If you played Destiny, you may be familiar with Xur, the weekly Exotic item merchant. In Destiny 2, he’s back, and he can now appear all over the map. This week, he’s in the Tower hangar, and there’s a helpful icon on the planet map to show you where he is. You can find Xur hiding out just north of the Dead Orbit vendor on some stairs.
Xur’s inventory this week consists of the following:
- Crimson, Exotic hand cannon: 29 Legendary Shards
- Fr0st-EE5, Exotic Hunter boots: 23 Legendary Shards
- ACD/0 Feedback Fence, Exotic Titan gauntlets: 23 Legendary Shards
- Starfire Protocol, Exotic Warlock chest: 23 Legendary Shards
- Three of Coins: 31 Legendary Shards
Each of the items comes at a maximum power level of 305 — a base power of 300, plus a Legendary (purple) mod that raises the value by five. This scales to your character’s power level, so make sure you’re buying Xur Exotics on your highest level character.
CRIMSON
The Crimson hand cannon arrived in Destiny 2 with the Curse of Osiris downloadable content. However, Destiny players may recognize it as an offshoot of the fan-favorite weapon Red Death. Its first exotic perk is Banned Weapon, which causes it to fire in three-round bursts. Its secondary perk. Cruel Remedy, causes Crimson kills to heal the player. If they’re precision kills, the magazine is instantly refilled.
Crimson is an awesome hand cannon, capable of some real destruction in the right hands. This is one of those weapons that players will either love or hate, depending on their preferences. If you enjoyed Red Death in Destiny or just love pulse rifles (which also fire in bursts), this is an awesome weapon. If none of that sounds appealing to you, you can probably skip it.
FR0ST-EE5
Fr0st-EE5 is a returning exotic from Destiny. Its intrinsic perk is Rapid Cooldown. When sprinting, your dodge, melee, and grenade energy will rapidly recharge. Dodging will also increase your sprint speed.
Fr0st-EE5 has some fun perk design that feeds into itself in a neat way. The actual usefulness of the perk is a whole different question, however. Hunters have so many good exotics, that even if Fr0st-EE5’s regeneration was incredible, it wouldn’t be worth wearing over Celestial Nighthawk, Foetracer, or Orpheus Rig. If you play a lot of PvP and you don’t like Foetracer for some reason, these could offer you some nice bonuses. Otherwise, skip the Fr0st-EE5s.
ACD/0 FEEDBACK FENCE
The Titan exotics are the ACD/0 Feedback Fence. These gauntlets have the exotic perk Fury Conductors, which causes melee kills to build up energy. When you get hit with a melee attack, you release that energy in an explosion. While the Feedback Fences look very cool, their primary perk is fairly unimpressive. If you’re looking to expand your armory and collect all the exotics, grab these. If you don’t want to waste shards, these Titan gauntlets aren’t for you.
STARFIRE PROTOCOL
Starfire Protocol will rarely be a worthwhile exotic. Its perk is Fusion Harness, which grants you an extra charge of fusion grenades and causes fusion grenade kills to grant you Rift energy. The fusion grenades are fairly subpar in Destiny 2, which makes this perk mostly useless. It also requires you to use Dawnblade, which is the least useful of the Warlock specs. If you already love being a Dawnblade and using fusion grenades, then you should absolutely pick this up. If you don’t often use either, skip it.
THREE OF COINS
This old farming buff has returned from the Destiny graveyard to help you farm Exotics. Three of Coins is a four-hour buff that increases the odds of Exotic engrams dropping in the wild. Bungie clarified their effectiveness, and they don’t seem particularly worth the steep Legendary Shard cost at the moment.