Salvation’s Edge challenges are mandatory if you want to get the Ignited Light Triumph, which you need to get the new raid title in Destiny 2: The Final Shape, Iconoclast.
These challenges add an optional wrinkle to each encounter that you can complete for bonus loot. Challenges rotate per encounter each week, and only one is active at a time. This changes when a newer raid arrives and it enters the weekly raid rotation, where all challenges become available.
In this Destiny 2 guide, we’ll walk you through how to complete each of the five raid encounter challenges in Salvation’s Edge.
Note: Due to the complex nature of these challenges, this guide assumes a general familiarity and understanding of the basic mechanics of Salvation’s Edge and its five encounters. If you’re unsure how an encounter works, check out our complete Salvation’s Edge walkthrough before diving into the challenges.
How to complete Substratum challenge ‘Scenic Route’
The Scenic Route challenge is for the first encounter in Salvation’s Edge, Substratum.
To spawn the Tormentor and progress the encounter, you first need to kill an Overload Minotaur. Two Overload Minotaurs spawn each phase, one on each team’s side of the map.
However, the spawns aren’t consistent across teams. One team will always encounter their Overload Minotaur in the third room they reach, while the other team will always encounter their Overload Minotaur in their fourth room. To complete the challenge, you must only ever kill the Overload Minotaur that spawns in the fourth room, meaning the team that encounters their Overload first (in room three) can’t kill theirs.
You can tell which team will have the Overload Minotaur in room four based on which team has Vex Hobgoblins in their first room. If you see those Hobgoblins, that means you’ll need to push forward until you find an Overload Minotaur to kill. If not, be careful not to kill your Overload when you reach it.
The only real strategy change here is mindfulness. Have a player on each side that’s responsible for both counting rooms and checking for Hobgoblins. The biggest failure condition here is the wrong team accidentally killing their Overload because they aren’t paying attention. You do, however, need to make sure you continue to go fast in this encounter, as this challenge will add anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to your phases.
How to complete Dissipation challenge ‘At Capacity’
The At Capacity challenge is for the second encounter in Salvation’s Edge, Dissipation.
To complete At Capacity, you can only ever dunk your Resonance into the bank if you have x3 Resonance. If you have anything less than that, the challenge will fail if you interact with the bank.
When gathering Resonance on each side, have the player activating the Conduit only grab the one Resonance they need, and have the bouncing player grab three of any kind of Resonance. Then, activate the Conduit and only have the bouncing players dunk.
This strategy means you’ll only net nine Resonance per phase, which will leave you about 15 seconds off of a full time refund. That means this method does require you to go fast in each phase, but it’s much simpler than alternative methods that have the Conduit players running to other sides to grab bonus Resonance (which itself wastes time). We recommend finding ways to speed up — like memorizing enemy spawns — rather than going out of your way to dunk bonus resonance.
How to complete Repository challenge ‘Balanced Diet’
The Balanced Diet challenge is for the third encounter in Salvation’s Edge, Repository.
The requirement for this challenge is that you can never pick up the same type of Resonance twice in a row.
To do this, find out what shape you need for your Conduit and work backwards. So if you’re triangle, grab square and circle first, then get the triangle you need to dunk. It involves quite a bit more running than the normal method of just grabbing your shape, but it’s otherwise difficult to fail if you’re focusing on it.
The one wrinkle here is that the challenge persists from room to room. So if you need the triangle symbol to dunk like in the example above, you can’t grab triangle next even after you move to the next room. If you’re struggling to remember your last symbol, try writing it down in the chat or a nearby notepad.
How to complete Verity challenge ‘Varied Geometry’
The Varied Geometry challenge is for the fourth encounter in Salvation’s Edge, Verity.
This is by far the most complex challenge in Salvation’s Edge, and requires you to beat Verity using all six 3D shapes to escape before your team repeats any shapes. That means the first phase and the third phase are normal, but you’ll need to make some major adjustments in phase 2.
In order for all of your inside players to escape with a different 3D shape than you used in the first phase, you’ll need everyone to grab identical shapes. So instead of grabbing a circle and a square, the left player will grab two circles, and so on. The best way to do this is to have the inside players make the call that they see inside — CST (circle, square, triangle), for example — and then shift it one to the right. So it would be: CST to TCS.
Once you’ve figured out the call, you can proceed. The dissector player will need to make the outside shapes match the new, shifted call. So in the example above, left would be double triangle, middle would be double circle, and right would be double square. Just follow the normal dissection protocol to swap the correct shapes into these locations. When you’re done, you need to have all three 3D shapes in their proper location, which is based off of the shifted call — triangle (pyramid), circle (sphere), and square (cube) in the example above.
Inside players have a bit more of a complex task here, but there is a simple way to make it happen. Trade all of the shapes around until you possess both of the shapes your statue started with (if you’re the square player, become lord of squares, like normal). Then pass the squares out to the other players. Once everyone is done here, you’ll then need to make one final trade in order to get two of the same shape.
If you started as the square player in the example above — the middle player — here is what you’d do:
- Trade until you become lord of squares, getting rid of all your non-squares.
- Distribute squares to circle and triangle.
- Wait until you receive a circle from the circle player and a triangle from the triangle player.
- Do not pick up your shapes to create a cone like you normally would.
- Look at the new call and see that your new position — once shifted — is circle.
- Trade your triangle away to the left player and wait to get a second circle from the right player.
- Once all the circles are in your possession and the dissection is complete, walk out of the glass holding circle/circle (sphere).
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If you want a visual explanation that uses a slightly different strategy than the one described above, I recommend checking out Datto’s explanation video, which includes gameplay footage.
Keep in mind that everything else in the encounter is normal outside of the second phase, so once you have this new method down, you just need to remember to swap between them.
How to complete ‘The Witness’ challenge Coordinated Efforts
The Coordinated Efforts challenge is for the fifth and final encounter in Salvation’s Edge, The Witness.
To complete this challenge, you need to break all six of The Witness’ seals (the buttons on its jacket) within a few seconds of each other. This requires all six players to have Glyphbreaker at once.
The best strategy here is to break into two groups of three as normal. But instead of three runners and three enemy slayers, you swap roles once the first three hands have been popped. The only thing to keep in mind here is that the first players to get Glyphbreaker need to keep an eye on their Resonance timers, as you’ll die if they expire. To get around this, have your most experienced Glyphbreakers go first and have them keep their Resonance under x3. If their timer is getting close to zero, they just need to get another stack to refresh it.
Once everyone has Glyphbreaker, head to the middle, do a countdown, and pop all six buttons on The Witness simultaneously — it’s best to assign everyone a button before shooting. Note that you need to simultaneously break the seals on every phase, not just the first one.
Kill The Witness without messing this up to complete the challenge.
As you complete each challenge, you’ll unlock an individual Triumph on the Iconoclast title seal. You’ll then need to compete every encounter challenge on the Master difficult to unlock the Ignited Light Triumph.
