Step #5: How To Defeat Riven [FINAL BOSS]
After solving the vault, you’ll begin the final boss encounter. There’s a gigantic Taken sphere, and six floor plates. To begin the battle, stand on all six plates — note which plate you stood on. You team will be split into two teams of three depending on which side you stand on.
Phase #1: Each team needs to enter a large room filled with enemies. Just clear out all the enemies you can. There are two sides — a “Tree” side and a “Crystal” side. Riven is on one side. One team needs to stun Riven so the other team can actually hurt him.
- How To Reveal Riven’s Weak Spots:
- If Riven’s tentacles are out, run close to him and wait for his tentacle attack. Shoot the tenctacle to make it retreat, and Riven’s face will open.
- If there are no tentacles, shoot Riven’s mouth after it spews fire. When it glows red, shoot the mouth.
- How To Damage Riven:
- After stunning Riven, the monster will open its mouth and show 10 eyes. TWO of the TEN eyes will glow. Those are the weak spots.
- Now, Riven will appear to the other team. When its face opens, communicate with your team and tell them which of the two eyes were glowing. They will NOT GLOW for the other team.
- Shoot the mouth, and have your most-accurate shooters blast the two eyes. If you shoot the wrong eyes, you’ll be killed.
Confused yet? The “glowing” eyes will only glow for the team that stunned Riven. The other team can actually hurt Riven, but they will not see the “glowing” effect, so it’s up to the stun-team to communicate with your mirror team. You can determine how to name eyes any way you want, just make sure everyone knows which eye to shoot when it’s called-out.
That completes the first phase. Now, you need to reach the second floor.
- How To Unlock The Elevator: Kill the Eyes of Riven and collect a Taken Orb. A stack of six symbols will appear — all the same symbol. Only the Guardian carrying the Eye of Riven can see this symbol.
- Another Guardian will need to stand on a tall pillar with energy swirling at the top — this will show you a bunch of symbols all over the room.
- Direct the Eye-of-Riven-carrier to the correct symbol (the one only they can see) and use the Eye of Riven cleanse grenade ability on the symbol to unlock the elevator.
Phase #2: Welcome to the second floor! The second floor is exactly the same as the first floor, except that your teams will be swapped.
- Note: Between each floor, you’ll need to solve the same exact elevator puzzle.
Phase #3: The third floor reunites your teams. At this point, Riven will pop-out of six spots. Wait for it to appear with tentacles or shooting flames. Keep stunning by attacking tentacles or shooting the mouth. When you stun it for the last time, it will enter the last spot.
When it appears in the last spot, you’ll be able to damage Riven. Aim for the eyes and mouth — target the correct, glowing eyes. Just like before. Except, this time, it will expose three sets of two glowing eyes. You absolutely must hit these eyes, so assign one Guardian for each glowing eye. You need to hit the eyes at the same time.
Clear the rest of the enemies, and six plates will begin to glow. Quickly sprint to the plate you chose at the start of the Riven encounter. You won’t have much time — you’ll die if you take too long. A nearby Guardian can revive you and return to their plate in time if you go down.
Once you’ve returned to your plates, you’ll fall back down and get a good view of Riven. This time, he’s covered in glowing Taken energy weak spots. You’re falling slower than before, so you’ll be able to target and shoot those weak spots. Target them all as you’re falling to do a bunch of extra damage to Riven.
Phase #4: And that’s it! You just need to repeat the steps you’ve already done. Stun Riven, shoot the eyes, solve the elevator puzzle, reach the third floor, and shoot the weak spots as you fall back down to the bottom.
Keep repeating these steps until you’ve hit the final chunk of health on Riven’s meter — it’s a separate little blip you can see, and reaching that will trigger the final phase of the fight.
Phase #5: At about 10% health, Riven will change tactics. You’ll teleport to the Ascendant Realm — you will not regenerate health while in this realm, and you will take a small amount of damage. Healing Buffs are absolutely required to survive this step.
Simply complete a parkour area. Rush to the end, fighting Taken — if you have healers, simply kill the Taken, take it slow, and you’ll reach the portal at the end.
Escaping, you’ll encounter one last damage phase. Unleash everything you have to kill him. There is no way to stop his team-wipe attack. Just keep shooting until its mouth opens wider — dive into the open mouth and you’ll reach the inside of Riven. Blast the last glowing Taken weak point. Kill it and you’ll earn your reward.
- Reward: Ethereal Key – You’ll earn the Ethereal Key for defeating Riven. You can use the key to unlock the Raid Chest and claim your real rewards.
And that’s it! Well, not really. There’s one final thing you need to do. There is a checkpoint after defeating Riven, but let’s go over the last step very quickly.
Phase #6: Grab the “Heart of Riven” orb and run it through a huge gauntlet of enemies, then plant it down in front of the raid chest chamber. That will unlock the escape route and give you access to your big reward chest prize.
And that is truly it. If you made it this far, congratulations!
