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Salvation’s Edge

Welcome to the hardest raid in Destiny (so far)! This raid is not for beginners, it is both mechanically challenging and combat-complex with one soft DPS check (Dissipation) and one harder DPS check (Zenith). A quick run with no wipes is a little over an hour with experienced people and a teaching run should likely timebox 2.5 to 3 hours.

Key Mechanic

In several encounters, you will be spawning different types of resonance to use on Resonance Conductors. There will be pairs of plates, the initial one is always glowing and the closing plate is always located near an open Resonance Conductor. Stepping on the initial one sends the signal to the closing one (literally you see a beam of light travel along a path), stepping on a closing one after the beam has arrived sends it back, you can do this forever, but it is typically functionally not useful to do it after 3 exchanges, as you have spawn the maximum amount of useful resonance by then.

Warning: The plates can be stepped on before the signal has arrived at the plate, doing so will cause the plate to fizzle or spawn a yellow-bar enemy that prevents the signal from traveling along that path, kill the enemy to re-enable the path. The plate shows you when it’s about to time out by showing a closing circle when the beam arrives, you do not need to wait for the circle to show up to step on the plate, you only need to wait for the beam to arrive.

Resonance Conductors are the key mechanic for encounters 1, 2, and 3. The way in which you interact with a Resonance Conductor is by looking at the shape on the Conductor (it’s a totem-looking thing near the middle of the room) and shooting that shape while holding the matching resonance before stepping on the plate. This means that if you intend to close the Resonance Conductor on the next beam send, you can shoot the Conductor at any point before the beam arrives and the Conductor will close at when you step on the plate (after the beam arrives).

Pyramid inside Conductor: you need a Pyramidal Resonance

Sphere inside Conductor: you need a Spherical Resonance

Cube inside Conductor: you need a Hexahedral Resonance

Resonances can stack up to 3, if you pick up a 4th resonance or your timer runs out, you die. The type of resonance you have depends on the last resonance you’ve picked up and does not require you to maintain a homogeneous stack (i.e. you don’t need all cubes or all spheres, for example, you can pick up a sphere and then a cube and a cube if you ultimately need a cube to close).

The Resonances look like this on the ground:

shout out to Reddit, I guess
shout out to Reddit, I guess
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Encounter 1: Substratum

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Goals

This encounter will require completing 3 cycles of the following:

  1. Release the energy into the architecture by killing Threshold Sentinels (Tormentors).
  2. Spawn Resonance for the entire team to pick up.
  3. Close the Resonance Conductors.
  4. Deposit as much Resonance as possible in bank to delay the wipe timer.

Loadout Recommendations

This encounter is very ad-clear heavy. you will be fighting hordes of Vex with a couple of Dread units sprinkled throughout at random. You need to be able to clear the hordes quickly while making your way through fairly confined rooms. In addition to the small ads, you will also find that you need to be able to quickly kill Vex Hydras and Overload Minotaurs (Joe’s Bane™). Last but not least, there are Subjugators and Tormentors so Microcosm or a Heavy Machine Gun is a fantastic pick. Typically you’re going to want to use burst-damage Supers to clear the Subjugators and/or Tormentors but roaming Supers can help you clear a room in a pinch.

Summary:

  • anti-Overload weapon
  • Precision Heavy weapon to deal with big Dread units quickly

Encounter Guide

To start, split your fireteam into two teams of three guardians. Let’s call these fireteams Left and Right.

At the start of every phase, Supplicants (exploding Vex harpies) spawn from two adjacent rooms, those are your initial rooms, you do not need to remember them, Team Left goes into the left room and Team Right goes into the right room. Each group makes their way clearing ads through the rooms, if one of the groups encounters a closed door, there is a Keeper of the Monolith (a Vex Hydra) somewhere that is preventing the door from opening. The Hydras can spawn in the room the group is currently in or sometimes even spawn late as you’re exiting a room.

The groups move around until they encounter Devotee of the Witness (an Overload Minotaur), you kill the Overload Minotaur, write down which room that Minotaur died in, and regroup in the middle room to kill a Threshold Sentinel (a named Tormentor). Only one group should encounter the Overload but we’ve observed situations in which two Overloads can spawn at the same time.

