Destiny 2: How To Complete Every Root Of Nightmares Raid Challenge (2024)

This guide assumes you understand the core mechanics of the Root of Nightmares raid. If you've never cleared this raid before, check out our Root of Nightmares guide for a breakdown on all mechanics and encounters.

Illuminated Torment requires good communication with your fireteam above all else. Whoever slays a Tormentor must be buffed with "Field of Light" to complete this challenge. Damaging the Tormentor without a buff will not void the challenge attempt.

We recommend having your fireteam play the encounter mostly the same but with one key difference: don't kill the Tormentor. When the Tormentor reaches roughly 15% HP, everyone stops shooting and at least one person makes their way to your runner. Gain the Field of Light buff, then return to the Tormentor to land the killing blow.

If you're playing with an LFG team and are struggling with the timing, you can use a two runner strategy and assign the off-runner with the task of slaying the Tormentor. Whichever runner isn't currently finding/damaging a plate will be assigned to slay the Tormentor. The runners will alternate this role with each plate until the encounter ends.

Psionic Purge is an easy challenge to understand. When the floating Psions appear, you and another fireteam member will need to kill them at the same time. When both players are ready, melee the Psions simultaneously to spawn the Tormentor. Repeat this process for every pair of Psions until the encounter ends.

If you're attempting this through an LFG team and struggle with communication, force a specific player to run this challenge with you. When ready, call out your username and say you're ready. This helps your team correlate voices to names and greatly reduces confusion.

During the Scission encounter, runners will need to traverse the central chasm by using gravity lifts dotted throughout the arena. For this challenge, each gravity cannon must be activated by the opposite side. Damaging your own gravity cannon will void this challenge.

Using the two runner strategy is easiest. In essence, runners will shoot each other's gravity cruxes when ready to swap. When both runners are ready to swap, they will both shoot the opposite player's crux to swap sides. This distance is quite great, so you might want to bring a Scout Rifle, Pulse Rifle, or Machine Gun to easily activate it. We do not recommend attempting this challenge with a four runner strategy. Ensure that both runners are cleansing plates at a similar cadence to prevent any issues with buff timers.

Ascending floors also requires the opposite side to shoot your crux, so remember to do this throughout the entire encounter to prevent accidental failure.

Shields Up requires that no one kills any Redolence shielded targets until all nodes have been activated on your current floor. For example, Dark side will not kill any Dark Redolence enemies until both Light and Dark sides have their respective plates activated. Once all plates are active, you can grab your side's respective buff and kill all the shielded enemies.

If you want to be safe, only have the runners grab buffs to ensure no one assigned to add clear defeats a Redolence enemy by mistake. Repeat for each floor to complete the challenge.

During the third encounter, players are required to rotate planets from one end of the room to the other. Instead of grabbing the odd planet out, you're going to rotate two planets to start the DPS phase. The left side will require all Dark planets, and the right side will require all Light planets to start the DPS phase. This will require two planet rotations in total.

The encounter itself will the same but with two planet swaps instead of one. Runners will kill their Colossus, find the pair of planets that match color, then grab one of them. Call out this planet to your partner, swap sides, then activate the planet your partner called out. Repeat once more, then start the DPS phase. Activating the middle DPS plates is the same as normal, no changes there. Repeat as necessary until the encounter is complete.

On Master difficulty, rotating sides can be especially tricky with the high enemy density present here. We highly recommend that add clear players use Trinity Ghoul or a Machine Gun to deal with the adds. The arena needs to be completely clear of enemies to give your runners the best possible chance of making it across safely.

Runners will want some form of survivability to survive the Explicator's occassional barrage of attacks. Hunters can use Nightstalker's invisibility, Titans can rely on Sunspots on Sunbreaker, and Warlocks can use Healing Rifts or Solar's Restoration buff. Be sure you have 100 Resilience to maximize your chances of staying alive before the DPS phase begins. For DPS, we recommend Rocket Launchers or Machine Guns.If you need a good Machine Gun, you can use Thunderlord with its Catalyst, Grand Overture, or Retrofit Escapade with Fourth Time's the Charm and Target Lock.

The description of this challenge is somewhat vague and uses encounter terms that most players seldom reference. In essence, runners can't kill any Colossus enemies once they've moved a planet. This is because players gain the Planetary Insight buff from killing a Colossus, so killing a Colossus after swapping planets will cause you to gain Insight for a second time, failing the challenge. Completing Singular Orbit will require a different strategy than what most groups are used to.

Start the encounter as usual. When the Colossus units spawn, one runner from each side will kill both Colossi and call out the odd planet out on each plate. For example, left side would kill both Colossi enemies on left side and call out both Dark planets. All four runners will still grab their plate's respective planet and swap sides to dunk. You're just having one runner read two planets at a time.

For the central DPS plates, the runners that haven't killed any Colossi yet will kill each side's pair and call out the planets. You'll need three people to activate the plates, so one person on add clear must grab a planet and move it to the correct DPS plate. The runners will state which planet the add clear player needs and where to dunk it.

This whole challenge might seem confusing on paper, so let's give an example of how this challenge will play out:

As stated previously, runners are killing two Colossi before reading planets, and one member of add clear must help with activating the DPS plates. The rest of the encounter—grabbing planets, swapping sides, and damaging the Explicator—stays the same.

All Hands requires that each player must activate one Light and one Dark plate before the DPS phase begins. There are 12 plates to activate in total, so this means each player will need to activate two nodes, one on each side. Bear in mind that creating a Refuge plate does not count as activating a plate; it has no impact on this challenge.

We recommend splitting your fireteam in half. Each side will have three players. Assign a plate activation order to each player, with your team's Nezarec taunters going last. For example, one player will always get the first plate, the second player will always shoot the second plate, and the taunter will activate the third plate. After the first three plates are active on each side, create a Refuge plate to survive the wipe mechanic. Taunters will call out which Refuge buff is required.

Once Nezarec explodes, everyone will switch sides. Each group will then activate the last three plates, same as before. The only difference is that the final plate activation must be timed for both sides. If one side finishes too early, Nezarec will start the wipe mechanic and cause the challenge to fail.

The DPS phase behaves like normal, so the main change is the lead-up to DPS. Give each player a number that represents the plate they'll shoot, ensure taunters go last so they can get Nezarec's attention, and your team should have little issue getting this finished. If you're attempting this on Master difficulty, we highly recommend the first plate activators are assigned to add clear.Use Trinity Ghoul or Machine Guns to kill the adds as quickly as possible.

Synchronicity is much simpler than the weekly challenge. In essence, each side must activate their nodes within five seconds of one another. Once you've shot a node, the other side has five seconds to activate a node and vice versa.

Since the timer is quite generous, this challenge doesn't require much communication to complete. If both runners are activating nodes at a similar cadence, it's possible to finish this challenge with no communication at all. For less experienced groups of LFG fireteams, simply give a short countdown before shooting your node to give your partner a heads-up.