The second act of Destiny 2‘s first new episode, Echoes, adds two new guns to the list of weapons you can acquire from the episode’s activities. Like other episode weapons, you can eventually earn the ability to buy those two guns from Failsafe, the Echoes vendor. However, the ability to “focus” Echoes engrams into Aberrant Action or Corrasion isn’t immediately available with the launch of the episode. Instead, you have to earn it as a vendor upgrade by completing Failsafe’s tasks.
The bad news is that the ability to unlock focusing for Aberrant Action and Corrasion isn’t available during the first week of Act 2, even if you grind all the available story and Failsafe content this week. But we have a sense of what you’ll need to do to unlock it when it does become available. And, with some luck, you can still secure red-border Deepsight versions of these guns while we await the ability to focus them.
Both guns are pretty notable: Aberrant Action is a rocket-assisted sidearm and just the third of that type of gun in the game, while Corrasion is a heavy pulse rifle that has a different feel from just about any other pulse. That makes being able to secure god rolls on them through focusing or crafting an enticing proposition.
Complete Failsafe’s Specimen Missions
With Act 2 comes Specimen ID: NES004, a new mission to gather weird Vex stuff from Nessus for Failsafe to study. The mission is a bit of a grind, and though completing it doesn’t unlock the upgrade to focus the new guns, it does unlock a different upgrade. It’ll be necessary to knock this one down in order to get the upgrade that does bring focusing, so you’ll want to complete it when you can.
NES004 Step 1 – Open Episode Chests
Specimen ID: NES004 is a bit grindy to complete. The first step requires you to finish episode activities and open the chests you find at the end of each, and progress on this can be slow. Some activities, like Enigma Protocol, don’t contribute at all, while Battlegrounds only give about 22% of progress, meaning you’ll need to clear about five of them to finish the objective. We found the quickest progress by playing higher-difficulty Breach Executable missions, which gave about 33% progress each.
NES004 Step 2 – Focus Echoes Gear
Once you’ve done enough episode activities, return to Failsafe. You need to focus five Echoes engrams into pieces of gear, but you can’t decrypt Echoes engrams into random stuff to count toward progress. Instead, use the focusing menu to pick something specific. You do not need to focus individual weapons or armor if you don’t want to, which is nice because specific focusing costs more engrams that you might want to save. Instead, for the cheapest option, pick the Echoes engram on the armor focusing menu furthest to the left. That’ll cost you one engram per decode, but counts as focusing for the quest. Once you’ve focused five, you’re finished.
NES004 Step 3 – Extract Data And Complete Battlegrounds
This is a simple one, with the requirement being to extract data from episode activities and to defeat powerful combatants in Battlegrounds activities. While it sounds like those are two separate requirements, you can actually complete them in one single Battlegrounds run. Just be sure to pick up Radiolite specimens, those weird-shaped crystals, throughout the Battlegrounds run. It’s recommended that you equip a Resource Detector on your Ghost shell to make them easy to spot. You should also use your Piston Hammer on the weird Vex Planetary Assimilation Pistons in the mission, to make sure you get enough Radiolite along the way to complete the objective. In our experience, though, this one was handled without really having to think about it.
NES004 Step 4 – Return To Failsafe
Head back to the HELM and talk to Failsafe to get your finalized Specimen ID: NES004 and add it to the specimen tank. That’ll unlock the Armor Reputation Boost upgrade with Failsafe, giving you 100% more Failsafe reputation points when you wear Echoes armor and do things like complete Echoes activities and turn in Echoes bounties.
Unfortunately, though, that doesn’t get you the ability to focus Aberrant Action or Corrasion. It does, however, get Specimen ID: NES004 out of the way so you can complete the next Specimen mission when it comes up. Eventually, one of these should unlock the ability to focus these new weapons, which will also allow you to purchase a Deepsight version each week to more quickly unlock the option to craft them. As noted above, you can get Deepsight versions now through random drops, including by focusing Echo engrams into weapons at Failsafe.
We’ll update this guide as Act 2 continues and we know more about unlocking focusing for Echoes weapons, so stay tuned.
