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Destiny 2 Missive quest: How to get the Ruinous Effigy exotic weapon

Destiny 2’s Season of Arrivals is a bit of a quiet before the storm. With Beyond Light on the horizon, the game’s summer offering is slim compared to past seasons. Luckily, a new exotic weapon quest just popped into the game, and it’ll keep players occupied for quite some time. Here’s everything you need to know about the new Missive quest, which unlocks the new Ruinous Effigy trace rifle.

Destiny 2 Missive Quest
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Completing the Interference mission

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When you log into the game, head over to the prismatic recaster, located next to the Drifter in the Tower. You’ll get a new exotic quest called Missive. The step tells you to complete a mission called Interference on Io. Sounds straightforward enough.

Well, it’s unfortunately a bit more complicated than it sounds. To unlock the mission, you’ll need to complete the weekly Means to an End quest. That means heading to whichever planet currently has Contact public events active, and running a few to advance the quest. After that, you’ll need to collect Umbral Traces. How you gain them won’t always be the same, so check the quest in your inventory to see what you need to run to obtain these.

Once you’ve collected enough Umbral Traces, the Interference mission will unlock on your director. Head to Io, and you’ll see a blue quest marker in the top left corner of the map. Kill a bunch of enemies, and you’ll eventually have to interact with a branch, which will unlock the next step.

Collect Calcified Light and defeat Savathûn’s Marionettes

Next, you’ll have two checklist items to complete. First, you’ll need to collect Calcified Light fragments. These can be found scattered around Titan, Io, Mars, and Mercury. Head to public areas on those planets and pull out your ghost. The fragments will show on-screen as quest markers. Simply follow those markers and you’ll find all 25.

As for Savathûn’s Marionettes, you can find these enemies wandering around Io and Titan. Look for powerful yellow bar Taken enemies roaming those planets.

If you want a more consistent way of hunting them down, they spawn during the Contact public event. Run rounds of Contact and keep an eye out for on-screen text telling you that Taken disruptors have appeared. Once that text pops up, kill the Taken enemy to spawn the Marionettes. You’ll need to kill 15 of these to complete the step, so you can either grind it out with Contact or hunt them down as you look for Calcified Light fragments.

Feed the branch

You’ll need to feed the branch you found earlier to turn it into the Ruinous Effigy. That’s accomplished by a good old-fashioned Destiny checklist. You’ll need to kill enemies with void damage and chain precision multi-kills until your completion percent for each task hits 100%.

On top of that, you’ll need to complete matches of Gambit or Reckoning runs. To better tackle all three of these at once, equip a void weapon with high precision and jump into one of those activities. The triple-tasking should help this go by faster.

Once this is done, head over to the Umbral Decoder next to the Drifter and you’ll receive Ruinous Effigy. This trace rifle “collapses victims into Void Transmutation spheres.” That’s a fancy way of saying that this gun turns enemies into spheres that you can pick up and attack enemies with. It’s one of the wildest weapons to hit the game in a long time, so make sure to get this before Season of Arrivals ends in September.

Giovanni Colantonio
As Digital Trends' Senior Gaming Editor, Giovanni Colantonio oversees all things video games at Digital Trends. As a veteran…
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