Destiny 2 Presage Guide: How To Start The Voice On The Other Side Exotic Quest For Dead Man’s Tale – GameSpot

It's only the second week of Destiny 2's Season of the Chosen, and already there's a new Exotic weapon for players to chase in a hidden Exotic quest. Here's what you need to find the Presage quest and get started earning Dead Man's Tale, a new Exotic scout rifle.

Your journey starts with this week's Nightfall: The Ordeal Strike, The Arms Dealer. You'll need to load into the mission in order to find the path to start Presage, so you'll want to grind your Power level up to at least 1230 to make things easier on yourself. The mission you're looking to unlock, Presage, also has a recommended Power level of 1230, so keep that in mind before you get started.

You'll need to start The Arms Dealer, this week's Nightfall: The Ordeal Strike, but the good news is that you neither have to finish the Strike nor play it at a high difficulty to find what you're looking for.

Start the mission and enter the first room, a Cabal facility where you'll fight a handful of enemies. Usually, you'd then use Ghost to hack a console and open the door at the far end of the room, which leads outside. Instead, look for another, newly opened door, near the table with the big hologram on it. This leads you to another large hallway deeper into the facility, and the path is littered with turrets.

Blast your way through the hallway to its end and you'll exit outside, but this time, onto a pair of landing pads. A Major Cabal Phalanx called Than'grot, Loyal to Caiatl, blocks the path here, as do some more turrets. Shoot through them all to open the path out onto the landing pads.

You'll see a few more turrets as you push away to the facility. Jump out to the furthest landing pad and look for a big gray crate. Interact with it to receive a Cabal Distress Signal datapad in your inventory. You can check it out for a little bit of backstory.

At this point, you're done with The Arms Dealer and you can finish the Strike as normal or just depart for orbit. Head back to the Tower and talk to Zavala. After getting a rundown of the situation, you'll unlock a new mission on the Director's Tangled Shore map. Look toward the top of the screen for the Presage mission.

When you load into Presage, you'll find yourself in the loading bay entrance of the Cabal ship called the Glykon. There's actually no way through these sealed bay doors. To find the entrance, head back down the ramp and, facing toward your ship and out into space, turn right and jump to the red pipes there. You can follow the pipes and scaffolding around the outside of the ship to find an entrance that'll let you get in.

It's better to experience Presage yourself, rather than follow a guide--the mission is heavy on puzzles and asks you to find your way through, and it's a lot of fun to figure out on your own. If you want to go it alone, stop reading now. We'll leave a few more key tips below.

If you get stuck in any given room, you probably need to shoot your way out. As in other Cabal-based missions, there are a lot of pathways that are hidden by ventilation covers that you can shoot through. If you get stuck, look for a vent you can blast open. You'll also open a lot of paths by throwing big switches (similar to those found on the Leviathan), and you'll often hear a beeping alarm that marks their locations when you get nearby.

Finally, you'll sometimes open doors or blow off vent covers to reveal a power conduit. You can shoot these to disable electrical fields or open doors, although they sometimes recharge, forcing you to destroy them and then quickly run through the path they clear. Watch for what these conduits effect, because it's not always obvious.

There's one other major mechanic throughout the Glykon. You'll often run up against glowing white barriers that burn you if you touch them. To get through, you'll need to find and shoot small round glowing balls that release spores. Stand close to the orbs when you shoot them to get a buff called Eregore Link, allowing you to pass through the white barriers. The spores only work for a short time, so you'll usually need to identify your path from the spore orbs to the barrier so you can make it before the timer runs out.

The mission culminates in a boss fight with a big Scorn enemy reminiscent of The Hangman from the Forsaken expansion. He has a giant maul he slams on the ground, sending flames shooting across the floor toward you. The room where you fight him fills with other Scorn enemies as you battle him, so keep moving as best you can so you don't get bogged down. After you do a little damage to the Locus, he'll drop down to the lower level of the room, where the floor is alight from the ship's boiler. You'll need to activate three control panels on the top level of the room in order to cool it down enough that you can continue fighting him.

