Destiny 2 Warlock BuildSolar Warlock Ignition Chaining Build

I live for the satisfying destructive power of ignitions. This super fun warlock build is meant to get tons of ignitions as well as maintain Restoration 2x nearly indefinitely.

TLDR: Using an incandescent primary weapon, easily stack scorch on enemies to chain frequent and powerful ignitions. Take advantage of the frequent solar kills to maintain Restoration 2x, making it much easier to survive in end game content and nearly impossible to die in normal content. This build also makes it possible to chain ignitions essentially ensuring enemies either die in an ignition explosion or cause an additional ignition explosion.

There are 5 main components to this build.

1. Dawn Chorus: Dawn Chorus does many things but we are using it to improve our scorch. Importantly, it increases scorch damage by 200%.

2. Incandescent Weapon: Incandescent is probably the best legendary weapon perk in the game that spreads 30 scorch stacks to neighboring targets on a kill. This is a huge factor in achieving constant Ignitions which require 100 stacks on a single enemy to proc. Any weapon with Incandescent will work for this build, but I find these 2 specific weapons the most effective and fun. For solo play, I use a Luna's Howl with subsistence and Incandescent. Scorch and Ignition kills caused by your weapon count as weapon kills and therefore proc subsistence. This essentially means you never have to reload. For team play, I definitely recommend using No Hesitation with Physic and Incandescent. You maintain the game play loop with incandescent while also keeping your team mates alive AND providing yourself a way to proc/maintain restoration. It makes for a super fun game play style that isn't just "shoot things, keep walking."

3. Dragon's Breath: This exotic is an ignition BEAST. On contact, the rocket spreads pools of fire that stack scorch on nearby targets. I don't know the numbers but it takes less than a second for an enemy to ignite. You can easily get 4-5 ignitions on a boss with just one rocket.

4. Chain ignitions: This is easily the best part of this build and is just stupid fun. There are 2 necessary solar fragments to chain ignitions: 1. Ember of Char - ignitions apply scorch stacks to enemies damaged by the ignition explosion. 2. Ember of Ashes - increase number of scorch stacks you apply by roughly 50% [incandescent: 30 -> 45 | Ember of Char: 40 -> 60 | Hellion 30 -> 45] With these two fragments, any ignition will cause a chain reaction as long as there are enemies close enough and strong enough to not die immediately. This means that anyone caught in an ignition either dies or ignites which usually results in death. A small caveat here is that for an enemy to ignite from another ignition, they need at least 40 scorch stacks before the explosion. Fortunately with this build, the minimum number of scorch stacks we can apply is 45, and with hellion, incinerator snap, Dragons Breath and Incandescent, there are so many sources of scorch, you do not have to think about this. My favorite is chaining ignitions on 2 close champions in a grandmaster, they will literally continue to ignite until one of them is dead, sometimes after 10 consecutive ignitions!

5. Maintaining Restoration 2x Restoration 2x is super powerful for endgame survivability. I have found that using both Ember of Emperyan [solar final blows extend restoration] and Ember of Solace [restoration and radiant have a 50% longer duration] are necessary to make constant restoration much easier and something you rarely have to think about. It is also necessary to run Touch of Flame [improves healing nade effect] and Healing nade to proc Restoration 2x. Without Ember of Solace, you have a much tighter window between proccing Restoration and getting a solar kill that I am maybe successful 40% of the time. Your max restoration time is also shorter which forces you to focus on keeping restoration up instead of having fun blowing things up. With the aforementioned fragments and aspects, throwing your healing nade will give an instant 6 seconds of Restoration 2x which is more than enough time to get a solar kill. Your max Restoration time is 15 seconds as well. This is enough time to chain some kills and by the time enemies start dwindling, you should have your healing nade back to refresh back up to 15 seconds of Restoration 2x. If you miss the window then you just start again at 6. This is where No Hesitation comes in. The perk Physic is so powerful because after shooting a team mate with 6 healing shots which grants them restoration, you refresh your own Restoration timer back to whatever your max was at the time. This is different from extending restoration with a solar kill which will only add a couple seconds to the timer. This means that if you are running out of restoration and there are no enemies you can kill, you can simply heal a teammate to keep restoration going. This is SUPER helpful in endgame content where average enemies can be cumbersome to kill.

