Skip to main content

Destiny 2 Missive quest: How to get the Ruinous Effigy exotic weapon

Destiny 2’s Season of Arrivals is a bit of a quiet before the storm. With Beyond Light on the horizon, the game’s summer offering is slim compared to past seasons. Luckily, a new exotic weapon quest just popped into the game, and it’ll keep players occupied for quite some time. Here’s everything you need to know about the new Missive quest, which unlocks the new Ruinous Effigy trace rifle.

Destiny 2 Missive Quest
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Completing the Interference mission

Recommended Videos

When you log into the game, head over to the prismatic recaster, located next to the Drifter in the Tower. You’ll get a new exotic quest called Missive. The step tells you to complete a mission called Interference on Io. Sounds straightforward enough.

Well, it’s unfortunately a bit more complicated than it sounds. To unlock the mission, you’ll need to complete the weekly Means to an End quest. That means heading to whichever planet currently has Contact public events active, and running a few to advance the quest. After that, you’ll need to collect Umbral Traces. How you gain them won’t always be the same, so check the quest in your inventory to see what you need to run to obtain these.

Once you’ve collected enough Umbral Traces, the Interference mission will unlock on your director. Head to Io, and you’ll see a blue quest marker in the top left corner of the map. Kill a bunch of enemies, and you’ll eventually have to interact with a branch, which will unlock the next step.

Collect Calcified Light and defeat Savathûn’s Marionettes

Next, you’ll have two checklist items to complete. First, you’ll need to collect Calcified Light fragments. These can be found scattered around Titan, Io, Mars, and Mercury. Head to public areas on those planets and pull out your ghost. The fragments will show on-screen as quest markers. Simply follow those markers and you’ll find all 25.

As for Savathûn’s Marionettes, you can find these enemies wandering around Io and Titan. Look for powerful yellow bar Taken enemies roaming those planets.

If you want a more consistent way of hunting them down, they spawn during the Contact public event. Run rounds of Contact and keep an eye out for on-screen text telling you that Taken disruptors have appeared. Once that text pops up, kill the Taken enemy to spawn the Marionettes. You’ll need to kill 15 of these to complete the step, so you can either grind it out with Contact or hunt them down as you look for Calcified Light fragments.

Feed the branch

You’ll need to feed the branch you found earlier to turn it into the Ruinous Effigy. That’s accomplished by a good old-fashioned Destiny checklist. You’ll need to kill enemies with void damage and chain precision multi-kills until your completion percent for each task hits 100%.

On top of that, you’ll need to complete matches of Gambit or Reckoning runs. To better tackle all three of these at once, equip a void weapon with high precision and jump into one of those activities. The triple-tasking should help this go by faster.

Once this is done, head over to the Umbral Decoder next to the Drifter and you’ll receive Ruinous Effigy. This trace rifle “collapses victims into Void Transmutation spheres.” That’s a fancy way of saying that this gun turns enemies into spheres that you can pick up and attack enemies with. It’s one of the wildest weapons to hit the game in a long time, so make sure to get this before Season of Arrivals ends in September.

Giovanni Colantonio
As Digital Trends' Senior Gaming Editor, Giovanni Colantonio oversees all things video games at Digital Trends. As a veteran…
Destiny 2: The Final Shape’s new subclass combines light and dark
destiny 2 the final shape prismatic subclass 2024 tfs dev preview press kit prism hero art compressed 002

We finally got another look at the Destiny 2: The Final Shape expansion today via a new gameplay preview from Bungie. We learned more about the new Prismatic subclasses and other features coming to the expansion.

With the Prismatic subclass, players will be able to wield Light and Darkness powers. Each has a meter that fills up as players use that kind of attack. When both are filled, players enter a state called Transcendence, where players get a grenade ability unique to each class alongside other buffs.

Read more
What is dragonsplague in Dragon’s Dogma 2 and how is it cured?
A dragon roars in Dragon's Dogma 2.

Dragon's Dogma 2 likes to keep many of its mechanics and systems a secret until you discover them. You will learn quickly that you can't fast travel around the map freely, but there's one mechanic that is far more detrimental to your game. This is called dragonsplague and it is a disease that can't be cured with a simple tonic. In fact, you may not even realize if you have it in your game because it isn't something that affects your character at all; instead, it affects your Pawns. Failing to recognize you have dragonsplague and deal with it in a timely manner can ruin your entire playthrough if you're not careful. To avoid such a catastrophe, here are all the details about this cruel disease.
What is dragonsplague?

Dragonsplague is a special kind of disease that Pawns can contract seemingly by interacting with either Drakes or Dragons. That part isn't fully clear yet, however, we do know that Pawns with dragonsplague can spread the disease to other Pawns. Since Pawns are able to pass between worlds to join other players, you are never fully safe from being infected if you're playing online. Unlike a real sickness, though, dragonsplague actually transfers between Pawns rather than spreads, meaning it won't fully run rampant through the game.

Read more
How long is Dragon’s Dogma 2?
A sphinx in Dragon's Dogma 2.

Open-world RPGs can be anywhere from around a dozen hours long to well over 100. Dragon's Dogma 2 is very unique, even among others in the genre, for not adhering to a lot of traditional design philosophies, such as how it handles fast travel. If anything, that will only add to your total playtime, plus there are all the optional quests to do, Vocations to try out and level up, and more if you're a completionist. If you're wondering if you have the time to fit Dragon's Dogma 2 into your schedule among all the other games releasing, here's how long you can expect this adventure to last.
How long is Dragon's Dogma 2?

For the main quest, Dragon's Dogma 2 can probably be beaten in around 25 hours, give or take. That's assuming you mainline the story as efficiently as possible and don't get stuck on any boss fights being under-leveled. A more realistic playthrough where you explore a bit, do some side content, and maybe go for the true ending will push you into the 30 to 35-hour range, as it did for us.

Read more