August 12th, 2024. An Ode to Deep Stone Crypt.

We're going in deep.

I didn't know what to write about so I decided to make a small little essay about Deep Stone Crypt, a raid from Destiny 2: Beyond Light. The raid is not the best raid in the game, nor is it the hardest, or the newest. It's just a very memorable activity in my mind, and so I shall share it.

Deep Stone Crypt released on November 21st, 2020, right after the Beyond Light expansion for Destiny 2. Beyond Light was the first expansion I had been there for, and man, I was not impressed at the time. My friends were absolute fiends for Destiny 2, and I joined them for a bunch of raids during Season of Arrivals, right before Beyond Light. I had done quite a bit, but I was frustrated with how easy the game generally was(enemies did not hit hard, and died fast), and how bad the story was. Even after completing the Red War and Forsaken campaigns, I thought that Destiny could do better, especially since these campaigns came after Bungie's Halo series.

But as I sat there in the Discord call, listening to my friends enjoying the campaign, I gave in to FOMO and bought the expansion.

And again, I was not impressed. The campaign was too easy, I didn't care about the enemies I was defeating. The game felt underachieving. As a new player, I actually didn't mind a lot of the controversial changes that Bungie made with the expansion. Bungie had just Sunset both weapons and expansion, with Red War, Curse of Osiris, and Warmind all disappearing, and most of the weapons that players used being unable to be leveled up. My vault was pretty empty, and so I didn't lose much. So I was immune to a lot of the really bad stuff that caused the community to riot, but I still wanted more out of this expansion.

And my, did I find it. The next weekend, Deep Stone Crypt released. My first contest raid. For 24 hours, the raid was in "Contest Mode", where everything was difficult, and unable to be overleveled. I was in a group of mostly randoms, friends of friends, and we had never played together.

Deep Stone was exactly what I wanted out of this game. First of all, we didn't know where to go, so we worked together to find the way forward. Enemies were surprisingly tough, especially the Fallen Captains. And in front of us lay a snowstorm. A Sparrow section, where you must quickly navigate a blizzard, with low visibility. There were heat bubble checkpoints scattered around, but inbetween them, you could quickly freeze to death unless you drove fast.

It was so much fun to navigate this area, trying to find the way forward, reviving teammates and watching us die in droves. Falling off cliffs, or freezing a foot away from the next heat bubble, and giving callouts for the way forward. And at the end, there were two giant Briggs, a new enemy type added, a dangerous mech enemy. We died over and over again as we threw our bodies against the Briggs until the eventually died, and the way forward was open. I even found a secret chest around the area, while waiting for my teammates to catch up. It was incredibly cool finding this meaningful secret on my own, just exploring out there in the snowstorm.

After that, we entered the Crypt proper, and the first encounter, Crypt Security.

My memories get a bit fuzzy, but I just remember having a ton of fun exploring this room, in and out, and intuiting along with my team how to progress and complete this encounter. There are a surprising amount of layers, like how you need to pass the scanner and operator in specific ways at specific times to see panels or fuses, and how you need to figure out how to give callouts amongst 10 unintuitive panels. We spent a long time in here, struggling, until we eventually managed to get this puzzle down. It even took us three grueling cycles, since our damage wasn't the best, making it an endurance fight that required use to keep up the rhythm for a long time.

And we were rewarded. Disregarding the loot, it's just awesome to be able to progress forwards after standing in the same room for a few hours. But the loot was cool too, and it was fun comparing our guns and armor to each other, seeing what the armor aesthetic looked like. We thought the holographic sights on the weapons were really slick.

But then the wall kicked in. The second encounter, Atraks-1, Fallen Exo. A robotic Fallen who had the power to make 8 clones of herself. We spent a little bit just getting to grips with the arena, combat, and sheer lethality of the boss, but we eventually found the gimmick of the fight. If you enter a pod at the back of the arena...

You fly to space. We realized as we saw a short cutscene of the pod flying up through the atmosphere, and popped out in an entirely new arena, in the space station "the Morningstar." I shouted in joy and confusion to my team, as they all stumbled over each other to try out the elevator pods and see space.

