A new Vanguard Strike mission is now available for Destiny 2 season pass owners to play. Proving Ground sees Commander Zavala sending a team of Guardians onboard Empress Caiaitl’s Land Tank to represent the Vanguard in an honorable fight to the death against her chosen champion.
This Destiny 2 Strike is a key part of the excellent Season of the Chosen story that Bungie has created and forms the finale of the Challenger’s Proving VII questline for this week. Any players that might be a bit out of the loop when it comes to Season of the Chosen’s story should catch up before getting through the quest and Proving Ground.
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While Proving Ground can be accessed straight away for season pass owners, it is recommended that players wait until they reach the appropriate stage in this week’s Challenger’s Proving quest to do the Strike. This will help players better understand the ongoing Season of the Chosen story and will also let players see a great cutscene once they have completed it. To start Proving Ground, players need to open the Nessus map from the Director and finding the Proving Ground Strike node at the top of the map. Destiny 2 players without the Season of the Chosen season pass will have to wait until next week to be able to access the strike.
Once players have loaded into Proving Ground, they will start in the Watcher’s Grave area of Nessus at the bottom of the path leading up to the Land Tank as seen in the Behemoth Battleground mission. The pathway will be filled with Vex and Cabal enemies and players just need to work their way up the path, similar to the Behemoth Battleground mission, clearing enemies on their way. While players can use their Sparrows to pass all the enemies, it is not advisable given how many Cabal soldiers and Scorpius turrets there are that will easily destroy a Sparrow.
Once players have reached the Land Tank and cleared out the enemies, its entrance doorway will open and a Cabal Colossus miniboss and some other soldiers will jump out to fight the Guardians. This miniboss is not particularly strong but does have an immune phase once its health gets to around half. To bring down the Cabal miniboss’s shield, players will need to run inside the orange dome shield that it summons and destroy the hovering shield generator. When the miniboss is dead, players can run up the Land Tank ramp and head inside.
Players will need to keep running until they reach a room that has a few Cabal Legionaries inside and two closed doors on either side. The area name will also change to “Infantry Concourse.” Once the Legionaries are dead, the text “The Land Tank rumbles to life…” will appear in the bottom left, and after a few seconds, the left doorway will open. Players need to run through the door and head down the corridor, bearing right and going up the Cabal gravity lift once they reach the end.
The gravity lift will spit Guardians out in a control room above the vehicle bay. Players should head into the large gap in the floor of this room to get inside the vehicle bay and start clearing out the enemies. There will be lots of Cabal soldiers of all kinds inside this large hangar, including a few Interceptor vehicles to destroy. Once enough enemies have been killed, two Goliath Tanks will hover into the room towards the back. When these tanks and all the Cabal enemies have been killed, a doorway in the middle of the back of the vehicle bay will open for players to proceed.
Players need to head up the corridor and turn left into a room with a few Cabal enemies inside. From there, they need to head to the end of the room and jump down the open hatch on the floor. This next section may look like some platforming is involved, but it is just a few corridors that players need to follow by bearing left the whole time.
Eventually, Guardians will emerge into a large open room with the Land Tank’s tracks visible below and the objective “Redirect the Tank’s Power Flow." Falling into the tracks will result in death. To complete this objective, players first need to clear out the enemies, including an Incendior miniboss, and then grab the power core orb that spawns at a tall Cabal device on the metal platform just above the tank tracks. It is worth mentioning that the power core has a 30-second timer before it explodes, so players should try and do the next part quickly to avoid having to go back for another power core. Power cores can also be dropped and picked up again, but the timer continues counting down.
All players need to cross the gap to the other side and go through the doorway into the power core room. The player holding the power core should turn right once they are inside the room and deposit it at the tall receiver surrounded by blue screens. Meanwhile, the other players should be killing the enemies to protect the core carrier. To get the second power core, the process is the same except players will need to go into another tank track room that is found on the opposite side of the power core room.
For this tank track room, one player needs to grab the power core on the far side while the others clear out the enemies. This room has a few Scorpius turrets that can easily kill the core carrier when they are jumping across, so players should make these priority targets. The core carrier needs to head back the way they came into the power core room, turn left, and deposit the power core into the other receiver while the other players defeat the Cabal enemies.
When the power has been successfully diverted, all players need to head down the corridor between the power core receivers. They will emerge into a room with a circular plate in the middle and lots of War Beasts and other Cabal soldiers. Players need to defeat all the enemies and stand on the plate to be lifted towards the final boss arena to face Ignovun, Chosen of Caiatl.
Once the lift stops, players will need to run down a long, opulent corridor until they reach the arena. In the middle will be one of the hologram projectors found in Battlegrounds missions that begin the “Rite of Proving” and the boss fight.
To begin the fight against Ignovun - Empress Caiatl's chosen champion - one player will need to activate the Rite of Proving, at which point Ignovun will leap onto the pedestal at the back of the arena and fire out a large volley of tracking firebombs. These firebombs deal lots of damage but can be destroyed by shooting them. Players should shoot them as soon as they appear over Ignovun or run back to create some space and then shoot the bombs.
This boss fight is a slightly longer version of the miniboss fight against the Colossus at the beginning of Proving Ground. Ignovun will go into immune phases once he reaches two-thirds and one-third health. As with the Colossus miniboss, these immune phases are over once the orange dome shield generator has been destroyed. Ignovun is not a particularly strong boss to face and is comparable to the Battlegrounds bosses, so powerful weapons such as Rocket Launchers and Swords are great for high damage. An SMG, such as the new Extraordinary Rendition, will also be great to have for destroying the tracking firebombs that Ignovun launches.
After a few weeks of not much happening in Destiny 2, Proving Ground has been a great addition so far, and nicely fills out the smaller roster of Strikes after Beyond Light’s content vaulting. Iron Banner also returns for the second time in Season of the Chosen this week, so any PvP fans should visit Lord Saladin to grab some bounties and equip their best gear.
Destiny 2: Beyond Light and the new Season of the Chosen are available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.