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King’s Fall

There’s a red border puzzle in this raid. Initial symbol set is right after the opening encounter, under the portal.

Key Concept: Brands

Several encounters will involve a taking a Brand and Brand-Claimer. In general, the brand claimer will require you to kill and enemy to get it to drop (it will look like a small Taken orb), and then using your interact key to pick it up. You will then have to interact with something or someone that already has the Brand to claim it from them. The Brand provides a small dome that shields the holder and other folks in it from some harmful encounter mechanic, and also enables folks inside the brand dome to engage with some shooting-related mechanic. Especially in later encounters, if you are the brand holder, be aware of how your movement moves the “safe” area.

Quick Reference

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Opening

To begin the raid, you need to dunk some relics into some totems to open up a portal. You know, classic Destiny things.

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Suggested Loadouts
  • @Steve Klabnik likes Witherhoard, an AR/smg, and whatever for heavy.
  • Use whatever you feel is effective for ad clear. This isn’t a darkness zone so it’s very low risk.
  • You’ll likely want something that can pop the blight veils/doors quickly in a pinch. Fusion rifles and shotguns work well here

Split the teams into two teams of three, one right, one left. One of the three will be grabbing the relics, and the other two will do ad clear and shoot open some doors.

Here’s what it looks like running to the right side:

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The relics look like this:

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Both people should grab the two relics at the same time; you need to dunk them almost simultaneously for it to work, and picking up a relic starts a timer that fails that “run” when it expires. After grabbing the relics, you’ll need to run back to the central area. To do that, you’ll need to shoot open some doors by shooting the taken balls:

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The center area looks like this, you can see one side completed and one side not dunked yet:

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You need to do these six times in all.

Advanced Technique: Extending the timer

Once the first dunk occurs, the timer resets to a short period of time (~5s) for the time-gate the second dunk. In general, this means that you have to dunk roughly simultaneously. However, if the timer is running short and one person is running behind, you can use this “reset” to gain a couple extra seconds for the second dunk.

Interlude 1: Ship jumping puzzle

In this section, there’s a bunch of hive ships, and you’ll need to jump from roof to roof to traverse an area.

Or you know, you can titan skate, if you’re gonna be like that.

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Suggested Loadouts

Doesn’t matter. If you’re a hunter, Stomp-EE5 are always good. Swords are nice. Grapple is good. Whatever you can move around with, there’s no real combat here.

Main Part

It’s pretty tough to describe what the pattern is in words so for now this is just gonna be what it is, sorry. Hopefully someone you’re running with knows what’s up.

The Barge

Get a person to stand on the plate on each side. Then, 2+ more people can jump on the spawned barge and cross, making sure to jump off (see below) before going through the archway if you want the secret chest. Without the plate people, the large arch and the bonus chest door will both be blocked off. When you get across (either via the large arch or the bonus chest door), two people should stand on the plates at the “finish line” to let the initial plate-standers across.

Secret Chest 1

When crossing on the barge after the main body of the jumping puzzle, jump down to the left onto the ledge just before the large gated arch. Run up the wall, and into the small door. You’ll want to constantly be “looking” at the wall so that the spikes on the wall don’t force you off.

E1: Totems

In this encounter, you’re trying to fill up a totem to open a door. You do that by standing on a plate while you have a buff. The plate will consume stacks of the buff. Once you’ve collectively dunked 200 stacks, the door will open.

You get this buff by killing enemies near a totem while you have another buff. This buff needs to be refreshed by other players, so you end up rotating each player’s role to juggle the buff.

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Suggested Loadouts
  • Think Chamber of Suffering in Pit of Heresy. Xeno is nice for boomer knights up above you. There’s some solar shield wizards.
  • There are unstoppable Ogres, so be prepared for that.
  • @Steve Klabnik used Xenophage, Heritage, and Calus Multi-tool on day 1.

