The First Descendant players share some tips to help out beginners

If you’re new to the looter shooter genre like I am, it can be incredibly daunting. When I was playing The First Descendant on launch day, it was overwhelming to try and figure out the dozens of menus and options I had to navigate to try and equip weapons, add modifiers, rank up my character, and many of the other basic tasks that you need to complete while playing the game.

U/Albane01 has taken to Reddit to post a list of tips that will help beginners get started with the looter shooter style of game. These tips have been combined from numerous other Reddit posts so new players can get all of the help they need rather than digging through multiple posts. As a new player to the looter shooter genre, having only spent a handful of hours playing the original Destiny back on the Xbox 360, a lot of these are likely going to come in handy for me, and hopefully, they will for you too.

These first tips were shared by @GAWDAMN69 and many of these focus on more unknown combat mechanics or helping to level up and improve your experience as a player.

• You can ground pound by double jumping and holding melee
• You can melee from the grapple hook.
• Dismantle weapons and items you aren’t using only sell when you need gold.
• The fastest way to level descendants and mastery levels is to do wave-based modes.
• The fastest way to level Battle Pass is by doing challenges.
• You can get free cosmetics by completing journal entries.
• Always research things that take real time to complete so keep something going at all times.
• Go to the weapon bench from time to time before dismantling weapons to see if you can use duplicates to level your currently equipped weapons.
• Don’t dump all your resources into maxing out one mod it will be too expensive for your new descendants to use.
• Dismantle duplicate mods to gain resources to level your new ones but don’t dismantle all of them because you can use duplicates later down the line.

This next tip comes from @ThatMooseYouKnow and this is news to me and I’m thankful to now know this.

“You can open your Journal (J on PC) tab over to Access Info and it will tell you how and where to get literally any item in the entire game This goes for crafting materials for Descendants, modules, weapons, everything. There is literally 0 guesswork in where to obtain any items.”

These next few tips could really come in handy if you’re unaware of how modding and dismantling weapons work and what they are used for. With @RespawningJesus saying,

“The mods that augment your melee attack, you can upgrade those mods, and they will raise your mod capacity. So definitely upgrade those first.”

@VainestClown gave some advice on dismantling weapons and why you shouldn’t immediately do them if you have more powerful weapons.

“Might be obvious but don’t dismantle Exotics/Ultimate/Unique weapons. You can pretty easily level them up to your current gun level at the weapon bench. Even duplicates; you can combine them to make them more powerful.”

This tip from @nicknamebucky is something I was unaware of and it is something that would have saved me some time had I seen this Reddit post sooner. “Level up the Descendants sub-module (the bronze-colored one) to increase your module capacity.”

@SirCorrupt and @ImmobileWheats both shared that you can cancel your reload at the halfway mark by using an ability or rolling and it will still be fully reloaded. This is something that you will likely realize early on as you frantically reload while fighting a horde of enemies.

Anyone who has experience with looter shooters such as Destiny 2 and Warframe will know that these tips just scratch the surface and there is so much more to learn and think about when playing The First Descendant. To help you with your journey, I highly recommend checking out our beginner’s tips and tricks guide as well as our game page which has all of our content including extensive guide coverage such as our character tier list.