What’s a Guardian to do when a derelict Pyramid ship docks inside the Traveler’s shattered husk, whispers ancient nightmares into your helmet comms, and locks a contest mode timer? If your answer is “panic-grapple with Strand into a bottomless pit,” well, you weren’t alone back in March 2023. Three years later, the Roots of Nightmares raid still earns a knowing groan and a fond chuckle from anyone who strapped on their Lightfall boots for that juicy weekend of chaos. The raid launched on Friday, March 10, 2023, and the ensuing 48-hour contest mode promptly turned the Destiny 2 community into a glorious melting pot of theory-crafting geniuses, sleep-deprived lunatics, and one very elusive final boss hiding in the shadows.

At the stroke of the daily reset, fireteams across the globe charged in—9 am PT, 12 pm ET, 5 pm UTC, 6 pm CET for the western crowd, while the dedicated East Asian and Oceanic squads either set alarms for 2 am JST / 3 am AEST or simply mainlined coffee like it was an exotic tonic. Contest mode capped everyone’s Power level, ensuring that no amount of pinnacle grinding could save you from the raid’s teeth. The prize? The World’s First seal, an exclusive digital crown that would forever cement one team’s bragging rights. But Bungie, ever the generous overlord, also dangled a special emblem for every other group that managed to limp across the finish line before the clock ran out on Sunday.

Casual Guardians soon realized they could adopt a magnificently lazy strategy: wait for the absolute legends to bash their skulls against the puzzles and encounters on Friday, then swoop in on Saturday after the internet had exploded with guides, and still snag that emblem. It was the perfect plan—except for the part where watching streamers suffer through the jumping puzzles turned into the weekend’s real entertainment. The 48-hour window meant endless memes, thousands of “We wiped again” club memberships, and a sense that even the architects of the Pyramid were giggling behind their geometry.

So, who were we really hunting? During the Lightfall campaign, a certain disembodied voice slithered through the narrative—Nezarec, the so-called Final God of Pain, whispered temptations as if he was trying to sell you a used Sparrow. Many lore hounds put their glimmer on Nezarec as the final boss, and oh boy, they were right. He turned out to be another Disciple of the Witness, the same creepy hierarchy that gave us Calus’s opulent nightmares. Except Nezarec preferred psychological torment over golden chalices. Meeting him face-to-face wasn’t just a bullet-sponge duel; it was a dance of light and dark mechanics that made entire fireteams suddenly forget how to communicate like actual adults. “Shoot the nodes!” “Which nodes?!” “ALL OF THEM!” – a typical interaction, probably.

Like every Destiny 2 raid, Roots of Nightmares was a delicious buffet of encounters, puzzle-solving sessions, and platforming gauntlets designed to test whether your team could handle vertical movement while under fire. Secret chests lurked in creepy corners, and collectibles teased the triumph hunters. Finishing the raid during contest mode was one thing; finding every hidden nugget required multiple runs and the patience of a Saint-14 meditation session. Some chests felt like they were placed by a sadistic architect who cackled every time a Guardian missed a jump by a single pixel. Spoiler: everyone missed that jump at least once.

Bungie’s pre-raid gift to the community was unlocking all Strand fragments right before launch, an obvious hint that the new Darkness subclass would be more than a little useful. Suddenly, every Guardian became a grapple-happy acrobat—some gracefully swinging through encounters, others enthusiastically yeeting themselves into the void while screaming about cooldowns. Builds that combined Strand with the old favorite Void or Solar turned into absolute chaos machines, and it was glorious. The raid practically demanded mastery of those threads, weaving movement tech with damage phases in a way that made the whole experience feel like an acrobatic light show.

By the time contest mode ended on Sunday, March 12, 2023, at those same daily reset times, the community had collectively lost millions of revives, gained a fearsome new boss to add to the nightmares catalog, and earned emblems that still make newbies ask, “Whoa, where’d you get that?” Three years down the road, Roots of Nightmares remains a standout memory—partly for its story implications, partly for the sheer hilarity of watching top-tier players get farmed by giant psionic attacks while the rest of us munched popcorn. It proved once again that when a Pyramid ship comes knocking, the only sensible response is to grapple in, cause a Strand-powered spectacle, and hope someone remembered to bring Divinity.

And so, dear 2026 reader, if you ever stumble across a dusty old Lightfall emblem on a veteran Guardian’s jacket, give them a nod. They might have been part of that glorious, slightly unhinged weekend when the whole world tried to roast Nezarec—and occasionally roasted themselves instead.