How to unlock Cloudstrike Exotic Sniper Rifle in Destiny 2

For the first week of Beyond Light there was a lot of confusion around the locked Sabotage objectives from Variks and how the player would go about completing these. Turns out these objectives were simply time-gated around the first completion of the Deep Stone Crypt raid.

Now that the Deep Stone Crypt has been completed for the first team by Team Luminous, a lot of extra content has been unlocked for the player base on Europa.

This means that the elusive Cloudstrike Exotic Sniper Rifle can now be obtained by Guardians at the completion of an elected difficulty Empire Hunt. However, these special Empire Hunts are not unlocked straight away and take a bit of work before you are able to take a crack at them. Here's what you need to do:

Complete Beyond Light Campaign and Varik’s Sabotage Quests

Before doing anything you need to make sure you have progressed completely through the main Beyond Light missions. At the conclusion of the main missions there will be a small quest given out by Variks called ‘Reclaiming Europa’ which unlocks his special Sabotage objectives and Empire Hunts.

Complete ‘A Hard Rain Falls’

A part of this newly released content are the ‘Eclipsed Zones’ which rotate between the areas of Europa each week. The description for the Eclipsed Zones reads: “Debris rains down from the sky; a constant remnant of the Orbital Station crash at the hands of Guardians. House Salvation intends to secure the area through the use of Darkness and collect an important debris. Guardians are advised to disrupt the Fallen’s plans.”

There is also a new quest from the Exo Stranger called ‘A Hard Rain Falls’ which tasks Guardians with defeating Fallen, completing patrols and completing Public Events in the current Eclipsed Zone. Finishing this quick quest will reward the player with the ‘High Albedo’ Sidearm.

Complete ‘Old Secrets, New Challenges’

This is a new quest given by Variks in Charon’s Crossing. This is done quickly enough as it is only a single mission that takes place in Braytech Exoscience, past Cadmus Ridge. This mission takes place within a Exo simulation where Clovis Bray tasks the player with surviving in the harsh cold while fighting your up an ice covered Darkness structure. It is a simple enough mission and should only take 10 minutes or so.

Complete Sabotage Objectives Europan Explorer I + II

Completing the previous steps will unlock a whole new set of Sabotage objectives from Variks. You will need to complete Europan Explorer I by achieving 50 Kinetic, 50 Energy and 25 Power weapon kills on Europa. Quickest way to do this is to run through a Lost Sector three or four times. Completing this will unlock Europan Explorer II which requires you to achieve 30 powerful combatant kills in Empire Hunts. The Dark Priestess Empire Hunt is a good choice for this as it has a large number of powerful enemies right at the start.

Grind the Weekly Empire Hunt

Now if you open up the Europa Map you will see that to the right of Eventide Ruins is a new node. This is the Weekly Empire Hunt that has a selectable difficulty. This can be Adept (1180), Hero (1220), Legend (1250) or Master (1280) with each step up in difficulty adding harder enemies and more modifiers, but with the trade off of better rewards.

It is in this matchmade playlist that Cloudstrike can drop. An interesting thing to note is that the drop chance for Cloudstrike stays at ‘Rare’ no matter what the difficulty so there is no pressure to go into the harder difficulties. Since there is a random drop you might have to run this a fair few times.

Initial findings give a rough estimate that it is around a 1 in 10 or 15 chance for the Exotic to drop but you might get unlucky and it could take over 20 runs. Just keep focused and it will drop eventually.