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FIELD MANUAL

Welcome to Destiny.
This guide is meant to be a companion, so you can dig a little
deeper into the universe of Destiny. We prepared this book
working alongside Bungie. We asked, and asked, and asked,
and they answered (and then some).
The volume you hold provides advice on every facet of the
game, whether PvE or PvP. We go through every mission
on every planet, we cover all of the foes of humanity you will
encounter, and we examine all the weapons, powers,
and abilities that make up the Classes. If you simply want a
broad overview of the game and its systems, read through
this chapter, the Field Manual. This is also the place to look
for information on each of the three Classes and all of
their abilities.

The Codex contains information about all of the foes you


encounter in the missions across the planets.
The Armory is where to go when youre ready to really dig
into the systems behind Destinys weapons. This guide
shows how every gun in the entire game is built from
scratch, and all of the possible combinations of weapons
you can find out there are discussed.
Finally, the Crucible is where to head for information about
battling and training with your fellow Guardians in PvP.
Enjoy Destiny, explore it, talk about it. And look to the future,
because this is just the beginning

The walkthroughs were written as spoiler-free guided tours


of the solar system and its PvE content, but if you really dont
want to know anything before you see it with your own eyes
for the first time, skip the walkthroughs and the Codex
chapters and come back when youre ready.
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YOUR CHARACTER
In Destiny, you will forge a legend, the tale of your deeds. You will explore the solar
system, finding lost and forgotten secrets.
You are not alone, because other Guardians fight beside you. In the Tower, at the
edge of the City, the Vanguard seeks to reclaim what was lost, to protect the City,
and to push back the Darkness that remains on the planets.
However, before you go anywhere, you must decide who and what you are. Are you a
mighty Titan, the foremost bastions of humanitys defense? Are you a wise Warlock, the
brightest, sharpest among us? Or are you a nimble Hunter, a roamer, a seeker, a trailblazer?
Your Class defines what you can do in Destiny,, the armor you wear, and the abilities you can use.

Races

Your race (and your gender) have no impact on your performance, so choose who you want to be in the
online world of Destiny.

Human

Exo

Awoken

Survivors of the dark ages after the


collapse, the remaining humans are
tough and resilient, determined to
retake the solar system from the
enemies of humanity.

War machines from another age,


the Exos were built in humanitys
image. These synthetic intelligences
are each as individual as the humans
who created them.

Not all of humanity remained on


Earth during the collapse. Some fled out
into deep black space. And something
changed them. Now, many live in the
distant Reef, but others call the Earth
their home again.

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THE TOWER

The Tower is the only home many Guardians ever know.


To the people of the City, it stands as a promise that we can
endure. The merchants and citizens who fill its plazas and halls
are as dedicated to the reclamation of our worlds as the
Guardians who venture into the Darkness beyond.

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A Guardian Rises
Level 1 Story / Cosmodrome, Old Russia, Earth
Enemy Race: Fallen
Rewards: XP Bonus
Mission Unlocked: Restoration

Gateway

TO THE BREACH

START

This is Fallen territory.


We wont survive long out in the open like this.

Objective: Enter the Wall


The adventure begins at the Cosmodrome in Old Russia, as a Ghost wakes a
GuardianYou. This Ghost is your companion for the duration of this journey.
You have been gone for a long time, so it is up to the Ghost to guide you
providing light wherever necessary. Follow the path of wreckage into the wall
ahead, clicking the Left Stick to sprint. As you move into the darkness, your Ghost
lights the way.

Objective: Find a Weapon


Location: The Breach
Stick to the walkway until you can see Fallen in the distance.

Objective: Grab the Rifle


Follow the Ghost around the corner to find your first weapon, a low level auto
rifle. This is placed in your Primary Weapon slot. Fallen swarm the areas ahead,
so proceed with a little more caution.

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A Guardian Rises
Objective: Fight through the Wall
The Level-1 Fallen Dregs are relatively easy kills, but its still
important to keep moving and kill them quickly. Follow the
objective markers around the next corners, as Fallen Dregs
drop into your path. Use your new rifle to mow them down.
Press the Melee button to perform a melee attack on enemies
that get too close. One drops nearly on top of you, creating a
great opportunity to use this move.

Melee Attack
You can take down these Dregs relatively easily with a quick
melee attack. Press the Melee button when youre next to an
enemy to perform a class-specific, close combat move.
Keep this in mind throughout your adventures. As you level
up your Guardian, the melee attack remains very effective
against many foes.

Weapon Types for the Classes


The different types of weapons in Destiny are not specific to
one class or another. Hunters, Titans, and Warlocks can use
any armament they desire. You should base the types of
guns you equip on your play style, your role in a group, how
your specialization and equipment are set up, and the
mission objective.