Despite that, this was where our team stopped. Atraks-1, first of all, dealt a ton of damage. Her bullets tracked, had long range, and dealt high amounts of damage, so frequently we would have deaths because cover was so scarce. She also did high damaging stomps that would most likely one-shot you if you ever got to close to any of her clones. Atraks-1 also had a very unique damage style, where damage phases were incredibly short, so short that we felt like it was just set up for the true damage phase, which never came. Bungie intended for us to do high amounts of damage in less than a second, using burst weapons that simply didn't exist at the time. Our best options were weapons like Falling Guillotine, 4th Horseman, or even Wardcliff Coil. We struggled to use high damage supers like Thundercrash or Golden Gun because those subclasses were simply too weak and fragile, and would die before we even reached the damage phases.

But we struggled, learned, practiced, and died for hours, but eventually, people had to leave. And so, I left my first contest mode raid in failure.

This sheer wall of a raid had humbled me. I loved it. I was severely disappointed with how the raid's difficulty plummeted after Contest Mode ended, and to this day, I'm still sad there is no option to turn on Contest Mode, just to enjoy its difficulty again. But I obsessed over Deep Stone Crypt. I learned all of its encounters, in and out, and found all of its secret collectibles and secret chests. I did the raid flawless, with no deaths on the team, for an awesome Shader I use to this day. I sherpa'd the raid, teaching runs to other people who wanted to learn and earn some loot, deepening my knowledge and proficiency. I taught this raid a LOT. Raid report says I have 230 sherpas, meaning I have taught at least 46 runs of this raid to different teams of people. I have also done Deep Stone as a trio, with only 3 people when the developers intended there to be 6.

And my raid history would not end there. I would go on to love Destiny, love the sense of exploring new content and new areas, like Presage, or the Season of the Splicer areas, or the Grasp of Avarice dungeon with my friends. I did every raid, day one, going for those Contest clears. I beat Contest Vault of Glass, Vow of the Disciple, Kings Fall, and Root of Nightmares. I got to the final boss of Crota's End and Salvation's Edge, where I was doing attempts up until the final minutes of the day. I love raiding in this game. And I will be there for the next one, if another every comes.

But that's not all I wanted to say. I wanted to speak about this raid's story specifically, which I think has gone horribly under appreciated by the community. because this raid, is just one giant grudge match.

So here is the second part of this article. The story of Deep Stone Crypt. Firstly, the raid takes place on Europa, a frozen moon where Clovis Bray, a mad scientist and businessman, ruled. He developed Exos, robotic frames that human consciousness' could live in, resulting in immortality, at a steep price. One of the playable human races are Exo, and many of the main NPC characters are as well. The Deep Stone Crypt is the secret home of the Exo, and its name has popped up in lore numerous times for many years.

Our enemy are the Fallen, a race of alien pirates who worship technology. They seek to gain power in the Deep Stone Crypt, and so we pursue them, through long-closed tunnels and a raging snowstorm. We find the Deep Stone Crypt, a giant facility in the ice, with its gates cracked open by the Fallen already.

The Deep Stone Crypt houses the Crypt AI, a copy of Clovis Bray's personality who watches and guards the Crypt. But Clovis is an asshole, he guards his trade secrets carefully, and as a result, he orders us and the Fallen to get out. The Fallen don't oblige, and neither do we. Clovis activates the Crypt Security, which is the first encounter, which are 6 large fuses which will overload and kill us all unless we can disable them carefully. We use buffs which are themed as mechanical augmentations, specifically the Operator, Scanner, and Suppressor augments, and can use terminals to pass them around to perform our tasks.

Once we get past the security, we find the secret of the Exo. Clovis has found the Darkness, the enemy of humanity, and used the power of the Darkness to make the Exo. This is a big revelation, but we don't have time. The Fallen are deep within, and we need to chase them.

The next room has you find Atraks-1, a Fallen general who is already an Exo. She is typing away at a terminal, and a large pod cracks open, revealing an old enemy: Taniks. Taniks is a Fallen mercenary legend, who is one of the most infamous killers in the galaxy. He has killed numerous Guardians, and somehow manages to continue to cheat death. You kill him in the Shadow Thief Strike, in your first encounter, but he is revived by the power of SIVA. And so, you kill him in the Rise of Iron version of the Shadow Thief Strike, where you defeat Taniks, Perfected. In Shadowkeep, we would fight Nightmares of our most deadly opponents, and so Taniks returned, as the Nightmare of Taniks.

So we have killed Taniks 3 times already. And he has been revived now, as an Exo robot. He immediately leaps towards the glass that stands between you and him, and punches it until it cracks. My team was scared that we were about to enter a fight, without any preparation, but Taniks crawls away like a spider into the ceiling. We would fight him later, but right now, our enemy was Atraks-1.

