Destiny 2 Warlock BuildRime-Coat Double Special Aggressive Prism Lock

Whilst most of the community's attention has been drawn to the reworked/buffed Starfire Protocol and its very strong builds, I genuinely think this build can go head to head with it this season and it's a lot of fun - especially if you find the Starfire gameplay experience as mind-numbingly boring as I do.

The build revolves around the Rime-Coat Raiment Exotic Warlock chest piece that juices our Bleak Watcher turret in multiple ways to spread CC and debuffs across the battlefield with nearly permanent uptime. Rime-Coat grants our turret increased range, spawns in 4 Stasis crystals (that will respawn after 15 seconds) on use and grants all of our weapons icicles when standing within the storm created by the Exotic, letting bullets deal 50 extra Stasis damage and inflict x50 slow stacks when we have any stacks of Bleak Domain in the bottom left of your screen.

Normally, Rime-Coat builds have coupled it with weapons such as Wicked Implement, focusing on long-range combat to freeze targets from a safe distance and spawn lots of Stasis shards. Whilst that version is still good - this one is just better. We're f*cking off Wicked Implement for the featured Exotic Trace Rifle Ager's Scepter. Similar to WIcked Implement, it is a featured Exotic, giving it a flat 10% damage buff in all activities. It does a lot of damage and released a freezing burst in a large radius on kill, essentially doing the same thing the Frigid Glare artifact perk does, freeing us up a valuable slot there. For our other two weapons, definitely take Aberrant Action in the energy slot as it benefits from a lot of artifact perks and helps us with Light Transcendence energy. Craft one with Field Prep / Incandescent as we don't need Heal Clip due to our many forms of DR and healing and Field Prep has been reworked to give +40 ammo generation stat which makes running double Special stupidly easy. It's alos just a fantastic weapon. For heavy, take a Stasis weapon that can do good single target damage for Bosses and Champions as this will let you benefit from some of our armor mods and there is one in particular that you wil probably already have in Cold Comfort.

In combat, throw your Bleak Watcher at packs of enemies instead of at your feet in order to shatter the wall of Stasis crystals immediately to instantly proc Devour and wipe out packs of ads. The icicle mechanic on Rime-Coat really isn't worth playing into and using it in this more aggressive way isn't just better, but a lot more fun. Given our choices for weapons, these crystals can easily be shattered in a single shot of our energy weapon and benefits from a whole host of artifact perk synergies.

We opt to use Prismatic instead of pure Stasis to take advantage of Devour, which should always be chosen on any Prismatic Warlock builds for health and grenade energy on kill once activated through any ability kill (this includes shatter kills which are happening all the time). For our other abilities we take Arcane Needle for 3 charges and also as it is just the best melee this subclass has available (not even a debate). For class ability we take Phoenix Dive for emergency Cure and easy activations of Powerful Attraction and Reaper mods. For our grenade, since Bleak Watcher can be activated by charging any grenade, we take Storm Grenade as it is a fantastic grenade that also gives us access to Amplified on any Arc multikills. You'll have so much grenade energy flowing on this build that you'll often find that you'll be able to chuck out these greandes more often than you'd think (whilst already having multiple Bleak Watcher turrets online. For the super, we take Song of Flame as it is the best Super in the game and also gives us Restoration from Facet of Purpose. Worth noting that you should try and use Aberrant Action as much as possible as it has amazing ammo generation for your two Special weapons and will be the main source of Light Transcendence energy as you will get a full Darkness bar filled up easily and very fast without much thought, so try not to let your Light bar fall behind.

Stat wise, get to 100 grenade and I wouldn't advise giong too far over - we want our Bleak Watcher online as much as possible and as we aren't using it for straight up damage it doesn't really make sense dumping more valuable stat points into it. I'd recommend putting the rest of your stats into either weapons or super, I've gone for weapons as I've found that we can get Song of Flame charged extremely fast without a large investment in it and extra damage isn't really needed.

As already mentioned, we run Facet of Purpose for Restoration x1 for 5 seconds on orb pickup alongside Facet of Protection for 15% damage resistance when near 3 or more enemies. These two should be ran on literally every Prismaticbuild regardless of class (unless you're running an Arc Super in which case you can drop Purpose as it wastes a fragment slot for Bolt Charge). As for the other 2 fragments, run Facet of Balance for 10% melee energy and 10% grenade energy on Light and Dark multikills (3 rapid kills) respectively. Lastly, take Facet of Dawn for 5 seconds of Radiant on any Arcane Needle hits. You can swap this out thanks to Fever and Chill from the artifact if you'd like, other options you could use are Facet of Courage or Facet of Command.

Armor mods go like this:

Helmet

Solar / Stasis siphon for orbs on any weapon multikills Special Ammo Finder for more Special bricks

Gloves

Firepower for an orb on grenade kills Two copies of Momentum Transfer for 17% melee energy on dealing grenade damage

Chest

Rainbow resists for DR

Legs

Two Stasis weapon surges for a 17% Stasis weapon damage buff whenever we have Armor Charge - can swap for two Weapon Fonts if you'd like instead One Stasis scavenger for more Ager's Scepter and Cold Comfort ammo

Class Item

Reaper for an orb after getting a kill following a Phoenix Dive Powerful Attraction for easy orb pickup Time Dilation for longer surge buffs

As for the artifact, there's a lot we can benefit from as I made this build with it in mind as there's some really strong perks in it this season:

Take Flame, Fiber and Freeze to free up space on your helmet for mods Take Fever and Chill for Radiant and Frost Armor from Solar and Stasis rapid precision hits or multikills (the artifact leaves out the multikill part for some reason) Take Frost Renewal for a large freezing burst whenever your shields break, fantastic in harder content Take Reciprocal Draw for a 15% damage buff for our Aberrant Action after scoring a multikill with a different weapon Take Cauterized Darkness to deal 30% more damage with Solar weapons or abilities on any Darkness debuffed non-Boss targets (this is invaluable and turns Song of Flame and Aberrant Action into nukes) Take Elemental Coalescence for a chance to spawn in Firesprites for 12.5% grenade energy when getting multikills from any source Take Radiant Shrapnel for free AoE Solar explosions when Radiant Take Shieldcrush for more grenade ability regen and damage and melee ability regen and damage whenever we have Frost Armor, Amplified or Radiant respectively

Please give this build a spin, especially if like me you are bored to death of Starfire this season. You really don't have to do anything special or difficult to get the gameplay loop rolling and the whole thing is a ton of fun. Try it out!