Transcendence is essentially a separate mini-Super in Lot 2. To activate Transcendence, which is attached to it exclusively to the Prismatic subclassyou’ll first need to charge a Light and Darkness meter – something that can be tricky depending on the build you’re going for.
In this Lot 2 guide, I will show you how to charge Transcendence, how to use it to break Bound shields and how to make the best prismatic construction to charge Transcendence.
How to charge Transcendence in Destiny 2
Image: Bungie via Polygoon
Transcendence manifests as two small bars below your Super bar. One bar represents lightand the other represents Darkness. Here’s how to charge Transcendence Lot 2:
- To fill the light baryou must deal damage with weapons or skills that cause Void, Arc, or Solar damage.
- To fill the darkness baryou need to deal damage with Stasis or Strand weapons and skills.
- Dealing damage with kinetic weapons gives a little energy to both barsor a fair amount of energy for one if the other is already full.
When you have filled both bars, they will be merged into a single bar that will glow pink. This means you’re ready to activate Transcendence, which is a new binding on your controller or keyboard. Unlike most Supers, you stay in first person when you activate Transcendence.
While you are Transcendent, you gain several benefits:
- Increase to all weapon damage
- Damage resistance
- Increased power charging speed
- A unique Prismatic grenade based on your class
Skill charging on Prismatic is intense, and you can essentially spam all of your skills while you have them active. Killing targets while in Transcendence will also give you some Transcendental energy back, meaning you can stay in it even longer if you play well.
How to defeat Bound weapons with Transcendence
Image: Bungie via Polygoon
In The Pale Heart of the Traveler you occasionally encounter enemies that “Be bound to”, and have pink shields that are completely immune to damage. To make them vulnerable, you need to become Transcendent and deal damage to them, including shooting them with your gun.
This sounds much more annoying than it actually is.
Image: Bungie via Polygoon
Every time one of these enemies shows up, a pool of Prismatic Essence will appear somewhere in the arena, like the image above. Standing in that pool will charge your Prismatic energy very quickly. If you can’t reach the pool, shooting bound enemies will charge your meter much faster than shooting normal enemies.
How to make the best prismatic construction for transcendence
Transcendence is extremely powerful in both PvE and PvP. It is the reason to play with a Prismatic build instead of a normal subclass. Every time you do a Prismatic constructionyou should focus on increasing the speed at which your Transcendence meter charges.
First and foremost, you want to make sure you have at least some skills of each type in your build. Instead of going all Stasis and Strand to close down the battlefield, try replacing your melee with an Arc ability, or adding a Void Grenade to the mix.
Even if you try to balance yourself in terms of skills, you’ll probably still end up lopsided – like you’re easily filling one bar but struggling to fill the other. Once you’ve identified where you’re falling behind, you can and should use Prismatic Fragments and your weapons to bring things back into balance.
Image: Bungie via Polygoon
You want to make sure your primary weapon matches the damage type you’re having a hard time filling because you’ll never run out of ammo and can continually contribute to the bar. Primaries are a little slower to build your meter, but they are reliable, and that’s what counts here. If you want to play a bit riskier, special or heavy weapons will give you a lot of progress on your Transcendence bars. Fusion guns, for example, give you a large amount of transcendent energy with each shot.
The real trick of Prismatic is to use a kinetic weapon – especially a kinetic exotic primary weapon, like Khvostov. If you can defeat with a kinetic weapon, you can ensure that you always gain a Transcendence meter, meaning you can pop it much more often.
With a few you can help this process even further Prismatic fragmentswhich you can unlock by completing the campaign and exploring The Pale Heart:
- Facet of dedication: Killing targets affected by a Darkness debuff grants bonus Light Transcendence energy.
- Facet of grace: Kinetic weapon damage gives you additional transcendence energy. Super kills give you and nearby allies bonus Transcendence energy.
- Facet of honor: Collecting an Elemental Pickup or destroying a Tangle grants Transcendence energy of the same type.
- Facet of sacrifice: While you have a Light buff, skill kills grant bonus Darkness Transcendence energy.
The best way to stay transcendent is to stay flexible. When swapping out a weapon, consider playing with a snippet to help you fill the gap. Whatever you need to do to stay balanced – or compensate for an imbalance – do it and you will wipe the floor with your enemies.