The new vendor in Destiny 2 Season of the Haunted, the Crown of Sorrow, is a consistent source of Figments of Darkness, the primary method of earning Seasonal weaponry, and a regular way of earning upgrades and Exotic materials and gear when you reset the vendor rank.
Related: How to get Figments of Darkness in Destiny 2 Season of the Haunted
Leveling the Crown of Sorrow is directly tied to the Derelict Leviathan destination. Whether you’re exploring the Castellum or taking part in the Nightmare Containment activity, there is an optimal way to level up the Seasonal vendor quickly and easily. You’ll need all the points you can get, with the later Crown ranks requiring hundreds if not thousands of points to advance.
Leveling the Crown of Sorrow in Nightmare Containment
If you want to help unlock the remaining Solar 3.0 Fragments and have a chance at Seasonal gear from the final chest, Nightmare Containment is where you want to be. You’ll earn 12 rank-up points for completing Tiers 1 and 2 of the activity, and 65 for beating the final boss and then spending 500 Vestiges of Dread at the Nightmare Harvester.
A fast group can complete Nightmare Containment in between 6-8 minutes, meaning if all you do is the activity, you’ll earn 1,200 rank points every hour on average. You can boost this further by picking up Leviathan Bounties and completing them alongside Containment. Daily Bounties earn you 20 rank points per Bounty, and the Repeatables earn you five. Turning in a full stack makes you another 105 rank points.
There are also Patrols scattered about the Castellum, and each of these earns you ten rank points on completion. Stick to Kill or Collect Patrols to ensure they’re done quickly, and you can make more than a hundred additional rank points per activity if you’re in a fireteam completing Patrols as you complete Containment.
All these methods, taken together, make an hour of Containment worth well over 2,000 Crown of Sorrow rank. However, you don’t have to do Containment if you don’t want to.
Leveling the Crown of Sorrow exploring the Castellum
If you’d rather take a casual approach to your Crown of Sorrow rank grind, it’s a perfectly viable route. Grab a full suite of Bounties and head into either the Pleasure Gardens or the Royal Pools, pick up the first Patrol you see, and get to shooting. Most Patrols in these smaller areas take a minute or two to complete, and you can focus more consciously on completing Bounties. Be sure to pick up Petrified Egregore whenever you see it. That stuff only grants two rank points per pickup, but it’s better than nothing.
Once you’ve cleared your stack of Bounties, head back to the H.E.L.M. and pick up more Repeatables. An hour of Patrol, Bounties, Egregore, and fighting High-Value Targets and Nightmares (worth ten rank points apiece) should net you as much as 1,000 total rank points. Not nearly as efficient as Containment, but if you put on a podcast or your favorite show or movie, you can chill and still make good progress.
