Destiny 2 The Witch Queen guide: Osteo Striga, Parasite, Dead Messenger Exotics (2025)

Destiny 2: The Witch Queen launched with at least three Exotic weapons. Picking each weapon up is fairly straight forward — if not a little time consuming. But there are potentially confusing spots in each quest.

In this guide, we’ll tell you how to the get Osteo Striga Exotic submachine gun, the Parasite Exotic grenade launcher, and the Dead Messenger Exotic grenade launcher.

Osteo Striga — Shaped Deluxe Edition pre-order weapon

Image: Bungie via Polygon

Osteo Striga is the Deluxe Edition pre-order weapon for Destiny 2: The Witch Queen. If you didn’t pre-order the Deluxe Edition of the expansion, you won’t be able to get it. However, it will almost certainly come to the game for all players in a future season or expansion (likely in May, when Season of the Risen ends).

If you did pre-order the Deluxe Edition of Destiny 2: The Witch Queen, you may still be confused on how to get this gun.

First, you need to complete The Witch Queen campaign. After that, you just need to head down to the Relic, look for the submachine gun section, and craft it. It’s completely free and doesn’t require any materials. As you level up Osteo Striga, you can Reshape it with new perks to change its stats. There’s also a Catalyst you can purchase later, but you’ll need some rare resources, including Ascendant Alloy.

The Osteo Striga is a monster of a weapon. Its Exotic perk is Screaming Swarm, which causes the gun to fire poison bullets that track enemies. Toxic Overload, the weapon’s other passive, causes kills or headshots to spread poison to nearby enemies. The Catalyst causes poison kills to reload and Overflow the magazine.

Parasite — Of Queens And Worms

Image: Bungie via Polygon

The Parasite quest in Destiny 2: The Witch Queen is very simple.

Once you’re ready to embark, after you’ve talked to Mara in The Enclave, simply mark the quest in your quest log and let the game guide you around the Throne World. Parasite really acts as more of a tour of the new location than anything else.

The only spots that may trip you up are the Lost Sectors and the platform section in the Alluring Curtain area.

With the Lost Sectors, you want to make sure you activate the Deepsight nodes after the chest, which will open up a secret chamber with a pedestal for the worm. These are hard to miss, but you can run past them if you aren’t focused.

Later in the quest, in the Alluring Curtain section, you’ll activate a Deepsight node which will open up some floating platforms. You don’t actually have to go anywhere here and this isn’t a jumping puzzle. All you need to do is shoot the torches on each platform to continue the quest.

The Parasite is actually a very powerful Exotic grenade launcher. Its primary perk, Worm’s Hunger, causes the weapon to get a stacking damage buff each time you kill an enemy with a different weapon. The buff stacks up to 20 times and can one-shot powerful boss enemies in certain activities. Its secondary perk, Worm Byproduct, will give you a damage buff if you damage yourself with your own worm explosion. The launcher likely won’t kill you at low stacks, but it will blow you up the closer you get to 20, so be careful with Worm Byproduct.

Dead Messenger — Kill The Messenger

Image: Bungie via Polygon

Dead Messenger’s Kill the Messenger quest is extremely easy to acquire and less easy to actually complete.

To pick up Kill the Messenger, go to the HELM and work through the Season of the Risen quest. After you’ve completed the weekly quest step, Caiatl will just give this mission to you. And once you have it, you’ll unlock a new node on the Throne World.

There is no between steps here. It’s really that easy: season > Exotic quest > mission unlock.

Once you have Kill the Messenger, go to the Throne World and you’ll see a selection node for “Vox Obscura” in the top right. You’ll also notice that the activity is Power 1550, which is a pretty steep increase from the campaign (but fairly quick to acquire in The Witch Queen, if you follow our guide).

While the power requirement is pretty high, what makes Vox Obscura a bit difficult is the mission’s timed nature. We won’t spoil how the mission works (which should be very exciting for veterans of the original Destiny), but you’ll end up coming across two timed sections in the mission. If you fail, you’ll go back to orbit and need to start over.

Our best tip for this mission is to put on your best stuff and give it a go. With two friends, we cleared this mission on our first try, but by the skin of our teeth. Go in looking to learn, remember the enemy patterns, and try, try again.

When you eventually get to the end and clear out the final boss, you can talk to Caiatl to hear some interesting lore bits and pick up the new Dead Messenger wave-frame Exotic grenade launcher.

The Dead Messenger is quite useful as a special ammo weapon, and it’s a ton of fun to use. Instead of shooting explosive grenades, it launches a wave of fire that runs along the ground. Its Exotic perk is Trinary Vision, which causes it to launch three waves of fire, affecting a much larger area than a normal wave-frame grenade launcher. Its other perk, The Fundamentals, lets you change the weapons element on the fly, just like Hard Light or Borealis.