I only play my Warlock now, and I’m pretty much 50/50 on Sunbracers and Chromatic Fire.
Sunbracers are very flexible with weapons, and I mainly use Conditional Finality, Hollow Denial (Lead From Gold + Killing Tally), and The Other Half for well skating.
For Chromatic Fire, I just use Wish Ender and arc. Wish Ender is already insanely powerful, and the added blinding explosions are just so good. I usually pair it with Forbearance or Techeun Force (Rewind Rounds + Controlled Burst), and Apex Predator (Reconstruction + Bait and Switch).
What is everyone else here rocking this season?
On my Titan, I’m running solar with Synthoceps. 3x Synthoceps Solar Titans + Tractor Cannon vs Ecthar is a big meme. I’ve also been trying out Strongholds recently for a nice change of playstyle.
For my Warlock, it’s an arc ability spam build with Crown of Tempests. Arc just feels really good with the artifact mods this season, and arc warlock makes the new dungeon almost trivial. While I’m kinda glad to be free of Starfire, I’m struggling to find a decent build for running well on solar. I find Sunbracers to be inconsistent to proc. Do you have a decent Sunbracers/welllock build to recommend?
On my Hunter, I’ve been enjoying one of Plunderthabooty’s builds for Threadrunner. Constant suspend uptime and woven mail uptime by using Radiant Dance Machines. Super fun build!
Sunbracers is pretty simple. Heat Rises and Touch of Flame, obviously. For fragments, the one to apply more scorch, regen class ability energy from scorched targets, apply radiant on powered melee hits, and extend restoration and radiant with solar kills. Use snap and phoenix dive.
Your loop is just activate Heat Rises, melee, dive, spam nades. Then alternate between melee and nades, saving your dive to refresh restoration.
Heat Rises is important because it gets you melee energy back super easily, and it buffs your dive; diving with it active gets you three seconds of restoration x2 as well as scorches. The restoration is self-explanatory; sometimes it’s a good idea to throw a grenade, then get restoration to get an immediate timer extension. Phoenix Dive also lets you get melee kills; as long as you apply scorch with your melee first, diving will stack onto that, ignite, and count as a melee kill because the scorch was applied by a melee initially. This lets you essentially melee healthier targets.
Weapons are up to you. I enjoy double special with Conditional Finality and Acasia’s Dejection, and Other Half for skating, but you’re mainly reliant on your Sunbracers for everything; your weapons are fairly supplemental to the build.
Thanks for the advice! I think I just need to commit the game loop with Heat Rises -> Melee -> Phoenix Dive -> Nades to muscle memory. The window in which you can extend your Restoration is very small.
By the way, thanks for the tip about Phoenix Dive’s scorch proccing your melee via scorch, that will go a long way to making it more reliable. I didn’t know that.
The Phoenix Dive too was a game changer for me. I usually don’t have any problems getting restoration rolling; snap, dive, throw, and I’m usually up and running. If you have Heat Rises already active and need to proc restoration, throw your grenade first and then start the combo. It’ll get you a head start on extending the timer. Once you play with it a bit, you’ll learn how it all flows together.
Another thing to keep in mind is boss damage. Only one solar grenade can damage a target at once, so you can’t just stack damage over time on a boss, but the lava blobs from Touch of Flame can stack up. So, depending on the enemy and arena, you can either landmine grenade directly and surround them with others, allowing the lava to possibly hit them, or widen the actual grenade area so they’re still taking damage as they move. Or you can stack a bunch of grenades on a ceiling or wall high above the target, allowing the blobs to all group up and do massive damage. This is kinda tricky and is reliant on the boss standing somewhat still underneath a perfect spot to stack them. There’s some good videos showing this out there that I can’t link at the moment at work.