#Destiny Compendium Exoticorum

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

Bastion

"The final stand is wherever I plant my feet. Not one step more." --Saint-14

Type: Fusion Rifle

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand

Perk: Saint’s Fists - Charge to fire 3 spreads of Kinetic slugs.

Trait: Breakthrough - This weapon fires staggering projectiles. Strong against Unstoppable champions.

Ornaments: Bloodline Memorial

Origin & Description: You ever meet someone so wholesome and pure that if you later discovered they died trying to find you after you stalked off in a sulk and even when they died they were like "I'm not mad at you I'm just disappointed" you would sell your soul to build a time machine to save them?

Let's start again.

Once upon a time before the City Age there was an Exo Guardian named Saint-14. Saint-14 was renowned as the archetypical Titan: fearsome in battle, ferocious in pursuit of the foe, never giving an inch of ground. Paragon of the Void Titan subclass, especially the top-tree Code of the Protector that lets you create the Ward of Dawn defensive bubble, Saint-14's determination and strength of will conjured up barriers of Light that sheltered humans and Guardians from harm. Outside of battle he was kind, compassionate, and modest, happy to do whatever was needed to help. While Iron Lords took wolves and eagles and bears for their sigils, Saint-14 adopted the humble pigeon because it is his favorite bord and if you talk shit about pigeons he will absolutely fight you. He loves his bords. None of this is to say that Saint-14 was perfect. He had all the flaws of the archetypical Titan as well: his relentless pursuit of the eliksni that bordered on fanaticism, his unquestioning loyalty to the Speaker, his need for someone to give him orders. But he saved countless human lives, and each person he saved gave him a ribbon as a token of their gratitude until they covered his armor and enshrouded his ship.

Saint helped people wherever he could, but the plight of humanity in the Dark Ages started to grind him down. That's probably why he agreed to help found the Last Safe City. During the construction of the Wall he also located the last person you’d expect this giant teddybear of a war machine to befriend and then befriended them: famously grouchy Warlock and professional recluse Osiris. Turns out even Osiris’ walls couldn't hold up under the relentless onslaught of cheerful kindness. Saint-14 notoriously decided the Speaker for the Traveler was his father even though Guardians don't have family and it doesn't make sense to begin with, but none of that stopped him. He just decided the Speaker was his dad one day and stuck to it. Similarly he decided he and Osiris were friends and that was it, now they were friends, and then they were more than friends*. Their relationship is detailed in heartbreaking glimpses in the lorebook The Pigeon and the Phoenix. The grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one, you guys. The grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one.

*While there was some ambiguity before & during Season 9, later seasons took a much more romantic tone in their dialogue, and during Season 12 one of Destiny's writers confirmed on Twitter that they are a couple.

Both Saint-14 and Osiris fought in the Battle of Six Fronts, the victory that established the City as a genuine refuge. Now that people believed the City might stick around, Lightbearers started to take oaths of protection and organize themselves into Guardians under the authority of the Vanguard. Saint was appointed the first Titan Vanguard and recommended Osiris as the Warlock commander, a position Saint hoped would finally give his drifting partner some roots in the City and show him he could use his abilities to help others - but Osiris accepted mostly so he could use City resources to research his own projects. Eventually Osiris’ diversion of resources became too glaring - and Osiris himself too divisive - and he was exiled. Osiris’ mature and considered response to this was ”You can't fire me, I quit," and he stalked off to Mercury to disappear into the Infinite Forest. Saint-14 was...not happy. He saw Osiris’ abandonment of his post as both a personal betrayal and an immaturity he thought Osiris had grown out of - this restless, relentless need to pursue his own curiosity at the expense of shouldering any responsibility. Warlocks, amirite?

