When you first start up the game, there is a short tutorial quest line with Shaw Han called A Guardian Rises. Players of Destiny 1 will find this familiar. After that you will be unceremoniously dumped into a small mountain of quests, and you are free to explore. Some will find this overwhelming, others will find it a fun adventure. If you would like a little extra guidance, these can help:

The /r/destiny2 subreddit's new player guide.[docs.google.com]
The official guide from the Bungie website can be found here.[www.bungie.net]

Player vs. player game modes open up once you leave the tutorial, but I do not recommend entering them until you have a confident understanding of how all the abilities, movement, and weapon types work. This game is predominantly player vs. enemy, so if you went in hoping for mostly PvP, this is not be a good fit.

Accessed from the top of your character menu, there is a list of objectives to increase your Guardian Rank. This is how you unlock mods to put on your gear, and walks you through major parts of the game. I recommend doing these.

A Tower NPC with some quests. When looking at the map for a destination, hover over the map icons for NPC names or a description of what you will find there. Each class has three exotic quests from her that introduce subclass effects such as jolt, plus a quest that reviews some past story content.

There is an empty space in your character menu underneath your ghost. This is for the seasonal artifact. It is available free for all players by doing the current season pass intro mission. Once you're done with the tutorial A Guardian Rises, you will automatically be launched into this mission upon starting up the game. You can leave at any time if you wish, and if you do not get automatically launched into it, you can view this mission in your Milestones in the upper left of the destinations tab. Each season has an icon and the game expects you to be able to match the icon to the quest objective. Usually these also give loot for free that is normally paid.

The artifact contains upgrades that you unlock as you gain experience. The champion mods in the first column are most important. As you gain experience, you also gain bonus power levels.

At the end of the season, the artifact, including its bonus power levels and mods, disappears and everyone needs to get a new one.

• Find and clear every lost sector at least once
  
• Find and talk to every NPC at least once
  
• Hover over any new items you get in your inventory (a tab at the top of your character menu)
  
• Complete the quest you get from Ada-1 in the Tower
  
• Complete the Milestones. These are listed in the upper left of the Destinations tab. Each one is the intro to a different campaign, available free. To complete each campaign you will need to buy it, but these missions typically unlock important parts of the game such as the seasonal artifact and weapon crafting system.
  
• Unless you have purchased the current season pass, reach rank 35 in order to receive an exotic gun. If you do not earn this within the season, it goes behind a paywall!
  
• Find at least one gun of each type, and each element. These come in handy for quests and bounties, such as Banshee's.

Here is my guide about everything available in this game for free.

Here is my guide about everything that costs money.

In the upper right of the director, hover over this icon for a timeline of Destiny 2. Click on it and scroll all the way to the left for the beginning, and hover over each icon for a brief text description. These are all events that occurred in this game. If you want to know Destiny 1 story, ancient history prior to the games' setting, or all the various side stories, you must use outside resources such as youtube or the Ishtar Collective[www.ishtar-collective.net] lore compendium.

You can do the beginning of each campaign for free, but to complete them, you will need to buy the corresponding DLC.

• A Guardian Rises (free to play tutorial questline)
  
• Timeline Reflection missions (free to play, start with Cayde's Fate from Ikora)
  
• Shadowkeep
  
• Beyond Light
  
• Witch Queen
  
• Lightfall
  
• Season passes

The power level applicable in gameplay is the average of all your equipped items. When you hover over activities, many of them will list a recommended power level, and it is good to be close-ish to that number. Press and hold E in the character menu to display the power level of your items at a glance.

Absolutely anything will give gear that increases your power level to begin with. Eventually you will hit the 'soft cap,' above which only Powerful Gear and Pinnacle Gear will continue to increase your power level. Each year, the power level caps raise slightly. For more information, including sources of powerful and pinnacle gear, see here. [www.blueberries.gg]

The power level of loot drops is based on the average of all the highest items you could equip, not what you are wearing at the moment, so there is no need to worry about swapping to your highest gear if you are already at a good enough power level for whatever you are doing. Just be sure not to dismantle the highest item for a given slot!

Every season, as you earn xp, the season artifact gives you bonus power levels that are added on top of your equipped gear. This bonus power level is not used when calculating the level of loot drops, but is used for gameplay.

You take less damage and deal more the higher you are relative to the enemies, and vice versa if you are lower. You will be unable to deal damage if you are 100 power levels or more below an enemy.

For the overwhelming majority of activities, the difficulty of enemies is static, meaning power level of enemies does not change based on you or your teammates. If you are too much more powerful than the enemies, you will be scaled down to 50 power levels above the enemies. This ensures that you cannot simply "brute force" your way through activities that are supposed to be difficult, and that groups of friends at drastically different power levels can still play together unimpeded.

In most pvp, power level is disabled. it will state on the activity when you hover over it if power level advantages are enabled or disabled.

This all means that it is not as important as many players assume to have a high power level for the majority of the game. Unless you have your heart set on a certain activity that is at a very high power level, do not stress getting higher power at the expense of fun.

When Destiny 2 came to Steam in fall 2019, the season pass monetization model began. Each season, there is a Season Pass costing 1200 silver that you can buy from the Seasons tab or Store (Eververse) tab in game. This grants access to the seasonal quest line, which will walk you through one or two pve activities, and maybe some side quests. Each season includes the ability to earn a variety of legendary items, exclusive cosmetics, and a title. When you buy the pass, you retroactively get the premium loot for levels in the Seasons tab you already unlocked.

