How to Farm Artifice Armor in Destiny 2

The endgame of Destiny 2 is a game of inches, where you’ll spend hours looking for weapons with the perfect rolls and armor with exactly the right stats. Knowing how to farm Artifice Armor, the ultimate endgame Legendary armor, will make getting the perfect stat line just a bit easier.

Destiny 2: How to Farm Artifice Armor

Artifice armor has one minor but still statistically significant advantage over non-Artifice options: an extra mod slot where you can add three additional points from any stat on top of the standard stat-increasing mod. If you wear a full set of Artifice armor with a single Exotic piece, that’s up to 12 additional stat points wherever you want them, or effectively a little more than an extra piece of armor.

You can only farm Artifice armor in Master-difficulty dungeons. You can’t get it from Raids, Trials of Osiris, or even Grandmaster Nightfalls. It’s Dungeons or bust. Worse, you’ll need to pay for all the Dungeons where you can do the farming. Specifically, the following Dungeons offer Artifice armor:

• Grasp of Avarice from the 30th Anniversary Pack
• Duality from the Witch Queen expansion year
• Spire of the Watcher, also from the Witch Queen expansion year
• Ghosts of the Deep from early Lightfall
• Warlord’s Ruin from late(r) Lightfall.

Of these Dungeons, only two are really worth your time: Duality and Warlord’s Ruin, and between those, Duality is superior. Here’s why.

The Best Artifice Armor Farm in Destiny 2

Farming Artifice Armor in Destiny 2 is all about efficiency. Which encounter can you do quickly, consistently, and doesn’t immediately bore you to tears? You can transmog any Legendary gear, so the look of the armor doesn’t matter much, and there are no more elemental affinities, so all you need to worry about is the slot.

It’s very easy to reach the first boss in both Duality and Warlord’s Ruin. There’s just a brief platforming section before the first encounter. Which you choose is ultimately up to you, but for my money, Duality is the best Artifice Armor farm in Destiny 2. The Nightmare of Ghalran is just an easier boss to kill, and both he and the first boss of Warlord’s Ruin drop the same three armor pieces: Helmet, Gauntlets, and Boots.

Duality is also a better choice for the other armor pieces you need because the second and third encounters are much more forgiving (from a DPS perspective, anyway). Opening the vault and defeating the Nightmare of Caiatl are trivialities these days. The same cannot necessarily be said of the Taken Ogre and Chimera bosses in Warlord’s Ruin. They have an absurd amount of health, and while a solid fireteam can one-phase both of them, Caiatl is so easy to beat she’s now one of the DPS testing bosses for how straightforward the fight is.

Worse for Warlord’s Ruin is its length. The traversal sections between fights are deadlier, longer, and overall take more effort to cross than in Duality’s. That each boss fight is also longer is a problem all its own.

Best Boss to Farm Artifice Armor: Nightmare of Ghalran in the Duality Dungeon

Here’s the quickest method to farm all the Artifice armor you could ever want:

• Load into Duality and make your way to Ghalran.
• With a teammate, grab a Ghalran checkpoint by starting the encounter, dying, and reloading in.
• Have either your main character or a teammate leave the activity, then load in on another character to save the checkpoint.
• Complete the encounter and load in on the other character’s checkpoint.
• Have the saved checkpoint character leave.
• Repeat.

Once you’ve farmed Ghalran until you’re blue in the face, have your checkpoint character leave as usual, then you can do the same thing with Caiatl, provided you have a full fireteam of three Guardians. Complete the loop as many times as you please — or can tolerate. Whichever comes first.

Remember that the only time you can farm Artifice Armor from Duality is when it’s the featured Dungeon that week. While you can get a Pinnacle from it for your first completion, every encounter drops loot for every victory.

Artifice Armor Farms to Avoid

• Sadly, Bungie patched the cheese for the Ghosts of the Deep Dungeon, but that was easily a 20-minute affair, and you can kill Ghalran or Caiatl five or six times in that time, making Ghosts of the Deep a poor farm, anyway.
• Spire of the Watcher‘s bosses have too much health, and their DPS requirements are too lengthy to qualify here.
• Grasp of Avarice also takes too long to reach the first reward chest, and the boss is a little too involved to be worth farming for armor. The shotgun you get from the Ogre is pretty good, though.
• Warlord’s Ruin takes too long, its bosses have too much HP, and it’s overall less efficient.

That’s how to farm Artifice Armor in Destiny 2. In short, the Duality Master-difficulty Dungeon is your go-to choice. And while community opinion is contentious on the Dungeon itself, there’s no denying what you get is worth the occasional frustration. For more content on Bungie’s live service smash hit, our D2 guides hub has much more.