By Alex Newhouse on
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Learn How To Craft Builds At Destiny 2: The Edge Of Fate’s New Shooting Range
Destiny 2’s latest expansion, The Edge of Fate, is out now, and one of the most notable additions to the core game is the Shooting Range. Accessible to all players, the Shooting Range is a controlled environment in which weapons, perks, armor sets, and entire builds can be compared against one another.
It’s no secret that Destiny 2’s a complex game, with multiple interacting systems at play that determine how much and what kind of damage you put down range. Each piece of gear you equip can affect how you play, but the specific nature of these effects are often hard to discern.
Historically, Destiny 2 high-level players have prototyped new builds by setting up custom games or repeatedly testing against Lost Sector bosses; while these worked okay, they never allowed the level of control or customization that could facilitate true comparisons. To more casual players, buildcrafting might seem entirely opaque, and they may never have the chance to figure out how to take full advantage of, say, cool Exotic perks.
The Shooting Range finally provides a space for prototyping builds, allowing players to pinpoint exactly how different selections affect gameplay. You can boot directly into it from a landing point on the Tower (see the map above). In this guide, we explain how to make the most of the Shooting Range’s various options and to understand the data that you can glean from testing.
Rally To The Flag First
When you first boot into the Shooting Range, go stock up on Special and Power ammo and fill up your Super meter at the Raid Banner that’s immediately ahead and to the right of the spawn point. You can use this limitlessly to ensure that you have all the energy and ammunition you need to test your builds.
There’s A Prismatic Well, Too
If you play a Prismatic subclass, you can fill up your Light and Dark meters at the Prismatic Well directly to the left of the spawn point.
The Enemy Selection Board
In the Shooting Range itself, there are two boards of buttons (one each on the left and right of the range). These buttons can be selected by shooting them; they’ll light up green to highlight your selection. The board on the left controls which enemies spawn. All enemy types are included here–as well as an option to shoot dummy enemies.
Options Selection Board
On the right of the range, another selection board contains a few other options. The furthest left button resets the scoreboards in the arena (see later images for more on how scoring works). The middle button sets the enemies to combat mode, making them behave like they would in normal Destiny 2 modes. The right-most button triggers a mini-boss (like a Champion) to spawn.
Combatant Wave Spawn
When you first select an enemy faction from the board to test against, a bunch of enemies will spawn downrange. By default, they will be unmoving and simply act as test dummies. In the image above, we have spawned a set of Fallen to test against.
DPS And Total Damage Scoreboards
Take note of the scoreboards arrayed around the arena. The scoreboard at the top of the screen (hanging over the range) keeps track of both damage per second (DPS) and total damage done by the entire party. The scoreboards at the bottom (along the shooting range fence) track DPS and total damage done by each individual player.
The individual scoreboards are numbered from left to right; if you’re using the Shooting Range solo, your scoreboard is the furthest left. In the image above, we have shot at the enemies downrange and the scoreboard reflects the DPS and total damage done since shooting began.
Respawning Enemies
If you’ve killed off a lot of the enemies in a particular wave, you can respawn that wave with a button on the furthest right of the arena’s fence. This will essentially wipe the arena clean and reset the combatants to normal.
Respawning Champions
If you’ve spawned a Champion, you can reset them too via the button immediately to the left of the Combatant Wave reset button.
Single Combatant Mode
If you want to test on one enemy in exactly the same location, you can use the button on the gate furthest to the left to spawn a single combatant (rather than an entire wave).
Changing Enemies
Each enemy faction in Destiny 2 includes a bunch of different species (for example, Hive has Witches, Thralls, and Knights). You can change between enemies within a faction by going up to one of the holograms in the hallway directly in front of the arena. Each hologram has a button that will spawn a wave of whatever enemy it represents.
How To Test Perks – New Land Beyond’s The Master
The Shooting Range’s main benefit is to enable players to zero in on exactly what different perks and abilities do, and to understand how they interact with an overall build. To demonstrate how this works with a specific weapon, we investigate the Exotic sniper rifle New Land Beyond over the next few images.
New Land Beyond is an iron sights-only sniper that has a couple of particularly cool perks: Bullseye Bolster and The Master. Both of these perks trigger upon landing precision hits (like headshots). Bullseye Bolster gives the gun a temporary boost in handling, reload, and stability. The Master is where this rifle really shines: upon a precision hit, this perk adds a damage boost that lasts until the player dies. This damage boost stacks indefinitely, making New Land Beyond an extraordinarily powerful weapon if wielded precisely.
This image shows New Land Beyond’s headshot damage against an enemy with just one stack of The Master: 4,684.
New Land Beyond’s The Master, x2
After the previous headshot, we then had two stacks. This boosted the next headshot up to 5,418 damage done.
New Land Beyond’s The Master, x4
At The Master x4, New Land Beyond did 5,954 damage in one shot, a 27% increase over its damage at one stack of the perk.
As a result, we are able to pinpoint exactly how much each headshot benefits the damage done by New Land Beyond. If we were to vary other things like armor perks or abilities that further affected the rifle’s characteristics, we could figure out the best build to pair with this rifle.
