Destiny 2 relaunches Refer-a-Friend scheme and unveils Enhancement Cores

Destiny 2 update 2.0.5 brings some significant quality-of-life improvements to the game post-Forsaken, and that includes a host of changes to make Exotic drops a bit friendlier when you’re hunting rare gear. A lot of small changes are making item management more convenient, Masterwork Cores are getting overhauled under a new title, and the Refer-a-Friend program is coming back for Forsaken.

Refer-a-Friend will let veteran players guide new players toward all the new features and perks of Forsaken and, of course, to purchase new copies for themselves. “New players” are defined here as those who either don’t own Forsaken or have owned it for less than seven days. The program will provide both the newbie and the vet a quest that offers new cosmetic rewards.

According to the latest installment of This Week At Bungie, more info on exactly how Refer-a-Friend works will go live on October 30 – which is naturally also when patch 2.0.5 will go live. Maintenance for the update will begin at 8:00 PDT / 11:00 EDT / 15:00 GMT, and all should be ready at 10:00 PDT / 13:00 EDT / 17:00 GMT.

That patch also brings the long-awaited duplicate protections on Exotics. Quest weapons are getting pulled out of the Exotic engram pool, and unearned Exotics will be weighted more heavily in that pool. When you do get a duplicate, it’s more likely to be an armour piece – since that means you’ve got a chance at fresh random rolls.

Following the update, Masterwork Cores will be called Enhancement Cores, in better keeping with their new role post-Forsaken. You’ll get them from more places, including Scrapper Bounties and six of the Spider’s weekly bounties, and the loot feed will now display them more visibly. That should all make infusing a bit less of a chore.

Festival of the Lost is currently underway, and we’ve got a guide if you still need to find out how to get Horror Story. When the new update hits, you’ll also have some convenient inventory management options – Banshee-44 will accept 25 Gunsmith Materials at a time, Ghost Fragment stack sizes are increasing, and shader dismantle time is dropping to just a quarter of a second. It’s the small things, in the end.