Here’s the opening room:

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  1. The plate where you’ll dunk your stacks of the buff
  2. Left hand side wizard/blight guard spawn
  3. Right hand side wizard/blight guard spawn
  4. Door to left hand side totem room
  5. Door to right hand side totem room

Split into two groups of three, one on right hand side, one on left hand side. Two players are going to go to the 2 and 3 spots above, and one is going to go into the doors at 4 and 5. Let’s talk about those players first.

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Here’s what those side rooms look like. Notice @Dannel Jurado standing beneath a very Pit of Heresy-ass totem. This works like it does in the Chamber of Suffering; if someone isn’t on the totem at almost all times, the team wipes.

Here’s a view from that POV:

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You can see the balcony above.

As you enter the room, there’ll be a little glowing ball. It looks like this:

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That’s the “Brand of the Weaver” buff. It lasts for 30 seconds. Grab it, and get to the totem ASAP. Your job is now to stand under the totem to keep it from wiping the team, while killing adds. For each add you kill, you get one stack of Deathsinger’s Power. Kill as many adds as you can, to get as many stacks as you can. If your Brand of the Weaver runs out, you die. So how do you prevent that? We have to talk about the other two players. Before we do, one thing to keep in mind is that boomer knights spawn in here, both on the balcony and on the ground, and just like Chamber of Suffering, they’ll ruin your day. Prioritize them.

A brand holder must be on the plate at (almost) all times, excepting a small grace period, otherwise it wipes the encounter.

So back to the other two members of your trio. Their job is to go to points 2 and 3 in the original room, and to kill two enemies there: first a Wizard, and then a Taken Knight. The Taken Knight will drop a Brand Ball, and when you pick it up, you’ll get a buff called Brand Claimer. As mentioned before, make sure to interact to pick it up. Once you have that, run over to the player on the totem, and press “interact” to claim the Brand of the Weaver from them. Now you are the one on the plate, killing ads and getting stacks of Deathsinger’s Power.

Once the first player has the Brand taken away from them, their job is to run to the plate in the first room, marked 1 above. Just stand on the plate and it’ll leech away your stacks. Make sure your last stack is gone before leaving the plate (the buff goes from Power x2—> Power so it’s easy to make a mistake if you’re not careful). Once your stacks are gone, it’s time for you to jump up and kill the wizard/knight and get Brand Claimer.

The third person starts to kill knight/wizard after the second player leaves. So once everything is in full motion, you end up having:

  1. One player on the plate, giving stacks of Deathsinger’s Power into the plate
  2. One player killing a Wizard/Knight to get Brand Claimer
  3. One player with Brand of the Weaver, killing adds to get stacks of Deathsinger’s Power

And you rotate through these three roles, in order, on both sides, until 200 stacks are dunked.

Corner cases, tips, and optimizations

  • Call out $PERSON, time? as soon as you pick up the Brand. The current Brand-holder should then count down. Aim to pick up around 3s, or a bit more if you have high ping.
  • If you pick up the Brand and you have 10s or less, call out “meet me!”. You should have enough plate “grace period” for the brand holder to run up and meet you half-way between.
  • If the brand holder dies, the Brand will reset to the little plate that it starts the encounter on. The next person in the rotation should grab it and bring it forward, effectively shifting the rotation forward a cycle.

E2: Warpriest

There’s a Priest, and he loves war. We love peace. So we gotta kill the priest. That’s just what peaceful guardians do.

In this encounter, you’ll end up reading some plates, stepping on them in order, and that gives you a spherical buff from which inside you can damage the boss. He’ll then try to wipe you. You get four DPS phases before the team wipes.

