#wicked implement exotic mission

[thefirstknife]

The exotic mission is incredible. Please get your exotic fish and dunk them in the HELM and then do the exotic mission. It's best to go in not knowing anything, though the mission is quite difficult gameplay wise. I'd still recommend trying it out on your own and then checking a guide later. Spoilers under:

XIVU. Just. XIVU. We're quite literally tithing her and she's quite literally addressing us directly now. That's not good! And yeah, the Pyramid architecture we've seen last week? That's where we go. It opens up:

And Xivu welcomes us in with some absolutely metal lines:

It's a drowned Pyramid.

The mission is timed once you get in here, you have 10 minutes. It's more than enough when you come prepared but you might have a tough time the first time around:

And the main area is in a full on maze inside of a Pyramid!

And there's a guy in there :) :

Once you kill the guy, you get "the audience" which consists of going to the veiled statue, aka the Woman, and receiving the exotic, which is a scout rifle called Wicked Implement. It looks... certainly interesting. It seems to be made by Xivu, but is modelled with heavy influence of the Lucent Brood aesthetic.

The shiny bits look like shiny "windows" in Savathun's throne world, the little sharp capsules look like capsules for holding the Light in the throne world. The muzzle mimics the "eye" central piece of Savathun's ship. I'm losing my mind. What is going on. The lore is also... something else:

Absolutely not having a great time with Xivu telling us to "become a god of death" as those are the exact words she told Osiris in Immolant. Immolant still directly relevant 3 years later? More likely than you think.

Once you get the weapon, seven Darkness artifacts will appear in the area of the maze, the first one being above the statue:

Shoot them all (there's plenty of time to find them all, just be patient) and then come back to the statue where you will get a "commune" prompt which includes Xivu talking to us directly, again. All of Xivu's lines at the end when you get all artifacts:

Now that I'm reading it again, the fact that she says that her sister's "needle" inscribed something "on this temple" makes me think that Savathun was somehow involved in this weapon and this drowned Pyramid. A "temple built of whispers" but "tithed to war in secret" and "sunken in the deep." As if Savathun was in charge of it but left it for Xivu. First thoughts, maybe completely off the mark but mentioning Savathun's involvement here is so peculiar. We know that Savathun has previously been helpful to Xivu, namely with preparing Torobatl for her invasion.

We still have to find the catalyst which might be something weekly so we probably have to wait. It might give us some extra lines or stuff.

Incredibly good shit here. 10/10 mission and season. Made for me, personally and all Xivu enjoyers. Super interested in this Pyramid and how it relates to Xivu and Savathun. Xivu having a Pyramid would be weird, especially since this one is seemingly defunct and sunken, as well as the implication that it was originally designated to Savathun. Or she at least did something with it. Wild. I'm eating it.

[sercj]

Got a chance to do the story/new exotic mission this morning after work. Spoilers for, well, the story and the new exotic mission ahead.

Story-wise, absolute banger. The exotic mission just being 'ahamkara custody battle' was equal parts silly and fun. Hearing about an ahamkara that wasn't a massive jerk was also interesting (maybe riven's clutch can be raised to be nice wish dragons instead of mean ones?).

ALSO the art/animations of riven and her mate (whose name i can't remember but starts with a T) were SO CUTE. absolutely adorable together. It's a shame oryx and savathuun took riven for such a ride and destroyed everything she cared about.

Riven's mate sacrificing themselves to protect the clutch until we could take over and keep it safe was really sweet too. And uncovering all this does seem to have given riven some closure, so maybe we'll see her be less abrasive from here on out.

Now, *mechanically*...the exotic mission was kind of a massive pain. Part of that might be because I was doing it solo (since my d2 friends all stopped playing the game long ago), but also the mechanics were just. Kinda bland in general? The encounters were hard almost exclusively because the enemies had a fuckload of HP, and also a lot of the beefiest boss enemies you needed to kill were taken phalanxes, so you also have to shoot around their shields, which made them just so annoying to take down. I also had abysmally poor heavy ammo luck, which didn't help.

The non-combat mechanics were pretty lackluster too. Really cool thematically, getting 'blessed' by both riven and her mate to be able to deal damage is a cool concept, but such a mechanic in all prior content would use the buff to break an immune shield on the enemy. In this mission, you had to have the proper buff to damage them *at all*. And in the final encounter, letting the buff time out basically killed you. This, combined with the tanky enemies, combined with the boss phalanxes and their stupid shields, just meant a lot of running around refreshing the dang buff before chipping away at the damn enemies.

At the very least, the hydra at the end could have it's stupid rotating shields removed. If I had had to fight that thing and it's 7 trillion hp with the shields interrupting every few seconds I would probably still be stuck there. Might try lfging for the mission in the future, I guess? Playing it solo was probably a lot of my issues.