After waiting a bit for Osiris to cool off and come back to apologize, which of course he didn’t, Saint set out to drag him back himself. He packed his Vex arsenal and stomped on into the Forest, intending to find Osiris and then…we don’t know what, because Saint never found him. He did find a lot of Vex, which he killed, which drew in more Vex, which he also killed, and so on. For years the Vex threw everything they had at him. He laughed and dared them to send more. Finally the Vex Collective invested a huge chunk of resources into creating a hyperspecialized Mind: Agioktis, the Martyr Mind, built solely to drain Saint’s Light. He slew Agioktis too, but not before it had accomplished its purpose, and he wrote his last words sitting atop a mountain of dead Vex just before they finally killed him. Then the Vex did something they have never done before or again: they built him a tomb. You have to understand that is insane for the Vex, who have no culture or sense of aesthetics. Hell, they barely have a sense of self. We've never seen them build a structure without purpose. Yet they built a tomb for Saint-14. And there they laid him to rest deep within the manifold dreams of the Infinite Forest, the end of a great Guardian.

Let’s start again.

Hey, remember Osiris? That stubborn brilliant bastard who took down Panoptes and bent the Infinite Forest to his will? How well d'you think he dealt with his sunshine bird husband's death? Once we found Saint-14's tomb in the Curse of Osiris DLC, he could no longer deny the truth. Turns out he blames himself for Saint’s death, and he’s partially right - Osiris knew when Saint entered the Forest and manipulated it to lead him astray. He intended to eventually, with cooler tempers, cross Saint’s path and try to work things out, but in typical Osiris fashion he got distracted and when he remembered to check in again he'd lost the trail. He fractured himself thousands of times, sending his Reflections to every corner of the Forest he could reach, but none of them found Saint-14. Osiris calls Saint’s death his greatest regret, and he has some real good regrets to choose from. And he doesn’t take fate lying down.

Osiris bargained for what he needed. We don't know what he sacrificed or to whom he traded it, but we know that it consumes Light, that he said, “What I had to do to forge it I can never take back,” and that he probably dealt with an Ahamkara since the chronometric Core he received keeps whispering. With that Core he built the Sundial. See, the Infinite Forest can simulate any time period, but it’s still a simulation. You aren’t actually traveling in time. The Sundial is real. It’s a real time machine and it’s really capable of screwing around with the real timeline. “Hey, that sounds dangerous!” Correct! That is super fucking dangerous and a disaster waiting to happen and Osiris didn’t care. He would walk the corridors of time, he would find the moment of Saint's death, and he would save him. No matter the cost. He activated the Sundial and once again fractured himself to send out thousands of searching Reflections, living centuries in a blink.

But the corridors of time are huge and infinitely branching. None of his Reflections found the right moment. Osiris let them fade, but couldn't bring himself to destroy the Sundial. He couldn't give up on Saint. Instead he hid it in pocket tears in reality and returned to the Forest, determined to learn more, find more, figure out what he needed to know to bring Saint back. Two years later, when we slew the Undying Mind in the Black Garden at the end of the Season of the Undying, it caused temporal fractures in our solar system that a trio of Red Legion Psion Flayers saw an opportunity to exploit. Niruul, Tazaroc, and Ozletc figured out they could use the newly-fluid timeline and Osiris’ hidden device to achieve a long-held goal: liberation of the Psion race from oppression by the Cabal by tampering with history. They gathered a Red Legion cohort under the pretense of taking a mulligan on their Red War defeat and seized the Sundial. Osiris, realizing the danger, located some common sense for once and alerted the City. Thus we report to Mercury for timecop duty and get dispatched into the corridors of time in pursuit. But when the Sundial first transports us, we don’t come back empty-handed.

Perfect Paradox is Saint-14’s signature shotgun. In the Curse of Osiris DLC the player can create special weapons in the Cult of Osiris' Infinite Forge using Prophecy tablets. One special tablet called only "Another Verse" leads to Saint-14's tomb and the remains of Perfect Paradox. Combining the tablet with that scrap lets us forge our own copy. Except here's the thing: Saint didn't make that gun. It was given to him by a Guardian whose description fits, well, us. Which means the old weapon we found in Saint’s tomb is the one that we made. Out of Saint's old weapon. It's a closed loop, a stable acausal contradiction. A frozen, perfect, paradox.