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Suggested Loadouts
  • This is a decently heavy DPS check. Decide how your team is doing DPS, and commit (precision and splash both work here)
  • Bring a Well
  • Bring heavy ammo finder/scout, and the ammo variant of Aeon Cult gear. Let the people running scout/cult gear kill the high-tier enemies like the Wizards.
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Points of Interest
  • The three pillars and corresponding plates
  • The large Taken death orb (kills you on contact)
  • The two rear spawn doors
  • The center warpriest stage below the death orb

Prework

  • Split up into 3 teams of two (left, right, center)
  • Split each team up into plate, ad clear, and brand roles (usually plate and brand is the same person)

Phase 1: Setup

Step on all three plates at once to start the encounter. Now, each team will be responsible for killing ads for a bit. There’ll be Wizards (let the ammo people kill those) on the left and right, and then eventually a Knight will spawn towards the rear of each section. Once you kill the knight in your region call it out. Once all Knights are killed, Phase 2 starts, so timing is important.

Phase 2: Reading

All Plate folks should step on the plates, post-haste. Then, center will look at the carved statue on the back (Warpriest-side) of each piller. One will be glowing (or if destroyed, will be red and floaty). If center doesn’t see any, that means the call is “center”.

Everybody steps off the plate, and then the person whose statue was glowing will step back on. They’ll look for the same phenomenon on one of the other two pillars, and then that person will stay on (so now 2 people are on plates). Finally, the third person will step on their plate, auto-claiming the Brand and starting DPS

Phase 3: DPS

All non-brand guardian and the third plate guardian (brand holder) will then move to the DPS spot. For the first two DPS cycles, this’ll be on the ground level near the right pillar. For the third cycle, this’ll be up on the right side near the plate. For the final cycle, back to the original spot.

Only guardians standing in the brand aura can damage the warpriest. Plonk down your Well, and start wailing. Meanwhile, the current Brand holder should count their timer out loud. At one of the two other locations, a knight will spawn. That location’s brand guardian will kill the Knight, which will drop a Brand-claimer buff that the guardian will pick up, and then return to the DPS area. When the current brand holder gets low on time, the next Brand-claimer will interact to claim it. Eventually, a third knight will spawn, the third brand guardian will kill it, and so on. You’ll get 3 brand-cycles worth of damage if you do it correctly.

Once you’ve gone through 3 brand cycles, the warpriest will attempt to wipe the fireteam with a full-encounter attack (you’ll see it) called Searing Torrent. Just before that happens, when the killfeed says that the “Warpriest calls upon the Occulus”, go hide behind the next pillar (right, center, left). Any single guardian hiding behind a pillar will count as “using that pillar” and cause the pillar to crumble, so it’s important that everyone hides behind the same pillar.

Once the Searing Torrent debuff goes away, you’re free to roam about again. Go take a loop around the encounter to grab Heavy ammo. Rinse and repeat (up to 3 more times) until the Warpriest is dead.

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The death orb will fry you if you get too close. Even a jump while going behind the stage to pick up ammo can be close enough. You’re always closer than you think.

Interlude 2: Maze

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Step (and stay on) each plate, in order, counting up. plate 4 is a bit tricky — it requires you to jump up through a small hole in the wall almost at the ceiling. Grapple is useful for this one.

E3: Golgoroth

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Suggested Loadouts
  • If you’re a gaze holder, you’ll want Arbalest to take gaze (or something similar for single-shot high damage), and a rapid-fire weapon to deal with the darts he sends out (smg, auto, machine gun)
  • If you’re in the Pit, you need some decent ad clear, and then also boss DPS. @Steve Klabnik uses Witherhoard and a (precision) ranged DPS weapon.

Prework

  • Split up into two teams of 3 (left and right)
  • Choose a gaze holder on each team

Phase 1: Ad Clear

Shoot the weird juicy ceiling orb to start the encounter. Kill adds. A Wizard will spawn up front. Kill it, otherwise it’ll bother the gaze holders & everyone else later. Eventually, a (normal) Taken Knight will spawn halfway up each lane. Call out when you kill the knight, because once both are killed, it’ll be time for DPS.

Phase 2: DPS

Gaze holders should position themselves on the “piers” half way down each lane so that they can clearly see golgoroth. Everyone else should head towards the back of the pit, just below the juicy orb on the ceiling. DPS players should shoot the juicy orb, which will drop into a pool of light on the floor. Standing in this pool will allow you do damage Golgoroth.

