The Destiny 2 Raid Bosses With The Hardest Mechanics

Key Takeaways

• Crota, Son of Oryx in
  Destiny 2
  requires precise team coordination with complex mechanics to defeat.
• Oryx, The Taken King in King’s Fall raid has randomized mechanics that demand precise timing and communication.
• Sanctified Mind, Sol Inherent in Garden of Salvation is the most frustrating boss to teach and execute due to chaotic mechanics.

Throughout the 7 years that Destiny 2 has been around, there have been many unforgettable raiding experiences, from the first release of Vault of Glass, to the grueling raid races of Last Wish and Salvation’s Edge, which take 18 and 19 hours respectfully. Something that all these raids have in common, however, is some brutal boss fights.

Whether a player raids with random people or an organized team, everyone has at least one boss that they hate fighting and despise teaching new players about. This list takes a look at eight of these bosses that make use of the most difficult mechanics. Each fight features a unique challenge to overcome, some of which even overwhelm veteran players to such a degree that the popular way to beat them is with cheese tactics.

8 Crota, Son Of Oryx

Crota’s End

Crota, Son of Oryx is not the most difficult boss by any means. However, the mechanics that appear in his Destiny 2 iteration caught many by surprise. As a returning boss from Destiny, Crota had several new mechanics introduced, taking the fight from a simple “shoot him with rockets and then smack him with a sword” to an encounter that requires cohesive communication and complete team participation.

To defeat Crota now, a team must collect a buff, pass said buff from player to player, deposit the buff, kill specific enemies, kill another specific enemy that spawns after the previous ones have died, break the boss’ shield, damage and destroy an environmental hazard, and finally hide in a room to avoid a total team wipe. It’s a lot to remember and is only made more difficult by the possibility of one player messing up and throwing off the entire run.

7 Oryx, The Taken King

King’s Fall

Oryx, The Taken King is another raid boss returning from Destiny that had a new coat of paint applied to his mechanics. Once again, this boss requires precise team coordination and communication, as players have to maintain control of plates, step on them at specific times, kill large minibosses to spawn bombs, stop other minibosses from getting to those bombs and destroying them, collect an invulnerability shield to survive the boss’ wipe mechanic, damage the boss, and deal with a post-damage phase attack that is randomized.

If all of that wasn’t enough to deal with, part of the encounter is randomized, choosing any of the six players to be “taken” and forced to perform a parkour puzzle. Knowing the mechanics of this fight is only one step, as it requires five other people to know them all too, and they must all be ready to pull them off with precise timing and positioning.

6 Rhulk, Disciple Of The Witness

Vow Of The Disciple

Rhulk, Disciple of The Witness is one of the most unique final raid boss encounters in the game. Not only does beating him require mastery of the mechanics introduced throughout the raid, but damaging him is genuinely difficult as he is hypermobile. Rhulk will walk around the arena kicking guardians off the floating platform where the fight is staged, as well as occasionally dashing across the room and firing attacks that give the players a stacking debuff that can easily kill if it’s not properly managed.

This fight also requires the players to memorize the names (or nicknames) of specific symbols in the game to make quick and accurate call-outs for other players to distribute buffs into the correct receptacles. The players are also only given three attempts to correctly do this before it becomes impossible to kill the boss and a restart is required, making this encounter unforgiving for a disorganized or inexperienced team.

5 Consecrated Mind, Sol Inherent

Garden Of Salvation

The Garden of Salvation is considered by many to be the most difficult raid in Destiny 2. Not only is it one of the longer raids, but the mechanics required to beat it are horrendously difficult to explain and buggy as anything. The main mechanics for the Consecrated Mind, Sol Inherent fight are collecting “motes” dropped by enemies and distributing them into a totem, and following the boss around to pick up its gunk, before shooting it in the correct eye.