Once a Tormentor is killed, this activates one of the sets of plates/resonant conductors, you should see the text “Energy flows into the architecture”. Repeat this process for another set of rooms, ending with killing another Tormentor. Once that Tormentor is dead, it’s time to spawn Resonance and unlock the resonance bank so that you can dunk that Resonance.

Two people in a group of three should be concerned with spawning resonance, the other person can act as the floater/ad-clear helper. Spawn a bunch of resonance, make sure everyone picks up as much of it as they can in the time allowed, then close the Resonating Conductor (detailed above). The third person should help with ad clear and then run through the middle room briefly to collect Resonance in between ad waves.

Head to the center, kill a Subjugator and its cronies and then dunk the Resonance into the bank to extend the timer. Dunking any amount of Resonance seems to add at least 20 seconds to the timer but to cap out the wipe timer every single cycle, make sure you dunk at least 15 or more Resonance collectively into the box (the cap is approximately 4:15). Congratulations, you’ve done 1 full cycle, repeat it two more times to complete the encounter.

Additional Notes

  • Standing in the doors that lead to the rooms at the time of the Tormentor getting killed can get you killed (don’t ask how we know, we just do).
  • If you’re not in the middle room at the time the Tormentor is killed, a Hydra will spawn to open the door that you’re stuck in at the time the Supplicants begin to spawn.
  • It may be helpful for teams to have different callouts for when they’re activating plates e.g. Team Left Opener could say “Sending” and Team Left Closer could say “Receiving” versus Team Right Opener/Closer opting for saying “Ping”/”Pong”. When in doubt, just call the other person’s name to say you are sending them a signal.
  • The Resonance bank is somewhat finicky to accept Resonance at times, make sure you no longer have resonance on the left side of your screen.
  • If enemies are still spawning after the resonance bank is open, it means that someone in the fireteam is still holding resonance.

Encounter 2: Dissipation aka Herald of Finality aka Harold

And now we fight Taniks Harold the Herald of Finality. While not a particularly interesting boss, this encounter introduces a second shape: Sphere. It is also the first boss encounter of the raid.

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Goals

  1. Release the energy into the architecture
  2. Acquire Stolen Favor
  3. Close the Resonance Conductor with the appropriate shaped Resonance
  4. Deposit Resonance into the bank to delay the wipe timer
  5. Kill the boss

Loadout Recommendations

This encounter is going to make you hate Attendants a.k.a. Stasis Psions. They hit hard, can use Duskfields against you preventing critical movement, and spawn 4-6 at a time, do not underestimate them. Dealing with them quickly can be done with several varieties of weapons including but not limited to Wave Frame Breach-loaded Grenade Launchers, Reservoir Burst Fusion Rifles, and Ergo Sum (Riskrunner, Telesto, or Wolfpack Rounds but Sacred Flame might work well too). Your team’s main boss DPS weapon is going to be a sword, it doesn’t have to be, but it’s pretty easy to use. The boss’s crit spot is easy enough to hit, but they will move towards you constantly and you need to step in the arena to do damage so a sword or another close-range non-precision weapon is a good choice.

Your team should have:

  • Swords
    • At least one person should be using a Wolfpack Rounds Ergo Sum, it buffs the rest of the fireteam
    • Swords with Whirlwind Blade will build stacks on Wolfpack hits and reach that 30% buff faster
    • Try not to stack more than one Cold Steel sword
  • Consistent ad-clear
  • A Warlock with Well of Radiance and probably Speaker’s Sight is very useful during the damage phase.

Encounter Guide

This time around, we’re splitting into 3 groups of two, typically named Left, Center, and Right. At the start of the encounter you will be killing ads until you spawn a miniboss tier Taken enemy called a Trammel (it will be a Phalanx, Wizard, or Ogre, depending on your side). While killing the enemy waves, one person per side will get an encounter buff named Call to Reckoning, these are the people who will eventually be able to see which shape is needed to close the Resonant Conductor.