When we first travel through the Sundial a timelost relic comes back with us, like a piece of temporal driftwood. Osiris stabilizes it into another copy of Perfect Paradox. Taking that relic back into the corridors lets it link to its own time-shifted self. We follow it to a tragic moment in Saint's life: the failure of the human re-colonization of Mercury (pre-Vex conversion). Beaten down by the deaths he was charged to prevent, Saint is ready to give up when we arrive. We show him a hologram of the City then still decades in the future: the safe place for humanity he's dreamed of. And we give him Perfect Paradox. When we return to the present a signal lights up that Osiris hasn’t seen before: a distress call from Saint-14's Ghost Gepetto. Whatever we did altered some past variable whose cascading effects change everything. We retrieve his Ghost and its trace leads us back through time to the moment Osiris searched for so desperately: when the Vex unleashed Agioktis to finally bring Saint down. We warp into that moment and greet Saint - and mid-sentence the Mind pounces to bind him. Except now there's two of us. We beat the shit out of the Martyr Mind until it turns its confining power on us instead, letting Saint-14 break out of his own shackles and bring the hammer - or in this case the Void-light shield - down on Agioktis for good.

Let’s start again.

Saint-14, legendary Titan, walked into the Infinite Forest in pursuit of his partner Osiris. He didn’t find him, though he carved a colossal swath of destruction through the Vex while trying. And years after we helped him narrowly dodge a final death at the hands of the Vex Mind built to bring him down, he walked back out of the Forest in triumph, headbutting a minotaur to death along the way. We meet him at the gate, pulling him through the Sundial to our present to avoid altering the past, and invite him back to the City he dreamed of building. Though the new Tower is haunted by the memory of the father he lost in the Red War - the enemy that he regrets he wasn’t here to protect us from - Saint-14 gladly takes up residence in the hangar, greeting friends new and old and entertaining awed Guardians with stories of the Dark Ages. He tells us excitedly of finding birds nesting in the City walls and laughs when we wear the exotic helm that bears his name. He’s planning a prank on Shaxx - don’t tell him - and Shaxx still owes him glimmer. Saint-14 is back, alive, alive again and saved.

The Speaker for the Traveler had Bastion custom-forged for Saint as a gift, so it bears a lot of his trademarks: the barrel is built in the shape of a bird’s head, the body is molded into wings, it’s decorated with his signature purple ribbons, and its charge indicator has two rotating mechanical symbols - Saint’s sigil and a sun - that align to fire. The frame has an inscription from the Speaker telling Saint he’s proud of him. So how do we end up with such a personal item? Bastion didn't get lost in time - it just got stolen. The regular kind of stolen, not like some crazy Where-In-Time-Is-Carmen-Sandiego-style caper. An eliksni Captain somehow took it off Saint; knowing Saint, he probably used the barrel to cave in some dreg’s skull and it got stuck. We track down the Captain’s grave but discover the poor bastard’s been raised as an undead Scorn. After laying him to rest for good we can recover his spoils and discover he’s left his own mark on Bastion: the inscription from the Speaker has been almost scraped clean and carved into the frame are five hashmarks and the phrase “dead little thieves” in eliksni. From the eliksni’s point of view humans are the ultimate thieves who stole the Traveler first, justifying the eliksni stealing from us whenever possible, and Saint had a particular mad-on for them. It’s not surprising considering that day-to-day in the Dark Ages eliksni were far and away the most common threat to humans and Saint’s an older Guardian who spent most of his time on the ground pre-City, but he took it to a particularly zealous level. Osiris never approved of the obsession with the eliksni; he thought it distracted from the bigger picture and resented the Speaker for sending Saint on so many missions to fight what he considered a lesser threat.

