Destiny 2 Sundered Doctrine dungeon guide and walkthrough

The Sundered Doctrine dungeon takes Destiny 2 players back to Rhulk’s Pyramid for more monsters, more riddles, and most importantly, more loot.

Veterans of the Vow of the Disciple raid will recognise the mechanics here, albeit with some new twists.

Sundered Doctrine is on the shorter side as far as dungeons go, with just three encounters and two not-so-tough boss fights. Provided you can get your head around memorising all those symbols, you should have no problem completing Sundered Doctrine — and if you’re lucky, receive the Finality’s Auger exotic fusion rifle while you’re at it.

How to start Sundered Doctrine

Before we begin, there’s a bit of admin to take care of first. To start Sundered Doctrine, you’ll first need to chat to Ikora in the Tower. She will give you a quest, “The Drowning Labyrinth” which unlocks access to the dungeon. Now, you just need to head to the Savathun’s Throne World section of the map, and find the Sundered Doctrine node in the top left, beside the Vow of the Disciple raid.

Once you load in, you’ll have a bit of a trek to get to the first encounter. Proceed forward and you’ll come to a large gap, with a bridge crossing it to your left. Take the bridge across, then jump up to the ledge on the left. Take the first right and drop down; you’ll enter a series of rooms with enemies to deal with.

Take out the Attendants and the Subjugators, then proceed forward. In the back-left corner of the second corridor, you’ll spot a large rectangle jutting out from the wall at a strange angle. Jump on it, and it will lower down, allowing you to pass through.

You’ll now be in a tight space with several ways to drop down. There’s nothing untoward here — you simply need to make your way down to the bottom. You’ll then emerge into a large, cross-shaped room with enemies to take out. Once you clear the way, look for a small waterfall. From where you enter, go straight ahead and you’ll find it on the right side.

Go under the waterfall, and follow the path down to the first proper encounter of the dungeon.

First Encounter, Flooded Inspection

This first encounter primarily consists of two things: memorising symbols and directing light beams. You’ll begin by entering the central chamber, with three lenses in the centre and a symbol wheel above the back of the room. There are three symbol slots on the wheel, but one is empty. The objective is to find the missing symbol and connect a light beam to it.

The layout and how it works

Let’s start breaking this down. There are four rooms around the central chamber. Two on the left, and two on the right. Each room has its own symbol wheel, and each wheel has just one symbol on it. To determine which symbol you need, you’ll need to locate the Truthspeaker.

In just one of the four rooms, a Grim labelled the Truthspeaker will spawn. When you kill it, it will drop a symbol, that is the symbol you need to link the light beam to.

Your next step is to locate the correct symbol. It will be on one of the wheels in one of the four rooms. Once you find it, you’ll need to link the light from the central room to the wheel. To do so, you’ll first need to shoot the shard above one of the three lenses in the central room to make it produce a beam of light.

You then need to create a chain of light through various lenses from here to the correct symbol wheel. The three in the central room are ready to go, but many of the other lenses are missing.

Each of the four rooms will spawn a Lens Bearer Subjugator. Kill one, and it will drop a lens that you can pick up. Bring the lens to one of the empty slots around the encounter area and you can place it there. Once placed, a lens can be rotated to one of a few predetermined angles. You can look at the base of the lens to see which directions the light can go.

The important steps

This may seem like a lot in writing, but it is pretty simple in practice. The order of operations goes like this:

1. Search each room for a Truthspeaker to find your missing symbol
2. Locate the symbol on one of the four wheels
3. Follow the path from that wheel back to the central room, noting which lenses are missing along the way
4. Activate the closest light in the central room, then grab lenses from the Lens Bearers as needed
5. Create a chain of light that links the central room to the correct wheel

Once you create the correct chain, you’ll get a notification that says “The Pyramid accepts a truth“, meaning you have completed the objective. After you complete the first chain, return to the central room and you’ll see that two symbols are now missing from the wheel. For the second round, you’ll need to link two symbols.

The method is identical; find the Truthspeaker to get your symbol, grab lenses from Lens Bearers, and make the chain. Once you complete the first one, a second Truthspeaker will spawn to give you your second symbol. Repeat the process, and once you have the two symbols linked, the second round is complete.

This may come as a shock, but for the third round, you’ll need to link three symbols. No changes here, just repeat the steps you have been following so far. In total, you’ll have to make six links to complete this encounter.

