The new best practice for DPS

I've been watching a lot of videos about the new DPS meta after Lightfall, and here's what I've found. There is a lot of info, so if you have any questions (or if there is any inaccurate information) let me know.

Weapon Surge Mods

One common factor I have been seeing with a lot of DPS builds is that they all utilize the Weapon Surge mods. These mods increase damage for the specified elemental type. Here are the numbers:

1 Mod: 10% more damage
2 Mods: 17% more damage
3 Mods: 22% more damage Keep in mind, to increase the damage in this way, the mods have to be the same element. An 'arc surge mod' and a 'solar surge mod' would give two 10% damage increases.

I have started to see many DPS builds that take advantage of this new system by matching the element of your heavy and special weapon and then stack 3 weapon surge mods to apply the 22% damage to both weapons. There will be a couple down below. Other mods to make this easier would include 'time dilation' on the class item, and 'stacks on stacks' on the legs. If you include 2 'time dilation' mods, then picking up 1 orb of power gives 30 seconds of the damage buff.

One amazing change is that, with the new system, your subclass does not have to match the weapon damage. (I am very happy about this)

Rockets

General info

With the nerf to LFR damage, rockets have started to come back on top, and there are two main types of rocket builds I'm seeing. However, what I've been seeing in common with all of them are the use of Gjallarhorn. G-horn itself is not the greatest damage, but the fact that it allows all other legendary rockets to gain wolfpack rounds outweighs this concern.

Update:

In a raid setting, the most effective way to use rockets is for the entire team to use legendary rockets, except for 1 person who is using Gjallarhorn. Extotic rocket lauchers do not obtain the Wolfpack Rounds buff from Gjallarhorn, and any legendary rocket launcher with a good roll and Wolfpack Rounds will outpace even the best exotic rocket launcher.

Fun note about G-Horn (or as my sister wants to me to call it Gally-Wally... shudder)

Update:

Season 22 introduced the solar fusion rifle "The Eremite." This is a craft able weapon that has the combo of envious assassin + controlled burst. This combo works very much like my lucky pants combo below, but any class can do it and it benefits from the same surge mods as Gjallarhorn. Back to the original post.

One of my favorite things to do on hunter is to pair G-Horn with Lucky Pants. This exotic turns almost any hand-cannon into a top-tier DPS monster. My personal cadence is to fire the rocket twice to give my allies wolfpack rounds, swap to my hand cannon, unload into the boss until I get the out of luck debuff, continue using G-Horn until the debuff goes away, and swap back to the hand cannon.

Rocket Frames

Shortly after the Witch Queen, Bungie made a change to how much damage a rocket launcher has based on the frame of that rocket launcher. This infographic has an amazing breakdown of how rockets work, but here's the TLDR: High-Impact Frames are the baseline for damage. Precision Frames to 10% damage less than baseline, and Adaptive and Aggressive frames to 10% more than baseline.

Implications

I'm going to break this down by considering 2 craftable stasis rockets: Bump in the Night, and Palmyra-B. When considering just the frames, Bump in the Night is going to do 20% more damage than Palmyra-B. But Palmyra gets free tracking. If the boss likes to move a lot, and is quite a ways away, or if a player does not have great confidence in their aim, then I think I would recommend the ease of use of Palmyra-B. This is compounded further when we consider that the best damage option for Bump in the Night is Frenzy, which is far more difficult to use than Palmyra's Explosive Light.

What to look for

The easy answer to this is reload-perk + damage perk. Below is a break-down of pros and cons for the various different perks. For boss DPS, keep an eye out for the perk "Impact Casing" in the mag-option column. This perk gives a small increase in your damage. It's not a game changer, but can be a nice bonus on top.

