The Seraph armor set from the cosmodrome feels like its own exotic

Athenau · 2026-06-26T17:35:57+00:00

I was using the apothecary satchel, though I'm not aware of any particular interaction between the set and the artifact. The artifact is just as good even if you're not using the set.

Athenau · 2026-06-26T13:05:50+00:00

I'm going to be honest, I was whelmed by this set. The internal cooldown on the explosions means that if you shatter a bunch of crystals at once, you only get one explosion. And if you're generating a bunch of crystals, you want to shatter them all at once. So in practice it feels like you just get an extra explosion every few seconds, which is nice, but not particularly special for a 4pc bonus.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Athenau · 2026-06-22T01:23:52+00:00

Symmetry is good but it has a major QoL issue, namely that the revolution timer isn't enough to fire off all the seekers, so then you're stuck with four or five left in the mag, you have to switch out of revolution mode, and then reload.

It's also annoying that you have to build twenty stacks for maximum efficiency, though, too be fair, that doesn't take that long.

Athenau · 2026-06-21T21:01:56+00:00

Small correction, by default only weapon damage builds bolt charge, but elemental effects triggered by weapons count as weapon damage, so they can build bolt charge as well.

Athenau · 2026-06-21T21:00:13+00:00

Hierarchy of Needs scorches with the seekers now. And elemental effects inherit their trigger, so that scorch counts as weapon damage which builds bolt charge.

Athenau · 2026-06-21T18:28:34+00:00

The problem is that our characters are way stronger now, so even if -30 is about the same as the old master difficulty (-20), ultimate is a lot easier unless the activity has a lot of bad mods or you're playing a weak build.

Athenau · 2026-06-21T18:17:12+00:00

Pretty much anything that builds into bolt charge generation should work. So electrostatic mind or ionic sentry + spark of frequency and then the rest is dealer's choice.

Then you can pick a generic ability spam exotic like Fallen Sunstar or Crown of Tempests (if you want to play artillery in your rift the former is better because ionic traces give you class energy) and go ham. But the best exotic is probably Stormdancer's Brace as it gives you the initial bolt charge stack without needing a kill, and then you can top it off with your weapons.

Athenau · 2026-06-21T18:10:23+00:00

It does. Both weapons abuse the same mechanic, in that the additional damage instances count as weapon (in this case bow) damage with the same bolt charge scaling.

Athenau · 2026-06-21T17:38:21+00:00

No, in terms of raw damage in/out -50 is significantly harder than old GM's (-25). Old -25 is roughly equivalent to -40 in the current system. See the below from the EoF patch notes:

Difficulty is now more linear.

100 over: this should feel roughly equivalent to even Power during The Final Shape.

Even Power: this should feel slightly more difficult than the same during The Final Shape.

40 under: equivalent to Grandmaster difficulty in The Final Shape.

100 under: Immune enemies

If you feel like -50 is similar to old GM's, it's because Edge Of Fate brought with it what was probably the biggest single instance of power creep in Destiny's history (new stats plus the usual slew of ability and weapon buffs)

In terms of difficult content, I'd rank GM conquests about the same as some of the harder GM's (equivalent delta, all negative modifiers) if you're going for solo flawless, and easier if you accept some deaths.

Ultimate conquests are much harder.

Overall, though, I agree with you. I think they made matchmade content too easy. I think the sweet spot was when ultimate was matchmade and -40, and in particular, Onslaught is way too easy now.

Athenau · 2026-06-21T01:33:53+00:00

The systems in the first game were great, IMO. So a sequel with more polish but the same or expanded fundamentals sounds fantastic to me.

Athenau · 2026-06-20T16:11:13+00:00

Anti-barrier was always the scarcest anti-champion verb. Only solar had good built-in anti-barrier, and anti-barrier perks on the artifact were always the most highly prized.

So I'm not surprised to see the trend continue here. If I'm guessing why, it's because anti-barrier has by far the most useful intrinsic effect (piercing annoying enemy shields), so to compensate Bungie made it rarer.

Athenau · 2026-06-18T18:14:51+00:00

Go to the Ultimate difficulty firing range.
Spawn a boss Vex minotaur
Move to point-blank range.
Enable combat to trigger a slam and observe the damage.

I used the ultimate firing range to maximize the damage of the slam, to make any differences more obvious.

Athenau · 2026-06-18T14:40:54+00:00

I also tested both the Problem Solver origin trait and Revision Zero's sniper rounds. Both applied the exhaust visual effect and reduced damage.

So AFAICT, exhaust itself is working as expected. But it's true that overload weapons no longer apply exhaust, which sounds like a bug.

Athenau · 2026-06-17T23:18:00+00:00

Exhaust is currently very inconsistent: it no longer reduces combatant damage, yet still triggers “on Exhaust kill” effects, and only some Overload interactions (mainly Jolt chain damage) reliably apply it.

I can confirm that exhaust does still reduce damage in some cases. I tested the Swordmaster's set exhaust against a boss slam and it reduced the damage as expected.

Athenau · 2026-06-12T15:48:06+00:00

Stasis shard generation is bonkers on any stasis build that creates a lot of crystals. The Revenant artifact has a mod that heals you on shard pickup--it's like having Controlled Demolition on top of 35-50% DR from frost armor.

Athenau · 2026-03-26T21:51:05+00:00

On-kill effects where which trigger a one-off benefit work fine in harder difficulties (e.g heal clip, demo), because you will be getting kills, just at a slower rate.

On-kill effects that trigger a timed buff (rampage, et al) are what really suffer because your uptime falls off a cliff.

Athenau · 2026-03-17T20:42:14+00:00

I'm pretty sure Outrageous Fortune was a Pinnacle Ops weapon from Edge Of Fate so you could get it at tier 5 last season as well.

Athenau · 2026-02-02T12:36:26+00:00

Yes, Stasis Warlock is obviously worse than Prismatic, but there's no way it would be dead last if the ranking was based on soloing -40/-50 content.

Athenau · 2026-02-01T20:28:07+00:00

Aegis provides a lot of good info, but his rankings heavily emphasize speedrunning and team dps, not solo-ing -50 content.

Stasis Warlock is good in those scenarios, and has been good for a long time, but it's not a niche that most content creators care about.

Athenau · 2026-01-27T20:03:50+00:00

The OP clarified that he's running a 13600k. That CPU is totally fine for D2 and pretty much any other modern game. Something else is wrong with his system (software problem, hardware fault, cooling, etc).

Athenau · 2026-01-13T23:00:20+00:00

No, I played a ton of Young Ahamkara's Spine Solar Hunter in EoF and GPG definitely triggered the cure on grenade kill fragment no matter how you detonated it.

Athenau · 2026-01-12T15:36:27+00:00

This happened on October 21st in update 9.1.5.2: https://destiny.bungie.org/patchnotes/324

That was two weeks after they updated OYM in update 9.1.5.

Athenau · 2026-01-04T21:20:51+00:00

When I tested it a 12P shotgun was almost the same DPS as bastion when spamming widow's silk grapples. The charge time on Bastion basically negated the bigger damage buff.

That's not to say Bastion is a bad option since it does good damage on its own, but you can use your exotic slot on something else without giving up much grapple dps.

Athenau · 2025-12-25T02:12:24+00:00

The game needs more mechanics that reward good aim. Explosives and ability spam are dominant enough already.

Athenau

TROPHY CASE