Destiny’s Oryx raid challenge is the hardest one to date

All 16 detonations at once

The seemingly final raid challenge has cycled in for Destiny‘s King’s Fall. The first offering was Warpriest, last week was Golgoroth, and now, skipping Daughters entirely, it’s Oryx’s turn. I managed to down him three times today with the challenge intact, but it took some patience.

Simply put, 16 (or more) orbs of light need to detonate at once, which instantly brings Oryx down to 0% life. To do this, you’ll need to go through four Ogre phases, leaving four orbs for each corner. That way on the fourth run you can stand in the orb’s wake, blow all of them up, and meet in the middle for the last part of the fight.

For most players, this isn’t that much different than what they’ve already been doing if they haven’t been using the “No Knight” strategy, it’s just more tedious. There are no other qualifiers for this challenge — anyone can die for example — but if anything goes wrong on any of the runs, it can spell instant doom and a wipe. Sure, you can go an extra phase if a bomb is accidentally destroyed by a Knight (hence “more” than 12 orbs), but it just creates more room for error.

To sum up the tedium, a full average Oryx run, due to the inherent timers involved that can’t be bypassed, takes roughly 12 minutes. If at any point someone screws up, you’ll have to start all over. In our runs, Ogres teleported instantly after spawning to the middle of the room no less than four times in different instances, causing an untimely end to our attempt. The less common glitch of a party member dying instantly after the Shade is killed after the third Ogre phase also was a kick in the teeth, because again, this challenge has very little wiggle room.

In the end though, it’s not nearly as taxing as proper raids in real MMOs, and after a decent amount of practice most groups should be able to clear it within a day. Your reward is a 320 helmet or primary weapon, an artifact, an emblem, and the King’s Fall ship. Good luck! Someone in my group hit 320 today, but he also runs three Warlocks.