One of the trickiest sections in Destiny 2’s Leviathan raid is undoubtedly the Pleasure Gardens thanks to forced stealth-centric mechanics. The main focus of the dog encounter has players splitting into two teams, with four members roaming around the arena and two others above on pillars. The team below must silently make their way through the gardens, gathering spores which can only be released by the people above firing a beam of light.
After each spore cloud released your team will gain a damage boosting stack which must be used to kill six roaming beasts in the area. For a more detailed breakdown of the base mechanics for the Pleasure Gardens visit our guide here.
There is only real change to the Pleasure Gardens and it’s quite a doozy. Instead of six dogs, your team will now have to face eight. These two additional dogs will be located in the cave to the right and in the trees to the left. Before the instance starts have everyone pick a dog along the outer ring so there is no confusion about who is killing what beast. Leave the two in the cave and tree for last since they are in the center and thus easily converged on.
The two additional dogs will spawn in the middle with one patrolling along the lip of the safe room and the other moves vertically between cave and tree. The outer dogs’ pathing has been tweaked slightly as well, but it’s nothing major that will cause unneeded deviation from your route. We recommend taking a round or two to learn the pathing of the dogs to ensure that there are no mix-ups. You will only want to go through the center when you’re passing between tree and cave. Also, it’s crucial that the Prism holders kill their snipers quickly because they do a lot of damage and can easily kill a player.
Outside of the additional dogs, nothing has changed outside of them being a bit beefier in terms of health. To counter this, our team simply played it safe and would attempt to secure a kill by turn three. We would only attack once we had 48 stacks since that allowed us to output enough damage safely to the dogs. For the first two phases simply focus on the outer dogs to the point where their health is barely visible. Then, on the third and final phase have everyone kill their outer dogs and then both teams of three rush the center ones and use Supers to obliterate their health bar.
Weapons we recommend using are the Merciless, It Stared Back (Raid sword), and a fully upgraded Legend of Acrius. Remember to use powerful one-shot Supers like Nova Bomb or Golden Gun to ensure maximum damage on the hounds. The trickiest part of this section is readjusting your paths, but once you learn their routes this is a fairly easy area.
