GUIDE: Warlord's Ruin

Warlord’s Ruin is seemingly a lot of players’ favorite. With beautiful scenery, some of the best Destiny 2 loot, and a whopping three bosses, there’s no question as to why the activity has garnered such high praise.

That said, dungeons can be challenging, especially for newer players who may not have as much experience with endgame activities. So, how does each encounter work, and how do you maximize loot through secret chests? In this guide, we cover all that and more. Read on.

Warlord’s Ruin Encounter Guides

1st Encounter: Rathil

After traversing a relatively linear pathway through the snowy cliffside, you and your fireteam will come across your first powerful foe: Rathil. For this encounter, swords such as The Lament and Bequest are great options for DPS. If you’d rather damage him from afar, rocket launchers like Dragon’s Breath are solid as well.

As with most raid and dungeon encounters, your first objective in this fight is to simply kill ads. After a bit, Rathil will summon a taken ritual totem and quickly teleport you and your team into separate cages. Slowly rising to the spikes positioned right above your head, the only way out is to shoot the three blighted eyes surrounding you. If you can’t spot them, be sure to look above and below your cage—or ask your teammates to shoot them for you.

Once you’re free, you’ll want to find the previously mentioned ritual totem that Rathil spawned. These totems—in addition to the blighted eyes you needed to shoot earlier—will appear in all three encounters, making understanding how they work of utmost importance. Luckily, their function is relatively simple. All you need to do is stand next to the totem until they transition from being corrupted in Taken energy to being wish-empowered.

Activate all totems you see; you’ll know this phase ends when the “Imminent Wish” buff on the side of your screen hits zero. Once this happens, it’s time for DPS. The length of your DPS phase depends on how many totems you activate, and you have infinite rotations to kill Rathil.

Imprisonment

Immediately upon slaying Rathil, players will spot an ascendant servitor before getting teleported into locked prison cells. The process of escaping and obtaining your loot is easy after you figure it out, but the clues to get there are relatively cryptic.

Two of the cells will have tally marks on the ground next to skeletons—one set will be orange, the other white. The values of these marks will change with each individual run, but they’ll always add up to six.

These six tally marks correspond to six rotating gears that can be shot from your cells—each player should easily be able to see two (one of these is circled in red in the screenshot above). Shooting them once will rotate them counterclockwise, while shooting them three times will rotate them clockwise (once to move them CCW, once to stop it, and once to move them CW).

The orange tally marks correspond to how many gears must rotate counterclockwise, while the white ones are how many should rotate clockwise. For instance, in the case of the screenshots featured in this section, you’d want one gear spinning counterclockwise and five spinning clockwise. After shooting all the gears in the correct directions, shoot the lever on the wall near the loot chest and the doors should open.

By the way, if you’re wondering what loot drops from each encounter, this Warlord’s Ruin loot table has you covered.

Encounter 2: Locus of Wailing Grief

Upon exploring the castle’s interior a bit more, players are confronted by the Locus of Wailing Grief.

Before beginning the encounter, your fireteam should take note of the torches located near the courtyard’s ledge. Finding these quickly will be extremely important later, so make sure you know their locations.

After starting the encounter, begin by killing the powerful Taken that spawn. Soon after, you’ll see blighted eyes appear around the area—destroy all of them to progress.

The next phase is similar to the first encounter: you’ll need to damage and kill two elite Chieftains, who spawn the taken totems that appeared earlier. We recommend waiting to kill these majors until they spawn one totem (that way you get two, since a second one spawns upon their death).

Also during this phase, freezing cold winds will begin to kill you. Stand in the torches we mentioned earlier to avoid this, although be aware that you’ll also want to capture the totems before Imminent Wish expires.

After the winds subside, Solar orbs will spawn in the center of the arena (the number of which corresponds to how many totems your fireteam successfully cleansed). After you deposit one in each of the four fire pits near the boss, DPS will begin.

Using rocket launchers and Leviathan’s Breath, have your entire fireteam stand in the same bonfire to damage the Locus. After the one you’re currently at burns out, you’ll need to move to the next one. Keep rotating until you finish DPS, then repeat the steps above for each phase until the Locus dies.

