One of the biggest mistakes people can make when playing Destiny 2 (something I am guilty of myself) is focussing far too heavily on getting gear with a higher light score and worse yet, discarding gear simply because the light level is lower than the current item that you have equipped.
The simple fact is that gear in Destiny 2 has six unique stats that provide various benefits for your character depending on how high your total of that stat has reached. The guide below will explain everything you need to know about how to find good gear in Destiny and knowing what to keep an eye out for.
Understanding What Gear Stats Do
When you look at any piece of armor, with the exception of the cloak/cape, you will see that there are six different stats with various numbers attributed to each one. Each piece of armor you equip will increase your total of all of these stats. The benefit that each stat provides your character with is as follows.
- Mobility – Increases movement speed and max jump height.
- Resilience – Increases the amount of damage you can absorb.
- Recovery – Increases health recharge speed.
- Discipline – Increases the recharge speed of your grenade.
- Intellect – Decreases the cooldown of your Super ability.
- Strength – Decreases the cooldown time of your melee ability.
You can see the total amount you have for each stat next to your equipped gear on the character menu in game.
Best Stats For Each Class
Now that you know what each of the six gear stats does in Destiny 2, you need to learn how to apply those to your character. There are three different classes in this game Warlock, Titan and Hunter. Each of these has different pros and cons and the best stats to focus on will depend on your class.
There are quite a few things to consider when it comes to the best stats for each class. Sometimes, you might have a very specific build and while Strength may not normally be something you want to apply to a hunter, it may work for you. If you are unsure where to start with this, I have put together a guide for each of the main classes in Destiny 2 to give you a great starting point to help you understand the best stats to focus on based on your class.
- Best Warlock Armor Stats: Resilience, Recovery. Discipline
- Best Hunter Armor Stats: Resilience, Mobility, Discipline (recovery for PvP)
- Best Titan Armor Stats: Resilience, Recovery. Discipline
Light Level Is not an Indicator or Gear Quality
Each week, you will see there are new challenges that award you with pinnacle gear. Completing these challenges to obtain the gear is essential if you want to increase your light level, but it is not an indicator that gear is good and even less an indicator that the gear is good for your current class/build. Plenty of pinnacle gear you pick up can be absolutely useless when it comes to making your character stronger.
This is why we have the infusion system where you can take the light level from one item that may not be very good and transfer it over to another piece of gear that might have the perfect stat roll for your loadout. Take the light level you need and discard the rest. You need to make sure you get in the habit of always checking the stats and then making sure they work for you before you equip it.
What Makes Gear Good
Gear is good based on its stats. Exotic gear has the addition of a perk of some kind but since we can only ever equip one piece of exotic armor, it is not really worth considering these perks since you can only ever have one and people tend to use an exotic to work specifically with a build. From a higher level, to make a good character you need good stats and to get good stats, you need to get gear with a high total of stats.
When to view a piece of gear, you can see the total number of stats that the gear has. This is a good starting point when sifting through new gear that you have picked up.
Based on your class, you will need to focus on finding gear that has a high percentage of the total stats applied to the stats that you are trying to max out for your class. Ideally, you will get 100 in three different stats. This is easier if you focus on legendary (purple) gear that has a high number of stats with good distribution.
It is generally good to find gear with more than 56 stats in total. With that being said, you may find something with 52 but the stats are distributed perfectly to the ones you want to max out.
Knowing What Gear To Avoid
For starters, it is a solid rule of thumb that you can ignore any blue gear. Blue gear will never have a high stat roll. Even if the stats are quite high in terms of the graph for the stats that you need, the blue gear just does not roll with a high enough number of stats available to distribute to the six stats.
