Garden of Salvation (Destiny)

by CyberKN , Oh no, Destiny 2 is bad, Saturday, February 12, 2022, 12:32 (1022 days ago)

Man, this raid…

I’m gonna preface this with some apologies;

Vortech was totally right about linking both red and blue tethers to the boss extending the damage phase; I went and looked it up this morning, and every guide I found claims this to be the case.

I got a bit punchy towards the end of the session, and I had no good reason to imply our failures were any particular team’s fault. I caused at least as many wipes as anyone else, if not more. Hope you guys don’t take what I said seriously.

The Raid

Garden of Salvation is so close to being a masterpiece of game design up there with the Vault of Glass. It introduces mechanics in a gradual fashion, and then combines them to form really hectic, climactic encounters. As frustrating as it can seem at times, I really really enjoy the tethering mechanic. I would have loved to see more mandatory combat-light encounters that made use of this, similar to how some of the Divinity puzzles work.

The garden environment itself is… wow. Probably my favourite environment in all of D2, no contest. I can’t do it justice with words.

I guess Nessus comes pretty close. Really, I’m learning that I want Bungie to just build more locales featuring Vex architecture.

Having completed the final encounter twice now, I can totally understand why people hate it. It’s unforgiving in a way other raid encounters aren’t, where a single missed callout or ill-timed death will inevitably snowball into a state where continuing the fight isn’t feasible. It actually reminds me a lot of Oryx in that way.

One of my chief complaints is that a lot of the anchors you connect the tethers to are just far enough away that they can’t reliably be completed with two players, at least not in the middle of combat. I feel like with just a little bit of iteration, that encounter would go from dreaded to one of the best in that game. Oil one or two of the encounter's moving parts, preferably some of the more buggy ones like mote collection.

I would still love to pop in and do this one more every couple months or so, if only to do the Divinity puzzles again and finish that quest.