It’s only the second week of Destiny 2’s Season of the Chosen, and there is already a new Exotic weapon for players to pursue on a hidden Exotic mission. Here’s what you need to find the start of the Presage mission and win Dead Man’s Tale, a new Exotic explorer rifle. There is a lot to discover on the mission, including secrets, curiosities of history and folklore, and we talk about how to find them below.
Your journey begins with this week’s Nightfall: The Ordeal Strike, The Arms Dealer. You will need to press the mission to find the way to start Presage, so you will want to increase your Power level to at least 1230 to make things easier for you. The mission you want to unlock, Presage, also has a recommended energy level of 1230, so keep that in mind before you start.
How to Find the Exotic Presage Mission
Play The Arms Dealer In Nightfall: The Ordeal
You’ll need to start The Arms Dealer, this week’s Nightfall: The Ordeal Strike, but the good news is that you don’t have to finish Strike or play it hard to find what you’re looking for.
Start the mission and enter the first room, a Cabal installation where you will fight a handful of enemies. Normally, you would use Ghost to hack a console and open the door at the end of the room, which leads out. Instead, look for another newly opened door near the table with the big hologram on it. This takes you to another large, deeper corridor in the facility, and the path is full of towers.
Find the distress signal
Make your way down the corridor to the end and you’ll exit outside, but this time, on a couple of airstrips. A Major Cabal Phalanx named Than’grot, Loyal to Caiatl, blocks the path here, as well as a few more towers. Shoot them all to make your way to the airstrips.
You will see a few more towers as you move away from the facility. Jump to the furthest landing platform and look for a large gray box. Interact with him to receive a Cabal distress signal datapad in his inventory. You can check out some of the backstory.
Back to Zavala
At this point, you have completed The Arms Dealer and can finish the Strike normally or just go into orbit. Go back to the Tower and talk to Zavala. After obtaining a summary of the situation, you will 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 loading into Presage, you will find yourself at the entrance to the cargo compartment of the Cabal ship called Glykon. In fact, there is no way to get through these sealed doors. To find the entrance, go down the ramp again and, facing your ship and in space, turn right and jump to the red pipes there. You can follow the pipes and scaffolding outside the ship to find an entrance that will let you in.
It is better to try Presage yourself, rather than following a guide – the mission is full of puzzles and asks you to find your way, and it’s a lot of fun to find out for yourself. If you want to do everything yourself, stop reading now. We’ll leave some more important tips below.
The hidden paths
If you get stuck in any room, you will probably need to shoot to get out. As with other Cabal-based missions, there are many paths that are hidden by ventilation covers through which you can shoot. If you get stuck, look for a vent that could explode. You will also pave many paths by pressing large switches (similar to those found on Leviathan), and you will often hear an audible alarm that marks your location when you get close.
Finally, you will sometimes open doors or blow vent covers to reveal a power conduit. You can shoot them to deactivate electric fields or open doors, although they sometimes recharge, forcing you to destroy them and then run quickly down the path they open. Observe the effect of these conduits, because it is not always obvious.
Use the spores
There is another great mechanic in all of Glykon. You will often encounter bright white barriers that will burn you if you touch them. To pass, you will need to find and shoot small shiny round balls that release spores. Stay close to the orbs when you shoot them to obtain a buff called Eregore Link, allowing you to pass through the white barriers. Spores work only for a short time, so you will usually need to identify your path from the spore orbs to the barrier so that you can do it before time runs out.
Fighting the Locus of Communion
The mission culminates in a boss fight with a great enemy Scorn, reminiscent of The Hangman from the Forsaken expansion. He has a giant maul that hits the ground, sending flames across the floor towards him. The room where you fight him is filled with other despicable enemies as you fight him, so keep moving as best you can to avoid getting bogged down. After doing a little damage to Locus, he will descend to the lower level of the room, where the floor is lit by the ship’s boiler. You will need to activate three control panels on the top level of the room to cool it down enough so that you can continue fighting it.
When you have eliminated the smaller enemies (Ticuu Divination does well in the standard version of the mission), look for the control panels at each end of the room. Behind the panels, you will see a large hole in the floor where you can fall. Do not do this before activating all three refrigerant 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 burn you. The best way to deal with this is to activate the other two panels first so that when you activate the panel in the firing room, it will turn off the flames and prevent burn damage.
After the soda panels are active, go down and fight the Locus of Communion on the lower level. The battle is almost the same as the previous one, except that there is nowhere to hide. If you have problems, jump to the top floor again to avoid Locus’ flaming maul attack. You can make it slide easily by running to one of the other two holes in the floor to fall and stand behind it.
Drop one third of the Locus’ health and the boiler will reactivate, forcing you to go back to the upper floor. Clean up the enemies and repeat the process. After disabling the boiler two more times, you can kill Locus and complete the mission.
Alleging the story of the dead man
After killing Locus of Communion, you’ll find Dead Man’s Tale in another room. The Exotic accumulates damage bonuses as you accumulate precision hits, while also gaining faster reload speed, so hit as many headshots as you can with him for maximum power. As a Hawkmoon, you can relaunch Dead Man’s Tale to gain different advantages in the weapon.
Obtaining Additional Dead Man’s Tale Rolls
After finishing Presage once, you will have access to the mission on the Director. Repeating the mission gives you a pinnacle drop. As far as we can tell, having performed the mission several times now, you can get a new test of Dead Man’s Tale on account per week. Presage will give you three Pinnacle drops per week, one per character, but only your first mission run a week will give you a new Dead Man’s Tale. Performing the mission on alternate characters gives you random items at the Pinnacle level.
Secrets In Presage
After clearing Presage for the first time and earning Dead Man’s Tale Exotic, returning to the mission allows you to unlock additional secrets within the mission. Several of them have additional triumphs linked to finding them. Here’s what we’ve found so far.
Result of a response triumph
To unlock more information about Glykon’s history and the death of his crew, you can find and examine various objects hidden throughout the ship. There are five verifiable objects in total; check out our Figments of an Answer guide for detailed instructions on where to find each one.
Captain’s logbook
We are still checking this out, but our time spent in Presage suggests that you will receive an entry in this storybook as one of the rewards for cleaning up Presage each week, with no extras for repeating the mission on different characters. Our unlocked in our second mission run, so it looks like you need to complete Presage and claim your Dead Man’s Tale before you can win it.
There are 12 lore entries in total, which suggests that you need to run Presage throughout the season to get them all. The first entry also corresponds to a secret chest hidden in the Presage mission, which suggests that you will find a new chest with each new entry you unlock.
Hidden Caches
Scattered throughout Glykon are items that look like datapads on other missions. None of the datapads are interactive the first or second time on the mission. We are not sure how it works yet, but it seemed that after gaining an entry in the Captain’s Diary, the datapad mentioned in it became accessible on the mission. This suggests that you will be able to unlock a cache per week per account.
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