I am about to head out of town for a bit, meaning I will be without my PlayStation and unable to do Solstice of Heroes in Destiny 2 until I get back. Fortunately, I have all month to do so, but I know that for some players, when you have limited gaming time you have to go really hard in order to try and achieve things before real life gets in the way.
I got my first full legendary Solstice of Heroes set, completing the green-blue-purple upgrade path, about 28 hours after the event launched. Probably 12-14 of those hours were spent playing the game, though I could have done it in less time knowing what I know now.
I’ve already written a grand advice post about Solstice of Heroes, so some of this will repeat that, but I thought it might be helpful to do a step by step rundown of how I got my set in not all that much time, trying to be as “efficient” as I could. This was for the Hunter set, but most of it can be applied to all the sets.
Green Set
Step 1: Public events, Patrols, Orbs
The first thing you want to do is equip a full set of whatever orbs you need on Earth, then head to the EDZ. For Hunter that was solar, so I went Gunslinger/Last Hope/Whisper of the Worm and started burning down heroic public events, doing patrols as I did so. Three for one. Only do kill or compass patrols, not the scanables or boss ones that will take you deep into random parts of the map. Almost everyone is always doing EDZ heroic events, and most of them can be done incredibly quickly with even just a few other people. Yellow bar enemies generate more orbs than normal enemies, so you will be able to quickly rack up earth orbs here. But once your public events and Patrols are done, move on, you can get more orbs in some of the Redux missions on earth, especially Payback, the tank mission.
Step 2: Strike orbs
This was arc for Hunter. You will be too low of a level to do Heroic strikes, so theoretically you have to run Vanguard strikes for this. Don’t do that. Simply load up the normal Nighfall this week and kill the first 6-8 yellow bar goblins with rockets to spawn orbs using a full arc/whatever loadout. This is far, far faster than playing through full Vanguard strikes, and you can complete this in about 20 minutes.
Step 3: Meditation
Do a meditation. They’re super easy. Just do D2 vanilla ones though, not Warmind ones especially which will be too high of a PL. Keep your full Solstice set on for whatever orb generation you’re current going for.
Step 3: Other orbs/Redux missions
The five redux missions should all be done wearing your full Solstice set. I think these missions are PL independent, meaning that it simply doesn’t matter if you increase your PL by only wearing one piece of Solstice armor and the rest of your normal gear. I think it’s worth it just to do these in your full set to generate orbs which will help with challenges but also elemental damage.
A few general tips that apply to both the green and blue versions of these missions (blue versions are way harder, but the same advice applies)
Homecoming – One of the easier missions. The only challenging part is the final “boss” room, especially in the blue version. Save a super and try to instantly melt the Colossus down as soon as he spawns, and if you can get the two yellow bar Incinerators while you’re at it, you beat the entire thing instantly.
Spark – Literally run through this entire mission until you get to the boss. Otherwise it’s just a slog. All three classes should be able to do this fairly easily, and I never tied trying. Once you get to the Servitors, I would advise using Riskrunner to clean out the mini ones when they spawn, as Dreg damage will give you your lightning activation. Clearing supers are also helpful here, and Whisper of the Worm can one shot pretty much any Servitor with precision damage.
Payback – This is the tank mission. Stay far, far back and just lob shots at enemies until everything is dead. Do not get into the fray because you will get heavily damaged and there are no replacement tanks. Know that you can park on tank pads to heal up your tank, but the blue version of the mission won’t heal you much. You can kill the final boss here by lobbing shots about a mile away, so don’t feel like you need to do that part on foot.
1AU – The hardest part of this mission by far is the solar deck part where you get melted in the sunlight as tons of enemies spawn. Run forward out of cover, wait for drop pods to spawn, run backward to safe cover again. Kill everything with Polaris Lance. Repeat. Do not overextend yourself. Always retreat until you can clear. Save a super for the Phalanxes and boss in the final room.
Chosen – Especially in the blue version, you MUST save a clearing super for the dog room, as it will be impossible to get past otherwise until you have a ton of sword ammo or something. For the boss fight, I’d recommend Polaris or Whisper against Ghaul. Hide under the tunnels and clear ads that come down, poking out to shoot him when you can. Never shoot him when he’s in void form. Get heavy ammo when it spawns. Do not overextend yourself. Patience, patience, patience.
For all of these, pick whatever class loadout you need to spawn orbs. If they’re too hard, use whatever weapons you need instead. If they’re still too hard, use one useful armor exotic in a slot that doesn’t need mission completion (Wormhusk Crown for me).
Step 4: Crucible Super Kills
Easily the most hated part of the Green Set objectives, you need 30 Crucible Super kills but only 10 normal kills which totally makes sense (not).
