How To Masterwork Weapons & Armor

Wondering how to Masterwork weapons and armor in Destiny 2? Well, here’s our guide to help you with the complete process.

Destiny 2 throws a mountain of guns and armor at the players, and all of them have a sometimes bewildering variety of perks, mod slots, and other features and selections to absorb. But as a player, your only options to improve these pieces are infusing them for extra Power and increasing their Tier by Masterworking.

Related: Destiny 2: Best Legendary Weapons, Ranked

You can massively increase your equipment’s power by Masterworking, but you will need some specific materials to do so. In this guide, you can learn exactly what you can do, how to do it, and what materials you’re going to need.

Masterworking Weapons

The simplest and cheapest kind of upgrading — weapons can be Masterworked by upgrading the Tier to Level 10. You can see the Tier in the Weapon screen in the Mods section. Each weapon has a unique Stat that the Tier increases by 1 each time you upgrade. If you are lucky enough to have any Adept weapons, they will grant an additional +3 to every other stat after they are Masterworked. The weapon’s main bonus stat can not be changed, so you should look to upgrade weapons with the combination of Weapon perks and Stat bonus you want.

Upgrading Tiers costs Enhancement Cores, which can be obtained by completing bounties for the Gunsmith, dismantling Legendary or Exotic weapons, or defeating powerful enemies with a Finest Matterweave item buff.

The table below shows how many are required at each level.

Masterworked weapons will also grant trackers for Crucible or PVE kill counts.

Masterworking Exotic Weapons

Exotic Weapons use a different system — they are Masterworked automatically by applying a completed Catalyst. Each weapon has a different Catalyst that is acquired through a different method. You can see what the method is in the Patterns & Catalyst section of the Triumphs screen. Often these involve completing a specific activity, such as Nightfall Strikes or Crucible matches, and the drop is not normally guaranteed, so it may require patience.

Once you have acquired and applied the Catalyst, it will have an associated task that must be completed before it is activated. Normally, these involve killing a certain number of enemies with the weapon, often hundreds, which will also take some time.

Related: Destiny 2: Best Hunter Builds For Crucible

Masterworking Legendary and Exotic Armor

Armor again has a different process for upgrading and potentially much greater benefits. Armor that is increased in quality gains Energy, which lets it slot higher-powered Mods. Armor that is Masterworked gains 2pts to every stat, for a total of 12 extra stat points. When you have several Masterworked pieces, not only will you have loads of room to apply mods in different ways and create different builds, but you will also have vastly increased stats and all the benefits that go with them, such as lower ability cooldowns or more damage resistance.

Armor upgrading also uses Enhancement Cores but requires the higher tiers of the same items — Enhancement Prisms and Ascendant Shards. These can be acquired by trading Enhancement Cores with Master Rahool in the Tower at the rate of 10 Enhancement Cores to 1 Enhancement Prism for 10,000 Glimmer and 10 Enhancement Prisms to one Ascendant Shard for 50,000 Glimmer. Both of these materials can also drop from certain Nightfall Strikes and other high-end PVE activities.

The table below shows the different material and Glimmer costs for each type of Armor.

Legendary Armor

Exotic Armor

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