Destiny: Xur weapons, gear, and location, February 3 - 5. Invective!

Xur, Destiny’s weekend Exotic trader, legendary professional bowling team manager, and whimsical potato puppeteer, is back. This week he’s in the Tower, over near the Speaker. He is over there, and he is selling this lot, most of which is actually great. 

• Helm of Saint-14 (Exotic Titan helmet) – 13 Strange Coins
• Radiant Dance Machines (Exotic Hunter boots) – 13SC
• Skull of Dire Ahamkara (Exotic Warlock helmet) – 13SC
• Invective (Exotic shotgun) – 23SC
• Legacy Engram (Helmet engram) – 31 Strange Coins
• Exotic Shard - 7SC
• Three of Coins – 7SC
• Glass Needle – 3SC 

Things start out strong with the Titan’s Helm of Saint-14, which blinds and stalls any enemy that wanders into your Ward of Dawn bubble. This makes the Ward immediately more effective as a safe-haven, in that you’ll easily be able to mop up anything that wanders into its vicinity. In fact it pretty much turns the swarm behaviour of certain enemies into an advantage. Many Hive shall fall to this one. It also gives extra Super energy for both grenade and Heavy weapon kills, so on the whole, a very amenable Exotic. 

The Hunters’ Radiant Dance Machines maintain the quality, with a very handy perk that increases your speed while scoped. Great on its own, but combine it with a gun like the MIDA Multi-tool (which has a movement speed buff of its own), and you’ll find yourself with a hell of a maneuverability advantage. The Warlocks get the only crappy piece of armour this week, Dire Ahamkara’s Skull only giving an armour bonus when firing your Nova Bomb. Thus, it’s only useful for 1/3 of your subclasses, and honestly, not particularly effective even at the one thing it’s designed to do. If you’re looking for a Voidwalker-specific Exotic, get the Obsidian Mind. The Obsidian Mind is bloody fantastic. 

As for guns though, if you do not own Invective, you owe it to yourself to buy Invective. Built around the best shotgun archetype in the game – ie. decent range, big impact, both of which can be further buffed out in its perk tree – it can also be modded to a really good stability rating for a weapon of its power, regenerates ammo, and most significantly, fires (very fast) in full-auto mode, and adds additional damage to the last shot in every mag. All of which means, in practice, that when you run up to something and hold the trigger down, that thing is going to get hurt a lot. Like, a hell of a lot. Also, Invective is possibly just the most fun shotgun to use in the game, and that’s as important as anything. Seriously, it sounds like the roar of an angry robot dragon. One shot and you’ll be hooked. 

As ever, Xur will be around until 10am UK / 2am PT on Sunday, at which point he’ll bugger right off and won’t care how sad you are about it. 

David Houghton
Long-time GR+ writer Dave has been gaming with immense dedication ever since he failed dismally at some '80s arcade racer on a childhood day at the seaside (due to being too small to reach the controls without help). These days he's an enigmatic blend of beard-stroking narrative discussion and hard-hitting Psycho Crushers.