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The Drifter is a rogue Light-bearer who hosts the Gambit activity and acts as a vendor for Gambit-related items. Aboard his Derelict ship, he has explored the far reaches of the Solar System and beyond, collecting machines, gadgets, and trinkets along the way.
The Drifter, for the most part, is a mystery to many. He has gone by many names, has travelled across the system and embraces both light and dark.
In recent times, the Drifter has helped us establish a better connection with the Nine, especially through his complicated relationship with the Emissary of the Nine. During the rise of the Kell of Darkness, the Drifter and Eris Morn assisted Guardians with wielding Stasis, a form of Darkness.
Information extracted from Destinypedia & Ishtar Collective. To view lore entries from Ishtar Collective, click here.
The Drifter is your point of contact for the Gambit activity and is located in the Tower Annex. The Drifter offers a seasonal weapon ornament, bounties, and a Triumph Seal for each season. Rank-up packages are also available which provide additional rewards, such as materials and a new shader, for specific Infamy ranks.
When the Drifter transmats you to the Gambit arena, hostiles will begin to flood a corner of the arena. Your objective is to clear out each wave, collect and bank the motes that drop from the combatants that you defeat.
Once your team has banked 100 motes, you will summon a Primeval, a Taken Boss, that you will need to defeat. Defeat your Primeval before the opposing team defeats theirs to win the match.
Banking motes will also send blockers to the opposing team’s bank, preventing them from banking further motes until they clear their bank. All blockers are Taken Majors. There are three different types of blockers that you can spawn:
If two or more blockers are summoned, they will begin to drain the bank. You will hear an audio alert when this is happening. If your bank is being blocked, work as a team to clear them out as quickly as possible, or your team may run the risk of losing a good chunk of motes!
Three times during the initial collecting round, a portal to the opposing team will become available. One Guardian can use the portal and invade the other side. The invader’s objective is to eliminate or disrupt the opposing team. Unless defeated, the invader has 15 seconds to do what they can to wreak havoc before being sent back to their side. When your team has summoned a Primeval, the enemy team can periodically send over their invader!
Use long-range weaponry, like a Scout or Sniper Rifle! Gjallarhorn, Xenophage and Eyes of Tomorrow also work great, and heavy spawns quite frequently after clearing out waves.
To destroy a Primeval, you will need to eliminate Taken Wizards called “Primeval Envoys” that spawn at certain health points. This will provide a stack of damage buffs for your team called “Primeval Slayer.” Rinse and repeat until the Primeval is dead.
NOTE: Prior to summoning your Primeval, it’s best to pick up special and heavy ammo and conserve them for the fight ahead. Unless you are actively invading, you should have plenty of ammo for the boss battle.
Here’s our recommendation for the Primeval Gameplay:
If you’re in a fireteam, you can communicate when supers should be used, but general rule of thumb is to leave them for last, especially the high-damage supers like Thundercrash, Chaos Reach, Nova Bomb and Blade Barrage.
Keep an eye out for reputation boosts! A notification will be posted in-game. Our Destiny 2 Dashboard will also provide a banner notification when reputation boosts are in effect!
The following updates have been made to Gambit in Season 16 (February 22, 2022). Information was from a Bungie.net TWAB article: This Week At Bungie – 2/17/2022 > News | Bungie.net
Core Activity ChangesThese changes are all about enhancing teamwork or making the mode easier to play and understand.
Blockers, Draining, and the BankWhile Bungie didn’t do any drastic adjustments here, they have a few tweaks that they think will increase interesting decisions both when sending and battling Blockers, and hopefully remove the feeling of helplessness as you pour ammo into three Knights as all of your Motes drain away.
Ammo EconomyBungie’s goal for these changes are to make a more predictable and equal baseline of Special and Heavy ammo among all players. They will be watching both feedback and analytics around ammo gain and usage rates, and they will continue to make tweaks if these aren’t enough to make fair matches.
The Primeval FightThe Primeval fight is the ultimate challenge of Gambit. It should feel like an epic boss fight and be long enough for the opposing team to get off some invades to counter strong DPS. It should have more to do than simply burning the boss as quickly as possible (and turn in place to kill Envoys every once in a while). Its mechanics shouldn’t be complex but should require about as much tactical play as a high-end strike boss.
With the tuning changes above, the Motes phase is significantly quicker, and the Primeval phase longer. You should expect matches to be just about as long as they are now, but Bungie will be watching to make sure they aren’t too short or too long.InvasionsAs Bungie said above, a good invader should be able to turn the tide of a match, but a good invader should be no more important than any other equally-skilled team member. They don’t want a single good invader to completely dominate match outcome — and they certainly can right now. However, they still want a good invader to be able to delay a strong PvE team from finishing off the Primeval.
RewardsGambit is the second of the core rituals (after Trials of Osiris) to get comprehensive engram focusing options.
Gambit Labs: Invasion EditionThere will also be a couple of Gambit Labs that play with some of the core invasion concepts. These will run for one week each and will take over the base Gambit nodes.