To read more, see the seasons page on the Bungie website.[www.bungie.net]

A "year" in this game starts when a DLC releases. Each year, there are four seasons. At the end of the "year," which is when the next DLC releases, all four season passes get removed. Be aware of this before buying! Season pass content is temporary, DLCs are permanent.

The cosmetics and title are the only exclusive things from season passes. The legendary armor set and weapons may be re-added to the game later down the road, not requiring a season pass to get. Owners of the year's DLC can get the exotics.

Every season, we all need to get a new seasonal artifact from the free to play first mission of the season pass. It is in your best interest to do this as soon as possible. In addition to bonus power levels, some of the artifact mods are necessary for fighting champions, special minibosses that appear in certain places such as, higher difficulty lost sectors and nightfalls.

If an activity has champions, it will say which type on the launch page.

Fallen and Vex can have Overload and Barrier champions.
Cabal and Hive can have Unstoppable and Barrier champions.
Taken and Scorn can have Unstoppable and Overload champions.

• There is a new legendary weapon for ranking up the vanguard, crucible, or gambit. The old one is moved to the Monument to Lost Lights. Every legendary item in the Monument came from here.
  
• Vanguard, crucible and gambit ranks are all set to 0.
  
• Iron banner gets a new armor set and shader. The old ones can randomly drop from Iron Banner matches
  
• Eververse stock will refresh. Any sparrows, ships, and ornaments from this season will only be obtainable if they appear in the bright dust rotation or as random drops from an eververse engram. The total pool of items in eververse engrams is enormous, so the chances of getting any one thing are tiny, especially now that it's possible to get duplicates.
  
• Seasonal challenges all get replaced by new ones. The seasonal challenges necessary for upgrading the season pass vendor stay, and move to the "past challenges" tab.
  
• There will be a different selection of nightfalls and legend lost sectors available to play.

Items you have earned are never robbed out of your inventory. New will not have the opportunity to earn them. Season pass guns may return at some point, possibly several months after first being introduced, but there is no pattern or consistency we can use to guess at when or how.

It's very common to be overwhelmed by the items, especially if you have never played a looter shooter or MMO before.

All blue rarity gear is not worth keeping. Most legendary gear is not worth keeping unless you really like it and use it all the time. The "economy" of this game runs on us dismantling the majority of item drops. As you play and use different items, keep an eye out for legendary items with randomized perk combinations that you like. You can view descriptions of what each perk does on the details page of an item, and you can view more in depth statistics and lists of possible perk combinations on third party sites such as https://www.light.gg/ and Destiny Item Manager[destinyitemmanager.com]. These sites do feature roll ratings and light.gg has loadouts, but these are mostly useless. It is far more important to understand why someone might recommend a particular perk than to simply do what they say, as there is a fair degree of subjectivity in what constitutes a "god roll" perk combination.

You can tell what a good roll might be by thinking of what a gun's weaknesses are. For example, slow reload times mean you would want to look for a perk that increases reload speed. Perks that proc on kill are better on items you use to kill lots of enemies, not items you shoot at bosses multiple times without getting a kill.

My advice:

• Keep the highest power level item per slot. The power level of loot drops is based on highest owned items.
  
• Keep at least one of each weapon type so you can easily do objectives such as Banshee bounties
  
• Keep at least one weapon of each element
  
• Keep one of every exotic armor
  
• Dismantle any blues
  
• Dismantle any items you hate
  
• Dismantle any exotic weapons you don't want to use. You can make a copy from Collections if you change your mind
  
• (Returning player advice) Dismantle all sunset armor
  
• (Returning player advice) Dismantle sunset guns unless you still really want to use them in activities without power level requirements.

• Don't make multiple characters of the same class. Many loot drops are on a per class basis, which means if you do a raid on 2 characters of the same class, only the first one will get loot. All three classes are viable in both pvp and pve; there is no need to worry about shooting yourself in the foot by picking the "wrong" one.
  
  
• Take a moment to explore the user interface. There is not much in the way of an in game tutorial for this, the game simply expects you to look. In particular focus on the director and the character menu. Be sure to look at the tabs at the top of these two screens. Hovering over things frequently brings up more information. To view major objectives, open the director (solar system map) and press E.
  
  
• Public events are a good way to get glimmer fast. Each one has a secret objective that will turn it heroic. The loot isn't groundbreaking, but it is necessary to do heroic public events for some late game side quests, some heroic events are faster than normal events, and you get a significantly larger amount of xp on completion.
  
  
• Bounties and seasonal challenges accessed from the Quests tab are the primary way to get lots of xp. You can often stack multiple ones and complete them at the same time. Zavala's bounties that don't specify "in strikes" can be done anywhere in pve, if you want to stack them with lost sector bounties or destination bounties. Destination bounties can be done in strikes that take place on that destination. Gunsmith bounties can be done anywhere.
  
  
• Do not feel pressured to play pvp if you don't want to. This is a majority pve game, and while pvp can be fun, it is not technically necessary.
  
  
• The glimmer cap is 250k, enhancement prism cap is 50, ascendant shard cap is 30, and exotic cipher cap is 5. Keep an eye out for things that cost these currencies if you find yourself getting close to the cap! Raising the masterwork tier of guns and armor or purchasing raid banners are a good sink for extra currencies.
  
  
• If you want to be in the loop about Destiny related news, keep an eye on the Bungie News page[www.bungie.net]. Every week there's a TWAB (This Week at Bungie) on Thursdays. There may be patch note previews and important information about things coming up.