Garden of Salvation (Destiny)

by squidnh3, Tuesday, February 15, 2022, 10:31 (801 days ago) @ CyberKN

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.

I like to think of the final encounter in Garden as a "best practices" encounter. I find it very similar to the final encounter of Crown of Sorrow. It seems like a very difficult encounter where even the slightest error dooms you, but in reality, the true problem is that you are probably doing all the things you think you are doing just fine at an "okay" level, and if you were doing them better you'd have a lot more leeway to recover from actual errors or unexpected circumstances.

In the Garden fight, what is truly important is efficiently collecting the motes. And by "efficient" in this case I mean you and your partner should be ready to come back almost as soon as it is possible for the home team to bring you back. The best way to do this is through ad-clearing supers, and also having a lot of experience doing it with the same person, with whom you've developed a sense for who will be picking up what motes in what situations (at least 4 permutations on each island). Of secondary importance is the home team and temporary defenders efficiently protecting the confluxes and breaking shields without getting in each other's ways, which is an ongoing "do this, unless this" mental calculation. Of tertiary importance is actual boss damage. Whether this kind of hierarchy is truly the best formula for a final boss encounter of a raid is debatable, but I do think these kinds of encounters that reward mastery beyond DPS are nice to have every once in a while.