The Best Warlock Builds For PvP And PvE

Getaway Artist
allows you to consume your grenade to create an Arc Soul
and immediately become Amplified, increasing your Arc Soul’s fire rate. The Arc Soul will hover next to your character and fire at anyone in your field of view. You won’t get your grenade back in time to refresh your Arc Soul, so we use the Arc Soul
Aspect to refresh its duration upon casting a Rift.

The general game flow of this build is:

Consume Grenade ⇾ Get Kills ⇾ Spawn Rift (when your current Arc Soul expires) ⇾ Repeat.

To make combat even easier, we pair this build with No Time to Explain
, an Exotic Pulse Rifle that creates a Time Portal after you land ten precision hits. This behaves identically to Arc Soul, firing at targets in your field of view. You can have an Arc Soul and Time Portal active simultaneously, drastically lowering your TTK with no input required from you.

The mods and Fragments for this build are mostly down to preference. We use Fragments that boost stats and mods that improve weapon performance. None of these mods or Fragments are hard requirements, so feel free to experiment.

Spec your artifact for neutral game benefits. While some Arc perks are present, we can’t make effective use of them inside the Crucible.

The gameplay loop of this build is straightforward. Eliminating an enemy with a Void weapon will trigger Verity’s Brow
, increasing your grenade damage by 20% for the next ten seconds. Paired with Echo of Undermining
, this is enough damage to one-tap a Guardian at any Resilience level. Get a kill, throw a grenade, and repeat.

You’ll need a Void weapon for this build to work, preferably one with Repulsor Brace and some sort of damage perk. We can gain Volatile Rounds through Echo of Instability
from Magnetic Grenade
kills, allowing your Void weapon to proc Repulsor Brace with every kill. If you pair this with Adrenaline Junkie or Golden Tricorn, you can drastically lower the TTK on your weapon.

Getting your grenade back is crucial for this build, so we focus on using as many sources of ability regeneration as possible. Feed the Void
grants access to Devour, restoring HP and some grenade energy with every kill. Echo of Harvest
and Firepower will spawn two Orbs of Power when your grenade gets a kill, proccing Innervation and Absolution to greatly restore your grenade energy.

Through Stacks on Stacks and Charged Up, this will give you x4 Armor Charge. Throwing a grenade will then proc Grenade Kickstart, consuming all four Armor Charge stacks to refund roughly 20% of your grenade energy. All of these effects drastically cut down on your grenade cooldown.

You might want to grab Supernova to give yourself another source of Weaken. Beyond that, pick any perks that suit your playstyle.

This is a build template that can be adapted to suit your playstyle. Arguably the most versatile subclass for Warlocks is Dawnblade, at least for PvP. This subclass has access to the Heat Rises
Aspect, which allows you to shoot and use abilities while gliding. It also allows you to consume your grenade to gain a burst of healing and the Heat Rises buff, greatly increasing your airborne time with glides.

You can pair this with Icarus Dash
to fling your character forward with a short dash animation. It has a short cooldown, doesn’t consume any ability energy, and gains a second charge if Heat Rises
is active. Equip Healing Grenades and Phoenix Dive
to heal yourself in a pinch, and you can adopt a fairly aggressive playstyle with this subclass.

For the build itself, we recommend a movement Exotic and your favorite weapons. Most players gravitate towards Transversive Steps
or Ophidian Aspect
for their neutral game, but we’re going to recommend Rain of Fire
if you own it. This Exotic automatically reloads all of your weapons when you Icarus Dash
, allowing you to more or less forgo reloading entirely.

Mods are also down to preference, but we can give some general recommendations. Targeting and Siphon mods are ideal on your helmet, as they give you improved ADS speed, aim assist, and the ability to generate Orbs of Power. These orbs can then proc mods like Recuperation and Better Already to heal you. Throw on Reaper to give yourself another source of orbs, and consider using two Powerful Attraction mods to grab all nearby Orbs of Power when you Phoenix Dive
.

Spec your artifact for neutral game benefits. Most of the options here are down to preference; nothing’s mandatory.

The central focus of this build is Sunbracers
, a pair of Exotic gauntlets that grant six seconds of infinite Solar Grenade
energy whenever you land a powered melee kill. This means you can throw about five grenades every time you kill someone with your melee. That creates the core gameplay loop: melee → throw five grenades → repeat.

