Destiny 2: How to Complete Nezarec encounter -- Root of Nightmares guide
Image via Bungie

Destiny 2: How to Complete Nezarec Encounter – Root of Nightmares Guide

You've come face to face with the Final Lobster of Pain.

This is it Guardians. After three other encounters, jumping around the pyramid, and dealing with light and darkness, you’ve made it to Nezarec. And honestly, the consensus is that they’re not that bad. For all the spooky scary lore and talk we’ve heard about Nezarec, the disciple who led the first collapse, he’s kind of a pushover. With him being more akin to looking like Larry the Lobster than anything horrifying or frightening. That doesn’t mean you can finish this encounter with your eyes closed. But if you’ve made it this far, chances are you and your fireteam are up for the challenge. This guide will be covering Destiny 2: how to complete Nezarec encounter, showing you how to efficiently deal with the Final God of Pain, and how to finally put them to rest.

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Destiny 2: How to Complete Nezarec Encounter – Root of Nightmares Guide

This final encounter can be split up into three distinct parts/mechanics, and those are: activating nodes, delay wipe mechanic, and damage phase. With one of these mechanics being entirely skippable, if you and your team can pull it off.

Related: Where to Find All Secret Chests in Destiny 2: Root of Nightmares Raid

Destiny 2: How to Complete Nezarec Encounter – Activating Nodes

Image Via Bungie

After clearing the third encounter, opening the “door” with the light and dark orbs, and making a fairly long trek up and about the pyramid, you’ll find yourself in the final encounter arena. Players should immediately recognize what one of the mechanics are, since activating nodes has been frequently used during this raid. Here you can see a beginning darkness orb on the right, and a beginning light orb on the left.

Splitting the team up into groups of 2 will be the easiest way to knock this mechanic out. Just have one pair on light orbs, one pair on darkness orbs, and one pair on Nezarec babysitting (I’ll explain later) and add-clear. The people on light and darkness orbs will be connecting their beginning node with all the other nodes leading vertically across the arena. In order to do so, have one person shoot the beginning node while standing under it, which gives you a buff, find the next node to activate, run over to it and shoot it while standing under. Once the first person has connected their node to the origin node, the other person should be standing under the original node and be ready to shoot it.

Keep in mind that the nodes you have to activate are random and change every time you wipe and have to try again. What’s more, as you get further to completing your respective side, the node that gives you the buff will change to a further node that you activated, so be aware of which node had the shield aura around it. As you go about completing the light and darkness nodes, some players will get the Nezarec’s Hatred de-buff. Causing those affected to be shot up in the air, interrupting what they are doing. This is where a player from the add team will need to shoot Nezarec in the chest, causing them to focus damage to that one person and getting rid of the de-buff.

Destiny 2: How to Complete Nezarec Encounter – Delay Wipe Mechanic

how to solve "Cross the Chasm" puzzle in Destiny 2: Root of Nightmares raid pyramids
Image via Bungie

As part of your team is activating the nodes on both sides while the others are dealing with other enemies and the big bad themselves, you will be on a timer. It’s not shown on the screen at all, but if you do not complete both light and darkness nodes in a sufficient time, Nezarec will send out a wave of energy and wipe the entire team. To prevent this from happening there are two options. You can attempt to use the delay mechanic we’re about to describe, or you can finish up the nodes quickly.

It has been found that the majority of teams making it to this fight on “contest mode”, let alone the regular mode, never had to use the delay wipe mechanic, and were simply connecting the nodes fast enough. But we’ll go ahead and give you the rundown on this mechanic, in case you running this with less experienced players, or just less players in general.

In order to delay the wipe mechanic on the Nezarec encounter, a player will need to shoot Nezarec in the shoulder as the team is getting closer to wiping. Doing so will release a bright blast of energy from them, and the color of this blast is very important. If the blast is bright white light, a player from the darkness orbs team will need to grab their buff, have everyone run over to one of the completed light orbs and shoot it. If the blast if a dark organge-ish color, then you’ll want to do the same thing as mentioned, just inverse.

No matter which color is shown, players will need to make sure that the orb everyone is standing under is not the main glowing orb. But if this is done correctly, when Nezarec uses their energy wave, your team will all survive and you can go back to connecting the orbs.

Destiny 2: How to Complete Nezarec Encounter – Damage Phase

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Image via Bungie

Now once both the light and darkness have completed their nodes on both of their sides, big beams of light will shine down on all the nodes, and Nezarec themselves. This signifies the start of the damage phase of the encounter. Once this has happened, players want to group up, preferably on one of the center platforms that holds a light orb and start blasting away. Due to the fact that these platforms are raised from the ground Nezarec is standing on, they seem to have a bit of trouble doing a ton of damage to your team, and allows everyone to rain down all the heavy and energy ammo you have. You won’t have an infinite amount of time to get damage in, so make sure you are focusing appropriately.

After a certain amount of time, they will disappear and reappear back up to the platform in the back middle of the room. This will then reset the light and darkness nodes, and your team will have to repeat the node activation process.

You can repeat this process as long as your team can survive, but once you get to a small section at the end of Nezarec’s health bar, things can get pretty dicey. They will be immune for a few seconds, do a few vfx magic, and then reappear in an enraged mode. Enraged mode can be an absolute run killer if your team doesn’t know the specifics of it. But basically, once they are in an enraged state your team will have a limited amount of time to finish off Nezarec’s health before the wipe mechanic, starting the team over from the beginning. It’s not an exorbitant amount of health, but it still requires a decent amount of damage, and certainly everyone should be focusing on it. If your team has wiped multiple times at enrage and/or aren’t doing a enough damage during enrage, consider not pushing Nezarec to enrage, waiting for the nodes to reset, and farming other enemies for ammo drops or super energy.

This can definitely lengthen the encounter a bit, and depending on your teams sustainability, you might not be able to do another wave of enemies, but the option is there if the main method isn’t working for you. And once that’s all over a massive congratulations to you and your fireteam! You have now successfully defeated Nezarec, and are one step closer to finding The Witness. We just have to hope we find them before it’s too late.


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Alex Garcia
Alex Garcia is a freelance writer for Gamer Journalist. Since joining the team in October of 2022, Alex has been covering news and writing guides from all corners of the gaming industry, with a proclivity for covering games such as Destiny 2, Vampire Survivors, and Honkai Star Rail, along with testing out the latest gacha games. In addition to his background in content creation and eSports, you'll find him streaming the latest AAA/Indie game titles on his Twitch in his off time, with a sprinkle of competitive FPS games every now and then (CS: GO, Valorant).