Destiny Crota’s End Guide
Destiny Crota’s End Guide by Sangheilioz
Entrance: Go Jump Off A Bridge
Description
When you start the raid, you spawn in above the Hellmouth. You need to stand on the stone circle near the edge while a bridge is formed. Once it is fully formed you run across the bridge to the center of the Hellmouth, then drop through the hole in the middle of the platform.
Strategy
Stand in place then run across the bridge and jump in a hole.
Part 1: Are You Afraid Of The Dark?
Description
After falling for a ridiculously long time, you’ll land on a circular platform lit by torch-crystals. The rest of the (rather large) room is dark, and you can see a white lantern post a ways away. You might also notice a ton of skeletons and scattered bones around. These are the remains of hunters that didn’t manage to jump the Hellmouth.
While you are in this area, you will have a debuff called “Weight of Darkness” or something like that. That debuff will stack while you are away from a light source, up to 10 times. The debuff will prevent you from double-jumping, and at 10 stacks it stops your ability to sprint. When you are standing near a light source, the debuff will slowly fade.
Loot Chest
Before you attempt to traverse this cavern, you want to get the first chest of the raid. If you’re looking towards the first lantern, turn 90 degrees to the left and follow the path. At the end of the path, turn right, and angle towards the wall. There will be a doorway that leads to a little alcove which is one of the places the chest can spawn. If there’s an orange light above the door, then the chest is in that alcove. The chest moves to a new location every time your team wipes. The easiest way to get this chest is to repeatedly wipe until it is in this alcove. Once you’ve gotten your Radiant materials, and possibly more if you’re a lucky bastard, head back to the starting platform and let your debuff dissipate.
Strategy
The idea here is that you will run to the lanterns in order, pausing at each of them to clear your debuff. The twist is, as soon as one player gets close enough to a lantern it will start to charge up. After a short time it reaches full charge and explodes, doing massive damage and killing whatever is nearby. There are approximately 16 lanterns that you will need to hop between to reach the end of the maze.
You and your team will want to stick together and run as fast as you can to the next lantern. Stay until your debuff is down to at MOST 2-3 stacks. It’s a good idea to have a designated team leader that will call out when you’re running to the next lamp, and which direction it is in. While you’re getting your debuff cleared, you need to kill the enemies swarming and chasing you. Occasionally there will also be a knight or few, and you’ll want to kill these quickly as they can be pretty brutal.
At the end of the lantern path is a chasm with a round pressure plate on the ground. This is where things get interesting. Your team needs to hold and stand on this plate long enough to build a bridge across the chasm. Once the bridge is built you don’t need to worry about it disappearing. However, while you’re attempting to hold the platform, there will be tons of thralls, knights, and even some ogres that spawn and attack you. Hold them off long enough then get everyone across the bridge. Sometimes there will be an ogre on the far side as well, just use heavy ammo to burn him down quickly. It helps to have a Defender Titan with Weapons of Light drop his bubble behind the platform, between it and the bridge, as you will be able to step back for the buff then back onto the pressure plate.
Once you’ve made it across the chasm, keep running forward as the enemies will still be pursuing you. If at least one of you makes it all the way to the end where your screen goes white (just keep running forward!) you should get a checkpoint, some loot, and arrive at Phase 2.
Part 2: More Bridges…
Description
Congratulations, and welcome to the hardest non-boss part of the raid! You will spawn at the top of some stairs that lead down to a large platform. On this platform is a pressure plate in the center, and two “Annihilation Totems” that look like Shrieker Tadpoles, one on either side. We’ll call this side of the room “Home.” There’s another large chasm that separates the Home platform from another platform we’ll call “away.” The away platform also has a pressure plate and two Annihilator Totems, and is significantly higher than the home platform.
Strategy
The mechanics of this room are fairly simple. You have to build a bridge by standing on the center pressure plate. However, any time somebody is on a bridge plate, you need to have someone standing under each of the two totems on that side of the room. You have to stay on the bridge plate to keep the bridge up once it is built, unlike previous parts of the raid where the bridges stayed once they were built. Obviously, the goal is to get everyone across to the “Away” platform.
