At the time of writing, Season of the Lost is in full swing, and the seasonal exotic quest is for Ager’s Scepter, a unique trace rifle that uses the Stasis element added in Beyond Light. Trace rifles don’t make it into the meta too often, but Ager’s Scepter dovetails well with Stasis builds and is a lot of fun to use in PvE, so it’s worth taking the time to unlock it. To do that, just follow the “Tracing the Stars” questline handed out by Queen Mara Sov, and when you have the exotic, you can look for the Catalyst as a reward drop in Astral Alignment.

Ager’s Scepter is a primary exotic that fires a Stasis-flavored trace rifle beam that does massive sustained single-target damage for as long as you can keep the reticle pointed at your enemy. The great thing with Ager’s Scepter is that final blows generate a slowing burst around the defeated target, amplifying and coalescing with any other Stasis effects that may be proc’d by your build or allies. Unlock and activate the Catalyst, and you can drain Super energy to add bonus damage and further Stasis effects.

One of the trickier exotics to obtain, but well worth the effort. To get hold of Xenophage, you need to start by unlocking the exotic quest. Find your way to the area next to the Pyramid Ship on the Moon, deep beneath the surface, where you’ll find four statues. You need to interact with them in the right order to obtain the quest, which has a lot of complex steps and takes you into the Pit of Heresy dungeon as well. We recommend seeking out a detailed walkthrough, and using a Looking For Game (LFG) website or your regular Destiny 2 clan buddies to help you with sections that need a fireteam.

Once you have Xenophage, you may struggle to look past it for your power weapon slot. This is a Solar-aligned machinegun, but its gimmick is that it fires slow-paced, high-power explosive ammunition, so it feels more like a scout rifle or even a sniper rifle in practice. Well-aimed single shots can wipe out hefty mid-tier enemies with overshields in one go, and holding down fire unleashes a satisfying low-tempo stream of massive damage, perfect for cutting through virtually anything from Strike bosses to Champions. The explosive element works well with the Wrath of Rasputin Warmind Cells mod, too.

This energy-weapon-slot Solar hand cannon was a seasonal reward in days gone by, but now it’s available for a pretty reasonable fee from the Monuments to Lost Lights kiosk in the Tower, and it’s well worth considering if you find yourself grinding a lot of Champion-heavy content.

A solid hand cannon with decent handling in its own right, Eriana’s Vow has the innate ability to pierce Barrier Champion shields, whether or not you have Barrier-related mods, meaning it’s an ideal companion for Nightfalls and other activities where Barrier Champions pop up regularly. We like to keep it in our inventory just in case we need it, and it’s satisfying enough to use that whenever we pull it out, we often keep hold of it for longer than we intended.

Grenade launchers occupy a strange spot in the grand taxonomy of Destiny 2 weapons, with variations appearing in all three weapon slots and using multiple ammo types. This is quite handy whenever there is a grenade launcher-related quest objective since you can load them up in multiple slots, but if we had to pick one to keep around at all times, it would be Witherhoard, currently available from the Monument to Lost Lights kiosk in the Tower.

Witherhoard is a primary-slot exotic grenade launcher whose grenades lay down Taken blight pools that do a surprising amount of damage over time. It’s perfect for battling large groups of popcorn enemies and even mid-tier foes, especially if you can drop a pool at a chokepoint, and anything that dies in the blight counts as a grenade launcher kill. The Taken may be terrible for the galaxy, but without them we wouldn’t have Witherhoard, so let’s keep them.

Getting hold of Telesto is a case of playing the game and hoping for either a random exotic engram drop or for Xur to have it in his weekly inventory, so there’s a touch of Destiny 1 nostalgia about the grind to obtain it, which feels appropriate given that this is a gun brought over from the original game. If you don’t have it, make sure you do Nightfalls and other weekly activities where exotics have a chance to pop, and of course Xur also sells that one engram with the loot table that favors exotics you don’t already own.

Owning and using Telesto feels like being part of a fancy car club: it breaks down all the time but god it’s so beautiful. A gorgeous fusion rifle, it has what sounds like a basic effect: its projectiles attach to things and detonate with a delayed Void blast. But the effect is so pretty and satisfying in action, and super powerful in PvE and PvP. As an added bonus, it was originally programmed into the game in such a complex way that it regularly breaks down and has to be disabled while Bungie rolls it into the shop and rummages around under the hood to fix it.

There are dozens of interesting exotic weapons in Destiny 2, but if you want to focus on a few other interesting ones, we definitely recommend Vex Mythoclast, Anarchy and One Thousand Voices. Anarchy can be had from the Monument to Lost Lights kiosk, although you’ll need lots of Spoils of Conquest obtained from Raid completions to get it, while Vex Mythoclast (Vault of Glass) and One Thousand Voices (The Last Wish) are still exclusive Raid drops.

Written by Tom Bramwell on behalf of GLHF.