The final act of Destiny 2's first content episode, Echoes, brings a refresh to both its activities and your arsenal. Speleologist is a new Solar machine gun that makes a pretty decent alternative to Fixed Odds from the Duality dungeon, allowing you to dump a lot of damage on tough enemies or take out a lot of little ones very quickly. The rapid-fire frame machine gun offers a 900 RPM fire rate, which mean it'll fire a lot of ammo very fast--and it's great for clearing out enemies in a hurry, especially in high-end content. With some extremely useful Solar-specific perks, the Speleologist god roll can also complement the rest of your Echoes weapons and fit well with your Solar builds.
As with the other Echoes weapons, Speleologist is part of the episode's loot pool, so it's most easily earned as a random drop from completing Echoes activities, including Battlegrounds, Enigma Protocol, and Breach Executable. You're also guaranteed one roll of the weapon for completing the Echoes weekly story missions, adding it to your collections. As with other Echoes guns, if you're looking to visit Failsafe and tune Echoes Engrams to get Speleologist drops, you'll need to first complete Act 3's new Nessus Sample missions to unlock that upgrade. Speleologist is craftable, like the other Echoes guns, so you can eventually build your own version of the gun with enhanced perks.
Enlightened Action: Dealing damage significantly improves reload speed and handling.
Envious Assassin: Defeating targets with other weapons before drawing this one transfers additional ammo to the magazine from reserves. This effect can overflow the magazine based on the number of targets defeated.
Second Perk: Incandescent / Killing Tally
Incandescent: Defeating a target spreads a longer lasting scorch to those nearby. More powerful combatants and opposing Guardians cause scorch in a larger radius.
Killing Tally: Final blows increase this weapon's damage until it is stowed or reloaded. Improves magazine size.
Masterwork: Stability
Speleologist is a solid option for a Solar machine gun in PvE, excelling in a clearance role to help you knock out lots of enemies quickly. While it's maybe not the best one you can get, it rolls perks that are reliably useful even if you're not speccing into a build that does a ton to synergize with them. In the barrel and magazine departments, you'll probably want to focus on the stability stat to make sure you can consistently land critical hits as you're dumping ammo. Choices that boost magazine size, handling, and reload speed are also useful so that you can swap to Speleologist quickly, shoot a lot of bullets, and get it back in the fight fast.
