Probably unnecessary since I saw quite a few new blue emblems in the roster last night, but here’s a quick guide for those of you who haven’t yet completed the challenge for the Leviathan Raid Pleasure Gardens encounter. As a refresher for the encounter, the Pleasure Gardens plays out in one or more rounds that include:

1) Stealth phase:

• Four guardians move around the garden avoiding the roaming beasts and navigating to one of the active flowers placed around the room
  
• Two guardians pick up prisms and stand inside one of several pools of light above the fog that allow them to fire light at the flowers and release a stack of damage multiplier (and then fire at the snipers that spawn)

2) Damage phase:

• When the beasts spot a guardian (or after a fixed amount of time passes), they move to fixed positions in the room and begin to howl for 30 seconds.
  
• When the howling begins, each guardian moves to one or more assigned beasts and damages or kills them while they are still howling.

For timing reasons, it’s important to kill all the dogs during a single howl, but it’s not necessary to kill them during the first howl. Many teams will damage (but not kill) their beasts during the first howl, return to the safe room, and then kill their beasts during the second (or third or fourth) howl. As damage multiplier increases to x36 or x48, it becomes much less difficult to kill a beast in a single howl.

The Challenge:
The challenge is that an individual guardian may only fire a prism at a flower once during a stealth phase. Since there are two guardians with prisms (one left, one right), that means that the fire team can collect up to a x24 damage multiplier before they must either start to damage their beasts and return to the safe room, or swap new guardians into the prism position to continue adding to the multiplier for the current round.

Rinse and Repeat Strategy:
It’s possible to complete the challenge with no changes to the default strategy. As soon as the second flower is fired upon (and the snipers cleared), the fire team members should run to their assigned beasts and damage them with their x24 multiplier. Make sure everyone returns to the safe room before the howl ends. When the next stealth phase begins, the same two guardians that used prisms in the initial stealth phase can continue to use them without failing the challenge. When the howl is over, the fire team simply repeats the first round - gathering another x24 damage multiplier and moving to their assigned beasts for damage. Assuming everyone was successful in doing damage in the first round, the fire team should be able to kill all six beasts on normal in the second phase, but if any one beast didn’t get adequate damage in the first phase, the entire fire team should hold off on their kills and just do damage so that the beasts can all be killed during a third damage phase. The encounter allows up to 4 damage phases, and the challenge will succeed as long as each prism guardian never fires at more than one flower per stealth phase.

Prism Swap Strategy:
It’s possible to complete the challenge with a multiplier higher than x24, but it requires that the fire team swap in new guardians to wield the prisms for the 3rd and 4th flowers to gain an x48 multiplier. If time allows, the last two guardians can swap into the prism role to reach a maximum x72 multiplier (but that’s generally unnecessary – even on Prestige). Note that an x48 multiplier is desirable on Prestige difficulty where there are 8 beasts to kill and they have more health.

It is safest to swap the prisms at the safe room. Not only are you out of danger from being spotted, but former prism guardians can only pick up their pollen in the safe room (after it’s dropped by the new prism guardians by pressing (Y)/Triangle), so it’s the best place to reform the stealth team.

Since the initial flower spawns will always be R1/L2 or L2/R1, this leads to a straightforward strategy. Depending on the spawn, the stealth team activates L2 or R2 first, and then moves to R1 or L1 second before returning to the safe room (which will be immediately accessible due to its location). As soon as the second pair of snipers is down, the prism guardians return to the safe room roof, drop the prisms, head down to pick up their pollen, and the new 4-man stealth team moves out to the next active flower. As the initial prism guardians are dropping prisms and picking up pollen, the second pair of prism guardians should be dropping pollen, picking up prisms and getting into position for the next 2 flowers.

The Prism Swap Strategy makes killing the beasts on Normal mode in a single damage phase trivial, and makes it considerably easier to manage the extra beasts on Prestige mode.