My best piece of advice is to wait until next Tuesday when Mayhem comes back, then this will be incredibly easy. But if you’re trying to do this fast like me, you’ll have to try in regular games. In any quickplay game, you will probably get your super about twice. I would recommend Golden Gun/Arcstrider for Hunter, Hammers for Titan, Dawnblade for Warlock. Do not just run into the middle of a room and pop it. Check your radar, pop it around a corner, then run out to take on enemies. The goal is to get 3 kills per super, which is 6v6, is very doable. If you get 3 kills per super twice per game, that’s five games. That’s of course assuming everything goes right. You will run into counter supers or rockets or kill one person and then find no one else, it happens. But sometimes you may find an entire team clustered together and get lucky.
There’s really no way around this without Mayhem, it’s pretty tough if you’re not an avid PvP player, but just try to set yourself up for success with what I’m telling you here.
Blue Set
Step 5: Elemental Kills
We are moving on to the blue set, which I maintain is easier to complete that the green set, minus the harder redux missions.
There’s no more orb generation needed here, so if you don’t want to wear 4/5ths of your Solstice armor at any given time, you don’t really have to. You will be asked for a ton of elemental kills, however, so you might as well leave most of your armor on in order to achieve multiple objectives at once.
Weapon kills – Just…kill anything with elemental weapons, depending on the type you’re asked. Keep track of when you’re done so you can switch to the next type. Again, you do not have to be generating orbs for this to count. Also remember that some of these will be POWER weapon kills, which I noticed when my solar kills on my Hunter weren’t going up.
Grenade kills – Titan has double/triple grenade charges and Hallowfire Heart for fast grenade recharge. Warlock has that one helmet that recharges your abilities fast on energy kills. Hunter has…nothing, really, for void grenades especially. The best place to farm any of this is probably level 1 Escalation protocol where you will be mobbed by Thrall and can probably kill 8-10 at least with a single grenade.
Melee Kills – You can slog through these manually if you want (I actually did a really fun run in a lost sector with headshot-recharging knives, dodge to recharge and the double knife exotic chest to do this with Hunter), but the most efficient way to complete this is to run around with an elemental sword and hack enemies to death. The best part? Even if the sword is out of ammo, it still counts. You’ll be done in no time using this method.
Step 6: Adventures/Challenges
I don’t have a list of the easiest Adventures in the game, but they’re all pretty easy, frankly. I did all the ones available on Earth and Titan as I think they’re the shortest.
Challenges are similarly easy. I would recommend doing every planet challenge, which will be 18 out of 20 by themselves. It’s usually just killing X enemies or collecting X material or loot a lost sector. You can usually knock a planet out in minutes, then just wait for reset or do two strike/Crucible challenges.
Step 7: Nightfall/Heroic Strikes
Unlike the redux missions, PL does still matter in these, so I would unequip every piece of Solstice gear you have except for the one that requires the completion you’re doing. Then just run these like you normally would. Use the Bungie app to instantly find a team for the Nightfall. The normal one at 270 PL is super easy. Bring arc and void weapons for enemies’ shields this week.
Step 8: Crucible Wins
Ugh. No good way around this one. This may be harder than super kills, depending on your luck. I’d like to say being awesome at PvP is a way to guarantee this, but I’ve lost 6/7 games in a row even being kill leader on my team every time. But then I went to win four in a row, so who knows, really. If you are really bad at PvP you are going to have to be carried. Just do your best not to sprint into death over and over and just pick off players when you can. Find a buddy and stay with them so at least you can help teamshot people. And pray.
Step 9: Redux missions
As I said, the blue ones are way, way harder than the green ones, especially 1AU and Chosen. The advice I gave in Step 3 is what you should be reading here, as it applies to the blue ones especially. This is some of the hardest solo content I’ve done in the game yet, so grab a fireteam if you can. If you can’t? It’s doable, but just be patient.
Step 10: You’re done, minus Masterworking
And voila, you have your armor. You can masterwork it if you want but honestly, I’m not sure it’s worth it considering we’re probably not even going to be using this gear in a month and it doesn’t increase your PL any further. Some of the Masterwork challenges are easy like 5 heroic strikes and 10 boss kills. Others are harder like Prestige Nightfall and the Raid, but easier now that you’re over 385 power, that’s for sure. Legend Crucible rank is a grind, but if you already hit it this season, you just have to play one game wearing the armor and it will count. You only need one masterwork to get the 50 point triumph for this, so I’d probably just do the strike/boss one out of all of them.
Hopefully this was helpful. Best of luck.
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