Trip mines crisscross the corridor around the next corner.


Crouch and move underneath them as more Dregs pop in
ahead. This is a good time to try out your new Special
Weapon. Avoid more trip mines as you weave around the
columns, eliminating the remaining Fallen.

The destroyed wall ahead offers little cover as you dispose of


the Fallen in the next room. A Level-1 Fallen Vandal joins the
fight. He is a bit tougher to take down, but a few rounds from
your weapon will eliminate the creature.

Crouch
The Crouch button puts your character into a lower stance,
allowing you to duck under the trip mines in this corridor. This
position is also good for ducking behind low cover. Press the
button while running to perform a slide maneuver.

Reloading and Dropped Ammo


Press the Reload button to keep your weapon loaded any
time you get an opportunity. Get into the habit of reloading,
and once you have Special and Heavy Weapons, keep them
topped off, too. Enemies often drop ammo when they die.
These ammo packs come in three colors: white fills your
Primary Weapon, Green is Special ammo, and Purple reloads
your Heavy Weapon. Keep an eye out for these lying around,
and dont worry about hogging them, as each player has his
or her own private loot stream.

A chest sits on the right side of the path ahead, just across the
bridge. Collect the loot inside. Chests always give you
Glimmer and, in some cases, include a piece of equipment.
This time, you get your first Special Weapon. The type of
weapon you get can fundamentally change the way you
fight. The Hunters sniper rifle enables you to fight from
far away, while the Warlocks shotgun allows powerful closecombat tactics.

Approach the big, open room ahead cautiously, as several


Vandals and Dregs drop into the arena. You dont need to
conserve your ammo too much, but you can take out each one
with a melee attack or two, depending on your class. Dodge
from side to side to avoid their slow projectiles as you take
down each one. Once the room is clear, exit through the door
on the right.

Incoming
Many of your foes have a grenade ability, so be aware of
incoming explosives. A grenade icon appears onscreen
when one is thrown in your vicinity. Quickly move out of the
area to avoid taking damage.

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THE TOWER
Following the hallway through another door leads back to the outdoors in The Divide. As you step outside, drop ships enter
from the left, dropping Fallen from three Fallen Ships.

Patrol Beacons are


available only during
the Patrol activity.

PE

Public Events frequency:


25-35 minutes

The Divide
TO ROCKETYARD

TO THE BREACH

B
PE

PE

PE
B

TO DOCK 13

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CODEX

Guardian, this chapter is designed to arm you with as much


intelligence as possible about the enemies of humanity. There
are four known hostile races dwelling within the solar system.
Each is a dire threat, but for very different reasons. Fight them
ruthlessly, suppress their strengths, exploit their weaknesses.
Lead your Fireteam to coordinate and conquer on the battlefield.

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The Fallen
We have butchers at our gatesfour-armed and eager for slaughter.
The Fallen are ruthless scavengers.
Brutal and uncaring, they arrived on
their massive Ketches in the wake of
the Collapse to loot and pillage the
devastated worlds.
There are hints of ancient nobility to
the Fallenthe scars of lost grandeur.
The Kells of their scattered Houses
still claim to be royalty, but they leave
only grief and wreckage in their wake.
The Fallen Houses: House of Wolves,
House of Winter, House of Devils,
House of Kings, The Shattered House.

The Fallen are a dangerous race, fast and agile, skilled in combat and supported by
robotic allies. They have stolen and raided the ruins of civilization across the solar
system, and you must deal with them in order to reclaim the lost colonies.

Fallen Weapons
Most Fallen weapons deal Arc damage, with a few exceptions.
The Shrapnel Launcher and the Devil Walker tanks cannon deal Solar damage.
The Servitors blast deals Void damage.

Weak Points
Humanoid Fallen all share vulnerability to headshots.
Shanks have no weak points.
Servitors have a critical point in the eye.

Dreg
The lowest class of Fallen, Dregs fight viciously to prove their worth to their superiors.
Loadout: Shock Pistol, Shock Dagger, and
Shock Grenade

Variants: Shrapnel Launcher or


Dual Shock Daggers

Behavior

Tactics

Dregs are individually weak, though


they retain the speed of all Fallen
combatants, making them tricky targets
when they are on the move.

You can easily dispatch Dregs with basic weapon


fire, grenades, or melee attacks.

Dregs prefer to fight from cover, which


they actively seek out and use against
you. They often use their own Shock
Grenades to flush you out of cover while
they try to pick you off with
Shock Pistols.
If forced into close-range combat, Dregs
retaliate with Shock Daggers. This is one
of their less threatening moves, but
watch out for the Dregs armed with
twin daggers.
You may occasionally encounter Dregs
armed with Shrapnel Launchers. These
foes have no Shock Dagger, and they are
usually only a threat if you get too close
to them.

