Destiny 2 Garden of Salvation Raid Boss Beat Without Using Guns

In the two weeks since Destiny 2: Shadowkeep's Garden of Salvation raid was first beaten, the race has been on to find more and more impressive ways to defeat its challenging final boss. First it was defeated by a team of only three players, then only two players. But this latest feat might just take the cake, because while it was achieved by a full six-player fireteam, they beat the boss without using a single firearm.

The average player will recognize guns as the most pivotal of Destiny 2's tools, the main solution to basically every problem in the game. That's what makes CommanderCuesta and his fireteam so impressive, as they managed to work around that this week and complete the game's most difficult raid to date using only special abilities like grenades, melees, and Supers.

The Garden of Salvation caps off a tough gauntlet of puzzles and enemy encounters in Mars' Black Garden with a showdown against the Vex giant known as “Sanctified Mind, Sol Inherent.” To beat it, players must hit glowing spots on its body to open up portals, through which they can fight enemies to collect motes. These are used to power relay towers scattered around the arena, which in turn allows players to damage the Sanctified Mind for a few seconds. But between the Vex minions that show up, the electrified floor that gradually swallows up more of the arena, and the coordination required to get motes to the relays, it's a brutal challenge even when playing normally and using guns.

To pull off a gun-free run, CommanderCuesta's teammates all played as Stormcaller Warlocks equipped with Aeon Soul Exotic gauntlets, which cut down on the cooldown time for Warlocks' grenade abilities and lets them use them on the Sanctified Mind and its minions more often.

The other key piece of equipment was for when the damage phases begin. At those points, all five Warlocks unleash the Chaos Reach Super ability on the Sanctified Mind at the same time, resulting in considerable damage. These were made even more powerful via multiple stacks of Relay Defender, a raid-specific armor mod that increases damage when close to one of the relays, as well as the Geomag Stabilizers Exotic leg armor which increases Chaos Reach's duration. This results in quite the lightshow at the end when the whole screen is filled with perfectly synchronized beams of boss-slaying lightning.

Having achieved this impressive feat, CommanderCuesta wrote that all that remains for the team to do is submit their run to Bungie. The hope is that Bungie will highlight it in “Movie of the Week,” the part of its weekly blogs that showcases the best videos from the Destiny community. All things considered, they should have a good chance of seeing it there soon.

Destiny 2: Shadowkeep is available for PC, PS4, and Xbox One, with a Google Stadia version launching with the platform next month.