The new exotic is pretty neat though! It's got me running a suspend build again, instead of my armamentarium/grapple build I was using to abuse the banner. Did a plat coil run with it, it's really good vs everything other than big bosses who can't be suspended, which makes sense. Still think wicked implement and lancecap are my fav build in the game right now, though.

[thefirstknife]

How's the difficulty on this season's exotic mission vs last season's? Especially for solo runs?

I think it's a little bit easier if anything then for being shorter. Some people might have an issue with it being timed; you only get 10 minutes and if you don't do it, you go to orbit which means doing the Deep Dive again (though you don't have to do the hard version of the Deep Dive).

Avalon was a lot because it took so long and it could become exhausting especially on the final boss where there were no checkpoints. The whole thing was a lot of stuff to do so I think that was a bit harder. There were also points in that mission where the combat would become quite overwhelming, especially on legend difficulty.

This mission is also overwhelming and this week's modifiers are tough (chill touch which means that if you're touched by any melee ability, you get slowed by stasis + no radar). Next week it might be easier modifiers though! Also since it's only 10 minutes (+ around 10 minutes of Deep Dive), you won't ever lose more than 20 minutes on an attempt. The problem is that the boss has a lot of health and it can seem super demoralising when you run out of time and the boss isn't even half health. I highly recommend running Divinity and machine guns (if you're in a group).

I haven't tried this one solo yet. It might actually be harder in solo because of the health pool of the boss, since you're limited by time. It mostly means that it will take more dps phases which increases the chances of running out of time or getting killed. Both returns you to orbit. I'd recommend running it with at least two people, but if you really don't have anyone, you can give it a go solo and check online for what builds might be helpful for soloing. I think it needs far less overall endurance to solo a shorter mission, even if it takes more attempts, but that will depend on a personal preference. Give it a try for sure.

[thefirstknife]

So the other day I got a broken blade during fishing in the throne world, am I meant to do something with it? I assumed it'd be a weapon crafting thing on Mars but

It's for an exotic from Season of the Deep! You need three pieces of the broken blade (by getting the exotic fish from other locations) which you then deposit in thrall statues in Deep Dive activity. Depositing them will open a secret area in Deep Dive which allows you to start the mission called Whetstone. Here's a full guide to how to start it and where the statues are.

Recommending to do this with a fireteam, as doing it with random people is a hit or miss. Not everyone comes to Deep Dive to do that so. Also you don't have to collect all the fish and blade pieces; you can also just join someone who has them and you can activate the mission as long as at least one person has all the blades. The mission also becomes timed at 10 minutes once you reach the boss. This is Esoterickk doing it solo (impossible for mortals that aren't him). Here's also secret collectibles you can grab when you get the weapon which gives gives you a bunch of voice lines from Xivu Arath at the end. The weapon is a stasis kinetic exotic scout rifle called Wicked Implement.

[thefirstknife]

Big fan of what I read in the thingy about plans for the exotic mission rotator, most of it sounds very solid to me

However

Since the focus seems to be on making the relevant exotic weapon craftable, do you think this makes it less likely we'll get whisper of the worm or zero hour back? Outbreak seems like it wouldnt be broken as a crafted but I cant imagine Whisper as crafted, that feels like a dangerous can of worms.

And also, as it seems unlikely Ada or Black Armory will have a story spotlight again, how would you feel about Niobe Labs getting reworked into an exotic mission, dropping craftable izanagi or le monarque, craftable black armory weapons, and then maybe some of those nifty modified foundry weapons but of the post-witch queen ones.

I thought about that too, specifically the potential to get Zero Hour and Whisper back with craftable Outbreak and Whisper. I really like the idea of craftable exotics with these missions and this idea would be the only real reason to bring back Zero Hour and Whisper. But how viable are they to be craftable is beyond me. I think in some way it might help, especially for Whisper, but on the other, it could make them too powerful, in this case for Outbreak. Balancing that would be incredibly difficult.

I'd like to see those missions returning however! Even if they don't want to make these weapons craftable. I just feel like they won't really bother going through that work if nothing of value can be added. A lot of people say that they want them back, but in reality they would not have much replayability without something to chase. They also might be too frustrating at this point; the Wicked Implement exotic mission being timed was a major point of frustration for a lot of people. But I would 100% enjoy seeing them back, with or without craftable exotics. In a way, it almost makes it more likely because at first it just made no sense to return those missions when the exotics are in the kiosk, but if they're going to be changed in some way, then it makes more sense. It's just on whether or not those two are viable for such a change.

Same thoughts on Ada and Black Armory. I think they did say at one point that they're looking into returning some old weapons, specifically Black Armory and Season of Dawn stuff, but so far we've not heard anything more about it. Your idea would be really cool. Reworking Niobe's Labs into a mission and adding a craftable Black Armory exotic would be really neat. No clue how likely that is to happen though; as of now, I'm thinking not very. But now that we know this stuff with exotic missions is possible, it's a neat possibility.