Sundered Doctrine maze route

With the first encounter completed, a door will open in the central room, leading to the next encounter. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a maze and some traps ahead that would give Indiana Jones a run for his money. While it can be easy to get turned around in the maze, thankfully you can’t get too lost.

When you go through the door, you’ll immediately come to some stairs leading to a locked door. Drop off either side of the stairs, and make your way down to the bottom. Continue forward, and you’ll come to a hole, and drop down again. This brings you into the small maze.

At the first junction, turn right and go straight to the end. Drop down, then look to your right. Take the first left down this corridor, go up the stairs and follow this path to exit the maze.

The next part is a massive open area with some enemies to deal with. No tricks here, just make your way past the enemies and cross the bridge to the right. Through here, you’ll find a long and dark hallway. Go down it, but stop at the second exit on the left, you’ll find another hole to drop down through.

This will bring you to a long room with a pit running through the middle. Stay on the side you enter on, walk to the far end, and look across and down. You’ll see a small opening below the opposite ledge. Walk through this small passageway and emerge into what seems to be an ancient Peruvian temple, with fewer golden idols and more boulders.

The boulder section is fairly simple, you simply need to use the safe spaces on either side to avoid the giant ball of spikes rolling towards you. You don’t need to go all the way up the hill either — there is a hole about halfway up it, and that is your way forward. Through here, you just need to avoid some crisscrossing boulders and make your way down to the door to the second encounter.

Second Encounter, Altered Convolution and Zoetic Lockset

The second encounter has two parts — opening the door, and the Zoetic Lockset.

Opening the door

The door into the second encounter of Sundered Doctrine is a small test, set to teach you the mechanics you need to know. You’ll enter a room with symbol wheels on either side, enemies throughout, and a door ahead with a symbol on either side of it. You need to highlight those symbols on each of the wheels in order to open the door.

To do this, take down one of the Perceptor Wizards and grab the item it drops. This will give you Heightened Knowledge, which you can use to move the highlight on the symbol wheel one space. You can move it clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on which way the inner wheel is spinning. To change the rotation, simply shoot the shard above the wheel.

You can gather more knowledge from the Perceptors, up to three at once. This is all very relevant for the encounter ahead, so make sure you get to grips with this system.

• As mentioned, a single stack gives you Heightened Knowledge, which moves the symbol one space.
• Two stacks gives you Brimming Knowledge, which will move the symbol two spaces.
• Finally, Overflowing Knowledge will move it three spaces.

Once you highlight the correct symbols, the door ahead will open. Go through it to enter the second encounter room. Here you’ll find the Zoetic Lockset, a group of four Hive Shriekers along the back of the room. There are four blank signs in front of them, and four symbol wheels throughout the room.

Defeating the Zoetic Lockset

This encounter is more art than science, as there is no rigid method for completing it. Put simply, the highlighted symbols on each of the wheels cause different, specific effects. The Zoetic Lockset will cycle through those effects throughout the fight, and you need to use this to your advantage. From our testing and research, the symbols appear to have the following effects:

• Hive – Spawns Ogres
• Knowledge – Spawns Knights
• Commune – Shriekers launch Darkness seekers
• Stop – Temporarily prevents enemies from spawning
• Kill – Begin the damage phase

It goes without saying, Kill is the symbol we want to focus on. However, there is an order to this, and jumping the queue can have unpleasant consequences. The Shriekers cycle their attention from right to left, which is why you will hear many Guardians referring to the boss, the signs, and the wheels as one to four, and from right to left.

There are various strategies you can employ here, but generally, the easiest path forward is to set the symbols in the following order:

1. Stop
2. Stop
3. Stop
4. Kill

Doing this will give you as much breathing room as possible, and having Kill in the final slot (the one on the far left) seems to grant the most time for the damage phase. Doing damage is quite simple, you can attack any of the four Shriekers and they cannot be killed individually, so pick a target and focus all your fire there. A good strategy for avoiding damage is to hang back near the stairs at the centre of the room, which you can use for cover.

As the Zoetic Lockset are a group of Shriekers, precision damage is your best friend. Sleeper Simulant, Queenbreaker’s Bow, or your other favourite Linear Fusion Rifle will chew this boss up in short order. Gather your team together, focus your shots on the critical spot of one of the bosses, and chip away at it until it dies.

Reaching the final encounter

Once the Zoetic Lockset is defeated, you’ll need to open the exit door. Just in front of the loot chest, you’ll notice a concave bowl in the floor. As you likely know, when Shriekers die, the spherical core drops to the ground and makes for a pretty decent football.

