If you’ve been playing Destiny 2 over the last year or so, this season’s best Warlock build should not be a surprise at all. With Season of Arrivals, Bungie has reintroduced Oppressive Darkness and that alone determines where most Warlock players will go with their builds.
For any kind of build making, I highly recommend using a third-party app, like Destiny Item Manager. Destiny still doesn’t have custom loadout slots. Nor can you filter items in your Vault according to category, element, ammo type, etc. No one Warlock build is ever best for every situation! So saving loadouts will save you a ton of hassle down the line. Anyway, with that said, let’s get to it!
More Destiny 2:
- Destiny 2 Season of Arrivals Calendar Guide – Roadmap, Event Dates
- The Best PVE Weapons in Destiny 2 (June 2020 Season of Arrivals Meta)
- Destiny 2 Forerunner Title Guide – All Required Triumphs for Season of Arrivals Title
Destiny 2 Warlock Build Armor Choices
As per usual, you can put together this Warlock build with basically any Legendary armor you want. Prioritize the stats you want to maximize but exclude your helmet. That’s where we’re going to slot in Nezarec’s Sin which increases ability recharge rate with void damage kills. This, combined with the aforementioned Oppressive Darkness lets you cast your super much more quickly than usual. When Oppressive Darkness is slotted into your class item, Void grenades weaken enemy combatants which further helps you eliminate them.
For this reason, we highly recommend focusing on Discipline and Intellect. These will minimize the amount of time between grenades and supers.
Destiny 2 Warlock Build Weapon & Mod Selection
There are a few different ways you can go with your build this time around. Let’s start with the most obvious.
New this season is the Unstoppable Pulse Rifle armor mod. This makes it so that even your exotic pulse rifles like Outbreak Perfected are finally useful in dealing with champions. If you decide that’s something you want, make sure to run that mod in addition to Pulse Rifle Loader to hasten your reloads and increase your DPS.
There’s also a dedicated sword using community this season as well. For that you’ll want to get any void sword though one with Relentless Strikes and Whirlwind Blade is the best. Then equip the following sword specific mods:
- Arms: Lucent Blade (Seasonal Slot)
- While Charged with Light, dealing damage with a Sword gives you bonus Sword damage for 5 seconds, consuming one stack of Charged with Light.
- Legs: Sword Scavenger (Enhanced if you have it)
And finally, thanks to Ehroar, we now know that Sidearms are incredibly powerful as well. And all you need for that is a single armor mod: Surprise Attack. While it does cost 10 Intellect to use, with it Charged with Light allows you to consume stacks when reloading or readying a Sidearm, converting them into a major damage buff. Each bullet consumes a single stack though it doubles the damage each shot does. This is obviously best combined with Devil’s Ruin which can get two full charges off before running out of stacks. Ehroar combines this with Mechaneer’s Tricksleeves (for Hunters, obviously) to further boost damage. When you become critically wounded with those, swapping to a Sidearm doubles its damage. In total you can quadruple your damage per shot or per blast with Devil’s Ruin. It’s very powerful!
Regardless of which of the above you choose, you’ll always want these mods. Though do note that some of these simply make the build better like Supercharged and Stacks on Stacks. While they aren’t required, they make things a hell of a lot better.
- Chest: Overload Grenades, Counter Charge, Supercharged (Seasonal Slot)
- Overload Grenades: Void grenades cause disruption, delaying ability energy regeneration and lowering combatant damage output. Strong against Overload Champions.
- Counter Charge: Become Charged with Light whenever you or a member of your fireteam staggers or disrupts a Champion or pierces a Champion’s barrier.
- Supercharged: You can have 2 additional stacks of Charged with Light, up to a maximum of 5.
- Legs: Swift Charge
- Swift Charge: Become Charged with Light by rapidly defeating combatants with Pulse Rifles, Sidearms, or Submachine Guns.
- Class Item: Oppressive Darkness, Stacks on Stacks
- Stacks on Stacks: -10 Recovery. Gain an extra stack of Charged with Light for every stack you gain.
And that’s basically all you need to get rolling. Throw on Nova Bomb and get going!
