Destiny 2 Scourge of the Past raid challenge guide: Hold the Line

As always, a new Destiny 2 raid means new raid challenges. Scourge of the Past and its three raid encounters are no different. The first challenge, Hold the Line, is for the Botza Downtown encounter. The task may seem relatively simple — don’t let the timer drop below half — but it requires some seriously speedy movement around the city and a slightly altered strategy.

In this guide, we’ll teach you how to do things a bit differently to get your extra reward.

If you aren’t sure how to beat the normal version of this fight, check out our Botza Downtown guide and come back for the challenge!

Getting a rotation going

The first key to making this work is rotating your players in and out of map duty. If you do your normal rotation of four players, the Ionized debuff won’t drop in time and you’ll fail. Instead, you’ll need all six to work together. This is actually pretty easy, since you don’t need to spend that much time looking at the map.

Start by having an order of groups. Players 1 and 2 grab batteries first, players 3 and 4 grab batteries second and players 5 and 6 start by reading the map. From there, you shift by going in order. Once players 1 and 2 have dunked their orbs, they become the readers, with 3 and 4 grabbing the next batteries, and 5 and 6 following after that. When you get around to the fourth battery, all roles will have reset to their original positions.

Keep this rotation going, and everyone should be dunking at least one battery, with players 1 and 2 doing two each. This should keep things going quickly and smoothly, without any waiting around. A group of batteries should ideally be dunked every minute, so you have to keep moving.

Bungie/Activision via Polygon

Gotta go fast — until you don’t

The hardest part about this challenge is how punishing it is. If any player doesn’t know the map and goes the wrong way, you’ll lose. If you drop a battery, you’ll lose. If someone dies and doesn’t get resurrected immediately, you’ll lose. You have to go fast as a group whenever possible, and take enemies on as a duo when your allies are too busy to help. Everyone has to do everything.

The exception here is when you get back to the map area. In the corner of one of the projectors, you can see a yellow clock ticking down. If that gets halfway depleted, you lose. Each battery refills three full ticks of the clock. This isn’t quite half, so you have to pay attention.

If you’re going very fast, you may run into a situation where you waste a great deal of energy by charging too quickly — this can mess you up if you have bad enemy spawns in future rotations. Wait until at least three bars are down before you dunk the battery and give your teammates some time to breathe.

Readers should spend most of their time clearing the rooftops. You should only be looking at the map to give the location of big Berserkers and telling battery players their charge level. Once both battery holders know where they’re going, the roles should shift and the current readers should jump off the roof and go for the new Berserkers.

If you can keep this mad dash going for four full dunks, you’ll complete the challenge as soon as you open the chest.