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For reasons that seemingly nobody can pinpoint, a Destiny 2 fireteam assembled almost entirely from players who have no idea what they're doing spent nearly 85 hours bashing their heads against the wall of the MMO's Salvation's Edge raid on Master difficulty.
The captain of this fireteam was MrRoflWaffles, a streamer and content creator with over 2 million YouTube subscribers. On July 6, he announced his quest and the (first) people joining him on this dive into the abyss.
"Today we are doing blind Master Salvation's Edge," he pledged, light in his eyes and vigor in his voice. "It's five blind players and one knower, basically, and the knower is not allowed to do anything – if we get to any kind of DPS phase in a boss, the knower has to just sit next to us and cross their arms. We also are using no Artifact perks other than the left column, so we can get rid of Champs, but all the other stuff here is off."
The rules are a little messier and more varied than that, but you get the gist. Almost everyone in this team has no clue what they're doing, the one person that does can't spoil the whole thing, and they're all underpowered. Some of the unaware folks – who rotated as the challenge continued, with many people understandably taking breaks – had barely played Destiny 2 at all before this raid challenge.
Salvation's Edge is generally regarded as one of the tougher raids in Destiny history, with some reasonably arguing that it is the toughest due to the volume of mechanics, some unforgiving encounters, and high potential to wipe the team at almost any moment.
RoflWaffles et al not only chose to take on this challenge with virtually no prior knowledge, they opted for the Master difficulty version of the raid. This significantly increases combat difficulty and DPS demands, so executing the correct strategies is even harder. By extension, this means that figuring things out and testing theories is much more challenging as well. You might spend hours chasing the wrong idea because you haven't been able to fully test it yet.
I've been raiding regularly in Destiny for over 10 years, and even my clan and I have to really dig in our heels to get Master clears after quite some practice – and sometimes we won't even bother at all. It is brutal.
Basically, RoflWaffles and the crew sized up the prospect of fighting a lion barehanded and decided, actually, make it two lions. In case the 84-hour grind didn't give it away, this went about as you'd expect. The run stands as a quintessential grab-bag of classic raiding tropes: correct ideas being ignored by the group, easy misunderstandings leading to hours of mistakes, simple mechanics being overthought to the Nth degree, and a spiral of exhaustion leading to worse and worse play.
Yet despite it all, they did it. I'm not calling these raiders bad at the game or at puzzles. There are some legendary throws in here, but the run is a commendable effort. Salvation's Edge is just really, really obtuse and demanding.
This raid is home to a few notorious walls – progress-blockers that derailed the initial Contest Mode world-first race, and have added hours to countless raid attempts since. The first encounter took this team just over seven hours, and surprisingly, the second encounter was about the same. They found a rhythm, dinners scarfed down and Microsoft Paint diagrams flying, and cleared the third encounter around 27 hours in.
Then they got to Verity.
Verity is a puzzle encounter so temperamental that it practically single-handedly killed Salvation's Edge as an LFG-viable encounter. Speaking as the go-to Verity solver for my group, you basically have to share sequences of shapes between two teams of three and then manipulate those shapes to match a key code. To put it mildly, it was a whopper of a blocker for RoflWaffles. To put it less mildly, each time I saw an update post on this team still being at Verity, I physically winced.
"Hi guys, MrRoflWaffles here," our leader says at the start of a separate stream VOD, with significantly less light in his eyes and vigor in his voice. "We're 51 hours in." The wall of Verity stood strong until the 58-hour mark, when a miracle clutch finally got the team out.
From there, it was onto the Witness himself, who tacked on another 25 hours or so. I have to admit, it's kind of gratifying to see this team struggle with the same stuff we did when The Final Shape first launched and this raid was fresh. Balancing enemy clear with mechanics, dodging The Witness' attacks, rationing ammo, budgeting revive tokens. It's classic Destiny 2 raiding, just dialed up through absurd self-imposed challenges.
Finally, the Witness fell. "We finally did it. Master Salvation's Edge is DONE," RoflWaffles declared. "It took so long that all emotions left my body, all thoughts, all agency, all sentience, I am a husk, a shell, totally empty. But we did it."
There were a lot of mistakes, misunderstandings, and team changes along the way, but the accomplishment remains. "I tried so hard to make this blind raid event as fun as I possibly could and while I don't think it was perfect by any means (and losing a ton of our blind players by the end meant that the dynamic was way different) I still hope that on the whole it was a really fun watch for you all," RoflWaffles concludes.
