One of the headline features of Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate is a new armor upgrade system that overhauls the traditional way of raising your character’s power level. In this guide, we explain how to progress beyond level 200 and make the most of the new material you’ll earn while playing the expansion’s content.
How the new seasonal leveling system works
The Edge of Fate resets everyone’s soft level cap to 200–Bungie basically reduced leveling by a factor of 10 to make the numbers less huge. Up to that point, leveling works essentially the same as always: activities grant new gear at slightly higher power numbers than your current gear. If you want to keep your current gear, you can feed new drops of the same kind to it by paying with Enhancement Cores, and any old Upgrade Modules can be safely dismantled. You can earn Enhancement Cores through dismantling unwanted loot, activity drops, and from vendors.
Once you hit 200, though, a new system comes into play. Exceeding the soft level cap is now temporary–it resets at the end of the currently active season. This means that when the next expansion hits, everyone will be reverted to 200; this was implemented by Bungie out of an effort to finally end the level inflation that has been characteristic of Destiny for its entire lifespan.
You’ll start earning weapons and armor that have a base power level of 200 plus an additional bonus power; these levels will be shaded blue (see screenshot above for an example). These bonus power points add up like normal to your character’s power level, but the gear’s level will also reset at the end of the season.
It becomes harder to find loot at higher power levels after this point, so it benefits your progression to start taking on Legendary, Mythic, and Fabled activities and events that grant a seasonal power bonus.
How to upgrade your current gear past 200
Like the existing infusion system, you can feed higher-leveled weapons to your current gear to push it above 200. This takes a new material introduced in the expansion: Unstable Cores, which you will probably start earning long before you hit the soft cap. Getting a piece of gear up to 200 will take normal Enhancement Cores, but pushing it above the cap will require a number of Unstable Cores.
You can earn this new material via activities on Kepler, dismantling gear with bonus power, and through some Seasonal Hub challenges. Our early impression is that Unstable Cores will be a bit harder to come by than Enhancement Cores, so it might be worth being stingy with your 200+ infusions.
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