Bastion's unique, the only kinetic fusion rifle, but though its classification seems weird it does behave more or less like a fusion rifle. It fires three high-impact kinetic bursts in each charge and its damage partially ignores energy shields, passing straight through to hit the enemy itself. It also makes a funny ratcheting noise as it charges and the counter-rotating barrels line up that keeps making me think of those penny-squisher machines. Initially Bastion's Breakthrough trait let part of its damage punch through elemental shields even if they were still active, but the addition of Stasis required gameplay changes that led Bungie to eliminate chip damage (damage done through shields) entirely; to compensate Bastion was given an intrinsic stagger ability that stuns targets and halts Unstoppable champions, same as Leviathan's Breath.

But after all that Bastion is curious and fun but not game-breakingly powerful. It's not a weapon you bring out against major bosses; like Xenophage it doesn't do precision damage, but unlike Xenophage it's not in the Heavy slot and therefore doesn't do the kind of damage that means you run it anyway. When it comes to red and orange-bar enemies, though, Bastion will bowl them over headlong. Usually if you want a heavy-hitting single-burst weapon in the kinetic slot you end up with a shotgun, so Bastion is a nice change of pace - it still uses special ammo, but has the longer range and more predictable recoil of a fusion rifle without the single-shot magazine and endless reload time of a grenade launcher. And the new stagger ability makes it useful in high-power activities where loadouts have to be specced to handle multiple champion types. But I think people would love it simply for what it symbolizes: Saint-14 is back. We saved him. We finally won one.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

[ Ace of Spades | Ager's Scepter | Anarchy | Arbalest | Bad Juju | Bastion | Black Talon | Borealis | Cerberus+1 | The Chaperone | Cloudstrike | Coldheart | Collective Obligation | The Colony | Crimson | Cryosthesia 77K | DARCI | Dead Man's Tale | Deathbringer | Dead Messenger | Devil's Ruin | Divinity | Duality | Edge of Action/Concurrence/Intent | Eriana’s Vow | Eyes of Tomorrow | Fighting Lion | The Fourth Horseman | Forerunner | Gjallarhorn | Grand Overture | Graviton Lance | Hard Light | Hawkmoon | Heartshadow | Heir Apparent | The Huckleberry | Izanagi’s Burden | The Jade Rabbit | Jötunn | The Lament | The Last Word | Legend of Acrius | Leviathan’s Breath | Lord of Wolves | Lorentz Driver | Lumina | Malfeasance | Merciless | MIDA Multi-Tool | Le Monarque | Monte Carlo | No Time to Explain | One Thousand Voices | Osteo Striga | Outbreak Perfected | Parasite | Polaris Lance | Prometheus Lens | The Prospector | Queenbreaker | Rat King | Riskrunner | Ruinous Effigy | Salvation's Grip | Skyburner’s Oath | Sleeper Simulant | Sturm | Sunshot | SUROS Regime | Sweet Business | Symmetry | Tarrabah | Telesto | Thorn | Thunderlord | Ticuu's Divination | Tommy's Matchbook | Tractor Cannon | Traveler's Chosen | Trespasser | Trinity Ghoul | Truth | Two-Tailed Fox | Vex Mythoclast | Vigilance Wing | The Wardcliff Coil | Wavesplitter | Whisper of the Worm | Wish-Ender | Witherhoard | Worldline Zero | Xenophage ]

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

You’re gonna have your work cut out for you with the Exotics list, this season.

*puts fingers in ears* dunno what you’re talking about all we’re getting is Witherhoard la la la

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

New exotics Tommy’s Matchbook and The Fourth Horseman have now both been released, so standby while I get Fourth Horseman and run around with it for a while to see how it is and then we’ll get cracking on some new Compendium entries.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

Destiny 2 Compendium Exoticorum March Patch Notes

New game content:

Bastion & Devil’s Ruin released

updated Wish-Ender for its bugged status & resurgence in Season of Dawn

updated Riskrunner for the Pain & Gain acquisition quest

updated Vigilance Wing with Season of Dawn Osiris gifs

updated multiple entries to reflect the loss of auto-reload perks from Lunas/Rally (rip)

New lore:

added the full story of Saint-14 in Bastion’s entry, updated for all Season of Dawn content

updated info about Osiris in Vigilance Wing

Fixes:

various prose, grammar, and typo fixes

various…uh…backend fixes? I organized my own notes & material.