Dregs are especially useful for triggering melee-based


special abilities because a melee strike can often
dispatch them in a single blow. This instantly
activates any melee power that triggers on kill.
However, if Dregs manage to find cover and
open fire on you, be careful. Both their
accuracy and their rate of fire increase while
they are hunkered down. If they have a
good line of sight on you from their
cover, you must pick them off or flush
them out.
Dreg Shock Grenades range from a
nuisance on lower tiers of difficulty to a
serious threat on higher tiers, particularly if
the Arc Burn Skull is active. While you can
easily avoid just a few grenades, dodging a hail
of them while dealing with other Fallen is a
serious threat.
Use your own grenades and potentially
even a super on higher tiers if you
can take out a cluster of Dregs in a
single shot.
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ARMORY

Welcome to the Armory. This section examines all of the arms


and armor available to outfit your Guardian. The proper
equipment can greatly enhance the power of your Guardian,
and knowing what to look for in a weapon or piece of armor
is important. There is an entire constellation of weapons
available for you to find and earn out there in the solar system,
and this chapter breaks down the core mechanics behind
every weapon you can find in the game.

This chapter also discusses the mods that can appear on


weapons and armor, and it outlines how you can assemble
complementary sets of armor that work best with your
weapon choices and your specific specialization. Over time,
you assemble an arsenal of weapons and a literal locker filled
with armor choices. No weapon or piece of armor is perfectly
suited for every situation in Destiny, so learning what to use
and when to use it is a vital skill for an aspiring Guardian.

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A Quick Word about Balance


Destiny will change over time. This is a simple truth about the online world of Destiny. It is not a static place, so events will come and
go, new content will be added, and old content will be polished. And when it comes to weapons in particular, your deadly tools of
destruction on the battlefield in PvE and PvP conflict, you can expect outliers to be tuned, tweaked, and adjusted.
If a weapon is wildly powerful to the point where other choices dont actually feel like truly viable options, expect it to get toned
down a touch. Likewise, if a weapon you love consistently underperforms, expect it to be bumped up a notch or two. This is,
of course, true across the entire game for all aspects of gameplay, but were mentioning weapons in particular because they are
so critical to the gameplay experience.
When youre playing an FPS, your gun is often the language you use to speak to the game. Speak loudly!

WEAPONS
With a few notable exceptions for those weapons known as
Exotic, the weapons in Destiny are somewhat fixed but
somewhat randomly generated. Two weapons of the same
name can have completely different mods. Weapons with
different names have different basic stats.
However, while the stats and the mods change from weapon to
weapon, all weapons in the game belong to basic templates
called archetypes.

And a Word about Damage


Before you freak out about the possibility of wildly powerful
weapons destroying you in PvP, understand this: every
weapon in the game has a tightly controlled damage range.
The rule of thumb is that weapons with lower fire rates have
higher damage, and vice versa, but overall, all weapons have
carefully tuned damage values.
Player abilities and weapon mods can affect damage,
but in PvE (and PvP where Level Advantages), your level and
your Attack stat are usually the greatest influence on your
damage output, rather than the random mods you can find
on weapons.
In PvP outside matches where Level Advantages are
enabled, level and Attack stats do not affect damage,
so whether you are using a Level 5 Common weapon or a
Level 20 Exotic, you will deal the same damage. In the case
of normal Crucible PvP, temporary damage mods are one
of the few ways you can increase damage on your weapon,
and almost every such mod requires you to earn the
damage bonus.

Essentially, for each different weapon class in the game (from


auto rifles to machineguns), several different archetypes define
how a weapon behaves in broad strokes. It doesnt make
every weapon of that class and archetype exactly the same,
but it does mean that if you enjoy the way a particular
archetype handles, you should look out for more weapons
of that basic template.
These archetypes are not explicitly shown anywhere in the
game, but the name of any given weapon is always a weapon
of a certain archetype. This chapter includes tables showing
the links between weapon names and their base archetypes.
Additionally, you can learn to recognize the ones you most
enjoy using over time, and you can use the charts in this
chapter to aid in spotting archetypes at a glance.
What this means as you hunt for the very best gear in
the game is that you can search for specific auto rifles that
have a fire rate, recoil pattern, and range that feels comfortable
to you.
It is also very likely that two or more of the archetypes for any
given weapon class will suit your personal tastes. You may also
find that you prefer some weapons for PvE and some for PvP.
Keep in mind that while the archetypes define a range of stat
possibilities for a weapon, the combination of the extremes of
those ranges and the random mods that appear on a weapon
can make one weapon handle very differently from another
within the same archetype.
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