Here’s where it gets complicated.
The only way you can cross the bridge, once it is formed, is while wielding a Blade of Crota. You can get these by killing the Swordbearer knight that spawns on the Home side. This sword is just like the ones you can get in the Cosmodrome, and will disappear after a short time, so you have to move quickly to cross the bridge once you have the sword. When you kill a Swordbearer, take the sword, and start moving across the bridge, a Gatekeeper knight spawns on the Away side. The Gatekeepers are bluish in color and can only be harmed by the swords.
You can only send one person across the bridge at a time because of the sword thing, so the strategy for this part is pretty specific and will be difficult to pull off. Also, every time you successfully get somebody across the chasm to the away platform, it will start spawning more adds on the away platform and less of them on the home platform.
The strategy has a few parts to it, so bear with me. First, you want to build the bridge and hold the totems on the home side. Your goal will be to keep the bridge and totems covered until you have three people across the chasm. At this point, the home team will retreat back up the stairs where they can easily pick off the adds and Swordbearers. The away team will now take up position on the two totems, and will build and hold open the bridge when the Swordbearers spawn. The home team wants to kill the Swordbearer and grab the sword about the time that the bridge is fully built. Repeat this strategy until your final member makes it across the bridge, then you will need to clear out all the adds as well as the ogres/Witches that will spawn in.
There’s a few things to note about the away platform. First off, you don’t need to kill the Gatekeepers. If you’re good with the sword and can pull it off, it will help, but it’s not necessary. If you’re standing under the totems, the Gatekeepers will almost never attack you, even if they briefly walk up close. However, because you can only hurt the Gatekeepers with the sword, once the sword is gone you don’t really have a way to finish them off and will have to just deal with them hanging around. This is why you won’t be holding open the bridge indefinitely for the home team.
Muskrat01 gave a great tip for dealing with the Gatekeepers. 2 normal attacks(melee) followed by a heavy(trigger) attack, stuns the gatekeeper for a short time. You can use this to chain attacks and kill everyone reliably. You can also “cheese” them off the edge of the platform with AoE grenades, or by luring them around the short pillars on either side of the bridge.
To successfully build/hold the bridge, you will have to dodge any Gatekeepers that are still alive. When my group did it, we employed what I like to call the “Hamster Wheel” technique. Essentially, we had a titan drop a bubble with Blessing of Light on about half of the platform. That titan then sprinted in a circle around the outer edge of the plate, passing through the bubble repeatedly. This allowed him to dodge most of the Swordbearers’ attacks, and with the added shield allowed him to tank an occasional hit. The hamster won’t be firing at all, just running in a circle. The key to this was having their super energy up, so we alternated between two defender Titans.
No matter what strategy you use, the players who are holding the totems down need to be keeping the adds under control. Killing all of the thralls and other enemies will significantly help the player(s) holding the bridge plate as they won’t be getting shot or mauled while focusing on dodging the Gatekeepers. Once you have your team across the bridge and kill the ogres and Witches, you will trigger a checkpoint and get your loot.
Part 3: The Gauntlet
Description
At this point, it’s just a short, good old-fashioned crawl through a long hallway, and at the end of that hallway there’s a large hole you drop down to get to the next phase.
Loot Chest
At the end of the hallway, behind a door on the other side of the hole you drop down, is another loot chest. However, this chest is on a timer, and once the door is closed you cannot open it except from the inside. If your goal is to get this chest, you want to have one person dedicated to running for it. A cloaked hunter with a build focused on agility and/or a weapon that gives agility/sliding/whatever bonuses would be ideal. As long as one person makes it, they can hold the door for everybody else.
Strategy
There’s not much in the way of strategy here. Just push forward and kill all of the adds. There will be a few Shriekers overhead that you’ll be taking out, so give yourself plenty of room to avoid the death blasts from them. Other than that, most of what you’ll face is a constant stream of Thralls rushing from the end of the hallway. If you have a Bad Juju, this is what it was made for, as you’ll need to be putting out near-constant damage (especially headshots) as your group marches towards the end. Once you reach the end of the hallway, the thralls stop spawning and you can continue down the giant hole in the floor.
