Destiny 2’s Salvation’s Edge Raid Was Dominated by a New Strand Weapon

Destiny 2’s new Raid arrived this past weekend, and it was a bit of a record-breaker. Salvation’s Edge turned out to be the longest Raid in Destiny history, cracking the roughly 18-hour record set by The Last Wish.

After over 19 hours of hard work, puzzle solving, and slaying countless enemies, Team Parabellum had beaten the Raid off-stream. Guardian’s Astro, bravo, DrakathShadow, Ham, Jake, and Tyraxe had kept their heads down, died about 1500 times between them, and gotten the job done. Bungie confirmed the win, and then everyone else was battling for second place.

One of the more interesting stories is what they were all battling with. While covering the World’s First Race, it was clear to me that class builds were pretty stagnant despite recent changes, buffs, and nerfs. With only three days to prepare, and with some of that time being spent offline due to server issues, it seems teams were sticking with what they knew best. Well of Radiance Warlock was a must, and Hunters were absolutely everywhere, still the preferred class of the Youtuber who needs flashy clips.

The surprise was the presence of a new gun in the mix. According to RaidHub, The Call was responsible for the most kills in Contest Mode. While heavily puzzle-focused, and designed to put contenders’ problem-solving skills to the test, Salvation’s Raid threw a lot of enemies at people. There was very little downtime when it came to murdering, and The Call racked up over 66 million kills, putting it ahead of every other weapon for sheer murder volume, according to RaidHub.

This is surprising because it’s interesting to see people who need to kill as much as possible as fast as possible put their faith in a new weapon that they haven’t had time to put through the rigorous testing the Destiny 2 community is known for. It is also not very surprising because The Call is an absolute murder machine.

It can be crafted, which means if you find enough special versions, you can figure out how to make it yourself. It has a perk pool from heaven, allowing you to build an excellent version that will back up almost any type of character build in the game.

It’s also a Sidearm that fires rockets, only the second one in the game, and it drops randomly from the new content so it is easy enough to get. The other rocket firing Sidearm is the Indebted Kindness, and that came in third place on our murder leaderboards. The Indebted Kindness is harder to get, being tied to a Dungeon, one of Destiny 2’s harder content types, and I would argue that it lacks The Call’s superb perk options.

The final factor is that The Call is a Kinetic weapon, and the Indebted Kindness is an Energy weapon. Some of the highest damage output strategies will require a different energy weapon, so The Call offered people the perfect chance to take all its minion-slaying might while still having an Energy and Power weapon that could put massive damage numbers into the bosses and tougher enemies.

I just find this level of detail in such a small thing fascinating. There are thousands of factors that go into trying to be the very first people to finish extremely tough content like Raids, and interesting things happen that you don’t quite expect. And so, a surprising new weapon won the faith of the very best Destiny players in the world, and they used it to slaughter their way to a fight with The Witness.