This past weekend has seen players undergo Destiny 2: Shadowkeep’s new raid, the Garden of Salvation. Lots of high-ranking Guardians have been throwing themselves at the expansion's endgame mission, only to be bested again and again by tricky puzzles and trickier bosses. The final boss especially has been stopping several six-player fireteams with ease, which is why it’s impressive that one team managed to defeat it with only three.
For the last two days, the final section of the raid, the fight with the boss known as “Sanctified Mind, Sol Inherent,” has proven to be the greatest hurdle for players to overcome in the Garden of Salvation. This won’t come as a surprise to most longtime players. Destiny and Destiny 2 have always come with raid bosses that are much more complicated than simply spamming bullets at them until they die. These are fights that require players to juggle all sorts of different objectives while fighting and avoiding enemy fire in order to make it possible for the bosses to be damaged.
And the fight with the Sanctified Mind is one of the most brutal examples of this the series has seen so far. In order to have any hope of beating it, players have to coordinate jumping through portals, killing enemies to collect Voltaic Motes, defending the pair of towers that these Motes power, and positioning themselves to form chains of light between them. All while avoiding fire from the Sanctified Mind, its horde of minions (some of which can land one-shot kills), and an electrified arena that gradually swallows up the few patches of safe ground as the fight proceeds.
That’s a tall order for even a full team of six players to pull off. But the fact is, once something is beaten, it becomes easier to do it again. While hundreds of Shadowkeep players who’ve completed the Garden of Salvation early have no doubt experienced this by now, it was best illustrated by players Gladd, Modern, and Chevy, who blazed through not just the Sanctified Mind battle (which starts at around 26:46 in the video below) but the whole of the Garden of Salvation by themselves.
Naturally, going at it with only half the recommended number of players requires some clever positioning, improvisation, and, of course, communication. But since these players had done it before, they had an idea of what had to be done to make it happen. So maybe they weren’t the first team to clear the Garden of Salvation, but they arguably pulled off a more impressive feat.
Destiny 2: Shadowkeep is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. A Google Stadia version of Destiny 2 is also in the works.