Before we do anything about Call to Reckoning, first, we’ll spawn the Resonances. The same dance as before will occur until you spawn 6 Resonances (3 Pyramidal and 3 Spherical). Once you have 6, let the signal fizzle and yet another Trammel will spawn, at this point the person who was Called to Reckoning will head to the center to acquire Stolen Favor.

Acquiring Stolen Favor involves each person who is Called to Reckoning shooting Harold’s face while the people left around the rooms will search for Taken Blights and shoot them. Once you’ve gotten rid of enough blights, the people Called to Reckoning will have an encounter buff called Stolen Favor (aka Stolen Valor). They return to their respective sides.

At the moment the others acquire Stolen Favor, ads will start spawning again, take care to not pick up a Resonance until the person with Stolen Favor has called out which ones they need. At this point you send the signal for closing the Resonant Conductor, once all three are closed, the Resonance box spawns in the far side of the arena, everyone deposits and the damage phase starts. You do not have to wait until everyone has deposited to start damage but you may want to set up Wells, healing, and debuffs at this point. Keep doing damage until you see Harold become immune and then repeat the above for another damage phase.

Once you reach final stand (the last portion of Harold’s health), all 3 Trammels will spawn around the room, ignore them and continue to beat Harold with sharp sticks to beat the encounter.

Encounter 3: Repository

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Goals

Traverse 3 rooms by unlocking the doors by activating the resonant conductors in each room.

Similar to the previous encounters you will:

  1. Release the energy into the architecture (by killing a Tormentor)
  2. Spawn enough resonance so the entire team can extend the timer to its maximum
  3. Open the door to the room after dunking by killing the unstoppable champions and friends.

Loadout Recommendations

While not a boss encounter in particular, you will want to burn down Tormentors and Subjugators in a very timely manner.

Similar to Substratum, you will be doing a good amount of running and gunning with the added threats of way more Dread Husks and a number of Scorpio Turrets (the Cabal turrets) that can gun you down real fast.

The only champion type in this encounter is Unstoppable and only 1 spawns per room but if nobody has any way to stop it, you’ll burn a lot of time killing it.

Your team should have:

  • At least two people using something that can stun Unstoppables
  • A way to deal with multiple Scorpio Turrets quickly, any of the rocket sidearms will do this well but other options exist.
  • Tormentor/Subjugator killer weapons, usually means a precision-capable Heavy Weapon

Encounter Guide

Start by splitting into 3 groups of 2. One of you will the anchor, or person who initiates the plate signal bouncing, the other one will be the closer, who is responsible for closing the Resonant Conductor with the appropriate Resonance.

First, both people on the team should try to team up on each Tormentor, with the care to have the closer land the killing blow on the Tormentor. Killing the Tormentor will grant the person who did it the buff Stolen Favor, which allows you to see which Resonance is needed to close each Conductor. After all three Tormentors are killed, Scorpio Turrets will spawn fairly high up in several places around the room, get rid of them quickly.

Now you can start the process of spawning the Resonance for your path, as in the previous encounter, your particular side will only spawn 6 Resonance, so once you see enough on the ground, the closer can head to the part of the room that has the Resonance they need. The anchor can take this moment to make it to where the Tormentor spawned and kill the Subjugator in order to have energy flow back into the architecture. It is somewhat important for the closers to call when they are done picking up the shapes they need, this indicates to the anchors that they can pick up any lingering Resonance on the field on their way back from killing the Subjugators.

Once the closers are back, the anchors will call out that they are “sending $side for close”, and the closers will shoot the Resonant Conductor and then step on the plate to close it. When every side does this, another group of turrets will spawn and the Resonance box will spawn towards the middle of the arena, everyone dunks their Resonance and heads towards the large door opposite the side you entered the room. Several ads will spawn here alongside an Unstoppable champion, kill them and the door opens to the next room.

Rinse and repeat 3 times, and you should have completed the encounter. The layouts of the room change significantly so take note of them quickly as you’re entering each room. The paths change as well, see the images at the top of this encounter section for a quick reference of the paths and their differences between rooms.

Additional Notes

  • Hunters with the Ascension aspect may want to use it in order to speed the team along in the between-rooms sections.
  • While not particularly lethal, there are hands doing a sideways attack throughout the room, watch out for where they spawn and their attacks.
  • Anyone with Stolen Favor can call out which totem is which, in case somebody accidentally kills a second Tormentor.

