Garden of Salvation, the new Destiny 2: Shadowkeep raid, was released on Saturday, October 5 at 1pm EST. It was cleared at approximately 7:13 pm EST by six members of the Destiny 2 clan Ascend. You can watch Ascend's moment of triumph in the Twitch clip above.
As Bungie confirmed on Twitter, the world-first fireteam members were: Antivist, Cyber, ExBlack, Monks, Narhzul, and Pash. Bungie also confirmed that after a six-hour race, the gap between Ascend and the second-place raid team was less than three minutes. So you can see why Ascend is in such a hurry to go to orbit and lock in their raid clear in the clip above.
With a world-first completion time of six hours and change, Garden of Salvation is somewhere in the middle of the pack compared to Destiny 2's other raids. The last raid, Crown of Sorrow, was initially billed as a raid lair, and was substantially smaller than Garden of Salvation. Nevertheless, it took players nearly five hours to beat it. Compare that to Destiny 2's first raid, Leviathan, which took players just over five hours. Then we have outliers like Scourge of the Past, which took less than two hours, and Last Wish, which took a whopping 19 hours thanks to a tricky puzzle section. All in all, Garden of Salvation is about average for day-one clear times.
If you don't mind spoilers and want to see more of the raid, you can watch a montage of all the new boss kills from Destiny YouTuber Datto here. Garden of Salvation has more bosses and larger encounters than several previous raids, and it looks like an awful lot of fun.
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