This week, Destiny 2 launched the Prestige version of its Leviathan Raid. Although the difficulty has a different name, most will know Prestige as Heroic – a more challenging version of the current raid. And like with past harder versions of raids, the Prestige version of Leviathan has a few changes to keep players on their toes.

Overall Prestige Raid Changes

The good news is that the no revive punishment is completely gone from the Prestige version of Leviathan. In past Heroic raids, once a player died, they stayed dead (Sunsinger Warlocks not withstanding).

Now, players get the same Revive Tokens as in the normal version of the Destiny 2 raid, with one slight change. If a player dies, he or she loses their Revive Token and is thus unable to revive a fallen teammate.

The other overall change for the Prestige version of Leviathan is that enemies are rated at power level 300. Given that the normal version was rated at 270, some may have expected this to be a big change, but the enemies are not that much tougher. They do a little more damage and take a little more damage to kill, but nothing too significant. In fact, it’s still possible to beat Calus in one damage phase with about 88x the Force of Will buff.

  • Revive Tokens disappear upon death.
  • Recommended Power Level 300

Royal Pools

The main change for the Royal Pools section is the Bathers now drop a purple fire that drains a player’s Psionic Protection at a very fast rate. So killing the Bathers as soon as they appear is essential, because if they die right next to a player he/she is going to run out of Psionic Protection very quickly.

This also poses a new problem for the lantern damage phase of the Royal Pools, because Bathers can’t die next to the center platform. If they do, the team will miss out on a ton of time for damage and need to start another chain-lowering phase.

If the team does need another phase, they will not be able to return to their normal positions for the chain phase. Instead, four random players will be given a debuff called the ‘Burden of Worthiness.’ This debuff makes it so each of those four players see a different symbol above the center plate, and they need to go to that specific plate to remove the debuff. The other two players can then grab the Psionic Protection orb from the center plate and rotate with their teammates.

  • Bathers drop a purple fire that drains Psionic Protection quickly.
  • After first lantern damage phase, 4 players will see a symbol that tells them which plate to go to. The other two players "float."

Pleasure Gardens

As some suspected, the Pleasure Gardens section now has 8 war beasts to kill during the raid encounter. On top of this, the dogs travel in new paths, so the team will need to learn new routes to each flower.

Destiny 2 Raid's Pleasure Gardens Beat by 2 Players

Outside of that, everything is the same. Some teams will be able to take out the war beasts in one round, while others will want to do one or two rounds to weaken them. Any strategy will work just fine.

  • 8 war beasts spawn instead of 6 and they travel new paths.

The Gauntlet

For the Gauntlet section, every member of the raid team will need to run at least once. After a successful run through the Gauntlet, and a dunk of the Psionic Orb, the player is ‘Proven Worthy’ and cannot grab an orb again. Every player will need to be well prepared to run through the Gauntlet.

destiny 2 raid gauntlet

Outside of the Gauntlet, the main change is that a Psionic Projection will spawn somewhere near the plate of the symbol activated. Sometimes the Projection will be on the plate, other times it will be above one of the flames, but the good news is you can shoot it from afar. Chances are you have probably seen one of these Projections spawn in the Gauntlet before when running slow, but this time they will always spawn.

After the three running phases, the team running phase only has three Psionic Orbs on each wall. What this means is that 3 players will need to grab those orbs and three players will need to skip that wall. Then, the players that grabbed the orbs will skip the wall, and so on. It’s nothing entirely new for raiders, but may require some slight strategy changing.

  • Every player must run the Gauntlet once.
  • The final, team Gauntlet run only spawns three orbs per wall.

Calus

The Calus change is not the biggest, but it is likely to give players the most trouble. Now, every time a player melee hits a Psion Councilor they will be teleported into the Shadow Realm and one random player will be teleported out. This player will then have to be part of the team that calls out a symbol on Shadow Calus’ head and their counterpart will have to help with enemies in the Throne Room.

Things can certainly get tricky with one player joining and one player leaving, but the good news is that is the only change. The team still destroys skulls for the Force of Will buff and the damage plates are still the same. And as we mentioned, Calus doesn’t have that much extra health so power level 305 players should have no problem defeating him in one or two damage phases.

  • Melee hitting a Psion Councilor teleports that player into the Shadow Realm and a random player is teleported out.

Bungie tempered players’ expectations by saying that the Prestige Raid didn’t have that many changes, and by and large that held true. That being said, there are some new wrinkles for each encounter that will force players to rethink strategies and roles within the raid team. Unfortunately, with only a color swapped armor set, an emblem, and a unique aura waiting on the other side of a Prestige raid completion, it’s hard to argue if the encounter is worth completing. Past Heroic/Prestige raids have offered an increase in Power (Light) level and unique gear, but Leviathan offers no such incentive.