But the odd thing is, that this is the final room of the Deep Stone Crypt that you would explore. For the rest of the raid, you are exploring the Morningstar space station that floats above the Deep Stone Crypt in orbit. This is because Clovis, with the help of Taniks, has initiated the Nuclear Descent Protocol, a protocol to protect the secrets of the Crypt. The Morningstar, with its nuclear cores, would plummet towards the Deep Stone Crypt and explode, taking out all of Europa with it, so that no one can have it.

So now we rush in the Morningstar to the command center, parkouring through space as we fight ships of Fallen. And in the command center, we find Taniks, all posed up with his iconic Scorch Cannon and cape, looking out the window into the horizon.

As you engage him, the "Descent" encounter begins. Your goal is not to defeat Taniks, actually, your goal is to survive. The Nuclear Descent Protocol has begun, with the Morningstar beginning to plummet towards the Deep Stone Crypt. Taniks and the Fallen swarm you, as you desperately try to unlock crates and safely dispose of nuclear cores with irradiate you. As you work, the heat shields of the windows activate, before they are blown off with the speed of the stations descent. The heat of the friction bathes the entire room with a panicked red, as you keep dunking cores and giving callouts for your broken augmentations. Eventually, the job is complete. You have successfully disabled all of the nuclear cores, and the Nuclear Descent Protocol is averted. Unfortunately, the space station is still about to crash into Europa. The end of the encounter has you in a mad dash to the safe room, as Taniks chases you and Clovis curses you out. The door to the safe room seals, with Taniks right outside, and the screen goes white.

And the space station collides with Europa. You can barely walk for a while, but Guardians are made of stern stuff. You emerge from the wreckage and see the exterior of the Deep Stone Crypt again. You've come full circle. Now, debris showers from the sky, with flaming scrap dotted all over the frozen terrain, giving the area a lot of personality.

As you come down, you see a giant pile of steaming scrap. If you poke it, you awaken Taniks, again, who has fused himself with other robotic parts to make Taniks, the Abomination.

You see, this raid was never really about the Deep Stone Crypt and the fascinating lore behind the Exo. It was never about going deep into this hidden, rumored facility, where we could learn the dirty secrets of Clovis. No, this raid has actually been the story of you stopping the Fallen, and ending your personal grudge with Taniks. He keeps coming back. You keep killing him. At this point, you hate each other. After all, Taniks, upon being revived, immediately tries to punch you to death, before leaving. His new plan is to go to space, and nuke the entire moon of Europa, taking you out with him. He does not care about surviving, or his fellow Fallen, or Europa's secrets. All he cares about is killing you. And when his plan fails, when he is buried under the wreckage of a fast descent from orbit, he refuses to die. Through sheer tenacity and willpower, he fuses himself with whatever is nearby, and creates a new body. A nuclear powered, hovering body, to try to kill you one last time.

And out here, in the snow, in the wreckage, you slug it out. Taniks is able to summon down rubble from the sky to try to kill you, like a meteor strike. You keep destroying his engines and spawning nuclear cores that you disable, allowing you to damage him. In his final stand, he teleports around, constantly summoning meteors as you try to squeeze out the last little bit of damage before he overloads and wipes you out. And in the last little bit of time you have left, you finish him off, finally ending the saga of Taniks, the Scarred. The Perfected, the Nightmare, the Reborn, the Abomination. He is dead.

Many are disappointed that you never really get to go that deep into the Deep Stone Crypt. After all, the name kind of implies you'll plunge into a massive complex. But the location ends up not being that important, with the Morningstar taking about about half of your time. As cool as it is to go to space, it's also not the Crypt that you might have been promised. Some people also found it tiring that the final boss was Taniks, instead of someone new. My counterpoint is that Taniks is already an incredibly compelling villain. After all, long lasting villains who continuously return are always going to be more memorable. You have the time to build up a sort of relationship with them. He might not speak a single word of English, but you get the gist. He hates your guts by now, and he wants to kill you dead.

I just love that. This raid that promised to be one with a lot of lore revelations and plot, instead becoming a deeply personal grudge match against an old foe. I personally love this direction, and I think others should too.

This really is the raid where old man Taniks comes back, with a steel chair, to whoop your ass one last time. It's excellent.