What are Vanguard Alerts in Destiny 2?

Destiny 2‘s Nightfalls are back by popular demand in Renegades, and we don’t mean Dredgen Bael’s Death-Star-at-home. Vanguard Alerts are Bungie’s way of rekindling the beloved playlist, offering weekly rewards and bringing something else to do every reset.

The Vanguard Alerts are as close to Nightfalls as it gets in the post-Edge of Fate era: they’re a set of weekly-rotating objectives with their own rewards, including one higher-difficulty version of a Portal activity. This is set at -50, so expect Kepler Mythic levels of suffering with three people.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the new system, including what it entails and what you get by diving into it.

Destiny 2 Vanguard Alerts, explained

Vanguard Alerts is a set of rotating activities added in Destiny 2‘s Renegades expansion. It brings six different nodes that rotate every week, which grant different drops when completing them. Each of the Portal nodes for these activities may also get a Bonus Focus drop, which is not included in this calculation.

The six activities are:

• Quickplay Fireteam Ops playlist
• Quickplay Arena Ops playlist
• Fixed Grandmaster Challenge (capped at -50)
• Raid challenge
• Dungeon challenge
• PvP challenge

The challenges for Fireteam Ops, Arena Ops, and the Crucible only require you to participate in activities for the first step. Completing any of the activities three times drops you a specific weapon and other loot from the matching playlist. Fireteam and Arena Ops have the same weapon on a given week, but the Crucible has a different reward in stock. The remaining two stages drop more gear.

Alongside the release of Vanguard Alerts, Bungie made it so season pass owners at level 550 can still earn a B grade on Quickplay activities, which is enough to grab the Bonus Focus reward. This makes Quickplay Playlists viable again—a common complaint from those who were on the higher end of the Power spectrum.

The weekly Grandmaster Challenge is the closest to the old Grandmasters, which takes you through a run of a Portal activity with set modifiers and at -50 Power. The Portal’s Ultimatum difficulty is capped at -30, so expect even heavier resistance than usual, to the likes of Mythic Kepler as it was on release.

Completing the Grandmaster Challenge with a B or higher for the first time gets you a tier five copy of a Pinnacle Ops weapon with an extra origin trait. Subsequent completions at B or above will still drop at tier five, but have a low chance of boasting the second origin trait.

Lastly, the raid and dungeon challenges seem to require you to complete all encounters in those activities, giving you higher-power gear for your time.

At the end of the day, the Vanguard Alert playlists offer a little more variety in a game that’s been struggling with it since the addition of the controversial Portal system and the removal of seasonal content.