Reload perks

Field Prep
- Usually considered Best in Slot
- Pro: Increased reserve ammo
- Con: Remember to Crouch
Ensemble
- Increased reload speed when near allies
- Con: No benefit while solo
Impulse Amplifier
- Pro: Also increases rocket speed, which aids in ease-of use
- Con: Reload benefit not as useful as other options
Ambition Assassin
- Pro: Overflows magazine
- Con: Requires kill to overflow the mag. In a boss DPS setting, only your first and second shots will get any benefit.
- I almost always prefer Clown Cartridge over this perk
Auto Loading Holster
- Pro: Fire and Forget
- Con: In a raid setting, another well-rolled weapon is needed to reap the benefit.

Damage perks

Explosive Light
- Pro: 25% additional damage, and increases the blast radius.
- Con: Requires picking up an orb of light first
- Con: If you die, all stacks of Explosive light are lost
Chill Clip
- Can provide some interesting damage increases, I'm not entirely sure the most optimal way to use this, so I can't comment more.
Clown Cartridge
- Pro: Massively increases Bust DPS when used with Wolfpack rounds
- Con: Sustain DPS suffers
Lasting Impression
- Pro: increases rocket damage by 20%
- Con: 3 second delay can often mean that your last rocket detonates after boss is immune, thereby wasting the damage
- Interesting Interaction: When used with divinity, you can fire a rocket, swap to divinity, and because of the delay, you will boost the damage of your own rocket!
Frenzy
- Pro: 15% damage increase, as well as bump to reload speed
- Con: conditional on being in combat for extended period of time
- Here is a video explaining how the perk works
Vorpal Weapon
- Pro: extra 10% damage for free
- Con: Out of all of the damage perks, this one does the least.

Route 1: Izanagi's Burden

Izanagi's Burden is an Exotic Kinetic sniper rifle that has a long and interesting history with the game. This weapon allows you to hold reload to combine 4 rounds into 1 super-powered round. (the buff that appears to indicate this is called "Honed Edge" The catalyst further increases the damage to Honed Edge and is a must for using this weapon. It is also necessary to learn the very particular cadence for optimally using this weapon. It is possible to load the 'honed edge x4' shot in a single reload. Many people do not know this, and will wait for the default reload animation to finish, then manually load in the 'Honed Edge' shot. For those who want to learn how to utilize this more-difficult and more-rewarding DPS option, I recommend watching these 2 videos: Izanagi - Auto-Loading Rocket tutorial Reload Cancelling

A note on reload canceling that he does not go over. When Destiny 2 was launched, Bungie put a hidden cooldown into the game that does not allow a gun to be fired for a short time if the reload animation was canceled. The cooldown is short enough that if you are doing anything else before you fire (swapping weapons, throwing a grenade, etc) you will not encounter it, but you cannot reload cancel in order to try to get back to shooting your gun faster.

Route 2: Surge pairings

A few days ago I saw this video which showed how you can pair a Bump in the Night with the Irukandji being sold by Banshee (pick it up before 03-14-2022) to get similar damage numbers as an Izanagi hot swap build. Here are the components of this build:

Mod armor to get max weapon surge for as long as possible.
Grab rocket and sniper with the same damage type
- rocket should have perk to increase reload speed
- Sniper should have boss damage setup. Something with 'Triple Tale' / 'Fourth Times the Charm' and 'Vorpal' / 'Firing Line' / 'Focused Fury'
When damage starts, use all of your rocket ammo, then switch to the sniper.

In order for this to be comparable to Izanagi's, you must utilize the surge mods, so both the rocket and the sniper need to match.

Here are other weapon combos that you could look for:

Arc
- Rocket
  - Hothead
  - Crux Termination (season 23)
  - Sleepless (season 23)
- Sniper
  - Cloudstrike with catalyst
  - Adored
Solar
- Rocket
  - Apex Predator (season 21)
  - Hezen's Vengeance
  - Ascendancy
- Sniper
  - Twilight Oath (season 23)
  - Last Foray (season 21)
  - Luna Regolith III (season 22)
  - Crafted Ikelos Sniper from season 19
    - Fourth Times the Charm + focused fury
Void
- Heavy
  - Leviathan's Breath with catalyst
    - I know, it's not a rocket. But if you have the catalyst completed, this same setup puts in work.
- Sniper
  - Fugue-55 (best in slot)
  - Frozen orbit
  - Father's Sins (craftable)

Strand

Rocket

Semiotician

Field Prep, explosive light

This may not be an exhaustive list.