To achieve this, we use Incinerator Snap
to force an Ignition on a target, counting as a melee kill when the explosion goes off. This will proc Sunbracers
and let you spam grenades until the buff expires, at which point you’ll have your melee back and can loop the process. The build itself focuses on giving you as much melee energy as possible to minimize any bottlenecks.

Fortunately, you can use Heat Rises
to recover 20% of your melee energy whenever you kill a target while airborne. This works with both weapons and abilities, including kills from Incinerator Snap
while you’re floating. We throw on Ember of Searing
to gain an additional 10% melee energy from slain Scorched targets. Since all of your abilities Scorch, this procs all the time. Spec for 100 Strength—Discipline isn’t needed since Sunbracers floors your cooldown to one second.

Now that you can throw infinite grenades, you’ll want to equip Touch of Flame
to make your Solar Grenades emit lava blobs. These lava blobs make your Solar Grenades
deal far more single-target DPS, melting Champions with ease. Ember of Torches
will also give you and nearby allies access to Radiant whenever you snap your fingers, improving your DPS with all weapons.

Finally, we round off the build with Phoenix Dive. This grants x2 Restoration on use while Heat Rises is active. You can extend the duration of this buff with Ember of Empyrean
. So long as you keep killing enemies with Solar damage, you are effectively unkillable. Spec for 100 Resilience and use chest DR mods to further improve your survivability.

There are no Solar perks this season. Spec your artifact for another build.

Briarbinds
significantly buff your Void Soul projectiles, increasing their damage with each kill. You can then pick up your Void Souls to redeploy them another time, resetting their duration while keeping their damage bonus. There’s no HUD indicator for how strong your Void Souls are, so you’ll have to keep a mental note of how many kills they’ve gotten.

Since Void Souls deal continuous damage, they pair exceptionally well with Final Warning
, a Strand Sidearm that inflicts Unravel on charged bursts. It functions closer to a Bow than a proper Sidearm, but it deals the highest DPS out of any Primary weapon in Destiny 2. Throw out a Void Soul to damage a miniboss, then unleash a Final Warning burst to unleash a constant flurry of Unravel projectiles.

If you aren’t a fan of Final Warning, you can use any weapon with this build and perform just as well. Graviton Lance
is a great option for general PvE content and Nightfalls.

Our only recommendation here is Power from Within, granting access to Devour when you land rapid kill against Weakened foes. Since Void Soul inflicts Weaken to all tethered targets, this perk is absurdly easy to proc.

You can also run Supernova to inflict a Weaken AoE effect on your next source of Void damage whenever you pick up a Void Breach, a resource we generate through Echo of Harvest
.

Rime-Coat Raiment spawns a snowstorm over your Bleak Watcher
turrets, extending their effective range while spawning a ring of Stasis crystals periodically on the storm’s perimeter. Shattering these crystals will deal immense damage to nearby targets, which we further amplify with Facet of Ruin.

We want to spam as many Bleak Watcher turrets as possible, so we’re going to need as much energy as possible. We can accomplish this through three sources:

1. Feed the Void

   ‘s Devour buff.

2. Grenade Kickstart.
3. Any Glaive with Demolitionist (Judgment of Kelgoroth or Forthcoming Deviance).

Feed the Void
grants access to Devour whenever you land an ability kill. This includes Stasis shatters from your Bleak Watcher storms, so this is surprisingly easy to trigger. While Devour is active, each kill you land will fully restore your HP and grant roughly 15% grenade energy, scaled based on the enemy you kill. The tougher the foe, the more energy you’ll receive.

A handful of Orb of Power generators—Heavy Handed, Reaper, and a Siphon mod that matches your Glaive’s element type—will give you x2 Armor Charge through Stacks on Stacks. We can then spend these stacks on extra grenade energy via Grenade Kickstart. You’ll need roughly four kills to gain a grenade at this point, but we can do better.

You’ll want to use any Glaive with Demolitionist, ideally Judgment of Kelgorath since it can get Demolitionist and Wellspring. Projectile kills will grant 20% grenade energy, stacking additively with Devour and your Grenade Kickstart mods. When everything’s working together, you can get a grenade every 2-3 kills, allowing you to easily maintain four turrets at a time. In enemy-rich environments, you can have five or even six Bleak Watchers up at once.

Revenant has tons of Stasis perks to pick from, although none are needed for this build to work. We highly recommend you get Armor of Eramis for the free freeze application on nearby targets whenever your shields break. Hail the Storm will greatly buff your Stasis shatter damage by adding ice shards to each crystal detonation. Finally, grab Brain Freeze for even more slow application on this build.