This is only the second week of Destiny 2’s Season of the Chosen, and there’s already a new exotic weapon for players to chase into a hidden exotic quest. Here’s what you need to find the beginning of the Presage mission and earn Dead Man’s Languages, a new exotic reconnaissance rifle. There is a lot to find within the mission, including secrets, story stuff and tradition, and we discussed how to find it all below.
Your journey begins with this week’s Nightfall: The Ordeal Strike, The Arms Dealer. You will need to load the mission to find the way to start Presage, so you will want to hone your power level to at least 1230 to make yourself easier. The mission you want to unlock, Presage, also has a recommended power level of 1230, so keep that in mind before you begin.
How to find the exotic mission
Play The Arms Dealer In Nightfall: The Ordeal
You should start The Arms Dealer, this week’s Nightfall: The Ordeal Strike, but the good news is that you do not have to complete the Strike or play it hard to find what you are looking for.
Start the mission and enter the first room, a Cabal facility where you will fight a handful of enemies. Usually you then use Ghost to hack a console and open the door at the end of the room, leading to the outside. Rather look for another, newly opened door near the table with the large hologram on it. This leads you to another large corridor deeper into the facility, and the aisle is littered with towers.
Find the emergency signal
Blow yourself through the hallway to its end and you will depart outside, but this time after a few landing pillows. A Major Cabal Phalanx named Than’grot, loyal to Caiatl, blocks the road here, as do a few other towers. Shoot through everyone to open the way to the landing pads.
You will see a few more towers as you push away to the facility. Jump out to the farthest landing site and look for a large gray crate. Interact with receiving a Cabal Distress Signal data path in your inventory. You can look at it for a bit of background.
Return to Zavala
At this point you are done with The Arms Dealer and you can finish the Strike normally or just leave for a track. Go back to the tower and talk to Zavala. After having an overview of the situation, unlock a new mission on the director’s Tangled Shore map. Look at the top of the screen for the Presage mission.
Presage exotic mission
When you load in Presage, you find yourself in the entrance of the boot of the Cabal ship called the Glykon. There is actually no way through these sealed bay doors. To find the entrance, go back down the exit, turn right in the direction of your ship and turn right and jump to the red pipes there. You can follow the pipes and scaffolding on the outside of the ship to find an entrance that lets you in.
It’s better to experience Presage yourself, rather than following a guide – the mission is heavy on puzzles and asks you to get through, and it’s a lot of fun to find out for yourself. If you want to go it alone, stop reading now. We give some important tips below.
The hidden roads
If you get stuck in a given room, you’ll probably have to shoot out. As in other Cabal-based missions, there are many paths hidden by ventilation covers through which you can shoot. If you get stuck, look for a vent that you can blow open. You will also open many paths by throwing large switches (similar to those found in the Leviathan), and you will often hear a beep alarm indicating their locations when you get close.
Finally, you sometimes open doors or blow off air vents to reveal a power line. You can shoot it to eliminate electric fields or open doors, though it sometimes recharges, forcing you to destroy it and then run fast through the road. Note what influences these channels, as they are not always obvious.
Use The Spores
There is another great mechanic in the whole of Glykon. Often you will touch glowing white barriers that burn when you touch them. To get through, you need to find small round glowing balls and shoot that release spores. Stand near the balls as you shoot them to get a buff called Eregore Link so you can move through the white barriers. The tracks only work for a short time, so you usually need to identify your path from the track balls to the barrier so you can make it before the timer runs out.
The struggle against the locus of communion
The mission culminates in a boss battle with a large contemptuous enemy reminiscent of The Hangman of the Forsaken expansion. He has a giant meal that he hits on the ground, sending flames across the floor toward you. The room where you fight with him is filled with other contempt enemies while you fight with him, so keep moving as best you can so you do not get stuck. After damaging the Locus a bit, it drops down to the bottom floor of the room, where the floor of the kettle is off the ship. You need to activate three control panels on the upper level of the room to cool it down enough for you to continue fighting.
If you have eliminated the smaller enemies (Ticuu’s Divination performs well in the standard version of the mission), look for the control panels on either side of the room. Behind the panels you see a wide hole in the floor where you can sink. However, do not do this until you have activated all three coolant panels. The third is in the small room in the middle of the top floor, but note that when the boiler is active, this room will burn you too. The best way to deal with this is to activate the other two panels first, so that when you activate the panel in the burning room, it will turn off the flames and save your burns.
After the coolant panels are active, drop off and fight the Locus of Communion on the bottom floor. The battle is about the same as above, except that there is nowhere to hide. If you get in trouble, jump back up to the top floor so you can avoid the Locus’ burning grinding attack. You can give him the slip pretty easily by running to one of the other two holes in the floor to descend and get behind him.
If you switch off a third of the Locus’ health, the boiler will be reactivated, which will force you back to the top floor. Clean up the enemies and repeat the process. After deactivating the boiler twice more, you can kill the Locus and complete the mission.
Claim Dead Man’s Tale
Once you kill the Locus of Communion, you’ll find Dead Man’s Languages in another room. The Exotic builds up bonus damage when you pile up precision hits, while also getting faster reload speeds, so land as many headshots as possible for maximum power. Like Hawkmoon, you can roll Dead Man’s Languages again to get different benefits on the gun.
Additional movies for dead men
Once you have completed Presage, you have access to the director’s mission. If you complete the mission again, you will get a peak. From what we can see, after running the mission several times now, you can get one new Dead Man’s Tale role per account per week. Presage will give you three Pinnacle drops per week, one per character, but only your first time of the mission per week gives you a new Dead Man’s Tale. If you perform the mission on alternate characters, you get random loot at Pinnacle level.
Secrets In Presage
After clearing Presage for the first time and earning the Dead Man’s Tale Exotic, you can unlock additional secrets within the mission by returning to the mission. Several of them have additional Triumphs associated with finding it. Here’s what we’ve found so far.
Figures of an answer triumph
To unlock more information about the story of the Glycon and the crew of the crew, you can find various objects hidden throughout the ship. There are a total of five scannable objects; see the figure of an answer guide for detailed instructions on where to find each.
Captain’s Log Lorebook
We’re still working on it, but we spend our time in Presage receiving an entry in this lorebook as one of the benefits of cleaning up Presage every week, with no extra benefits of repeating the mission on different characters . Ours was unlocked during the second run through the mission, so it seems you need to complete Presage and claim your Dead Man’s Languages first before you can earn it.
There are 12 total entries for the history, which indicates that you have to drive through Presage all season to get them all. The first entry also corresponds to a secret coffin hidden in the Presage mission, indicating that you will find a new coffin with each new entry you unlock.
Hidden cabinet
Across Glykon are items that look like data cards in other missions. None of the data pads can work together on your first or second time. We’re not quite sure yet how it works, but it looked like the data path mentioned in it became accessible in the mission after the Captain’s Log Lorebook entry. This indicates that you can unlock one locker per week per account.
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