When you've cleared out the smaller enemies (Ticuu's Divination does well in the standard version of the mission), look for control panels at either end of the room. Behind the panels, you'll see a wide hole in the floor where you can drop down. Don't do so until you've activated all three coolant panels, however. The third is in the small room in the middle of the upper floor, but note that when the boiler is active, this room will also inflict burning on you. The best way to deal with it is to activate the other two panels first so that when you activate the panel in the burning room, it'll turn off the flames and save you from burn damage.

After the coolant panels are active, drop down and fight the Locus of Communion on the lower floor. The battle is pretty much the same as above, except there's nowhere to hide. If you get into trouble, jump up to the top floor again so you can avoid the Locus's burning maul attack. You can give him the slip pretty easily by running to one of the other two holes in the floor to drop down and get behind him.

Knock off a third of the Locus's health and the boiler will re-activate, forcing you back up to the upper floor. Clear out the enemies and repeat the process. After you deactivate the boiler twice more, you'll be clear to kill the Locus and complete the mission.

Once you kill the Locus of Communion, you'll find Dead Man's Tale in another room. The Exotic builds up bonus damage as you stack precision hits, while also gaining faster reload speed, so land as many headshots as you can with it for maximum power. Like Hawkmoon, you can re-roll Dead Man's Tale to get different perks on the gun.

Once you've finished Presage once, you'll have access to the mission on the Director. Re-running the mission gets you a Pinnacle drop. From what we can tell, having run the mission several times now, you can get one new Dead Man's Tale roll per account per week. Presage will give you three Pinnacle drops per week, one per character, but only your first run of the mission per week will give you a new Dead Man's Tale. Running the mission on alternate characters gives you random Pinnacle-level loot.

After you clear Presage for the first time and earn the Dead Man's Tale Exotic, returning to the mission allows you to unlock additional secrets within the mission. Several of them have additional Triumphs tied to finding them. Here's what we've found so far.

To unlock more information about the story of the Glykon and its crew's demise, you can find and scan several objects hidden throughout the ship. There are five scannable objects in total; find them all and finish the mission to unlock the Figments of an Answer Triumph.

Object 1: The Cabal Bodies

Progress through the ship until you make it to the switch that opens the door to the loading ramp where you first spawned in on the Glykon. Throwing the switch unlocks the door that leads into the ship proper. As soon as you go through, you'll be confronted with some weird plantlife. In the center of the room, you'll see several Cabal bodies have been grabbed by the vines and suspended in the air. Scan them for your first hint at what's going on in this place.

Object 2: Scorn Helmets

Continue forward until you hit a room with a pair of big electrical barriers splitting it apart. You'll start on one side of this room and enter a narrower hallway in order to reach a switch. To get to the other side, you'll need to jump a gap, then use spores to run through a sealed Darkness doorway. Before you do that, however, jump across and check to the right of the sealed door to find two Scorn helmets lying on the floor beside the path forward.

Object 3: The Guardian's Jump Ship

After you complete the section with the trash compactor, you'll drop into a fight with some Scorn enemies and see the Locus of Communion for the first time. Keep moving until you enter the ship's hangar for a big fight with two Abomination Majors. Clear the room and head toward the back left corner, where you'll exit out the big hangar opening and go back out into space. Before you do, scan the ship right next to the exit. It belongs to the Guardian you're searching for, and it's outfitted with some Season of Opulence gear.

Object 4: Dark Ether Canisters

Before much longer, you'll hit another room with an electrical barrier, but this one will be above you. You'll unlock a door exposing a power conduit that lets you interrupt the barrier briefly so you can pass through it. On the other side, turn left to find a side room with a switch clearing the path back to the far side of the barrier. To the right of the switch are some canisters with a light blue liquid inside, your fourth piece of evidence.

Object 5: Calus's Message

The fifth and final scannable object appears after your boss fight with the Locus of Communion. Defeat it and leave the boiler room through the newly opened door. Continue until you can blow open a hole in the floor and drop down into a ventilation shaft lit in red. Instead of continuing down the clear path, turn the other way and hop over the low pile of junk to get to an open space on the other side, where you'll find a little hologram of Calus's face. Scan it for one last tidbit of info about what happened aboard the Glykon.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

Read more:
Destiny 2 Presage Guide: How To Start The Voice On The Other Side Exotic Quest For Dead Man's Tale - GameSpot