Destiny 2 Seasonal Artifact: How to Level and What It Does

What the artifact actually gives you

Every season hands you a Legendary artifact that sits in the bottom-left slot of your character screen. It does two separate jobs, and players usually only notice the first one.

The visible job is mods: five columns of five perks, 25 in total, covering champion counters, weapon loaders, ability refunds and class-specific effects. The invisible job is Power. Artifact XP adds a bonus on top of your gear average, which is why the early levels are the cheapest Power in the game — our Power progression guide covers where that bonus lands in the cap structure.

Progress is shared across all three characters on the account, and it wipes at the start of a new season. Nothing you unlock carries over, so there is no point hoarding.

The 12-of-25 problem

This is the number that decides everything else: you can have 12 unlocks active at once out of 25 mods. You cannot buy the whole board. Roughly half of every artifact is designed to be left on the table.

That reframes the whole exercise. It is not a checklist to complete, it is a budget to allocate. A player who spends twelve unlocks on one plan beats a player who spreads the same twelve across five half-finished ideas, because artifact perks are multipliers on a loop you already run — not standalone power.

Read column one before anything else

Column one is always the champion coverage: the Anti-Barrier, Unstoppable and Overload mods, each tied to specific weapon types that rotate every season. Those weapon types are the single most important thing to check on day one, because they decide which guns you are allowed to bring into content that has champions at all.

If the season’s anti-champion list does not include a weapon you actually like, that is a loadout problem you solve now, not in the boss room. The Grandmaster Nightfall guide and the Lost Sector rotation both assume you walked in with the right counter equipped.

The later columns cost more than they look

Columns unlock by spending unlocks in the ones before them — the exact thresholds move season to season, but the shape never does: each new column demands that you have already bought a set number of perks further up.

That creates the trap. To reach a strong fifth-column perk you must first buy enough filler in columns two through four, and those purchases come out of the same twelve. A deep perk is never just one unlock; it is that unlock plus everything you had to buy to stand in front of it. Count the real cost before you commit.

The reset button is a trap, not an escape

You can wipe the artifact and respend from scratch, but it costs Glimmer and the price climbs every time you do it. The first reset is cheap enough to feel free. The third one is not.

This matters because resetting is the standard response to “I picked wrong in week one” — and it is almost never necessary. Column one is cheap and interchangeable; the expensive mistakes happen deeper, where a reset cannot help you anyway because you would just be re-buying the same path to reach the same perk.

Leveling it without grinding

Artifact levels come from seasonal XP, which means literally everything feeds it: playlist runs, patrol, bounties, seasonal challenges. Seasonal challenges are the efficient source because they pay several ranks at once for something you were going to do anyway.

The cap is low enough that a focused week of challenges gets you most of the way. You are not meant to grind this — you are meant to keep playing normally and check back when a new column opens.

A spending order that survives contact

Buy the champion counter your build can actually equip, then the one perk that makes your main ability loop cheaper, then stop and play. Come back to the board when a new column unlocks, not before.

Two things to skip on principle: perks that only fire in content you do not run, and perks that duplicate something your armor mods already give you. The modifier guide is the better place to check what the activity is actually asking for before you spend a limited unlock on it.