Destiny 2 Vex Offensive Activity's Final Assault Event Is Live

The last of the known new seasonal content for the Season of the Undying has hit Destiny 2, making a fairly minor change to the Vex Offensive activity that's been running for several weeks. Now when you fight through Vex Offensive, you take on new, tougher boss fight at the end of your ventures into the Black Garden. [Update: This is now over, but you can check out something more recent in the form of our The Dawning recipes list.]

This is the culmination of something of a story arc throughout the Season of the Undying, which kicked off with the launch of the Shadowkeep expansion. The Hive have been doing rituals around the giant black pyramid ship that was discovered buried under the moon's surface. It's related to the Darkness, the scary but relatively undeveloped bad guys at the heart of Destiny 2 lore. In response to the Hive's activities, the time-traveling robots known as the Vex--who also worship the Darkness, just like the Hive--have been launching assaults against the moon all season.

During all that time, the Vanguard, the Guardian leadership in charge of players, have been trying to find a way to stop the Vex. Over the last few weeks, Ikora Rey has been building a big portal to find the root of the Vex's attacks: the Undying Mind, the robot in charge of the Vex's lush but evil origin point, the Black Garden. We've been visiting the Black Garden all season to weaken the Vex, both in the Vex Assault activity, and in the Garden of Salvation raid.

Ikora's completed portal brings a change to the Vex Assault activity, where you can now find and kill the Undying Mind, ostensibly stopping the Vex's plans and cutting off their assault. The trouble is, the Vex's whole deal is about working in multiple alternate timelines at once. So there's not just one Undying Mind, there are thousands, operating in multiple timelines. The Guardians need to stop them all, so every time you jump into Vex Offensive, you use Ikora's portal to summon an Undying Mind from one of the timelines and destroy it. That's a pretty decent story reason to make the activity replayable over and over again--you might beat the boss once, but there are many copies, and they have a plan.

In practice, Final Assault isn't especially different from the Vex Offensive we've been playing all season. The first two phases of the activity remain the same, requiring you to first kill a whole lot of Vex until you clear a certain number of enemies, and then destroy several "Oracles" that appear around the area, using special objects dropped by Vex Minotaurs. Once you do that, you get to the final boss fight arena where you summon an Undying Mind. It's a little tougher to kill than the previous Gate Lord bosses, thanks to some new Vex robots that appear and fly straight at you to explode like missiles. But for the most part, it's the same activity.

This final phase of Vex Offensive does make one big change to the situation, though. It allows you to finally complete the Undying seal on your Triumphs menu. Seals are the biggest bragging rights in Destiny 2, requiring you to gather all the season's weapons and items, plus knock out a number of grindy Triumphs. Up to now, there was one Triumph that couldn't be completed, however, because it required you to kill the Undying Mind three times. Now that the Final Assault has begun, it's possible to complete the seal. That's a good thing if you're a Destiny completionist, because the seal is only available in the Season of the Undying, and that comes to a close in about three weeks.

There might be more to Vex Offensive than we've seen so far--Bungie's new approach sees the rollout of new content over time, and just because there's nothing left on the content calendar for the season doesn't mean there won't be secrets. But for the time being, Vex Offensive: Final Assault is a pretty thin addition. It'll keep you busy if you're the kind of person who wants to finish a seal and get some recognition from other players, but if you were burned out on Vex Offensive before, a new boss fight probably won't change much.