One person should not be able to defeat the final boss of Destiny 2’s Vault of Glass raid. The fight is designed in such a way that multiple players in completely different locations have to work together to win the battle. And yet, using a combination of consummate skill, a bit of luck, and a well-known glitch, one player has managed to take Atheon, Time’s Conflux, down all by their lonesome.
Defeating the massive Vex villain waiting at the end of the Vault of Glass raid in Destiny 2 normally requires a well-coordinated raid team ready to switch roles at a moment’s notice. At certain intervals during the battle, Atheon will teleport a portion of the raiding party to different rooms, where they must shoot a series of red Oracles in the correct order to continue. The trick is, the order of Oracles’ destruction is only communicated to the players left behind when the rest are teleported. Non-transported characters quickly relay the order to the rest of the team, who then dispatch the Oracles before being transported back into the fray. Once three groups of three Oracles are dispatched, the raiders gain a powerful 30-second buff allowing them to do massive damage to Atheon. Once the 30 seconds is up, the cycle begins anew until Atheon goes down.
So how did player VoteForShifu (via PC Gamer) manage the feat solo? First, he’s very, very good at Destiny 2. As a player who couldn’t even complete the original, easier version of the Vault of Glass in the first Destiny, I can’t imagine making it very far at all by myself. So he’s got skills.
He’s also got some serious trickery going on. First off, he’s got the good old finisher glitch. Using a finisher on a damaged enemy begins a short animation. Once that animation ends, VoteForShifu is teleported back to the place the animation began. So before Aetheon teleports VoteForShifu into one of the side rooms, he pulls off a finisher. In the side room he picks up a relic needed to clear a blinding debuff and fires off a shot of his Witherhoard, a grenade launcher that leaves behind a powerful pool of damaging blight.
He is then teleported back to the main room, but the Witherhoard’s blight pool kills the Gatekeeper that spawns in the side room, opening a portal and allowing VoteForShifu to quickly travel back and forth. He has to take out the Oracles in the side rooms quickly, or else he could succumb to the Lost in Time mechanic, which wipes the raid if no members are in the main area for a certain period of time.
So it’s a combination of the right equipment, skill, speed, precision, and enough luck to not get teleported to a spot too far away from the debuff clearing relic that makes the encounter work. Even with all of that going for him, it still took VoteForShifu many, many attempts to complete. Phil Savage over at PC Gamer crunched the numbers and estimates this feat took over 1,600 attempts. And as Savage points out, you can for sure feel every one of them in the voice of VoteForShifu as he finally achieves his goal in the video below.
Sometimes the hardest challenges a video game can offer are the ones we make ourselves. VoteForShifu took an already difficult raid, turned the difficulty up to 11, and after a whole lot of hard work, completely kicked its arse.
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