rearranged & rewrote index page

more links added between entries where appropriate

fixed alphabetizing mistakes (derp)

added cool high-res renders for*:

Malfeasance, Lord of Wolves, Jotunn, Jade Rabbit, Black Talon, Arbalest, Polaris Lance, Symmetry

Red String of Fate (Malfeasance), The Panama Ravine (Chaperone), Eye of Osiris (Prometheus Lens), Ronin (Izanagi’s Burden)

added cool art* for Crimson

updated all footer links in all posts for all current exotics (yay!)

added the Shadowkeep Moon Rabbits to Jade Rabbit’s entry

added masterwork trait “Focused Fire” to Cerberus+1 (not sure how this got missed in my earlier sweep)

* I add cool official artwork to weapon entries as I find it, so send it my way if you have some. By “official” I mean either official Bungie art or portfolios/renders posted by the concept artists, not fanart or fan-made renders. If you do have badass fanart, you should still send it my way, but I can’t post it to the Compendium.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

Destiny 2 Compendium Exoticorum January Patch Notes:

New game content:

added Season of Dawn exotics Bastion, Devil’s Ruin, and Symmetry

added Season of Dawn exotic ornaments Violent Exorcism (Arbalest), Frostborne (Black Talon), Ain’t My First Rodeo (Chaperone), Black Death (Crimson), Brumal Dawn (Hard Light), Packmaster’s Command (Lord of Wolves), Long Live the Queen (Telesto), and Abyssal Scream (Tractor Cannon)

added new masterwork perks for Black Talon (Reversal) and Lord of Wolves (Fang and Claw)

New lore:

removed the Saint-14 summary from Vigilance Wing’s entry since Bastion will now contain the full story

updated Truth’s description for Season of Dawn content

updated Black Talon’s description for the current status of Uldren Sov

Fixes:

added high-res renders for Huckleberry, Fighting Lion, Anarchy, and Prometheus Lens

added the correct secondary trait (Anti-Taken Fletching) to Wish-Ender

corrected statement that Cassoid Foundry is part of the Reef; its actual location is unstated

added info to Telesto’s entry on how the damn thing is constantly breaking the game

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

I just want you to know that your exotics list is, hands down, my favorite Destiny based content on this site.

Thank you!

It takes a lot of work but the amount of support people have shown for it keeps me going.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

I have put a great deal of effort into making Bastion’s entry very long and now I must put in an even greater amount of effort to make it short.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

Hey just to say, I love your Destiny exotic posts! I'm one of the new light newbies, so I'm still playing catch up on all the backstory and lore, and your posts really help me get a feel for a lot of that. So thanks very much, hope you enjoy season of the dawn as much as I'm hoping to!

I’m so happy to hear that! I started writing these posts because I wanted to share cool Destiny stories in a form that would be accessible to people who didn’t play the game, so it’s great to know they’re helping people get into the lore. Destiny’s writing and the breadth of its universe are honestly super impressive and they don’t always do a good job of conveying it in-game - I understand wanting people to be able to just sit down and play without learning all the backstory but on the other hand that backstory’s pretty rad. Good luck out there, Guardian.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

With the posting of Divinity’s entry the Compendium Arma Exoticorum is now complete! Time to enjoy it for the few weeks I have till next season gives me more to write about.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

Destiny 2 Compendium Exoticorum December Patch Notes:

added the correct trait for Thunderlord (Lightning Rounds)

changed Hard Light’s trait from “Arc/Solar/Void Core” to “The Fundamentals” (in-game change)

added Ace of Spades’ new masterwork perk Funeral Pyre

updated Sweet Business’ Business Time perk (in-game change)

added that Skyburner’s Oath’s lore tab can be read to the tune of Fortunate Son (TIL)

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

You might have been asked this before, but i didn't see it. Any change you start in on the Exotic armor of Destiny?