Encounter 4: Verity

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Useful Tools

There is a solver that we use to complete this encounter. This is used for people who are on the outside to construct predictable keys for the people on the inside.

https://www.iximeow.net/verity/index.html

Additionally, there is a tool that shows which of your fireteam members are wearing which armor pieces, Ghosts, and exotics. This is helpful if you’re raiding with new people and trying to recognize their ghosts or fashion. You need to log in to view this one.

https://engram.blue/verity/fireteam

This solver, while interesting because it shows you how each shape dissection leads to the next one, is less concise than the first one

https://verity.d2atlas.com/

Goals

Verity, a lot like the Last Wish Vault encounter, is about unlocking a path to the next encounter

In order to do that we need to do the following three times:

  • On the outside of the glass, we need to create a unique shape for each of the inside locks, we do that by dissecting shapes.
  • On the inside of the glass, we need to give shapes to the other people inside so that they can create the shape matching the lock being created on the outside for that person.
  • Once the inside folks have exited the glass, the Witness “kills” all but one Guardian and they have to match the corresponding Ghosts to the Guardian statue (which they will likely not be able to see)

This is a gross simplification of just the necessary things that need to happen to complete this encounter, please read the full guide for how the encounter actually happens.

Loadout Recommendations

You will not be able to choose a role in this encounter, guardians are picked at random for inside or outside roles. The enemies you will encounter are:

  • Hive Knights with boomers
  • Grim, lots of Grim
  • Hive Thrall
  • Hive Ogres, including Unstoppable Ogres.

Your most effective loadouts are heavy ad-clear focus, there are a lot of fast enemies that can run or fly in front of you so be aware when equipping explosive weapons of any kinds.

Some favorites include, but are not limited to:

  • Riskrunner Ergo Sum
  • Heavy Machine Guns, especially ones that auto-reload
  • Buried Bloodline to gain Devour regardless of equipped class.

Whatever you choose to use, having effective ad-clear is key so that you can execute the mechanics of the encounter while thinking minimally about the things you need to kill or stay alive from.

Encounter Guide

While there are several possible ways to solve this encounter, we’re going to discuss one that the overall community has settled on for now. This strategy tries to reduce inside team comms so that outside team can focus on making the lock shapes using the solver linked below.

Every lock phase, there are 3 people who are chosen at random to be the inside or solo, and 3 people who are left on the outside. Outside and inside will be working on their objectives simultaneously. Their end goals align, but they have little interaction aside from that (with the exception being the ghosts phase and if somebody dies on the inside and is swapped with one of the people from the outside).

I am going to outline the general strategy. I am not claiming this is the most effective strategy or the fastest, I am saying this is a strategy that works to complete the base encounter.

Before you start, it is important for you to know what each of your fellow guardians ghosts and guardians look like. So take a look around at the statues around the Rally Flag and learn them or take notes. If you can recognize them based on equipped item icons, the Verity Fireteam Viewer should help as well, but in general you want to avoid having the same ghost shell as another guardian and having the same fashion/ornaments as another guardian, armor pieces with unique shapes are great for quickly being identified.

If at any point you pick up a 2D shape that you didn’t mean to pick up, to discard it you need to form a 3D shape by picking up another 2D shape, then depositing it in any statue. This has no functional effect on either the inside or the outside, it’s just a mechanic that lets you fix an accidental pickup. The knights holding those shapes will respawn in the next cycle.

Each room

Every room that you will be in mirrors the room you start the encounter in. They share the following:

  • 3 Guardian statues holding a shape
  • A wall where the shapes that can be dropped in the room are projected. These are the shapes “in” your room.
    • When you are on the inside, this changes, on the outside, this does not change.
  • A hole towards the middle of the room (don’t fall through it!)

