An Idiot Plays Vow of the Disciple

When it comes to video games, I judge myself quite harshly. I’m not particularly good at them, and I improve very slowly. However, in Destiny 2, somehow my ineptitude goes up to 11 and I an barely hanging on. Basically, I am really, amazingly bad at Destiny 2. And, somehow, I found myself doing the newest raid, Vow of the Disciple.

The main encounters were perfectly fine.

Starting with essentially a payload mission, we made our way inside one of the massive dark pyramids. This one belonged to Rhulk, the first disciple of the Witness. He left the door open for us to enter, thinking we’d be easy to kill or convert.

The upcoming puzzles all required learning the call-outs for a bunch of symbols. While Last Wish has you remembering snake, dragon and bird icons, Vow of the Disciple has more varied symbols, each one being unique. These symbols were also required for the entirety of the raid, so learning them is definitely a requirement. The first encounter went by very smoothly, and the encounter with the Caretaker also wasn’t too bad. We did have a little bit of trouble with the artifact puzzle, but that was mostly because we were all disorganized. Now that I know where all the relics are supposed to go and who does what, I can at least more easily remember the puzzle for next time.

Then there was parkour…

Parkour is one of the things I am notoriously bad at. Especially in Destiny 2. If you stick any sort of climbing or jumping puzzle in front of me, I get scared and start overthinking my every movement. However that overthinking just makes me fuck up even more.

When it comes to Vow of the Disciple though, things get a lot worse. Not because the parkour is particularly challenging, but because everything is so damn dark. Black on black, with just the odd faint gold line to lead the way. Yes, I know that the inside of a massive, dark pyramid is going to be dark, but leaping across hard-to-see chasms isn’t as fun as doing the raid itself.

I held the raid group back for about 20 minutes as I tried to complete that damn obstacle course. Sure, I managed it in the end, but I felt so embarrassed.

We still had more to do though, and we made our way towards Rhulk.

An actual boss fight with dodging and dashing

Of course there was a roadblock getting in our way. One final puzzle before we could even touch Rhulk. I don’t know what the team did, something about splitting a debuff into two buffs and depositing them somewhere. I didn’t really get it.

When we got to fight Rhulk himself? Things were amazing. The Disciple didn’t just hide away, he’d watch as you complete one more puzzle, then jumps off his high horse to fight us in person. The battle actually reminded me of Mithrix from Risk of Rain 2, especially as Rhulk was actively trying to kill all of us and charged around, slamming the ground with dark fire and filling the air with colossal beams of energy. But, finally, we could all throw everything we had at him. He even used our HUDs against us to insult us, just like Mithrix.

In one final explosion though, Rhulk died, his last words begging for forgiveness from his master, before melting into some sort of weird, metal tree. And that was it, it was all over.

Overall? A cool raid. I enjoyed bits of it. But bloody hell, I’m still not quite sure what I was supposed to be doing…