The Season of the Chosen has brought with it a new slate of weapons to Destiny 2 to help players battle the Cabal and the season’s new villain, Empress Caiatl. If you pay for the season pass, you can get the cool new bow Ticuu’s Divination immediately, but to unlock another big-time weapon this season, you’ll have to put in some work. That weapon is Salvager’s Salvo, a breech-loading Energy grenade launcher that requires completing the Messy Business quest to unlock. The bad news is that you’ll need a whole lot of kills to earn the gun–but on the plus side, you can earn those kills in any activity playlist, including Gambit, Strikes, Nightfall: The Ordeal, and the Crucible.
Salvager’s Salvo is going to take you a while to earn no matter what–it’s the kind of chase that’s meant to last you through at least a portion of the season. You can speed up that process, however, if you pay attention to the requirements in Messy Business. It requires you to complete playlist activities and earn points for killing enemies during those activities. You need a whole lot of points–7,500.
Here are a few tips for how you can make the most of your playlist activities, speed up your progress in Messy Business, and grab yourself Salvager’s Salvo with a minimum of frustration. You’ll also want to check out our other Season of the Chosen guides, including our rundown of seasonal challenges and a complete explanation of how the HELM, Hammer of Proving, and Umbral Engrams work.
Step 1: Get The Messy Business Quest
You’ll first need the quest for Messy Business, which you can pick up from Banshee-44 in the Tower. The quest tracks your progress across your entire account, so if you play on other characters, you’ll still chip away at the quest–even if you don’t pick it up on all characters.
Step 2: Grab A Good Grenade Launcher
The first requirement for Messy Business is to rack up points for getting kills in playlist activities. You need 7,500 points, which is a lot. You’ll get points for any kills you make during Crucible matches, Gambit matches, Strikes, and Nightfall activities, but most of those kills will have very low point totals.
To maximize your points, you want to use breech-loading grenade launchers, barrel-loading (that is, Heavy ammo) grenade launchers, and grenades in battle. Kills with these weapons rocket your points up, whereas kills by other means can get you as few as one point per kill.
To maximize efficiency, we recommend using Witherhoard if you have it. The Blight-launching grenade launcher from the Season of Arrivals leaves a poisonous ring on the ground where it lands, and enemies who stumble through it will die even while you’re reloading or focusing on something else. Grenades and Heavy ammo launchers are useful too, especially launchers with the Chain Reaction perk, but Witherhoard is going to do the bulk of the work for you here.
If you don’t have Witherhoard, other breech-loaders will do, including Deafening Whisper from the Season of the Hunt.
Step 3: Set Your Loadout For Discipline
Having lots of grenades to throw will also help you significantly in advancing along the track to Salvager’s Salvo. It’s best to have an armor set with Discipline mods equipped to get your grenades back as quickly as possible.
You’ll probably also want to avoid using the Stasis subclass on this grind, as Stasis grenades don’t immediately kill enemies. Any grenade that issues a powerful explosive, chain lightning, or creates a lasting damage field will help you maximize your kills against small enemies.
Step 4: Jump Into Gambit
We did a few experiments to determine which activity is likely the best for grinding Messy Business, and it seems like Gambit is the winner in most cases. There are lots of enemies in any given Gambit match that you can kill with your Witherhoard, which will help you earn points as quickly as possible.
The second requirement for the quest is completing playlist matches of any kind, which drives up a percentage for the objective. The numbers vary a bit, with wins earning more percentage points than losses, and tougher Nightfall: The Ordeal runs raising the percentage more than easier ones. Crucible and Gambit losses added about 2% to the total, while Gambit wins and Nightfall Strikes of the Heroic difficulty raised the percentage around 3-3.5%, it seemed.
If you want to go tougher Nightfalls, you’ll raise the percentage more quickly, but Gambit seems like the sweet spot for efficiency. We added about 250 points per Gambit match with just Witherhoard in tow, so speccing properly to favor grenades and grenade launchers will likely add more points. If you’re earning between 2% and 4% per match, that should put you at around 30 Gambit matches to fill the meter for the second objective; your points total should pretty much match that trajectory, requiring about 30 matches for you to earn all 7,500.
Note that some playlist activities will not advance the Messy Business quest. The new Battlegrounds list that’s under the Vanguard node in the Director, specifically, does not affect your progress toward Salvager’s Salvo. Save those activities for when you’re working on the catalyst for Ticuu’s Divination or other objectives you want to complete.
Step 5: Play What’s Fun
Of course, your mileage may vary, and that’s a lot of Gambit to play. Note that Bungie has deliberately redesigned Ritual weapon quests to be playlist-agnostic–meaning you can work on them no matter what part of the game you like to play or need to play for other objectives. Keep in mind that quests like this are meant to be completed over the course of at least a portion of the season; if the grind sounds overwhelming, know that you can always progress Messy Business at a much more leisurely pace. Mix in Strikes and Crucible to keep yourself having fun.
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