You’ll need to go the long way as there are barriers on either side of the hole, so bring one of the balls to the back of the room, then coax it across the bridge. It should fall nicely into the dish, which will open the door to the next encounter.

The journey here is less complicated, you should have little issue finding your way forward. Before long, you’ll come to the skeletal remains of a giant Hive worm. Go through the ribcage tunnel to enter a room with another light puzzle. If you made it through the first encounter, this part isn’t going to stop you.

You’ll find the sources of both lights on one side of the room, beside the symbols for Enter and Worm. Simply bounce the beams to the matching symbols on the other side of the room to lower the barrier and proceed to the final encounter.

There is one last hurdle, as you find yourself in a room with a sealed door. There is no mechanism to open it, you simply have to shoot the door. How much it opens is directly relevant to how much damage you do, so hit it with something reasonably powerful to open it fully and walk through to the boss room.

Final encounter, Isolate Preservation and Kerrev, The Erased

Our last task in the Sundered Doctrine dungeon is to take down Kerrev, The Erased. The final boss room consists of a large central room, with side rooms on the left and right. Kerrev has an invincible shield, which we will need to use the mechanics to bring down. We’re back to using light beams to illuminate specific symbols like the first encounter, but there is a bit more brainwork involved this time.

At the back of the central room, you’ll find a symbol wheel. There are six symbols on it, three on the left and three on the right. The first thing you should do is take note of these symbols. Take a screenshot, take a picture with your phone, whichever is the most convenient for you to reference back to.

Search the rooms

Next, you need to find the Truthspeaker. They can spawn in either of the two side rooms, so do a quick search of both. To enter the room on the right, jump onto the rectangular structure that sticks out of the wall at an angle (much like the one at the very start of the dungeon). Standing on it will lower it, and you can walk through. You cannot use this to return to the central room, you need to go through the small tunnel further along the connecting wall.

The left room is less convoluted, but the door has to be damaged to open, like the door that got you into this encounter. Check both rooms and defeat the Truthspeaker to get a symbol. It will match one of the symbols on the wheel.

Light up the correct symbols

This is the crucial thing to remember, whichever side of the wheel the Truthspeaker symbol is on, you must darken the symbols on that side, and illuminate the symbols on the opposite side. If the symbol is on the right side, you need to switch off any lights on the right side, and turn on any lights that aren’t lit up on the left.

How you do this is quite straightforward — each of the symbols can be found in one of the three rooms, with a lens nearby that you can use. Here is where you can find each of the symbols, relative to where you start:

Left Room

• Witness – Far-left corner
• Hive – Far-right corner
• Guardian – Directly right as you enter the room
• Pyramid – Ahead and to the left as you enter
• Traveller – Back-right corner

Central Room

• Worship – Back-left corner
• Kill – Back-right corner
• Stop – Downstairs, under where the boss stands
• Give – Downstairs
• Drink – Far-right corner

Right Room

• Light – Back of the room
• Darkness – Centre of the room
• Worm – Far-left corner
• Savathûn – Far-right corner

Take note of which symbols you need to turn on, and which ones you need to turn off. Then, go to those symbols and interact with the corresponding lens as needed. Many of the lenses will be locked down with Strand energy, for those you need to take out Unwritten Attendants to gain the Unwritten Empowerment buff, which allows you to destroy the Strand locks. Be careful, as each one you destroy will spawn a particularly nasty Threadling.

Damage phase

Once you have the correct symbols switched on or off, interact with the main symbol wheel in the central room to input your answer. As soon as you do, run for cover. This triggers a massive burning effect which will quickly kill you if you are out in the open. Use the shadows of the structures in the room to find a safe space, and wait until the burning dissipates.

If your symbols are lit up correctly, the boss’ shield will have burned away, and you can start dealing damage. Kerrev is a squirrelly customer, so you’ll need to keep up as he moves around the room. A great way to maximise your damage here is to use Divinity with a couple of Linear Fusion Rifles or Machine Guns for massive critical damage.

You’ll only have a short while to deal damage before Kerrev’s shield regenerates. When that happens, repeat the steps exactly as you did before to trigger another damage phase. Repeat the process until Kerrev is dead, and the Sundered Doctrine dungeon is complete.

Fingers crossed you were rewarded the dungeon’s exotic, Finality’s Auger — but if not, the previous link delves into ways you can improve your drop rate.