Unique vendors are at the core of any piece of Destiny 2 seasonal content, and in Episode: Heresy, you’ll be leveling reputation with the Shaping Slab. A Taken artifact hidden away in Eris Morn’s flat, it’s the primary source of progression during the Episode, and knowing how to increase your reputation is key to getting the most out of the season.
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Increasing your Shaping Slab reputation follows the same pattern as previous Episodic content. The best way to progress is to engage with the new activities, but you’re not entirely bound to them this time around.
How To Level Shaping Slab Reputation
There are three ways to increase your Shaping Slab reputation, a value called Taken Mastery. Two are unique to the Episode’s core activity, The Nether. The last is thematically linked but accessible anywhere in the game.
The early Shaping Slab reputation levels will cost less than later ones. The first few will only take a few hundred Taken Mastery points to unlock. Future ones will take 1,000 or more.
The three methods of gathering Taken Mastery reputation are:
- Completing boss challenges in The Nether and opening the loot chest.
- Turning in ten Metastasized Essentia at the Taken Altar.
- Breaking Taken orbs and collecting their remnants.
Opening the randomly spawned loot chests does not reward any Taken Mastery.
Boss Encounter Progression
Completing a boss challenge in The Nether is the most consistent way of increasing your Shaping Slab reputation, and you’ll want to do so in a group. Solo runs give 25 fewer Taken Mastery reputation points per opened chest, for whatever reason.
The specific point values are:
- The first two bosses defeated on Advanced difficulty: 75 Taken Mastery reputation if solo, 100 if in a group.
- The third boss defeated on Advanced difficulty: 100 Taken Mastery reputation if solo, 125 if in a group.
If you and/or your team leave the Nether for any reason, either because you wipe, disconnect, or some other issue, you’ll lose out on rewards entirely. No reputation, no loot, nothing. Be sure you finish all the smaller Eversion encounters, defeat the boss-level enemy, and open the chest at the end.
Turning in Metastasized Essentia is a more passive way to earn Shaping Slab reputation. You’ll mostly find the stuff aboard the Dreadnaught during The Nether activity, and you’ll find it everywhere. It’s also a reputation level-up reward at the Shaping Slab itself.
Essentia are large, white, spiny spheres that grow along walls, in corners, and among rocky outcroppings. When you pick them up in the Dreadnaught, they’re marked as “Fleeting,” and you need to complete a boss encounter to remove that descriptor. They’ll also turn from white rarity to green.
Once you have ten Essentia, you can return to Eris Morn’s flat and interact with the Taken Altar there.
You can’t turn in less than ten Essentia and bank them for later. It’s either a stack of ten or not at all. You can turn in multiple stacks of ten per visit, but you need to interact with the altar for each.
For every ten Metastasized Essentia you turn in, you’ll get a solid 200 Taken Mastery points.
Taken Orb Progression
While the previous two Shaping Slab progression paths are exclusive to the Nether activity, finding and breaking Taken orbs is activity-agnostic. That is, you can do it anywhere in the game. Don’t expect huge returns, but it is a nice quality-of-life feature.
Every enemy in the game has a chance to drop one or more glowing Taken orbs, which, when shot, splinter into three smaller orbs. Each orb awards five Taken Mastery points and one or two Sigil Stones for up to 15 points per Taken orb.
We tested this system in multiple game modes, including Strikes, the Revenant Onslaught playlist, and in the open world. We could usually get about 45-75 Taken Mastery points on a lucky run, though sometimes less.
In short, if you want to progress the Shaping Slab efficiently, play The Nether, complete all three boss encounters, and collect as much Metastasized Essentia as possible. Whenever you see one or more Taken orbs on the ground, take a second to shoot them and collect the smaller orbs they drop.
Most runs of The Nether should take about 15-20 minutes, depending on your team composition and skill. That averages to about 325-375 Taken Mastery per run or around 1,000 per hour. Lastly, ensure you have a Tome of Want ritual running for more rewards.
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