Update: The Ghosts of the Deep dungeon added a statis rocket launcher with envious assassin and bait and switch. This is an amazing rocket, but it is difficult to use optimally and even more difficult to get. If you have this, and really want to use it, reach out to me and we can talk. I pair mine with the Irukandji sniper rifle.

Linear Fusion Rifles

Legendary LFR

There are 2 main advantages to LFR's over rockets. One is their high ammo reserve. LFR's have amazing total damage output. Even after the nerf, this is largely true. The second advantage they had was their ability to dump insane amounts of ammo without needing to reload. For most LFR's this is no longer reliably possible, as the perk that enabled this (Veist Stinger) has been heavily nerfed. Where once it reloaded your entire magazine, now it only refunds 25% of the mag.

Alas, now, you might have to reload once or twice per damage phase. This, plus the damage nerf, has hurt LFR's but it has not killed them. However, in order to compete the roll on the weapon has to be perfect, your accuracy must be perfect, and for all legendary LFR's that use Veist Stinger you have to be very lucky. For most LFR's the perfect combo is triple tap + firing line.

However, there is one outlier. The Cataclysmic is still a top tier dps weapon, but it is much more difficult to use. Bait and Switch proves a 35% damage increase, but requires you to damage an enemy with all 3 weapons. Fourth Times the Charm is also less forgiving than triple tap. Missing a single shot will drastically reduce your DPS. This weapons is higher risk, for higher reward.

Weapon pairings: for legendary LRF's the best boss-damage pairing is going to be Witherhoard. However, in a raid setting, running Witherhoard gets complicated. Having multiple people attack a blight to a boss does NOT increase the damage the boss takes. The boss will take damage from ONE blight if it is stuck to him, and a second blight at its feet. Even if he is hit by 6 blights, he will only take damage from 1. The other 5 would be wasted.

Exotic LFR

Sleeper Simulant did not get nerfed. With the catalyst completed, it competes fairly well with other DPS options. This video from Aztecross had doing damage comparable to Izanagi's Rocket Hot Swap.

For those using this weapon, I recommend stacking on the Solar Weapon Surge, and then using a solar legendary sniper build for boss DPS. (If you have the pattern, the easiest to get is a crafted Ikelos Sniper with enhanced Fourth Times the Charm and Focused Fury)

Use Sleeper until you run out of ammo, then start spamming the sniper.

Update: The season 22 fusion rifle The Eremite, and the season 23 sniper Twilight Oath would also pair well with Sleeper

Grenade Launchers

These have been buffed this season. From what I've seen, they don't quite out DPS rockets, but it's close. These are a bit harder to use, however.

Perks.

These perks are mostly the same as the rockets. Personally, I like field prep and explosive light. While doing the campaign, both my sister and I got a Typhon GL5 with spike grenades, demolitionist, and explosive light. I don't know if it was a campaign reward, or if we were incredibly lucky. But this would work nicely with the stasis sniper listed in the armor-surge section above.

Another pairing to look for is 'Auto-Loading Holster' and 'Cascade Point' Cascade Point does the following: Final blows or sustained precision hits with another weapon increase this weapon's rate of fire for a short duration. Here's the cadence: - Get 2 precision hits with your sniper rifle - Swap to the grenade launcher, and empty the magazine - Swap back to the sniper, fire until the grenade launcher has reloaded. - Repeat until grenade launcher ammo is gone - Use sniper until ammo is gone, or damage has ended.

No matter what GL you are using, you should pair the special weapon so that in can also reap the benefits of the weapon surge mods.

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