I might have answered this before, but I forgot it. I wasn’t planning to do armor when I started this series, but it’s been fun to make and people seem to enjoy it, so I’m considering it. I’ll evaluate it more seriously after I’m done with the weapons, though - still have four regular ones to go, plus the six added in Shadowkeep…plus the three more getting added in Season of the Dawn…oof.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

How long does it usually take you to make each exotic entry in your list? Do you bulk-make them and release on a schedule, or is it back to back?

Would you believe the original plan was to make them all before I released any of them so I could just post one a day all the way straight through? Hah. What a pleasant dream. I stockpiled about ten complete entries before I started posting, with another fifteen well-drafted and the rest only outlined. By now I have drafts set up for all current exotics but I’m down to posting them - or at least queueing them to be posted the next day - as I finish them. All in all each entry is probably 2 to 5 hours of work spread over a few days, more for certain special entries.

When (official) info is released on a new exotic I immediately make a draft entry with the basics - name, pull quote, type/slot/element, perk & trait info, and a reference image. I upload the perk image, straighten out the HTML, and set up the footer. That part’s easy. The bulk of the work is split between building the images and writing the Origin & Description text. Writing tends to take the longest, followed closely by making gifs, followed by making the fancy titles.

If the item has a complicated story or ties into a world element I haven’t yet discussed, I’ll spend most of my time writing, researching, annotating, and revising the text. Especially revising. Since I’m writing these entries for new players/non-players I want to ensure they’re a) accurate b) concise and c) comprehensive. So I double-check a lot of statements with canon instead of relying on memory to make sure I’m telling the story correctly. Sometimes I talk to other players about the history of certain weapons in the gameplay meta. I also spend a lot of time editing myself. It’s easy for me to go on a tangent about something I like and explain a lot of irrelevant detail that might confuse or bore a new player, but at the same time I don’t want to skip important aspects of the story. Summarizing is hard, my dudes.

I also make the fancy titles myself, and I’m far from a pro artist of any stripe, so that means picking out fonts, decorating the text, swearing at Inkscape, etc. Trawling the ‘net for images originally took a lot longer but by now I’ve worked out good sources for reference renders, ornaments, etc. and I’ve gotten better at finding Youtube videos and trailers I can mine for gifs. Doesn’t mean it’s easy, though; some exotics are really hard to portray in gif form, and sometimes I want to get an aesthetic just right and go through dozens of iterations. I make a lot more gifs than I end up using and getting the Taken effect on Whisper’s text to look right took a few evenings of tinkering, for example. But the result was worth it.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

Is the Exotics List plan currently Bastion then Divinity?

Yup. Bastion’s taking a LONG time to write because of everything that’s happened with Saint, and Divinity evolved into a retelling of the Unveiling lorebook that fit best at the end of the exotics compendium. I’m contemplating splitting that off into its own post and making Divinity just about the Kentarch 3, though. We’ll see.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

When do you plan on releasing Phase Two of your exotics list, since you’re done with the original set of exotics?

Deathbringer will be out later today to start Phase Two!

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

Congrats on finishing the pre-Shadowkeep exotics, but how do you plan on doing the post-Shadowkeeps?

Thank you! Since two of the Season of Dawn exotics aren’t out yet, I’m planning to start alphabetically with the six Shadowkeep exotics (Deathbringer, Divinity, Eriana’s Vow, Leviathan’s Breath, Monte Carlo, and Xenophage) and then do the three Season of Dawn exotics (Bastion, Devil’s Ruin, and Symmetry). Hopefully we won’t be onto season 10 by the time those are done.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

How are you going to do the Exotics that we’re added into the game after the list? Are you going to continue through alphabetically, and then sweep by again?

I began this project before Shadowkeep’s release, so my current plan is to finish the pre-Shadowkeep exotics alphabetically. Two of the Season of Dawn exotics (Bastion and Devil’s Ruin) have been previewed but not yet released, so I’ll probably do the six Shadowkeep exotics (Deathbringer, Divinity, Eriana’s Vow, Leviathan’s Breath, Monte Carlo, and Xenophage) next and save the Dawn ones for last. I plan to update for future seasons as well.