Destiny How to Relic in Vault of Glass Guide

Destiny How to Relic in Vault of Glass Guide by Sangheilioz

With the upcoming hotfix that will make Atheon teleports random, rather than sending the three farthest players, I figured it would be a good idea to put together a guide for those who may not have much relic handling experience.

Controls

While holding the relic, you cannot use grenades, guns, or your normal super ability. Instead, the controls change as follows, with the normal button function in bold.

Fire Weapon: a short-range shield bash that usually targets a nearby enemy. This sometimes glitches and misses the target, but will still get you near enough for a normal melee. If you are in the air when using this, you will slam the relic into the ground and do significant damage in an area around you. Often staggers enemies it doesn’t outright kill, and can be invaluable against minotaurs/praetorians.

Melee: A quick melee attack. Works like your normal melee, but it’s a bit stronger. Meleeing in the air, as long as there isn’t a target in front of you for it to auto-target, will throw you forward with the swing. If you can melee fast enough, you can cover distances rather quickly through the air this way.

Grenade: Cleanse ability. Covered more thoroughly in the next section.

Super: Bolt of Light. Covered more thoroughly in the next section.

Abilities

While holding the Relic, your normal abilities get replaced.

Grenade: This is now a Cleanse. You must hold this button long enough for a bubble to form, and the bubble will stay up for as long as you have grenade energy left, or until you let go of the button. While the bubble is active, it blocks all incomingdamage, but your team can shoot out of it. You will also remove debuffs off yourself and teammates within the bubble, including being marked for negation by the oracles in the Templar fight, or marked by the void at the Gatekeepers/Atheon.

Super: When your super is charged, you can use it to fire a massive bolt of light that will travel straight forward to where you’re aiming at the time. This bolt will break the Templar’s shield, or do massive damage to any other target.

Tips

• Contrary to popular belief, any class can effectively use the relic. I would recommend maxing out your toughness with your subclass perks for the best survivability, and if you have alternative gear then discipline (for cleanse) is going to be your best stat to stack, followed by intellect. A lot of your super energy will come from killing adds though, so definitely prioritize discipline over intellect!
• You can still use your upgraded jump abilities with the relic, and if you are looking downward, you can aim the ground-pound ability to an extent.
• When using the relic, you want to be conservative with your cleansing. You don’t want to hold the cleanse bubble up until it drains and then not have it charged when you need it. Hold it for a couple seconds, just long enough to make sure it cleanses the people you’re standing next to, then release the button.
• During the Templar fight, warn your fireteam before breaking the Templar’s shield, and make sure you’re on the ground when it hits. If you or anyone else gets a detainment shield around them while in the air, they will fall out of it and die rather quickly.
• Also during the Templar fight, you only need to cleanse your fireteam before the Ritual of Negation is completed. You can tell when this is because it will pop up in yellow in the center of the screen, and you can hear the Templar starting to cast it with a loud “whirring” sound.
• If you are detained in a bubble, jump and then immediately “ground pound” with the fire weapon button. This will usually break the detainment shield in one hit, though I found that on Normal the larger detainment bubbles forced me to shield bash first to get close to the edge of it.
• During the Times’ Vengeance buff, you can hold up the bubble indefinitely. Some strategies call for the relic holder to do this while everyone else stands inside the bubble and unloads on Atheon. If you are doing this then you need to stand absolutely still while it’s up, and you want to be covering any nearby surfaces that his shots can impact for splash damage. It’s a good idea to have defender Titans that can drop a bubble when there’s a few seconds left on the buff so that everyone has cover when the Cleanse bubble goes down.
• If you get teleported during the Atheon fight and pick up the relic, you want to move forward and to the right on the stairs. There will be a pillar (or two) that you can run behind as you descend the stairs that give you cover from the adds while you get close enough to ground-pound and shield-bash them. Your teammates should be throwing grenades or firing rockets to help weaken the adds before the first oracle spawns, then it’s your job to finish them off quickly before getting back to your teammates to cleanse them. (and yourself) Some groups prefer not to have the oracle killers fire at the hobgoblins in the Past portal as it makes them go immune and might mess up the Relic carrier, but it really comes down to the Relic carrier’s preference.

If you have any other relic-wielding tips, feel free to drop them in the comments and I’ll add the good ones to the OP! (with credit, of course)