Destiny 2 is at its prime when players are challenging the elaborate six-person raids that define the endgame of each new expansion in the series. Some players, however, have found interesting ways to break Destiny 2's usual formula, either by challenging raids without a full party, or in remarkably short amounts of time.
Over the past two years, the community has built up a sizable list of unconventional ways to tackle Destiny 2's raids. Some of them even put the ways that raid bosses in the original Destiny were taken down to shame, thanks in part to some of the major changes that came with the Shadowkeep expansion.
Record Setting Speedrun in Scourge of the Past
This Speedrun stands as the fastest raid completion in the history of Destiny 2. Clocking in at five minutes and twenty-two seconds, this comes in at half the time necessary to quickly take down any other raid in the game. Most of Destiny 2's bosses take at least ten minutes to finish, even when exploiting bugs and glitches to advance faster than the game normally allows.
Thanks to a few clipping exploits, along with some host switching techniques, the clan Fast was able to quickly skip through most of the raid and immediately find the final encounter with Insurrection Prime. In fact, half of the time spent in the raid involved quickly rushing towards the end before taking down the final boss in under a minute.
Garden of Salvation Final Boss Beaten Without Guns
Seeing as how Destiny 2 is a First Person Shooter, it goes without saying that guns and shooting would be less than optional and even necessary when it comes to taking on the game's most powerful encounters. However, a group of players decided to see how far they could go without shooting a single bullet. As it turns out, the answer was all the way to the top.
While guns are an integral part of the gameplay of Destiny 2, there are other ways for players to damage their enemies, including melees, grenades, and supers. Using only these abilities, CommanderCuesta and his raid team managed to punch and explode their way through the encounter, all the way until the five warlocks on the team could lightning blast the Sanctified Mind until it melted.
Players Exploit Armor 2.0 to Kill Shielded Argos
By the time Armor 2.0 arrived in Destiny 2, the Leviathan raid layer Eater of Worlds, and its final boss Argos, were a thing of the past. That didn't stop a raid team from using one of the most overpowered abilities granted by Armor 2.0 to burn through Argos before even reaching the second phase. The result is a hilariously neutered raid boss that shreds apart a boss long before it should be possible.
It's Armor 2.0's Anti-Barrier rounds that fuel this comical raid encounter. While Argos normally has a shield that can only be removed through a well organized assault from a raid team setting off elementally charged mines, the Anti-Barrier rounds can pass through the shield with little resistance. This means that Argos can be killed before even activating the first damage phase.
Solo Player Beats Riven in One Damage Phase
The final raid boss of the Forsaken expansion in year 2 of Destiny 2 took the form of Riven, an ancient, wish-granting Ahamkara from some of the deepest stretches of the Destiny lore, with major implications on the Solar System and the fight with the darkness. Naturally, an enemy that has been built up by years of world building, flavor text, and grimoire cards would deserve some respect from players. That is not what happens when player Crspy Chicken took on Riven solo and defeated Riven in a single damage phase.
On release, Riven was an incredibly long and difficult encounter that took full six-person raid teams hours and multiple wipes to finally take down. However, thanks to some powerful exotics like Liar's Handshake, as well as some clever enemy manipulation, Crspy Chicken was able to melt Riven in just a few minutes.
Arcing The Colony Over An Impassable Wall
Sometimes encounters in Destiny 2 raids are strategically crafted in order to make sure that a raid team needs to have the six required players if they hope to survive. Usually this takes the form of large groups of enemies that can quickly overrun players if they aren't careful, or requiring players to stand on multiple platforms at the same time. In the case of Crown of Sorrow, the limiting factor involves three rooms that players are separated into, divided by impassible walls and filled with Ogres that have to be killed to continue forward.
So, of course the best way to get through this wall is by going over it, or in this case shooting over it. By using the exotic grenade launcher The Colony, players Gigz and Vendetta were able to arc their shots over the impassible wall as long as they aimed a seemingly impossible shot perfectly. Once the shots made it over the wall, the weapon's special ability to track nearby targets with its grenades took care of the rest and allowed the two man team to kill the Ogre and move forward on the encounter.
Morgeth Beaten From Across The Broken Bridge
Visiting Forsaken's Last Wish raid again, a group of players went above and beyond to get out of the way of danger while taking on Morgeth from a safe distance. Normally, this fight would be a close-up encounter between the raid team and Morgeth, but using a number of movement abilities allowed for the team to end up on the other side of the destroyed bridge where the fight takes place. This means that instead of fighting Morgeth up-close and personal, Gladd and his team were able to fight from so far away that they could barely see who they were firing at.
The movement ability that allowed for this is related to the Warlock class' Radiance super, which under a specific build allows players to glide almost infinitely. Although, one of the more impressive feats involved in this attempt is the ability to bullseye Morgeth from across the giant bridge without being able to really see the Taken Ogre.
Two Players Dominate Every Raid Boss Without Dying
Tons of players work for weeks to craft perfect strategies for taking on every raid encounter in record times or with limited players, but few have tried a crazy back-to-back run of every Destiny 2 raid boss without wiping once. If at any point the players died, they would have to restart from the beginning and go through the whole list over again. However, at the end of the hour and a half long run, Gladd (a frequent flyer on this list) and his companion Chevy triumph in an unbelievable test of skill and coordination.
While some of the entries on this list tests the limits of solo runs, speedruns, and 2-man encounters, none of them require the constant dedication that the task of running through every boss perfectly calls for. However, this run was pulled off in April, meaning that there are now even more raid bosses to add to the list, meaning now Gladd has even more to prove if he ever tries to recreate the success he found here.
Destiny 2 is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One