The growing issue with Warlocks identity

There have been a few posts and comments on this sub and a few others about the current state of Warlocks. It's not that they don't have build diversity, but how much said diversity is lacking in anything outside of sheer survivability and crowd control. Some of these builds even struggle with basic things like ad clear because they lack damage or AoE. I myself as a Warlock main didn't initially see the issue until I started messing around with some of the best or most unique builds the other classes have, and man the difference is day and night.

To clarify one thing, yes we did just have this issue with Titans last episode with Hunters taking the title of "the melee class" simply because they had much better synergies than Titans. Now that melee is overall the best builds currently in most activities, what are Warlocks? Warlocks have never been known for their melee, so they're still the grenade class right?

Well, not even. Nowadays Warlock is what Bungie has been calling a "Summoner Class" who happens to also have a plethora of support capabilities. This summoner class identity was first showcased near the launch of Lightfall with the Broodweaver class and eventually doubling down on this with Prismatic by including Bleak watcher, Helion, Threadling Grenades, and Healing grenade for the sake of Speakers Sight all into one subclass.

While I'm not entirely upset at this since I do like some of the builds it has given us, I feel like it should not have come at the cost of our original grenade identity. Not to mention Summons of all types have a slew of issues with them alone. Low damage, poor tracking, and most being tied to our class ability are some pretty obvious ones, but the biggest one for me is a lack of orb generation. Summons/turrets do not count as grenades, weapons, and obviously not melees. So they are incapable of generating orbs, with the exception of Speakers Sight. In Episode: Revenant, as well as Echos, I found myself relying solely on my weapons to generate orbs for me since my abilities are typically either too weak to use on their own, do low damage over time or are simply for the sake of creating a summon.

Bungie further leaned into this summoner/support fantasy by releasing exotics like Swarmers, Briarbinds, Speakers Sight, Rime-Coat Raiment, Cenotaph Mask, and even Ballidorse Wrathweavers. The only two exotics Warlocks recieved throughout this time period that didn't follow this trend were Mataiodoxía and Solipsism.

As of Episode: Revenant, the current best builds for Warlocks involve turning your grenade into a turret rather than actually using your grenade. This alone should speak volumes of how underwhelming Warlocks kits are right now. Many past popular builds that actually utilized grenades like Controverse, Starfire, Veritys Brow, Osmiomancy Gloves, or even just through exotics that push towards ability spam like Crown of Tempests and Fallen Sunstar have all either been nerfed into the ground via direct nerfs or nerfs like the global ability refund change back in Season of the Wish, or have simply too demanding of a loop that makes you question "why do XYZ for a big damage buff when I can hop on another class and do just X for an easier and more consistent big damage buff."

For those who aren't familiar what this Season of the Wish change was or don't remember what it did:

A perk that grants 10% grenade energy on activation results in a cooldown reduction of 6.4 seconds to Firebolt Grenade, but results in a cooldown reduction of 15.2 seconds for Lightning Grenade.

When players stack these buildcrafting elements together (e.g., Grenade Kickstart + Innervation + Absolution + Demolitionist + a chunk energy fragment), it results in long-cooldown abilities having uptime that is dramatically higher than what we intend for their potency level.

With Season of the Wish, we’re taking a first step at addressing that problem. Starting in update 7.3.0, the base passive cooldown tiers for abilities will also influence the amount of chunk energy they receive from perks. For our fastest-charging abilities, things are not changing. But as we progress through the passive cooldown tiers into the slower-charging abilities, that immediate burst of energy will be reduced to a floor of 50% of base for our slowest-charging grenade and class abilities, and 60% for our slowest-charging melee abilities.

Here's that same example under the new system: a perk that grants a base value of 10% grenade energy on activation results in a cooldown reduction of 6.4 seconds for Firebolt Grenade and results in a cooldown reduction of 7.6 seconds for Lightning Grenade.

The intent was to reduce how often stronger abilities come back when using a means of refunding ability energy while keeping low-cooldown "weaker" abilities the same. The issue though is that it had zero effects on builds that were already strong while destroying builds that relied on these methods.

Naturally, Warlocks have the longest class ability in the game at base, so this messed up a ton of builds and exotics that relied on Rifts and didn't have an intrinsic way to restore them. Solar and Prismatic, subclasses that were/are pretty much already meta, are fortunate to have Phoenix dive, which is just superior in every way nowadays.

And of course it affected grenade abilities as well. Paired with the nerfs to some of these exotics, such as Sunstar granting less energy from Ionic Traces, then you have a recipe for a bunch of already off-meta builds becoming obsolete while pushing more on-meta ones (like sunbracers) that didn't rely on these mods to begin with.

The only thing that Warlocks have over the other two classes is its survivability from on-demand healing. Crowd Control isn't much to speak of, since it doesn't matter if everything is dead anyways. Which by the way, Warlocks also suck at. It's almost polarizing how much better burst dps options are for the other two classes over Warlocks.

Im not going to be counting burst damage options that are universally shared such as Fusion Grenade, Flux Grenade, Glacier Grenade, ignitions, shatter, ect. since...well, everyone has them. These are abilities unique to their respective classes only, and I won't even consider weapons or exotic combos/builds like liars and contact-cannon, because then it'd just widen the gap even more which is redundant. I'm only considering ones that plainly boost the damage of burst supers in some way/shape/form. Again, these are burst damage abilities that are typically either used for dps, or taking down Orange/Yellow bar enemies quickly.

Hunters have: Golden Gun w/ Celestial Nighthawk, Gunpoweder Gamble, Knife Trick, Weighted Knife, Gathering Storm, Combination blow on Arc, Combination blow on Pristatic, Star Eater Scales

Titans have: Consencration, Thunder Crash w/Cuiress, Thunderclap, Frenzy Blade , Throwing Hammer, Burning Maul w/ Pyrogale Gauntlets, Twilight Arsenal, Synthocepts, Star Eater Class Item

Warlocks have: Novabomb, Needle Storm, Lightning Surge, Incinerator Snap, Chaos Reach w/ Geomags, Star Eater Class Item

Besides being so few, all of Warlocks options are much weaker than their Hunter/Titan counterparts. Obviously they don't compare melee wise, so it leaves grenades. But even the most potent of them, Starfire, wouldn't even compete with the damage Hunters and Titans can dish out nowadays, with less loops to jump through mind you.

So if Warlocks aren't the melee class, but simultaneously don't have good enough grenade builds right now to be considered a grenade class, that just leaves a summoner class, or at least attempts at being one. With low DoT, burst dps options put on significantly longer cooldowns with lower damage than their counterparts, and a harsh lack of orb generation.

Mind you all of this isn't even considering how the Subclass 3.0 system completely screwed Warlocks over from the get go, giving away verbs and abilities to the other classss like Devour, Jolt (Arc web), Ionic Traces, and Healing Grenade (Divine Protection) without giving Warlocks any new verbs in return. Child of the Old Gods, Incinerator snap, Helion, and Lightning Surge are the only abilities that were new, and the other classes have access to something similar but just straight up better.

Yeah, Warlocks are in a rough place. It's to the point where I can say that for the first time in a long time Warlocks aren't needed for most activities. Maybe Master Raids and Dungeons because Well still has its value, or simply a Song of Flame warlock, but beyond that Titans and Hunters can do everything else better with half of the hassle.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.