Destiny 2 – How to get Heir Apparent (Exotic Heavy Machine Gun)
Heir Apparent is the prize for turning in a lot of medals during the Guardian Games, however, this exotic is worth it. It’s unique, deals some heavy damage and you feel like a member of the Cabal when your firing this thing. The following is a guide for how to get Heir Apparent in Destiny 2.
Guardian Games runs from April 21st – May 11th 2020 and the main prize for the event, outside who gets to call themselves the best class for the rest of the year, is Heir Apparent. This is an exotic heavy machine gun, that takes more than a little inspiration from the Cabal and one Valus Ta’aurc.
The games themselves are bounty focused, which means a bit of a grind to get this weapon. But this one is worth it, and you still have plenty of time to get the weapon before it goes away on the 11th of May. It may come back at a later date, but we don’t know when, so get it while it’s hot.
To get this weapon you have to complete a Triumph called Class act. This can be found on the triumphs tab, and then have a look at Seasonal Events and then Guardian Games.
There are a few tactics you can do to get this weapon earlier as well as some triumphs to avoid. You’ll be able to get this weapon faster if you run multiple Guardians. With just over a week left, you may nearly be there, but if not you can still do it by logging in over the next week or so, picking up medals on your guardians and turning them in.
Triumphs to do
Renowned – Earn points by collecting laurels from supers, grenades and charged melee final blows. Get to 100%. This one is fairly straight forward, albeit a little time-consuming. This is one of those where the percentage bar goes up slowly. I do have a guide on how to farm laurels, I’d recommend checking that out. Basically you want to be farming activities with lots of weaker enemies – since you need destination, forge and gambit medals anyways I’d recommend those activities so you can double up on earning medals and collecting laurels at the same time.
Great Deeds – Collect laurels in Gambit, Strikes, Forges and Destinations. You’ll need 400 in Gambit, 500 in strikes, 600 in Forges and 1000 for Destinations. I found I did this one while doing the other triumphs for destination, forges, strikes and gambit but if you need to top this off once they are complete then just hop back into the activity and pick up them laurels.
Represent – Defeat enemies in strikes and nightfalls, get to 100%. This is one of the easier and quicker ones to do, it probably took me around 5-10 strikes to complete.
Quintuple Threat – Redeem a gold medal in crucible, gambit, strikes, Destinations, Forges. This one is another easy one, simply turn in a gold medal for each of the main activities.
World Class – 20 medals from Forges or Destinations. This is where running multiple Guardians come in handy, as each day you’ll be able to pick up 9 medals in each activity. If you have one of each class, then the day gambit medals are available you can pick up 3 on your Titan, 3 on your Warlock and 3 on your Hunter.
Guardian Gamble – Redeem 10 Gambit medals. This is another where multiple characters do you some good. Pick up as many as you can on all your characters and get this one done quickly.
Embrace the light – Get 25 super kills in Rumble. This one is a pain in the ass if you don’t like PVP that much. In Rumble it’s the first to 20, so you’ll need to get as many kills as you can as quickly as possible to get your super up. Try and get multiple kills with your super, otherwise, this is going to take much longer. If you can get 2 or 3 kills per super then it’s not going to take very long. The most frustrating part here is getting the super, and then not getting any kills at all. I saved this one until last, as I knew it was going to be a grind, and it took a few hours to complete.
Triumphs to avoid
Medalist – Redeem 75 medals. If you get all medals on all 3 characters then it’s still going to take 8 days, and I didn’t really want to go 8 days in a row getting all medals on all characters – that doesn’t sound great. One to avoid.
Gold medalist – Redeem 30 gold medals. Again, this means getting a lot of golds, which is going to be VERY time consuming and repetitive, another one to avoid.
Show your colours – Get points from bounties. You could do this one sure, but the percentage meter goes up slowly and the bounties are very specific and time-consuming. For me, another one to avoid.
Let me know down in the comments which triumphs you completed and which ones you avoided.
Once you have the seven triumphs complete then you can complete the Class Act, head back to the Tower and pick up the Hier Apparent from Eva.
Heir Apparent
This is an exotic heavy machine gun that goes in the power slot. It’s 900 round per minute and has 115 in the magazine, making this one of the fastest machine guns in the game. It’s got good range at 64, great handling at 70, pretty good stability at 58 and on the hidden stats it’s 90 aim assist and 75 on recoil.
There’s a few interesting perks on this one and the first is Heavy Slug Thrower and you use this to spin up the weapon. It can only be fired when fully spun up. The second is Amor of the Colossus, while at full health spinning up this weapon protects you with an Arc shield.
This is basically a mini-gun and you can see the big Cabal shooting them at you at various points in the game. One interesting thing with this gun is you can’t aim down sights, the regular aim spins this weapon up. This has to be one of the most unique exotics in the game right now, it’s fun to use and does big damage. It’s probably not going to take the place of Xenophage or Whisper of the Worm, but it’s good – plus if you’re a Titan you can wear something like Actium War Rig and shoot this thing for days.
As well as the damage this dishes out, you get an arc shield. This seems to work much as arc shields work out there in PVE. When you’re at full health this thing protects you from all damage, but if you’re using this in PVP and another guardian shoots you with an Arc weapon then this thing explodes.
It’s most likely going to be better for PVE rather than PVP, as by the time this gun spins up and is ready to shoot, then someone with has wither sniped you or 3 tapped you and you’re dead. It’s not impossible for PVP, but that spinning up probably won’t do you any good.
Guardian Games, in general, is a grind with too many bounties. Bounties layered on bounties even. It doe seem like Bungie has taken this into account with their latest update in This Week At Bungie.
“Our Seasonal free events are also currently heavily utilizing bounties in their design. We have seen the feedback around Guardian Games being the most recent source of frustration, with too much emphasis on completing bounties to participate in the event. We don’t plan on making any changes to the current event as it’s ending in a few weeks, but are already looking at plans to adjust the role bounties will play in future events.”
Hopefully, we can look forward to changes in the future, but for now Heir Apparent is good enough to warrant the effort, so go out there and get it.
The Heir Apparent got me grinding my way through Guardian Games, and if it was just the matter of calling yourself the best class, that probably wouldn’t have been enough to get me through the event. This Exotic weapon though was a great incentive. This is exactly the kind of weapon you would want from a drop from a Cabal themed Nightfall (or maybe Grand Master Nightfall), having the loot thematically tied to the activity you’re playing would be great going forward.
It’d be cool in the future if you had a chance for this weapon to drop on successful completion of an end game activity, but I would imagine Bungie wanted to give as many people as possible the chance to get this weapon and take part in the Guardian Games.
Let me know down in the comments what you think of Heir Apparent. How do you think it compares with other heavy machine guns and is it worth that exotic slot?
That’s it for this guide for how to get Heir Apparent in Destiny 2. For more Destiny 2 content like this check out the Shadowkeep Guide or check out the YouTube Channel.