Blog

Jul 18, 2023

Here Are Destiny 2’s Next 14 Exotic Armor Buffs, From Least To Most Interesting

Destiny 2 We only have some vague hints about the themes and storylines of season 22 of Destiny 2, out in two weeks, but we have a lot of substantive information about how the sandbox is changing, and

Destiny 2

We only have some vague hints about the themes and storylines of season 22 of Destiny 2, out in two weeks, but we have a lot of substantive information about how the sandbox is changing, and once again, Bungie is taking its buff bat to a slew of underperforming pieces of exotic armor.

I’d argue that out of the big batch they did last time, few of the buffs actually moved all that many needles on the items. Will that happen this time? At least a few sound interesting, but others…not so much. I figured I would rank them from least to most interesting based on what we know here.

14. Winter’s Guile (Warlock Arms) – This is the “stack melee damage” exotic that is pretty bad on Warlocks. Now it auto-shatters enemies frozen by your Stasis Penumbral Blast melee attack after a delay. Given how not-difficult it is to shatter enemies, this does not sound terribly useful in the least. Also I hate Penumbral Blast, at least in PvE, even with some eventual buffs.

10-13. Icefall Mantle/Doom Fang Pauldrons/Path of the Burning Steps/Eternal Warrior (Titan Things) – These are all equally boring because they’re just extensions of Bungie’s new idea of giving exotics innate elemental weapon damage boosts to save you from spending mod slots. Icefall and Doomfang are just getting that for Stasis and Void respectively. Burning Steps already had it but now it activates on Solar Grenade kill too. Eternal Warrior now has a 30 second timer of max arc buffs after you super ends, not 10. I just don’t love this new philosophy of putting this on half the reworked exotics. Sometimes effective, but dull.

Knucklehead Radar

9. Knucklehead Radar (Hunter Helmet) – This one is funny because they just…gave it all Foetracer’s abilities, marking targets, doing more damage to low health marked targets and more Airborne Effectiveness. This joins the radar abilities of the original making it a more all-purpose PvP exotic. Not super exciting, but we’ll see how it does.

8. Renewal Grasps (Hunter Arms) – My one Stasis Hunter-obsessed friend will yell at me for ranking this low, but it’s mainly the reversion of a bad change back when Bungie was throwing everything at the wall to reduce stasis power. They increased Duskfield grenade cooldown a crazy amount for this exotic, but now that’s undone. Should be a lot better, and remember how insane this was at its peak. Maybe it will be that again.

7. Hallowfire Heart (Titan Chest) – This one is sort of confusing, but I’m excited about it because I have always loved this chest. They have removed “base energy to Solar abilities” and replaced it with a perk that lets you build more into Sunspots. They…are not saying what this perk is? The ability regen on super being charged is still there. But I love sunspots so I hope this is good.

Geomag

6. Geomag Stabilizers (Warlock Legs) – They still will not add back in the ability to “top off” your super with Geomags, presumably because of the same issues in PvP that got that deleted in the first place. Instead they will now have Ionic Traces give you more super energy. It would have to be a lot to get this to compete with Crown of Tempest or Sunstar, however, on arc builds.

5. ACD/0 Feedback Fence (Titan Arms) – Here’s an interesting one. Old basic perk is dead. New idea is that punching gives you an Armor Charge, then when you are punched, that charge is spent to explode into arc jolting energy, and deals more damage the more Armor Charge stacks you have. Depending how much damage this has, that could be interesting, though I’m not usually wild about the concept of needing to get meleed to trigger the main perk of something.

4. Foetracer (Hunter Helmet) – Starting to get into the genuinely interesting ones now. Since they took all Foetracer’s perks and gave them to Knucklehead, they essentially gave it an entire artifact perk from past seasons. Damaging enemies with abilities gives a damage bonus to elemental weapons of the type. Then defeating those damaged enemies spawns a trace/sprite/tangle whatever for your subclass. That actually sounds really good.

Wings

3. Wings of Sacred Dawn (Warlock Chest) – I think the idea of building so much into Warlock floating has always been an issue with the class, but this sounds like goofy fun, if not tactically sound. You will now auto-reload your guns when you kill enemies in the air, meaning you don’t drop as often for reload. They suggest trying this with Xenophage so you can be an AC-130. Does sound like it’s worth trying out.

2. Lucky Raspberry (Hunter Chest) – Sadly the buff is not getting ornaments that don’t suck. But the actual buff makes me excited as someone who likes arc Hunter but is tired of only building into melee for it. This now not only increases chains on arcbolt grenades, but now you get the grenade back on Jolt damage, and the entire exotic now lets you stun Overload champions even when you don’t Jolt them, just with normal damage. Hmmm, I kind of love it.

Verse

1. Astrocyte Verse (Warlock Helmet) – Keeps the old blink stuff. Now when you blink you make enemies near you Volatile. Then when you’re in Nova Warp, you can blind without spending any energy, Volatiling-up the entire field. Seems like this could create a really fun loop with so much potential application of Volatile as you hop around between enemies. Looking forward to seeing this one in action.

Which of these are you the most exciting about, or meh on?

Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.