Destiny 2‘s next seasonal celebration, the Halloween-themed Festival of the Lost, will offer new ways to get some highly sought-after rewards. The annual event is bringing a means to get its best piece of armor, the ability-combining Exotic class item, that allows you to skip the (excellent, but potentially arduous) two-player Dual Destiny mission. The Festival of the Lost will also see the return of Superblack, an all-black cosmetic shader players haven’t been able to get in the game since the launch of the Final Shape expansion.
Bungie laid out the details for how to get both rewards in its latest This Week in Destiny blog post, where it also provided a bunch of information about the Festival of the Lost event, which launches on October 29. During the Festival, players can earn an event-specific currency–candy, because it’s Halloween–that can be spent with Eva, the vendor for holiday events. With 2,500 candy and one of the Festival’s specific gear drops, an Eerie Engram, you can buy an Exotic class item directly from Eva.
Currently, players need to complete Dual Destiny, a two-player story mission, located in the Pale Heart of the Traveler location that was added with The Final Shape. It’s one of Bungie’s best missions, in fact, but some players have struggled with or complained about its requirements. Dual Destiny can’t be completed alone, and because it requires a lot of communication and teamwork in the same way Destiny 2’s raids and dungeons do, the mission doesn’t support matchmaking. Thus, if you don’t have a good teammate with whom you can communicate to complete the mission with, you can’t unlock the Exotic class item.
Buying the class item from Eva gives players a new route around Dual Destiny to get the item, although there are some caveats. First, you still need to own The Final Shape in order to get a class item.
Exotic class items carry two special perks, which are drawn from other Exotic armor pieces, which allows players to combine those abilities to create special new builds. Those perks are assigned randomly, and you can buy as many class items as you want to try to get the combination of perks you’re looking for. However, if you do complete Dual Destiny, you can unlock the ability to “attune” the class items you buy from Eva to get the specific rolls you want. So players who haven’t completed the mission can still buy random Exotic class items from the vendor, but they can only get random rolls, not attuned ones.
Alongside the class items, the Festival of the Lost will also offer an opportunity for players to earn Superblack, possibly the best shader in the game, or at least the most requested. To get it, you’ll need to really lean into the Festival of the Lost, though. The shader is the reward for the Ghost Writer event challenge, which requires you to complete 15 event challenges. Those are the special Triumphs that are part of the Festival’s Event Card, so they’re likely to require a lot of participation in the Festival.
Shaders recolor weapons and armor and usually several different colors and textures based on a specific theme, but Superblack stands apart because it’s the only all-black shader in the game. Superblack was first released in the original Destiny, but it wasn’t a part of Destiny 2 until Into the Light, the event that Bungie released ahead of The Final Shape. If you completed a lengthy list of objectives as part of Into the Light, Superblack was your reward–but when Into the Light ended ahead of The Final Shape’s release, Superblack went with it.
This is the first time Superblack has been back on the menu for players. Unlike with the Exotic class item, though, you can get Superblack as a free-to-play Destiny player. The Festival of the Lost itself is also free.
The Festival of the Lost doesn’t sound like it’s changing too much from previous years, requiring players to take on different haunted Lost Sectors to defeat bosses and earn candy, usually while wearing Festival of the Lost-specific masks. The event is adding seven more masks this year, as well as Arcane Embrace, a shotgun with a new special archetype that fires two shots in quick succession. You can read more about the Festival of the Lost on Bungie’s blog.
