My best endgame Warlock build for Destiny 2 Season of the Wish

Many Warlock builds can claim to be the best in Destiny 2, but this one is my particular favourite. Destiny 2 has many levels of PvE content from raids and dungeons up to GM Nightfalls.

This Well of Radiance build includes Phoenix Protocol and Polaris Lance to allow you to bunker down and burn enemies with piles of scorch stacks. If you want to use this build in the game, we have all the details below.

What does the build do?

The gameplay loop of this build is to drop your Well and pick off enemies with Polaris Lance. This might seem a little dull at first, but there's more going on under the hood that you need to know. First of all, we use Phoenix Protocol to make even more wells.

While we're staying healthy in the well, Polaris Lance will do most of the work. Its exotic perk, The Perfect Fifth, has been updated so now every fourth precision hit loads a solar explosive round into the gun, which causes a lot of scorch. With the right setup, this can be extended to cause ignitions on a single shot.

For the most part, we want to post up with a well and focus on landing precision shots on tougher enemies. Getting those consistent ignitions will tear apart the biggest bad guys, and with this setup the damage will spread to others, meaning while focusing on the boss you can ad-clear at the same time.

This build is an incredible blend of damage that can take down Champions single-handedly, with healing that will keep you alive in the toughest spots. Grandmaster Nightfalls are nothing to a Warlock rocking Polaris Lance and Phoenix Protocol.

Abilities, Aspects & Fragments

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Subclass - Dawnblade - Well of Radiance

Aspects

• Touch of Flame - Improves the effectiveness of your grenades, specifically the Healing Grenade. 
• Heat Rises - The aerial mobility is handy, and using it to consume your Healing Grenade can be useful in a pinch. 

Fragments

• Ember of Ashes - You apply more Scorch stacks to targets, the core of our damage output. 
• Ember of Char - Ignitions spread Scorch to nearby targets, spreading our damage to collateral enemies while we focus on the toughest targets.
• Ember of Benevolence - Reduces ability cooldowns while we heal teammates.
• Ember of Empyrean - Solar weapon or ability kills extend the duration of restoration and radiance, giving us our buffs for even longer, potentially indefinitely.

Abilities

• Healing Rift - Good to use while Well of Radiance is still on cooldown. 
• Burst Glide - Dealer's choice, this is what I like to use. 
• Celestial Fire - Excellent for applying Scorch at close range. 
• Healing Grenade - Considering how much Scorch and damage everything else is doing, it's best to have a Healing Grenade handy.

Weapons

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To be honest, this is kind of a one-weapon build. The focus here is on Polaris Lance, so fill the other two slots with whatever you like the most. That said, my loadout recommendation for this build is:

• Kinetic: Riptide (w/ Chill Clip)
• Energy: Polaris Lance
• Heavy: Apex Predator

A Riptide with the Chill Clip perk is always useful, especially in high-level content like GM Nightfalls. The ability to freeze an enemy with a single burst is really powerful, and a great way to get out of dodge if you get surrounded. This build works best at range, so use Riptide to shut down enemies trying to rush you.

Conversely, a rocket launcher is great for that extra burst of damage from range, and a good Solar one like Apex Predator suits this build well. I often use the rocket launcher to engage a group of enemies, before swapping to Polaris Lance to clean up what's left.

Armour & mods

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The primary piece of armour we want for this build is the Phoenix Protocol exotic chest piece. With this equipped, any kills or assists you get while standing in your Well of Radiance will grant you super energy.

This more or less caps off at 50%, but the fact that you can use your super, and gain back half of its cooldown while still standing in it is incredibly powerful. This build is really strong while playing solo, but works so much better as a pseudo-support build in team content. If you have two Warlock friends also using this build, you can have 100% uptime on your Wells, and endless Scorch and ignition damage.

For the mods, we can get a lot out of Season of the Wish's artefact perks. Kindling Trigger increases our scorch stacks while Radiant, and Revitalising Blast allows us to weaken Champions and bosses with our Solar abilities, a great way to use your melee.

The big ones are Ray of Precision and Flint Striker. The former causes enemies to ignite when defeated with a precision hit, provided you are Radiant. The latter grants Radiance from precision Solar weapon hits. These two perks seem like they were made for Polaris Lance, they absolutely sing when used together.

For the regular mods, cooldowns like Absolution, Invigoration, and Outreach are great choices. Definitely grab a Solar Siphon to get plenty of Orbs of Power from all your Solar weapon kills.

If you like to branch out to the other classes, check out our:

• Best Hunter build
• Best Titan build

That is it for our best Warlock build, feel free to play around with it and make it your own. For more info, head to our Destiny 2 homepage with our up-to-date guides for the weekly reset, lost sector rotation, Trials of Osiris, Xur, and everything you need to know for The Final Shape.