Part 4: A Concert To Die For
Description
This part is somewhat complicated to explain, but fairly easy to do once you understand what’s going on. Essentially, you need to complete four steps.
- Get to the high ground
- Lure and kill the Witches
- Kill the Shriekers
- Kill the miniboss Witch.
The catch is, you only get like 5 minutes to do it. (Reports vary as to how long it gives you, or how that timer gets triggered, but suffice it to say that you don’t want to be lollygagging.) My group managed to do it on our first or second real try once we understood the mechanics and came up with a plan.
Strategy
First, you need to split into two groups of three. It’s recommended that you have a Titan in each group with Weapons of Light bubbles ready. To start, both groups will run straight forward and past the two knights. At this point, group A goes left and group B goes right. You will run to some stairs that lead up, then run up those stairs. At the top of the stairs, follow the platform around as it goes over the space you just ran through, then jump up into the elevated rooms with the columns towards the outside of the arena.
Everything is going to be the same for both teams, except for which side they are on. At the top of the stairs you ran up, there was a doorway. Inside that door will be a witch, and you will need someone to poke their heads in, get the witch’s attention, and lure it back outside. Once the witch is outside, you want to burn her down as well as any adds that have accumulated. Icebreakers are very effective, as are Gjallarhorns and Vision of Confluence. I would save heavy ammo at this point.
Once the witches are dead, you need to have one team take out the Shrieker farther back in the room on their side. A well-placed rocket or two should do the trick. When the Shrieker is down, that team will then join the other team on their side. While the first team was taking out the Shrieker, the other team was clearing adds in the room from the doorway. When the full team is assembled, take out the second Shrieker, and run outside to aboid the death blasts.
Once the second Shrieker is down, the forcefield around the named Witch (can’t remember the name, sorry) will go down. You need to take this Witch down as fast as you can as you won’t have much time left, then clear out adds inside those rooms.
Part 5: Crota’s End
Description
Prepare yourself for the toughest boss fight in the game. Throughout the fight, you will have a debuff called the Presence of Crota. This debuff disables your normal health regeneration, but there’s an item called the Chalice of Light that you can take that negates it. You don’t “equip” the chalice like the sword, but only one person can have it on at a time and you can take it from your teammate at any time you are near them.
Strategy
You’ll start off in the room with the crystal, penned in by force fields. Everyone needs to stand close to the crystal, and your screen will glow green. After a moment, Crota is summoned outside in the area you were before. At this point, you want to move to the back of the room, and prepare to fight off the hordes on either side. Once you’ve killed all of the adds in the room, you want to pick a place to keep the team together. Send one person to pick up the Chalice and have them meet the rest of the team at that location. My team chose to return to the room we initially ran out of. From here, you need to kill adds until a Swordbearer comes down. Take out the Swordbearer, and somebody with the Chalice of Light will take the sword and start running towards Crota.
At this point, everyone else needs to burn down Crota’s shield. Once his shield is depleted, he will kneel and the person with the sword will be able to hurt him. If you time it right, they can get three good hits in on him before he stands again. You do NOT want to take a hit from him, as it will insta-kill you. If you’re REALLY quick, you can sometimes drop his shield and get another round of hits in before the sword disappears, but that’s really risky and I wouldn’t recommend it. Once the sword disappears, the player who was using it regroups with the team and the chalice is passed around to those who need a health regen.
Every couple of rounds, two ogres will spawn and you will need to take them out. Crota also has an ability called the Oversoul. When he uses this ability, the giant eye-like-thing in the sky will expand and cover pretty much the whole sky. The team needs to pour fire into this to stop it before it wipes the whole group. It’s possible to stop it with heavy firepower, but you don’t get long. He only uses this ability when somebody dies, or when he’s enraged.
After several rounds of sword-jockeying, Crota will fall and you’ll get your loot. Congratulations!
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