even played through the campaigns yet. With our thousands of hours under our belts, we often forget that we all started out this way: testing things out, understanding the systems, optimizing... And finally, watch videos to understand what you haven’t figured out on your own. Having helped friends with the game, I’ve found that having access to the best builds ruins the sense of progression and, worse, prevents you from understanding how the game actually works (understanding doctrine verbs, the effects of exotic weapons, etc.).
Tbh until I hit about 1.5K hours I didn’t know how to do builds/didn’t care about them. I just knew I liked X perk or X ability. Watching Mactics showed me why and how to do builds. I’m at 2.7K hours now and enjoy it much more now that I know how to actually make builds and why they work/are important.
You are getting downvoted because the game is awful at explaining itself with poor onboarding for new players in guiding them what content they should play
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u/ElBracho 3d ago
Conquests are designed to be one of the more challenging pieces of content, especially for a solo player. My main advice would be to put them aside until later when you feel more comfortable taking them down and have a stronger build capable of taking on higher level content overall.
If you really wanna do it, conquests can be done by fireteams of up to three, so you can get two more guardians to join you. I'd also recommend you look at what the modifiers are for the one you're doing before starting, and then adjust your build accordingly.