Additional Notes:

Kinetic Slot Your Kinetic slot is super flexible with this build. I would go for something with good burst damage. In my build I have an Autoloading, Recombination Mountaintop. The gameplay loop with this is super rewarding. Recombination takes 10 kills to charge all the way for 100% more damage on your next shot. Because of the nature of the build, this happens SUPER fast. When I encounter a stronger enemy, i simply swap to my nearly always charged recombination mountaintop and get huge burst damage. Then I immediately switch back to my primary. Autoloading reloads the weapon so I'm ready to get huge damage again after a couple seconds of getting ignition kills. You could also use something like chill clip riptide for more utility with champions or even Swap out Dragon's breath for a heavy with incandescent so that you could use Conditional Finality in the Kinetic slot. Honestly its super fun either way.

Solar Fulmination Currently you can apply the Solar fulmination seasonal mod to add even more scorch stacks from every source! I am not sure how the math works, I only know that it DOES stack with Ember of Ashes.

Subsistence Using an incandescent + subsistence solar weapon in the energy slot means you never have to reload. Because of the increase scorch damage from Dawn Chorus, you will frequently get scorch kills which counts as weapon kills and refills the mag with subsistence. If you use my exact build, none of the weapons you have will ever need to be reloaded. Once you play this way it is JARRING to have to start reloading again on other builds.

Super This build is so fun and synergistic, I frequently sit on my fully charged super because I simply do not need it. However, Song of Flame is an easy winner for huge damage, tons of ignitions and stupid ability regen for you and your allies. It also refreshes all your abilities at the end of your super so you can continue the game play loop.

Hellion Phoenix dive is an easy class ability choice with a short cool down and instant healing in a pinch. The most important part of the class ability is the Solar Aspect Hellion, which spawns a solar mortar that does HUGE damage as well as applies enough scorch stacks to get an ignition in 3 shots which takes about 2-3 seconds. This just adds to all of the scorch on the battlefield making ignitions more frequent even with encounters with higher health enemies.

Mods The mods aren't super important for this build but definitely enhance the experience. What I focus on are generating enough orbs to keep my armor charged [2 harmonic siphon mods] and increasing my solar weapon damage [2 Solar Weapon Surge mods]. I use the rest of the mod slots to take advantage of kills and orbs to recharge my grenade so I always have access to Restoration 2x [2x Impact Induction & 2x Bomber]. I run one copy of Font of Vigor to effectively give me 100 melee even though I would say the powered melee is the least important part of the build, though it can be an easy instant ignition in a pinch. I also found that as long as I have Time Dilation, I can maintain armor charge pretty much indefinitely.

Solar damage boosts This build offers tons of sources of damage boosts. Using the Radiant Orbs artifact perk grants 10 seconds of Radiant [flat 25% weapon damage boost to all weapons] on orb pick up which is refreshed every solar kill using Ember of Empyrean. Gathering orbs also means filling stacks of Armor charge which further increases solar weapon damage with solar surge mods[17% additional damage to solar weapons when using 2 stacks].

Fragment Combination Using these 4 solar Fragments obviously means you have to give up on some great fragments like Ember of Eruption which increases ignition radius, but after extensive testing I have found that this is the best combination for high damage, high ignition frequency, and easily maintained Restoration. All other combinations lack too greatly in one or more of these areas to be useful/fun.

Enhanced weapon Perks Obviously I would enhance all weapon perks where possible but I think the most important ones to enhance are Incandescent [adds 5 additional scorch stacks] and Subsistence [increases ammo refill from 20% to 30%]. For my luna's howl, this means 4 bullets every kill. With 13 in the mag, this is so easy to keep fully loaded constantly.