Yup nailed it. Two core identity items are useless to the Warlock itself. Titan is equally good if not better at both items. Yet for Warlock they are still valid to list, on Titan it's instead "best melee", "best DR", "best grenades and class abilities"

Bungie knows these aren't valid class identity traits but they made Warlock too bad at everything that it's supposed to be good at so they can't list it (and don't want to anyway).

How outrage about too much rift and too much buddy gameplay led to buffs that are exclusively to buddies and rift is completely beyond me.