So I managed to finish off the Exotic Sword quest with a group of matchmade randoms. The final step in the quest is to play a special version of the Sunless Cell strike. The strike gets bumped up to a super high difficulty (might have been level 300, if my memory is correct). Lots of majors and elemental shields across all encounters. The good news is the strike is tough, but loads of fun too. Plenty of different shield types within each fight, so you need to be smart and coordinate various weapons/supers with your fireteam.

The real meat of this quest mission comes at the end, during the fight against the Darkblade. Over the course of the battle, 3 major knights will enter the arena. Each knight has a unique name and a different elemental shield: 1 void, 1 solar, 1 arc. You will need to focus your attention on 1 of these knights, based on the sword you are trying to unlock. If you are going for the void sword, the quest hinges on the void-shielded knight, for example.

The quest requires you to kill the Knight that matches the element of your sword AND the Darkblade within 30 seconds of each other. It's simpler than it sounds. You can kill the knights that don't effect your quest at any time just to get them out of the way. From there, wear down the Darkblade until he has a sliver of health left. As you can imagine, things get tricky when you have people in your fireteam who are working on different sword quests!

Here's a video of my fireteam pulling it off last night. I got lucky and was matched with players who were also working towards the Void sword. No voice chat, but we coordinated well together and achieved our goal without too much trouble. My personal highlight is when we get the Darkblade down to a sliver of health: I find the void knight, pop my Celestial Nighthawk golden gun, line up my shot, and nail the thrall standing next to him -____-

It's a fun fight, for sure!