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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 ability to unlock focusing for Aberrant Action and Corrasion are now available as of Week 9, with the lengthy Specimen ID: NES005 mission coming into the game. It’ll eventually give you the vendor upgrade for Failsafe you need to earn these new guns, but there are a few long, grindy steps involved.
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 ID: NES005 Mission
With Act 2 comes new missions from Failsafe in the HELM that are separate from the quests that advance the story of Episode: Echoes. In Week 9 of the new episode, Bungie released Specimen ID: NES005, and while it’s not immediately obvious from the description, this is the one you want to complete in order to unlock focusing for Aberrant Action and Corrasion. Unfortunately, while you’ll get rewards and vendor upgrades for multiple steps of this quest, you need to fully complete it to get the focusing upgrade.
Complete A Rising Chorus: Act II Through Quest Step 16
Unlike some of the other Specimen ID quests, accessing Specimen ID: NES005 requires pushing through the episode’s main story. You’ll need to do everything that’s part of Week 9 as Failsafe uses her nanomachines to track the flow of Radiolaria through Nessus. The simple way to follow this is just to do all the story steps you have access to in A Rising Chorus: Act II. You’re specifically trying to get to Step 16, in which Failsafe sends you to the Watcher’s Grave area of Nessus to find a new research specimen.
Spawn in at Watcher’s Grave and follow Failsafe’s instructions to find the specimen. You’ll have a small bar labeled Proximity Sensor at the bottom of your screen that will fill as you get closer to your goal. When you find the specimen, interact with it and then return to the HELM and talk to Failsafe, where you can pick up the new Specimen ID quest.
NES005 Step 1 – Gather Bufo Bites
Don’t worry, it’s not important that you know what “Bufo Bites” actually are. In practice, this step requires you to gather Radiolite, those weird crystals that appear around Nessus during episode activities, namely Battlegrounds and Breach Executable missions. The best way to advance this quest is to find Planetary Pistons throughout either activity and smash them with your Planetary Piston hammer, which causes Radiolite to spawn around the piston. You need to make sure you have hammer charges to do that, though, which you can earn from completing episode activities.
Collecting Iridescent Radiolite will give you Bufo Bites, of which you need 30, but the Radiolite you’ll find on Nessus is random, so you’re just going to have to gather a lot of it. Our recommendation is to equip a Resource Detector mod on your Ghost so you won’t miss any Radiolite, and then do some Battlegrounds. These activities guarantee two Planetary Pistons in each run, and they’re tough to miss, as they appear right on the path as you’re going through the mission. What’s more, other players are more likely activate these easy-to-find pistons for you, which can save you hammer charges. Any Radiolite picked up by your teammates will count for you as well and vice versa, so it’s not essential you personally pick up each Radiolite sample. We found we needed to complete three Battlegrounds to gather up all 30 Bufo Bites, activating both pistons on all three runs, so this is going to take a minute.
NES005 Step 2 – Gather Nessus Flora
The Bufo Bites step is definitely the most annoying, but once it’s done, you’re onto some simpler times wandering around Nessus. Use the Watcher’s Grave transmat zone again and follow the waypoints to collect seven Nessus Flowers, which you’ll use to fill the terrarium for Failsafe’s new frog friend, Captain Jacobson.
NES005 Step 3 – Kill 100 Vex
Another fairly straightforward action item, this one will take you a minute, but can be accelerated by heading to Vex-heavy locations on Nessus. We used The Orrery, the Lost Sector that’s right next to The Artifact’s transmat zone and full of Vex. Head inside and clean the place out–it’s a small, very short Lost Sector you can crash through in just a couple minutes. Three runs should be more than enough to get you all 100 Vex you need to knock out, and you can probably do it in 10 minutes or less.
NES005 Step 4 – Return To Failsafe And Unlock Focusing
That’s the hard work done. Head back to the HELM and talk to Failsafe to complete the quest. Your reward will be the upgrade that unlocks Echoes engram focusing for Aberrant Action and Corrasion, and at this point, you should also have the upgrade where your first focused engram each week gives you a guaranteed red border Deepsight weapon. Use that to more quickly unlock the ability to craft Aberrant Action and Corrasion–we recommend focusing on Aberrant Action, as it’s an extremely good sidearm, particularly for Solar builds.
Bonus: Complete Specimen ID: NES004
It doesn’t seem strictly necessary that you complete Week 8’s mission, Specimen ID: NES004 to earn you the Aberrant Action and Corrasion focusing upgrade, but since Bungie didn’t make that clear back when Echoes: Act 2 launched, we’d already written this whole guide–so consider it a bonus.
Specimen ID: NES004 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. You don’t have to complete it to get access to NES005, but its upgrades will be useful to you, so it’s best to knock it down as well. You can do these Specimen missions concurrently with each other, so progress made toward Specimen ID: NES005 will count toward NES004.
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.
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