Encounter 3: Hefnd’s Vengeance

Feeling like a toned-down raid boss encounter, Hefnd’s Vengeance is an extremely unique yet challenging fight that builds on the previous two encounters.

To start the encounter, shoot the small blight on the far side of the lowest platform. Blights like this one will spawn periodically through the encounter to cause damage and throw you in the air—simply shoot them to make them disappear.

The vast majority of this encounter progresses like the Locus of Wailing Grief: kill ads, destroy blighted eyes, and kill the elite Chieftains that spawn. However, instead of biting winds hindering your progress of cleansing the totems, you’ll receive a debuff entitled Hex of Vengeful Corruption. To get rid of it, you’ll need to punch a Corrupted Hex-Drinker. However, be aware that if the enemy melees you back, you’ll receive the debuff again. Once the timer of the debuff expires, anything (enemy or player) that has it will die.

Once Imminent Wish expires, you’ll have a short time to DPS Hefnd’s Vengeance—the more totems you cleansed, the more time you’ll have to DPS. If you meet the threshold on its health bar, you’ll move up to the right and begin the process again. Repeat this until you reach the top of the arena, where the main DPS phase will start.

In this circular arena, each main island will allow you to damage Hefnd’s Vengeance for a short time. If you prevent it from spawning all ten blighted eyes, your DPS time will be extended (equipping Orpheus Rig on a Tether hunter is extremely potent here).

After one of the three phases inevitably concludes, move to another of the three islands to continue damaging the boss. Finishing damage phase and using up all three platforms will teleport you and the boss down to the bottom of the arena, ready to begin anew.

After Hefnd’s Vengeance is at a sliver of health, you’ll be teleported to a final stand arena with no additional mechanics—just continue damage until you defeat the servitor.

Warlord’s Ruin Secret Chest Locations

There are two secret chests in Warlord’s Ruin, but both are hidden among trapped chests that change every run. Here, we’ll cover how to get both.

Secret Chest #1

The first secret chest has six possible locations which span throughout the entirety of the dungeon’s length. Only one of the six will be real, while the others will have a blue ether aura that spawns Screeb if you open it. Keep in mind the real one will change run-by-run, so you’ll need to test each one for every run you do.

Chest Location #1

The first chest location is before the first encounter, on the cliffside you begin the dungeon on. Continue up the cliff until you find an outcove that has a fair amount of space to walk on; if you reached the rope bridge, you went too far. Inside this outcove is the first potential chest.

Chest Location #2

The second chest is in the maze of castle halls you encounter after releasing yourself from imprisonment. Continue through the sprawling corridors of traps until you come across a dimly lit staircase. Descend down it as normal, but then take a right at the first intersection. Follow this path, climb through the debris, and you’ll come across the second possible chest location.

Chest Location #3

Near the same area that location #2 was in, you’ll come across a long hallway that has a small open room to the right. Right inside here is the third chest location.

Chest Location #4

Chest location #4 is the final one before the Locus of Wailing Grief. After leaving the castle interior and facing a ton of Scorn enemies, you’ll come across a large castle wall you’ll need to scale. Instead of taking the pathway to the left as usual, enter the large door and you’ll find a secret chest to the right.

Chest Location #5

Chest location #5 is one you’ll probably stumble upon by accident. Once you exit the cave after the Locus of Wailing Grief, continue forward up the mountain toward the red flag (in the screenshots below, Skyknight is at the chest location). After scaling the entire thing, you’ll find location #5.

Chest Location #6

The final possible chest location is after the large blight room, where you’ll find a hollowed-out cylinder with large blights surrounding. Immediately upon entering this area, look down and to the left and you’ll see an open doorway. Make a left after entering, and there will be the sixth and final location.

Secret Chest #2

The second secret chest is right after the Locus of Wailing Grief encounter. In this room, you’ll see a slew of chests tempting you to open them, with only one being real. Just like the first secret chest, you’ll want to find the one that isn’t glowing blue. For example, in the screenshot attached, the correct one is circled in red.

This post was written by BlueberriesGG, your resource for Destiny 2 guides, including Lost Sectors today, Exotic Mission, and more.