Arc subclasses have been a little neglected in Destiny 2 Season of Defiance, with most of the Seasonal Artifact mods focusing on Strand, Solar, and Void abilities. Still, with a little buildcrafting, Stormcallers can still be quite powerful. Here’s an Arc Warlock build for Season of Defiance that focuses on jolting enemies.
Destiny 2 Arc Warlock Build — Aspects and Fragments
Electrostatic Mind is a no-brainer for its ability to generate Ionic Traces and grant Amplified when you pick them up. Your choice of a second aspect is up to you. Arc Soul is fantastic, of course, but Lightning Surge is a powerful melee ability that can also jolt enemies. Both aspects give you two fragments slots, so it’s down to personal preference.
For fragments, we want Spark of Shock, Spark of Discharge, Spark of Ions, and Spark of Haste. These will grant us jolting grenades, a chance to make Ionic Traces on Arc weapon kills, Ionic Traces on defeating jolted targets, and a boost to resilience, recovery, and mobility while sprinting.
Choice of grenades is up to you, though it’s worth noting that Flashbang Grenades will give you an intrinsic means of dealing with Unstoppable Champions thanks to the changes made in Lightfall.
Neither Stormcaller super is particular useful for DPS right now, but they’re both nice for picking off powerful enemies and doing add control. Either one is fine.
Destiny 2 Arc Warlock Build — Gear and Mods
There are two main Warlock Exotics for Arc users — Fallen Sunstar and Crown of Tempests. To some extent it’s a matter of taste as to which you pick. Fallen Sunstar emphasizes Ionic Traces and benefits your allies, which is nice, but for this build we’re going to run Crown of Tempests. That’s because it grants ability energy not just from ability kills, but from jolt final blows, and we’re going to be doing a lot of jolting.
For weapons, you want something with Voltshot. The IKELOS SMG would be ideal if you have a good roll or crafted one, but anything that can reliably proc Voltshot will work.
These are the target mods for the build, though obviously you also want to try to get your Resilience and Recovery up as high as possible:
- Head: Harmonic Siphon x2, Ashes to Assets x1
- Arms: Impact Induction, Font of Focus x2
- Chest: Charged Up x1, Font of Endurance
- Legs: Arc Weapon Surge x2
- Bond: Time Dilation x2
Seasonal Artifact Perks
Under the new Destiny 2 artifact system, unlocking a Seasonal Artifact perk automatically applies it. That means you can eventually have all of them active. Unfortunately, there are no Arc-specific artifact perks in the Season of Defiance. Still, there are some generally useful ones in the mix. Prismatic Transfer gives your non-Arc allies a weapon damage boost when you pop your super, and Authorized Mods: Grenades makes grenade mods cheaper.
