Just weeks after release, the final boss of Destiny 2's new Root of Nightmares raid has been killed by a single Guardian – the same mad lad who recently soloed the Vault of Glass Gatekeepers challenge thought to be impossible.
TheSnazzzyRock posted their world-first kill (above) on March 29, and you can tell a lot of effort went into it from the absolute war cry he lets loose when ol' Nezarec finally goes down. This kill took quite a bit of practice, some theorycrafting from a veritable strike team of friends, and intense hot-swapping enabled by the loadout system introduced with Lightfall. The fight is less intense than most raid bosses, but it was still designed with six people in mind, so there's a lot to juggle and little room for error. The Merciless-aided DPS strategy for Nezarec's final stand is especially impressive – a real Rube Goldberg machine of buffs that would surely make one of my clanmates proud.
I reached out to chat through their solo kill and their plans for future runs. Spoilers: they want to solo flawless the entire raid.
"This challenge compared to my previous solos was honestly pretty enjoyable," Snazzy explains. "It did take a lot more effort put in because I had started from pretty much nothing with the encounter. I had friends helping along the way with building strats."
The sheer variety of gear used in the fight made me wonder if it would be possible if we didn't have loadouts. "It probably would still be possible just way more annoying and less set up for each loadout," Snazzy reckons. "I'd assume you can just do a couple armor swaps. Would just take a bit to get used to being so fast."
Much of the discussion around Root of Nightmares has focused on how easy and simple the raid is compared to the likes of Vow of the Disciple. After all, it was cleared in less than three hours, and more people finished it during its Contest Mode launch window than any previous raid, and by a huge margin. Having soloed the encounter that still occasionally trips up my raid team, Snazzy generally agrees that "the difficulty of the raid really isn't that hard to be completely honest."
"The planet encounter with the Explicator boss is the only encounter that I'd say stands out from the others," they add. "But nothing too crazy. I'd say this raid is only really a bit of a challenge when doing it solo/duo/trio."
Of course, most Destiny 2 players don't even raid, and an incredibly small percentage of players attempt low-man raids (assuming you don't count struggle bus five-man runs that only happen when someone on your team drops out at the last minute). But that hasn't stopped Snazzy before, and they aren't slowing down now.
"I am actually currently working on the third encounter solo, then after I complete that my goal is to work on and complete the entire raid solo flawless," they say. Godspeed, Guardian.
It won't affect raids, but Bungie just nerfed almost all of Destiny 2 to make it less bullet spongy.
