Paying for season passes and expansions in Destiny 2 has traditionally earned you a nice piece of gear right out of the gate: an Exotic weapon. These unique guns always have strange properties and usually mince up enemies without issue. Among the preorder bonuses for the new Witch Queen expansion was Osteo Striga, an Exotic submachine gun. However, unlike Grand Overture, the Exotic machine gun you get with the season pass for the Season of the Risen that unlocks as soon as you start playing, you might be wondering how you actually get Osteo Striga. Turns out, it’s not awarded to you immediately upon jumping into the game.
Osteo Striga requires you to take some steps to earn it, and the game doesn’t do much to tell you where your SMG is or how to get it. In fact, you’ll play the entire Witch Queen campaign before you get any information about Osteo Striga, and you’ll need to understand something about the new weapon crafting system in order to get it. You’re going to want this gun, however–it’s excellent. Here’s everything you need to know about how to get Osteo Striga.
How to unlock Osteo Striga
First, Osteo Striga is currently only available to players who buy the Deluxe Edition of The Witch Queen, so if you purchased the standard edition of the game, you can’t access it right now. That could change in the future, but it’s unclear how or when the gun will become available for all players.
In order to get hold of Osteo Striga, you’ll first need to complete The Witch Queen’s story campaign. That can be an investment in and of itself, as the campaign is pretty long, especially if you play it on Legendary difficulty. Expect to invest some time in uncovering the secrets of Savathun’s throne world.
Finishing the story campaign doesn’t earn you the gun, however–it only unlocks the Osteo Striga pattern to craft at the Relic, in the new social space called the Enclave. Once you’ve completed the final mission, called “The Ritual,” you’ll return to the Enclave for a short denouement. At that point, check the Triumphs screen, under the Patterns and Catalysts tab, to find and unlock Osteo Striga’s pattern.
Head to the Relic and hit the Shape button, then go down to SMGs on the Primary gun tab to find Osteo Striga. Your options will initially be pretty limited for what perks you can add to the gun. You’ll also notice that you won’t be able to craft its Exotic catalyst just yet. Once you’ve locked in the gun, hit Finalize Shape to craft it. You might need crafting materials to make that happen, but you can get them easily enough by completing the few short missions that introduce you to crafting as part of the campaign. Anything you come up short on can be purchased from Rahool or Banshee-44 in the Tower.
Using the crafting system means you can customize and upgrade Osteo Striga over time, but you’ll need to level up the gun by using it in order to do so.
What Osteo Striga does
If you’re familiar with Thorn, the deadly Hive hand cannon, you have a sense of what Osteo Striga is like. The SMG fires objects that look like thorns instead of bullets, and those thorns track their targets. Kill an enemy with Osteo Striga or hit them with a number of precision shots and you’ll trigger a burst of poison that infects both the enemy you shot and any opponents in the immediate vicinity, dealing them damage over time. The gun can be devastating against crowds, blasting multiple enemies with poison at a time, even if you don’t manage to kill any of them.
How to unlock Osteo Striga’s Exotic catalyst
The best upgrade you can get for Osteo Striga is its Exotic catalyst, which significantly amps up its reload speed and automatically refills the magazine as you get kills with the gun’s poison effect. In order to unlock it, however, you’ll need to put some work in with Osteo Striga, pushing the gun up to Level 10. To do that, you just need to play with it; you’ll level up all your crafted guns by using them in activities, and the more enemies you kill, the faster they’ll advance. Leveling up guns is how you unlock the ability to “reshape” them with better perks, so keep your favorites in the rotation to make them better more quickly.
Once Osteo Striga is up to Level 10, you can return to the Relic and reshape it to add the catalyst. It requires 140 Ruinous Element, 2,000 Neutral Element, and 3 Ascendant Alloy to craft. The first two currencies you should come by fairly easily by using weapons with Deepsight Resonance and dismantling Deepsight weapons you don’t want. Ascendant Alloy is tougher to earn, but if you need to, you can purchase it from Rahool or Banshee.
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