At this point, one of the gaze holders should shoot Golgy in the back in the yellowy part, taking the gaze and gaining a buff called “Gaze”. At this point, the gaze holder should run so that they’re up on the balcony behind the DPS pool. Golgy will always face towards the gaze holder, so if the gaze holder is not in position, his crit spot (his stomach) will not be visible to the DPS folks. Golgy will shoot darts at the gaze-holder that are decently damaging, so the gaze-holder needs to make sure to shoot them to avoid being killed.

At 10s of gaze left, Golgoroth’s back will open, revealing the yellow stuff. At 2s of gaze left, the other gaze-taker should take gaze. Ideally, the gaze-holder should count time down out loud, but the other gaze-taker should also count down 10s from when they see the back open. If you drop gaze, you’ll end the phase early, so don’t do that.

Meanwhile, DPS will wail on Golgy. At some point, some DPS guardian will get a debuff called Unstable Light. They will explode, wiping the team unless they run away. They should run right up to Golgoroth instead to damage him and get away. If the team is close to Golgoroth at the moment, they should run behind Golgoroth instead.

After a short while, a new juicy orb will appear on the ceiling, and the current pool of light will expire. Shoot the new orb for a new pool, rinse, and repeat. You’ll get 6 pools if you do things correctly. If you miss pools, it’ll charge the Tablet of Ruin at the back of the encounter, eventually wiping the encounter, so don’t mess up too much.

After 6 pools, reset for Phase 1 again, and rinse and repeat till Golgy is dead.

Interlude 3: Piston wall

Colloquially called the “Dick Wall”

Another jumping puzzle, this time with… rods that extend out of the walls, with plow shaped heads to facilitate booping you off to your death.

Don’t ask me, I don’t work at Bungie.

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Suggested Loadouts
  • Similar to the Ships puzzle earlier, whatever moves you. There’s very light combat here, anything works.
  • Grapple and Eager Edge are both useful here

Secret Chest 3

To find the secret chest, proceed halfway along the wall, till you get to the big center pillar. Jump over to it, and pull out your Ghost (really, it’s like deepsight before deepsight) to access some hidden platforms. Jump up the pillar, around, and over to the hole in the opposite wall. Grab the chest, then use your Ghost again to see some more platforms to get back to the main wall.

E4: Daughters

There’s two big Wizards, and they need to die.

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Suggested Loadouts
  • Divinity plus precision is nice here
  • Well is nice here
  • Something with range is good for taking out the Taken snipers that appear outside of the arena

Prework

  • choose 4 plate holders (one for each plate) and 2 floats (space and spawn)

Spatial Terminology

The side closest to Space is Space. The side closest to spawn is Spawn.

Facing space from spawn, right is Right, and left is Left.

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We DO NOT use “front” or “back” from now on. DO NOT even utter those words.
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We also do not argue over what those words might mean.

Phase 1: Plates

There will be a knight on one plate, and that plate will glow green. Kill the Knight to start the encounter. The guardian assigned to that plate will stand on that plate, and call it out like “Start is XYZ”. Then, they’ll look up high for a floating Taken orb above another plate, and call it out, like “going to XYZ”. Whoever’s assigned to the end plate will hop on.

Meanwhile, some guardian will be Taken. They’ll proceed to the start plate post-haste. When both plate-standers are on their plates, a path of platforms will appear from the start plate up to the Taken orb above the end plate. The Taken guardian will run up the platforms, jump through the Taken orb for the first two pieces or interact for the third piece, and then call “done, everyone off”.

If people linger on plates after their done, or step on a wrong plate, the plates will glow red and start damaging. If this is due to a mistake, everyone off and try again.

If the Taken guardian dies, a new one will be chosen. If a plate guardian is Taken but would need to be on their plate float needs to cover.

On the third run of this, the Taken guardian will need to interact with the Taken orb to get brand claimer. Then, they’ll jump over to the Sister that’s shooting at them to steal the Brand from her, then back down to the ledge opposite that sister to start DPS.