The difficulty in this is that both of these tasks must be done simultaneously. The totem cannot be left alone, as Vex enemies will constantly spawn and drain the motes from it if left unchecked, and a player can only pick up one of the boss’ secretions before dying, so the team has to split in two and constantly talk over each other to organize themselves enough to reach the damage phase. To top it all off, the boss will spend the entire damage phase moving backward away from the party, meaning they must remain mobile while also trying to produce enough damage to kill it.

4 Zo’aurc, Explicator Of Planets

Root Of Nightmares

Root of Nightmares is widely considered one of the easiest raids in Destiny 2, largely due to its final boss, Nezarec, Final God of Pain, being a complete pushover. Zo’aurc, Explicator of Planets, however, feels like an encounter from a completely different raid. The fireteam must split itself up, with four players taking plates and the remaining two clearing out enemies. The four players on plates must gain a buff, spot the odd planet floating above their plate, and swap it with the correct planet on the opposite plate.

This sounds simple enough, but in practice, it often devolves into mistakes, frustration, and members of the group leaving with no warning. The damage phase itself is simple enough, requiring standing on specific plates at different times to get the right buff to damage the boss. However, swapping the planets back and forth can be an absolute nightmare.

3 Sanctified Mind, Sol Inherent

Garden Of Salvation

As the only raid on this list with two entries, Garden of Salvation wins again for “most difficult raid”. Sanctified Mind, Sol Inherent is a chaotic nightmare, even for the most organized of teams. The fight involves tethering players together with lasers to connect inputs and outputs to build platforms, open portals, and stun the boss. It also involves the mote collecting mechanics from the first boss of Garden of Salvation. Finally, there’s the damage phase, which is woefully short unless the team is coordinated enough to repeatedly stun the boss.

This boss takes the top spot for most frustrating to teach, and most painful to do with a random team, but doesn’t contain the most difficult-to-understand mechanics. The mechanics themselves, when boiled down, are quite simple, but in practice are all but impossible to pull off. The tether will connect to random people constantly, the boss disintegrates the floors leaving big pools of liquid that tick away at the players’ health, and the motes can sometimes just glitch through the floor, meaning whole sections must be redone to collect one extra mote.

2 The Witness

Salvation’s Edge

As the final boss of not only a raid but the entire Light and Darkness saga of Destiny, the big bad evil guy the players have been building up to for 10 years and two games, The Witness should be a difficult fight. And it is. Players have to face off against the giant being, arms sprouting out of the floor, walls, and sky, while enemies spawn constantly. Not only do players just have to survive, but they also have to damage the arms, which is done by obtaining one of three different buffs and then using this buff to damage the correct arm, which they will know based on the color it glows and which shape that correlates to. Once an arm has been destroyed, the player that did the deed gets the “Gliphbreaker” buff, which allows them to destroy the circles on the front of the boss.

Once all these circles are gone, it’s damage phase time. The boss will unleash different attacks on the damage platform that must be dodged or will end in death, making dealing damage in return difficult. The Witness also has several instant wipe mechanics throughout both the damage phase and the phase leading up to it. Ultimately, without a well-organized team that knows exactly what is going on amid the menagerie of flashing lights, shapes, colors, and appendages on screen, this fight is all but impossible.

1 Riven Of A Thousand Voices

Last Wish

Almost all players in Destiny 2 will admit that they have never beaten Riven of a Thousand Voices legitimately, and that’s because of how confusing the mechanics are. If a player is realistically looking to win this fight, they can simply go to the correct room and throw as much damage as possible at Riven’s leg, which will often be enough to kill her. Beating her legitimately is much harder.

The team splits into two groups, and each goes to opposite rooms. They then take turns picking up taken blights and destroying symbols, as directed by a player standing in a specific spot that allows them to see the symbols, while the other team flinches the boss by dodging her attacks and shooting her in the mouth. When Riven flinches, she reveals her eyes, two of which will be glowing. The team that can see this must then tell the other team which eyes are glowing so they can flinch her and shoot the correct eyes. This is then repeated in another room before the team can finally damage the boss. It’s incredibly confusing on paper, and arguably the most difficult raid encounter in the game when the mechanics are used.