Additionally, the combat flow of the rooms is very similar. You kill Hive Knights to have them drop shapes on the ground, you kill Ogres to make Knights spawn, and Grim and Thrall spawn on a timer

Inside (aka solo)

  1. Someone on the Inside needs to call out, from left-to-right, the shapes being held by the Guardian statues.
  2. Take note of which shape your guardian is holding: square, circle, or triangle. There’s no need to call this out but it is important you remember it for the next steps.
  3. Your first goal is to become stable, which is shorthand for your room containing two copies of the shape your guardian is holding. You do this by trading away the shapes that you are not holding. The easiest way to do this is to dunk the shape to the guardian that is collecting those shapes, i.e. you give a triangle to the guardian holding triangle and circle to the guardian holding circle.
    1. Once you have given away the shapes that are not yours call out that you are stable or type something to that effect in the chat.
    2. It is possible to be teleported to the inside area and start off as stable, just confirm your shape is changing into itself on the back projector wall. You do not need to kill any knights, just call you are stable then hang back and pick off Grim and Thrall while you wait for the other two people inside to also be stable.
  4. Once every inside person is stable, the next step is to send a copy of your shape to each of the other people on the inside. This is often known as the trade phase. You again kill Knights, pick up shapes one at a time, then deposit them into the statues of the other two guardians (for convenience sake, you can do it left to right, but the order doesn’t matter as long as you remember which you’ve deposited shapes into so you don’t accidentally give someone two copies of a shape).
  5. Finally, once everyone is done trading away their shapes, you should be able to kill two more Knights, pick up the shapes they drop and they should form the 3D shapes that they need to escape the room through the large glass in the middle of the room. If you can exit the room, you should see the color of the large glass window change and crack.

If, at any point, someone on the inside dies, their ghost will be moved to the outside room and someone from the outside room will be picked at random to replace the person who died. While it is possible to recover from this, the inside folks should still play their life as much as they can instead of trying to go very fast.

Somewhere in the middle of step 3 or 4, the text “The Witness notices your efforts” will show up in the feed, if you are inside, you will then be calcified in place and your ghost will appear on the outside. You need to use the death camera to switch to the POV of somebody on the outside and call out the statue of a guardian that you can see. You can only see one guardian’s statue and there are 3 available slots, the slots are number from left-to-right, 1 to 6, so your callout, in voice or in chat should be “[gamertag] [position]”. Once your ghost is deposited into your statue, you will return to the exact same place where you were calcified and you will retain any shapes you had on you at the moment of calcification. If you are unclear or were mid depositing a shape when becoming calcified, it’s worth checking your buffs to see if you are still holding the last shape you had. This can be very disruptive, it’s important that you remember which things you had left to do at the time you were calcified.

Outside

In general, the outside is somewhat easier mechanically but harder combat-wise. In between every wave of Knights, they will have to kill two Unstoppable Ogres to make the next set of Knights appear.

Someone on the outside should be running the linked solver.

That person should:

  1. Wait for the inputs from the inside team
  2. Input the shapes they see on the outside statues
  3. Direct the outside guardians to which shapes need to be deposited in which statues in order.
  4. Confirm that the output of the tool matches the state in-game.

The other two guardians clear ads, follow instructions to deposit shapes, then pick up ghosts to expedite putting the inside guardians back in their statues.

While you should follow the steps given by the solver, if at any point you lose track of what shape went where, outside can always re-input the current outside shapes into the solver to reach the solution.

When the “The Witness notices your efforts” text appears, focus to looking for a ghost (it should be a marker in your HUD), identifying it by its shell, then following the inside callouts to where you should deposit that guardian’s ghost. While waiting to be recovered, the three inside guardians can't do anything but look at their death cameras: picking up and recovering your fireteam is outside's top priority!

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While the solver instructions are sufficient on their own for the outside team, it is helpful to understand the mechanics the solver guides outside through. Feel free to skip this section if you don’t care what is actually happening with the outside dissection

Finishing a lock phase

Once every inside guardian makes it out, two Unstoppable Ogres will spawn (alongside some Grim and Thrall) on the tops of the two platforms near the spawn (the area with 6 podiums for statues). Kill the Ogres and any other remaining ads, then stand apart from your fellow guardians. The Witness will then calcify all but one guardian and you have 1 minute to put every ghost back with their corresponding statue. Do not pick up a ghost without knowing where it goes, especially if you are the only non-calcified guardian, depositing a ghost in the wrong statue will kill you and if everyone is dead or calcified, you fail the encounter. Whether it’s in the chat, or over voice, make sure you clearly identify the guardian you can see from your calcified camera and follow the previous pattern of numbering the podiums 1-6 from left to right.