You’ll need to go through relatively quickly, since the sisters have a wipe mechanic that will end the encounter after 2 minutes.

Note that snipers will appear outside the arena while the plates/platforming is happening. Make sure to shoot them when they appear.

Phase 2: DPS

Everyone head over to the ledge opposite the target sister once the Taken guardian grabs the final piece of the Brand Claimer buff. Then, while standing in the Brand aura, wail on the sister till you run out of time.

Once time runs out, a sister will attempt to wipe the fireteam. Stay in the brand aura till that happens to avoid that fate.

Rinse and repeat till you finish both sisters

Advanced Info

In theory, you can steal the brand from either sister. If you steal the brand from the shooting sister, the Brand will protect you from her wipe mechanic, but you’ll need to wait for it. If you steal it from the flaming sister (i.e. the one not shooting), you’ll need to one-phase her, since you will not get protection.

E5: Oryx

The God himself. He’s angy. Time to show him what the Sword Logic is all about.

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Suggested Loadouts
  • Same stuff as Warpriest, honestly.
  • Something to quickly nuke your yellow-bare Ogre and Knight (special)

Prework

  • same roles as Daughters
  • assign a final stand player to the left and right ogres each

Phase 1: Plates

Go tickle the Taken orb up space-wards to start the encounter. Oryx will appear, then float over to one plate and smash it. That’ll be the starting plate at the beginning. Wait till it lights up, and then proceed as with the last encounter.

However, there’s an added wrinkle this time. Shortly into the encounter, Taken Ogres will spawn. Kill them as soon as possible from range. They’ll drop a small Taken blight with a circle in the ground around it, called a bomb. Do not enter the circle. Do not be in the circle when the bomb drops (do not kill the Ogre from melee range). After this happens, yellow-bar Knights called Light Eater Knights will spawn. Kill them immediately, otherwise they’ll cross from left to right (or vice versa) and eat the bomb on that side.

Once the Taken player grabs the third/final piece of Brand Claimer, the plate players (or the substitute float as needed) should go stand outside their bomb’s area. Wait till you see Oryx calls upon the darkness in the kill feed, then immediately step into your bomb’s circle. Wait till you see $YOUR_NAME detonates a bomb in the kill feed, then leave your circle and go straight to the Brand’s aura. If anyone is outside the aura when a bomb goes off (shortly after it’s “detonated”), they’ll die, so it’s important that everyone has roughly the same timing. If fewer than 4 bombs go off, you’ll get a short DPS phase.

For the Brand-claimer guardian, instead of stealing from a daughter, you’ll steal from an otherwise invincible Knight who spawns between the two pillars that the daughters were on, and otherwise wanders a bit. Once you’ve gotten the brand, hang out in the middle slightly skewed towards where Oryx is.

Once all bombs have gone off, it’s DPS time.

Phase 2: DPS

Wail on Oryx’s chest from the center of the room.

Phase 3: Minigames

After DPS, Oryx will do one of two minigames: Orbital Strike or Thunderdome.

If Knights appear on the plates immediately after DPS, it’s Orbital Strikes. Kill the Knights immediately then keep moving. The orbital strikes will continue until all knights are dead, and moving will help you avoid them. The strikes are one-shots.

Otherwise, it’s Thunderdome. Oryx will gradually suck players into a Taken dome space-ward-center, where they’ll have to kill a miniboss. Everyone else should kill ads and not touch the dome.

Either way once this is done, rinse and repeat from Phase 1 till you hit final stand.

Final Stand

Oryx will move space-ward center. Wail on him, and don’t stop shooting till he’s dead.

The assigned Ogre players will have to kill the Ogres that appear to the left and right (one on each side) and detonate the corresponding bombs once Oryx calls upon the darkness, just like before.

Loot!

You’ve beaten the Taken King! Look for the vendor box, as for all the new raids, to purchase a red border with spoils.