Destiny 2 The Witch queen guide: Weapon crafting and materials

Weapon crafting is a major new feature in Destiny 2: The Witch Queen. And while the game does go to major lengths to ensure you understand how to craft (called Shape) and change your crafted items (Reshape), there’s a few currencies you’ll have to juggle to fully grasp what’s going on.

In this Destiny 2 guide, we’ll teach you all the various currencies for weapon crafting, how to build them, how to get patterns, and how to build the weapon of your dreams.

Update (Sept. 19): This guide was updated to reflect the simplification of the system seen in the post-Witch Queen seasons.

The currencies

Scientifically speaking, there are a buttload of currencies in Destiny 2: The Witch Queen’s new crafting system — although significantly fewer now that Bungie has cleaned up the system.

Here’s a look at what they do and how to get them:

Glimmer

You’ll need a lot of Glimmer (Destiny 2 for “money”) to craft, but you get this from everything. If you need more, you can trade resources with Master Rahool in the Tower.

Resonant Alloy

Resonant Alloy comes from dismantling Legendary weapons. You’ll usually get one each time you dismantle a purple gun, and you’ll need five to build a new gun from scratch and unlock its Intrinsic perk. If you want to then Reshape the weapon with an Enhanced Intrinsic (basically, more stats), you’ll need 20 Resonant Alloy.

Harmonic Alloy

Harmonic Alloy are like Resonant Alloy but for raid weapons. You’ll get one each time you dismantle a weapon from a raid (you can only hold 50 at once), and you’ll need five to build a new raid gun — just like Resonant Alloy. If you want to craft a lot of raid weapons — especially if you want to give them enhanced perks — it’s best to hold onto as many raid weapons as you can in your Vault once you’ve reached the Harmonic Alloy cap.

Resonant Elements

Resonant Elements are the general crafting currency you’ll use every time you make something new or make changes. You’ll get 300 Resonant Elements every time you complete a Deepsight Resonance weapon (which we’ll get to shortly). If you dismantle a Deepsight Resonance weapon, you’ll only get 100 Resonant Elements.

Note: These do not appear in your inventory. If you want to know how many you have on you, you’ll need to head to The Enclave on Mars and pick up the Relic Tether from the crafting table.

Ascendant Alloy

Ascendant Alloy is a rare and important crafting resource. You’ll need it to craft Exotics, Exotic Catalysts, and Enhanced Traits. You can buy them from Master Rahool once a week, as well as unlock them from Banshee-44’s reputation track, weekly campaign missions for The Witch Queen, high difficulty Wellsprings, and other endgame activities.

Deepsight Resonance weapons

Image: Bungie via Polygon

Deepsight Resonance weapons are a new kind of weapon drop in Destiny 2: The Witch Queen. Or rather, it’s a random new node that can drop on any weapon.

Deepsight Resonance weapons have a red outline around their box, similar to the orange crafted icon on your Shaped weapons. Deepsight weapons function identically to the non-Deepsight version of the same gun. However, they also have quests associated with them. By killing enemies with the weapon, or completing activities with the weapon equipped, you’ll progress the Deepsight Resonance progress bar. Once you’ve reached 100%, you can extract resources from it (which we described above).

Whether a weapon drops normally or with Deepsight Resonance is random. Once you extract the resources, you can continue using the gun normally.

Extracting weapon patterns

Image: Bungie via Polygon

Not every weapon in Destiny 2 can be crafted, and you’ll get many Deepsight Resonance quests for guns that are only randomly rolled. However, you will need to use Deepsight Resonance to unlock weapon patterns (also called blueprints) for the weapons you can craft.

During The Witch Queen, the expansion in which Bungie introduced the feature, only three weapon sets were craftable: Throne World weapons, Season of the Risen weapons, and the Vow of the Disciple raid weapons. In the seasons since, Bungie has added more sets, including those for the reprised King’s Fall raid. But you won’t be able to craft these weapons until you unlock their pattern.

To unlock a pattern for weapon crafting, you’ll need to complete a Deepsight Resonance version of that particular weapon. This actually involves quite a bit of luck, as you’ll need to get the weapon from the raid or whatever activity, and get lucky enough for it to drop with Deepsight Resonance on it.

Some weapons only require you to finish a single Deepsight Resonance weapon, but others can take up to five Deepsight Resonance completions for you to unlock the pattern. You can check which weapons you can craft, as well as how many Deepsight Resonance completions you need to unlock it, in the Patterns and Catalysts section in your Triumphs menu.

As an example, here’s a step-by-step example of how to unlock the Tarnation pattern in the Throne World:

1. Wait until Tarnation is the featured weapon in the Throne World’s Wellspring activity (every four days)
2. Complete Wellspring until you get a Deepsight Resonance version of Tarnation to drop
3. Run Wellspring again until you get a second Deepsight Resonance Tarnation (Tarnation requires two Deepsight completions to unlock its pattern)
4. Complete both your Deepsight Resonance Tarnations and extract resources from them
5. Go into the Triumph section and claim your Tarnation pattern
6. Go to the Relic and craft your Tarnation
7. Level your Tarnation up to unlock more perks for it

Crafting

The actual crafting part of Destiny 2’s new weapon crafting system is actually quite simple.

Image: Bungie via Polygon

Approach the Relic on Mars and select the weapon you want to Shape. Pick from your patterns, and then the game will take you into the crafting menu. Here you’ll need to spend Resonant Alloy to pick the Intrinsic perk for your gun. Then you can spend Resonant Elements to pick your passive (barrel, magazine, stock, sight, explosion) and active perks.

Once you’re done, you can select what we’ll call the cash register node, and pay all the actual resources you’ve used up. You can also reset your weapon here if it’s too expensive or you want to make a change.

If you want to change something on your weapon, you can Reshape it later. Here you can spend currencies to buy enhanced perks and intrinsics. To unlock more perk options, use your crafted weapons out in the wild, much like leveling up a Deepsight Resonance weapon. All weapons have all perks available to them by level 20, but there is no weapon level cap. You can level up your favorite toys indefinitely.