Destiny 2: Vow Of The Disciple Sets A Standard Future Raids Must Beat
With the recent Vow of the Disciple raid, Destiny 2 has once again raised the bar on just how good the pinnacle of its endgame content can be. With its blend of environmental storytelling, challenging encounters, and the game's most interesting raid boss to date, Bungie created the most memorable raid since Last Wish from Destiny's Foresaken expansion. While other raids have excelled in some areas and lacked in others, Vow of the Disciple offers a rare complete package.
Released March 5, 2022, a week and a half after the launch of the expansion The Witch Queen, Vow of the Disciple has players traversing through a pyramid ship of the Black Fleet for their first face-to-face encounter with an enemy closely tied to the Darkness. The raid's final boss is Rhulk, Disciple of the Witness. Rhulk, according to game lore, is actually the first Disciple of the Witness, the character who became the series' first physical representation of the Darkness at the end of Destiny 2's Witch Queen campaign.
The raid includes four main encounters: Acquisition, Collection, Exhibition, and Rhulk. Like Last Wish, the core mechanics in each Destiny 2 raid encounter include a series of symbols that players must eventually memorize if they wish to complete the raid. After the world's first team completed Vow after around seven hours, a new mission called Preservation was unlocked for all players. In this mission, players must clear out Scorn enemies in the area of the Acquisition encounter, and after the mission, players are free to explore the area and scan pedestals to access messages left behind by Rhulk. With this, Bungie provides the most background for a raid boss since Oryx from King's Fall.
The most important aspect of what makes a good raid is the encounters, and Vow's present an enjoyable challenge. As mentioned before, the raid features more than 20 symbols for players to commit to memory. Thankfully, Bungie released an official list of names for each symbol to make it much easier after a handful of attempts. Those symbols are arguably put to use the best during Destiny 2's Exhibition encounter, which is sort of a trip down memory lane as it involves relics from previous raids. Using the Aegis Shield from Vault of Glass, Taken artifact from Last Wish, and a Resonant Shard - which fires a laser, like the prisms from Last Wish and Leviathan - players have to navigate a series of rooms using the relics for different purposes. The catch is that after each room, the relics must be dropped and then picked up by a new set of players, meaning no one can just sit back and clear out enemies and everyone must have a role. It's an encounter that's very involved, fast, and chaotic, and it still gives teams a hard time even after the first day.
The storytelling in Vow of the Disciple and Preservation is also some of the strongest Bungie has offered from a raid experience across Destiny and Destiny 2. While navigating the Sunken Pyramid, players see rooms filled with worm larvae, murals predicting the defeat of The Traveler, and Xita, the mother of Destiny 2's Worm Gods that corrupted the Hive. It gives players a glimpse of Rhulk's duties within the ship, and Preservation allows Rhulk to elaborate further with his messages. With each message, a page from the new lore book Shattered Suns is also unlocked. The pages are transcribed conversations between Rhulk and the Witness, and the two discuss Rhulk's early days on his homeworld Lubrae and how he became a Disciple. Aside from Oryx, no other raid boss has been given this level of detail.
It's almost a guarantee that Destiny 2 will have at least two more raids with the releases of Lightfall and The Final Shape. The arrival of the Darkness has been an anticipated event in Destiny since its 2014 release, and Bungie made sure it lived up to the hype. With Destiny 2's Vow of the Disciple raid being such a home run, the anticipation for the final conflict with the Darkness has only amplified.