How To Increase Your Light Level In Destiny

It’s got to a point now, no doubt, that you just want to get on in Destiny. Maybe you want to reach the right level for raids, or are sick of being stuck at level 20?

At level 20 you’ll start levelling up entirely through your Light level, a new stat that is applied to all level 20+ defensive items. As your Light stat increases you’ll increase your Light level.

But it can seem like an arduous task finding the extra gear to increase your Light levels, so here’s some handy tips we’ve gathered from our own experience and from across the web.

Upgrade Your Weapons & Armour

First and foremost, at level 20 you’re going to have almost entirely rare items, if not the odd legendary and exotic thrown into the mix.

A simple way to increase your Light level is to level these up enough that you can upgrade their defence, which will in turn increase your Light stat.

It’s only a minor upgrade, but each upgraded defence item will increase your Light stat (not level) by 1, while each upgraded legendary or exotic item increases the stat by 2.

It’s worth doing as soon as you can, and remember to equip any new items you have before handing in Bounties to make the most of the XP reward you earn.

Xur, Agent Of The Nine

This intriguing fellow will only appear during the weekends in the Tower, and will sell you special exotic items for particular amounts of Strange Coins. His exact location changes, but from Friday morning to Sunday morning he’ll be available to sell you goods.

Among a variety of items available, Xur also sells exotic weapons and armour. He sells exotic engrams, too, for Motes Of Light, but as is so often the case with engrams that doesn’t mean you’ll actually get an exotic item.

Still, it’s one way of buying exotic armour and – as such – a handy way of guaranteeing an upgrade your equipment (and therefore Light level). Of course you’ll need the Strange Coins to actually purchase these, but you can always aim collect as many as you can.

Sadly Strange Coins are random drops from dismantling equipment, found in chests and all the other usual ways you find rare materials. However, if you take part in public events you’ll have a much higher chance of earning Strange Coins.

Whenever you complete a public event you’ll receive a letter at the Postmaster; opening this letter will give you a rare material – and one of those could be a Strange Coin. It’s not consistent, but it’s worth doing a public event if you see one happening just to make the most of this.

Level Faction Reputation First

At level 20 you’ll have the arduous task of reputation grinding (and they say it’s not an MMO), but while many would recommend levelling your Vanguard and Crucible rep ranks first, it’s actually better to rank up for a particular faction first – at least if you want to increase Light level.

The reason for this is the fact that every reputation rank at rank 3 and above will net you an legendary weapon or equipment item – and that’s item, not engram – so you’ll have a reward worth chasing.

When wearing a faction class item, any reputation you earn – whether it’s Vanguard or Crucible – would be applied to your choice of faction instead. This means that whatever you do at level 20 will increase your rank twice as quick as you might if you didn’t have that faction item equipped.

As such you can reach rank 3 much quicker, though it’s worth knowing that you can only buy faction items with Crucible marks – so you may want to slightly favour that and simply complete Vanguard bounties.

Legendaries might not be as fancy as exotics, but they still offer a great deal of Light bonus so definitely worth aiming for, at least initially.

Vanguard & Crucible Items

After you’ve grabbed a few faction-based rep legendaries, your next option is to work on Vanguard and Crucible purchases. You’ll be able to guarantee yourself an upgrade (since it’s a purchase, rather than a drop), so a little more consistent.

But it does involve grinding. You’ll first need to raise your rank to level 3 before you get access to anything worthwhile, and not only that you’ll need to collect Marks to buy the items with.

Completing PvE missions and events (such as dailies and weeklies) will earn you Vanguard reputation and Marks. Completing PvP matches in Crucible will earn your Crucible reputation and Marks.

Both are capped out at 100 Marks a week – after that you won’t be able to earn any more, and this cap is reset on Tuesdays.

Farming For Drops

The last and least-favourable option is simply grinding for loot drops. The methods will regularly change as and when Bungie starts patching things out, so your preferred option might not always work.

Cave-camping is a popular one since it’ll get you a lot of drops quite easily without much work – but it’s also easy to patch out by Bungie, so make the most of it while you can.

A current popular grinding option that isn’t quite as easy to patch is the mission The Dark Beyond, at the point in the mission where the doors open and the Hive pours out.

Here you can keep gunning the enemies down (there are a lot of weak Thralls, a handful of Acolytes and a Knight) and hope that a special item might drop.

The trick, however, is to let yourself die after killing most of the enemies (absolutely don’t kill them all), and this will cause you to respawn and reset the fight. Use this to rinse and repeat the process, collecting the drops as you go.

It might take a while to get something worthwhile, but it’s an option. Here’s the grinding spot detailed in-full: