With the addition of weapon crafting in Destiny 2, red border weapons have become available and are a necessity for unlocking weapon patterns.
In order to unlock weapon crafting fast, you will need to know the best way to get red border weapons in order to unlock their weapon patterns. We will go over some of the easiest ways to get red border weapons.
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The best way to get red border weapons in Destiny 2 is by completing Seasonal activities. Completing Raids and Dungeons has a chance of rewarding red border weapons. You can also use Deepsight Harmonizers to create red border weapons.
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How to Get Red Border Weapons in Destiny 2
Red border weapons are weapons that contain Deepsight Resonance. In order to unlock the crafting pattern for a weapon, you must first find five red border variants and extract their Deepsight Resonance for pattern progress.
Then, you will be able to craft that weapon at the Enclave on Mars. Check out our guide on Weapon Crafting for more info.
You could get lucky and find red border weapons simply by playing the game normally, as any craftable weapon has a chance to drop as a red border variant.
If you are looking to unlock a certain weapon pattern fast, then you will want to know the best way to farm that weapon for your best chances of getting a red border.
Season of the Witch Weapons
Every new Season in Destiny 2 brings new Seasonal activities. These activities are usually the source for this Season’s craftable weapons. For Season of the Witch, this means Savathun’s Spire and Alters of Summonning.
Completing either of these activities will reward you with new Seasonal gear and weapons. These weapons will always have a chance to drop as a red border.
For better chances at red border weapons, you will want to make sure you grab the two secret chests in the activity.
These can be acquired by shooting the elemental symbols throughout the platforming sections of the activity. These chests have increased chances of rewarding you with red border weapons.
Near the end of the activity, there will be a secret Shrieker boss that spawns. Killing it will also potentially reward you with Deepsight Resonance weapons.
Every activity you complete has the chance to drop a Witch’s Engram, this includes Sasonal activities, Crucible matches, Gambit games, and Strikes.
These Engrams can be decoded at the Ritual Table in the H.E.L.M. with a slight chance of rewarding red border weapons.
If you unlock the Witchcrafting Arcana Card at the Lectern of Divination, then you will be able to purchase a red border weapon of your choice for four Witch’s Engrams and 3,000 Glimmer.
The amount of times you can do this per week will depend on your Lectern of Divination upgrades. This is by far the easiest and most reliable way to get your patterns complete for the Season.
Be sure to log on at least once a week to pick up these patterns.
Older Seasonal Weapons
For any Seasonal weapons that aren’t in the current Season’s loot pool, you will need to play that Season’s Seasonal activity for red border weapons.
You can always pick up the Seasonal Heirloom for earlier Seasons from their vendors. This will allow you to obtain their Seasonal Engrams randomly from completing activities. These engrams will have a chance to reward red border weapons.
Overall, it is a lot harder to get red border weapons from older Seasons.
If possible, it is best to make sure you unlock the patterns for the current Season before it is over to save yourself the trouble of farming hundreds of Engrams later on when the Season passes.
Raids and Dungeons
Recently, Destiny 2 has brought back many of the older Raid and Dungeon weapons as craftable patterns, refreshing them with new Perks and giving players a reason to do these older activities again.
Luckily, Raid and Dungeon rewards will always have a chance of dropping as a red border variant. This means you could get multiple red border weapons from a single Raid or Dungeon run.
The best way to get these Deepsight Weapons fast is by waiting until the Raid or Dungeon of your choice is the Weekly Featured Raid or Dungeon.
Featured Raids and Dungeons have no limit on the amount of rewards they can give, unlike normal Raids and Dungeons, which only drop one reward per encounter per week.
Find the shortest encounter in the activity and begin farming it. Having a player with the encounter checkpoint ready is a must.
Join the player with the checkpoint, have them swap to a different character, complete the encounter as fast as possible, swap back to the character with the encounter checkpoint, and have everyone join the checkpoint again to rinse and repeat.
This is one of the best ways to far red border weapons, though you will only be able to get weapons from the Raid or Dungeon that you are farming. Doing this, you could easily get around 30 red border weapons every hour.
Some of the easiest encounters to farm are Kali in Last Wish, Ecthar in Ghost of the Deep, The Templar in Vault of Glass, and Phry’zhia in Grasp of Avarice, to name a few.
Dares of Eternity
Dares of Eternity has a great selection of weapons, with many of them being craftable.
Dares of Eternity is where you will find both the Half-Truth and The Other Half Swords, which are mandatory for Well Skating.
These Swords only require a single instance with Deepsight Resonance to unlock their weapon patterns for crafting.
While the drop rate for red border weapons isn’t amazing in Dares of Eternity, you will quickly build up a stockpile of Strange Coins.
You can exchange them for Paraversal Hauls at the Starhorse in Xur’s Treasure Horde, which has the chance of dropping a lot of loot, resulting in a better chance of obtaining red borders.
Deepsight Harmonizer
Deepsight harmonizers are Exotic crafting materials that take some of the RNG away from red border drops and let you choose which patterns you want to unlock faster.
When you get a red border weapon, you will see that it already contains Deepsight Resonance. Extracting the Deepsight Resonance is what gives you pattern progress.
You may notice that craftable weapons that drop without Deepsight Resonance have a tooltip saying, “Deepsight Activate is available for this weapon instance”.
This means you can use a Deepsight Harmonizer to attune your weapon and grant it Deepsight Resonance.
This will consume your Deepsight Harmonizer upon use, so make sure you only use them on weapons that you really want or weapons that are very hard to obtain.
Deepsight Harmonizers are best used on older Seasonal weapons as they are much harder to come by now.
While it can be tempting to use your Deepsight Harmonizers right away, you should know that Deepsight Harmonizers are very scarce. Bungie made sure of this. For Season of the Witch, you can find only six Deepsight Harmonizers available on the Season Pass.
It takes five Deepsight Harmonizers and five weapons to complete a weapon pattern for a weapon that you have zero pattern progress on.
this means you will have enough to extract an entire weapon pattern and have one Harmonizer left over for next Season. Choose your weapon wisely.
Xur and Banshee-44
While not necessarily sources of red border weapons, you will want to visit Xur and Banshee every week to see what weapons they have for sale.
These two vendors are the only vendors to sell weapons from older Seasons.
There is no limit to how many weapons you can buy from them, meaning you can easily get five different instances of the same weapon to have ready for your Deepsight Harmonizers.
This is by far the best use for your Deepsight Harmonizers, as there is usually no other way to unlock the weapon pattern for these older weapons.
Now you are ready to go out and get yourself some red border weapons!
What weapon patterns are you still trying to unlock? Is there a specific weapon you just can’t get to drop? Let me know in the comments!
