Destiny 2 Season Of Dawn Guide To The Sundial

The Sundial is the new six player activity that’s been added to Destiny 2 with Season of Dawn. The activity sees Guardians jump through portals in time in an effort to prevent the Cabal from ending Humanity. The activity might be a bit tricky for newcomers, so we’ve put together a little guide to get you started in your first couple of runs. If you’ve yet to unlock The Sundial, check out our guide for getting the Lantern of Osiris, it’s all in there.

The general gist of The Sundial is that it’s almost a wave based activity. There’s a meter that you need to fill up, and you do that by completing encounters throughout the portals into various time periods. So far it looks like you need to do at least two, but the chances are that you’ll need to do more since the score for that meter is awarded based on your speed and performance in each encounter.

Encounters

Right now we have four encounters in The Sundial, but that doesn’t include the boss. As I said earlier, you may not encounter all four if you perform quickly and efficiently, but here they all are anyway.

Ascent

Kill everything and activate the Sundial. There isn’t anything more to this encounter, and it’s basically impossible to lose score on it.

Bombardment

In Bombardment you need to kill the shielded enemies around the edges of the arena in order to get their relics. These relics are used to lower the shields of the miniboss in the centre of the arena. Each miniboss killed counts towards your score, but the next one will be tougher, and the encounter will become more difficult as a result. This is where you can really ramp up your score if you’re efficient, killing as many minibosses as possible within the allowed five minutes.

Datamine

This encounter tasks Guardians with capturing and holding a point. While capturing the point, enemies will spawn and attack while Psions spawn in the background. When a Psion Commander spawns the capture process is halted, meaning that these commanders need to be taken out as soon as they appear. You can only kill a Psion Commander with a punch, so you need to get up close and personal with them.

Once you’e captured the first point, a miniboss will spawn. Killing the miniboss will spawn two new points to capture, which you can head over and repeat this process in until the end of the encounter timer.

Gatecrash

In Gatecrash you need to kill Vex Minotaurs that are holding Arc Charges. Once the Minotaurs are down you need to deposit the charges in points on the opposite ends of the map, and after three have been claimed a miniboss will spawn. Kill the miniboss, and then you can repeat the process and get even more points.

Boss Encounters

At the time of writing, we only have one boss, Niruul, but three more are planned out in the Season of Dawn roadmap. We’ll update this guide with the tactics for each boss as they launch, but for now we’ll cover Niruul.

Niruul

Niruul deals heavy damage, and can only be damaged at certain times. There is a one-hit-kill move that puts Guardians in a purple sphere. If you don’t escape this then you die, so escape it alright? To get out you need to keep an eye out for the lighter section of the bubble that captures you, and shoot it.

After a little while of dodging attacks and dealing damage, Niruul will become invulnerable. Just like in the Gatecrasher encounter, you need to punch Psion Commanders to destroy that shield. The number of Psion Commanders that spawn begins with one, but more will follow and make the encounter harder as it goes on.

Reward

Once you’ve killed the boss, you’re transported back to the Sundial for some much earned rewards. The rewards might change over time, so we’re going to hold off putting the exact ones that you’ll definitely get in here. However, we can tell you that in the first week of Season of Dawn the rewards were the Legendary Auto Rifle Steelfather Repeater, and the Legendary Sidearm Breachlight.

Let us know if you’ve got any handy tips for The Sundial in the comments.

Image Sources: PCGamer, Gamepur