How to get Microcosm in Destiny 2: The Final Shape

Microcosm is a heavy exotic spur rifle Destiny 2: The Final Form. Not only does it excel at breaking enemy shields, it also works in tandem with your Super, regardless of which Super you have equipped.

In this Lot 2 guide, I will guide you through it how to get Microcosmincluding how the Cooperative Focus missions in the “Recovery: nascent‘ mission, where you earn the exotic track.

How to get Microcosm in Destiny 2

You get Microcosm from the last mission in the Convalescence questline: ‘Recovery: nascent.”

Achieving “Convalescence: Budding” is fairly easy Destiny 2: The Final Form. Here’s a quick overview of everything you need to do:

• Completely The final shape campaign
• “Destined Heroes” — “Queens, Part 1”
• “Recovery: root-bound”
• “Restoration: undergrowth”
• “Recovery: Green”
• “Recovery: blossoming”

How to Complete ‘Recovery: Emerging’

You begin the first quest in the Recovery Chain — “Rootbound” — as you work your way through “Destined heroes”, which you can start working on immediately after the campaign. Starting with ‘Rootbound’ you must then complete all Convalescence missions to reach ‘Budding’ and Microcosm.

Fortunately, this entire series of quests is relatively simple, as it is designed to teach you more about The Pale Heart destination and all its activities. But once you learn about Lost Ghosts in ‘Rootbound’, Pale Heart mods in ‘Underbrush’ and Cyst activities in ‘Greenery’, you’ll have to learn more about Cooperative focus missions in ‘Burgeoning’.

To complete ‘Convalescence: Budding’ you’ll need to complete the Cooperative Focus mode versions of three campaign missions:

• Ascent
• Disagreement
• Iconoclasm

You’ll need at least one other Guardian for these missions, although ideally you’ll want a full Fireteam of yours as the missions don’t scale. But no matter what, these missions in Cooperative Focus mode are not problems you can tackle soloso you need to link with friends or other players through Fireteam Finder.

Once you’re done, find the campaign repeat nodes on The Pale Heart. You’ll find the three icons for these Cooperative Focus missions below. The missions say they’re Power from 2005, but the enemies are actually less powerful than the campaign’s legendary villains.

When you complete these missions and return to Micah-10 in The Lost City, they give you Microcosm.

You can play these missions in any order, but they all share three tricky mechanics: Glyphtouched, Berserkers, and Witness Fracturing. Here’s how they work.

Glyphtouched

Image: Bungie via Polygoon

The first is a change in the Glyphtouched buff, which normally lets you see symbols and encounter the right ones. In the Cooperative Focus versions of the missions, only one player gets Glyphtouched and they cannot see what the symbols are. So you have to communicate as a Fireteam, with the non-Glyphtouched Guardian instructing the Glyphtouched player what symbols to do.

Berserkers

Image: Bungie via Polygoon

Secondly, the Cooperative Focus missions are reintroduced Berserkers of the incursion of the Plague of the Past. When you get close to these enemies, they unleash a slowing field and expose weak points. The catch is that you have to destroy a weak point on the front and back at the same time – something you have to do as a group.

Once you kill the Berserker, two Darkness Cruxs in the area their immunity shields will disappear. You and your Fireteam members must shoot a Crux at the same time as the other player. If you don’t do this long enough, you wipe and have to start over.

Witness of breakage

Image: Bungie via Polygoon

Finally, in certain sections of each mission, The Witness will begin to randomly affect the Fracture debuff of one member of your Fireteam. This stacking debuff increases every few seconds for the Fractured character. Once the debuff reaches x7, the affected player can no longer use movement skills. But at x7 you can interact with the Fractured player to take the debuff for yourself.

You’ll essentially have to juggle this between your Fireteam while the Fracture debuff is present. You can’t make it go away until you’ve made progress in the goal, and it will kill your Fireteam members if they ever reach a x10 stack. Just coordinate together and play hot potato with the debuff until it disappears.

What does Microcosm do?

Image: Bungie via Polygoon

Before we even get into the benefits of Microcosm, the weapon is already unique for two reasons: it is a Heavy spur rifle and it’s a heavy weapon that doesn’t deal elemental damage (Kinetic). It also does quite a bit of damage, so it’s a great pickup for any Prismatic build where you’re trying to get Transcendence as often as possible.

Microcosm has two exotic advantages. The first is Paracausal ray, causing the gun to fire kinetic light, dealing massive bonus damage to shields. The second is Paracausal penetration, which causes kills with Microcosm to give you Super energy. Additionally, Microcosm deals extra damage for a short time after your Super expires.