Microcosm is a Heavy Exotic trace rifle in Destiny 2: The Final Shape. It not only excels at breaking enemy shields, it also synergizes with your Super — no matter what Super you have equipped.
In this Destiny 2 guide, I’ll walk you through how to get Microcosm, including how to complete the Cooperative Focus missions in the “Convalescence: Budding” quest, where you’ll earn the Exotic trace.
How to get Microcosm in Destiny 2
You’ll get Microcosm from the final quest in the Convalescence questline, “Convalescence: Budding.”
Reaching “Convalescence: Budding” is fairly straightforward in Destiny 2: The Final Shape. Here’s a quick glance at everything you’ll need to do:
- Complete The Final Shape campaign
- “Destined Heroes” — “Queens, part 1”
- “Convalescence: Rootbound”
- “Convalescence: Underbrush”
- “Convalescence: Greenery”
- “Convalescence: Budding”
How to complete ‘Convalescence: Budding’
You’ll pick up the first quest in the Convalescence chain — “Rootbound” — while working your way through “Destined Heroes,” which you’ll start immediately after the campaign. Starting with “Rootbound,” you’ll then need to complete each of the Convalescence quests in order to reach “Budding” and Microcosm.
Thankfully, this entire questline is relatively straightforward, as it’s designed to teach you about The Pale Heart destination and all of its activities. But once you learn about lost Ghosts in “Rootbound,” Pale Heart mods in “Underbrush,” and Cyst activities in “Greenery,” you’ll need to learn about Cooperative Focus missions in “Budding.”
To complete “Convalescence: Budding,” you’ll need to complete the Cooperative Focus mode versions of three campaign missions:
- Ascent
- Dissent
- Iconoclasm
For these missions, you’ll need at least one other Guardian — although you’ll ideally want a full Fireteam of thee, since the missions don’t scale. But no matter what, these Cooperative Focus mode missions are not ones you can tackle solo, so you need to pair up with friends or other players via Fireteam Finder.
When you’re ready, locate the Campaign replay nodes on The Pale Heart. You’ll find the three icons for these Cooperative Focus quests under them. The missions say they’re 2005 Power, but the enemies are actually less powerful than the Legendary campaign baddies.
When you complete these missions and return to Micah-10 in The Lost City, they’ll give you Microcosm.
You can play these missions in any order, but they all share three tricky mechanics: Glyphtouched, Berserkers, and Witness Fracturing. Here’s how they work.
Glyphtouched
The first is a change to the Glyphtouched buff, which normally allows you to see symbols and walk into the correct ones. In the Cooperative Focus versions of the missions, only one player will be Glyphtouched, and they won’t be able to see what the symbols are. So you’ll need to communicate as a Fireteam, with the non-Glyphtouched Guardian instructing the Glyphtouched player what symbols to do.
Berserkers
Second, the Cooperative Focus missions reintroduce Berserkers from the Scourge of the Past raid. When you get close to these enemies, they’ll unleash a slowing field and expose weak points. The catch is you need to destroy a weak point on their front and back simultaneously — something you’ll need to do as a group.
Once you kill the Berserker, two Darkness Cruxs in the area will have their immunity shields disappear. You and your Fireteam members will need to each shoot a Crux at the same time as the other player. If you fail to do this for long enough, you’ll wipe and have to start over.
Witness Fracturing
Finally, in certain sections of each mission, The Witness will begin to afflict the Fracture debuff one member of your Fireteam at random. This stacking debuff increases every few seconds on the Fractured character. Once the debuff hits x7, the afflicted player won’t be able to use movement abilities anymore. But, at x7, you can interact with the Fractured player to take the debuff for yourself.
You’ll essentially need to juggle this between your Fireteam while the Fracture debuff is present. You cannot make it go away until you progress the objective, and it’ll kill your Fireteam members if they ever reach x10 stacks. Just coordinate together and play hot potato with the debuff until it goes away.
What does Microcosm do?
Before even getting into Microcosm’s perks, the weapon is already unique for two reasons: it’s a Heavy trace rifle and it’s a Heavy weapon that doesn’t deal elemental damage (Kinetic). It also does pretty decent damage, so it’s a great pickup for any Prismatic builds where you’re trying to get Transcendence as often as possible.
Microcosm has two Exotic perks. The first is Paracausal Beam, which causes the gun to fire Kinetic light, dealing massive bonus damage to shields. The second is Paracausal Imbuement, which causes kills with Microcosm to grant you Super energy. Additionally, Microcosm does additional damage for a short time after your Super expires.
