Of the features available to Strand subclasses in Destiny 2, Threadlings feel the most underwhelming. Suspending enemies is a powerful effect, grappling is fun and useful for quick movement, and unravelling can help with crowd control. Threadlings, though, don’t feel like they have a whole lot of impact.
Of course, Threadlings aren’t entirely useless in Destiny 2. In PVP, they’re nice for scoring trades. And in PVE, they’re a source of extra damage. But on their own, they can’t compete with the other options.
Take Warlocks, for instance, who are ostensibly supposed to be the Threadling master class in Destiny 2. The best current Warlock Strand build involves using consuming your Tangle Grenades to get nearly-infinite access to a buff that causes suspending explosions on enemy defeats. Suspending enemies means they can’t fight back and provides a useful means of dealing with Champions. Forgoing the ability to suspend foes in favor of the Threadling-generating grenade means losing out on a big advantage of Strand.
You can build into Threadlings, but doing so requires a lot of work, spending fragment slots on improving them. Again, this means forgoing options which could help you be more effective if you weren’t trying to use them at all.
How could Destiny 2 improve Threadlings? Maybe a baseline increase to their lifespan would help. Other options would include letting them apply some kind of debuff to enemies or increasing their damage, but that would probably make them overpowered. With new Strand aspects coming to Destiny 2 soon, maybe we’ll see some new uses for Threadlings. Until then, they’re basically just a nice bonus for most Strand subclass users, rather than something that’s worth building around.
What do you think of Threadlings? Do you have any builds that focus on creating and managing them? Let us know in the comments below.