Once every guardian is un-calcified, the lock phase completes. If this is the third lock phase, then the encounter completes and you can move on to fight the Witness.

A note on Shapes

In this encounter, you will be combining or dissecting 2D shapes and 3D shapes. This image is a somewhat rough reference, you do not need to be a geometry wizard but it does help to be familiar with these combinations. Additionally, when a 3D shape needs to be identified, please make sure you have seen enough of its sides in order to correctly identify it as things like Pyramid and Cone can be confused if glanced from certain sides.

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Encounter 5: Zenith, Witness these Hands

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Goals

Welcome to the final encounter of the raid, take a quick bio break, stretch, and lock the fuck in, it’s time to kill The Witness.

In this fight we need to do 3 things:

  • Break the 6 buttons on his coat with the Glyphbreaker buff.
  • Damage the Witness for big damage amounts of damage.
  • Stay alive
    • This is always an objective but it is even more of an objective here

Seems simple, yeah? It’s not, but we’ll get into it. Hey, at least this fight is easier than the Verity encounter 😂

Loadout Recommendations

Unlike previous encounters, this encounter’s loadout recommendations need to optimize heavily for BIG DPS, as it’s known in the community. When in doubt, you should ask more knowledgeable members of your fireteam what optimizes your damage further. You do not need perfect DPS, but you do need to be a significant contributor whenever possible. The general guidelines are:

  • Big damage that lets you remain mobile is great
  • Effective primary ad-clear, favor longer distance over close quarters.

Hunters

Until it gets nerfed, Hunters will be perma-locked to Celestial Nighthawk. Still Hunt is great additional DPS, but Microcosm’s Paracausal Imbuement procs off of a quick Golden Gun shot and allows you to shoot from the hip effectively while dodging the Witness blasts.

Generally Prismatic Hunter is going to give you the kit that you want, but Healing Grenade on the Solar Hunter subclass gives you a nice on-demand heal if you’re finding it challenging staying alive.

Thinking about running Nightstalker? Stop thinking about it, don’t. You’re leaving damage on the table and we need that damage.

Titans

Titans don’t have a great one-and-done at-range super.

“What about Twilight Arsenal?”

Yeah….sure…I guess? If you can hit all three axes, then it does decent damage + applies a weaken. But missing an axe is so expensive.

“So what do Titans do?”

DELIVER A SWEET KNEE OF JUSTICE TO THE FACE OF ANY SUBJUGATOR ON THE FIELD. Sorry. As of The Final Shape, Peregrine Greaves were buffed to return melee energy on any Tormentor or Subjugator hit. Combined with Offensive Bulwark, you can often one-shot any Subjugator that spawns after breaking a glyph/button.

Consult your local damage spreadsheet obsessive for the current best option, Microcosm does great as of the raid launch, Leviathan’s Breath is also a fantastic option for firing from the hip. A sniper rifle for some extra backup damage also work.

Warlock

Every non-Warlock on the team, please take a moment to thank your local Warlock for committing to keeping you alive during this hectic encounter.

The easy pick here is Speaker’s Sight, it’s just easy to use, helps keep everybody alive, and makes orbs. You can run Solar or Prismatic

Encounter Guide

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source: https://www.reddit.com/r/raidsecrets/comments/1dd754c/witness_shapes_images/

Weekly Red Border

Throughout the raid, in the traversal sections, there are 5 sets of connected plates that allow you to get an additional guaranteed pattern weapon drop per-account, per-week.

Once you reach this wall:

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You read the third column, from bottom to top. In the above screenshot, it is:

  1. Triangle
  2. Triangle
  3. Circle
  4. Triangle
  5. Circle

Your team needs to activate the 1st, 3rd, and 5th resonant conductors throughout the traversal sections between encounters with the corresponding shapes and complete the Witness fight to get the drop. In this case with Triangle, Circle, and Circle, in that order. The other two shapes are used to unlock raid mods once you have completed the raid challenges/triumphs.