What's Good About Strand in Destiny 2

We’re now three for three in Destiny posts and this is where it all leads to STRAND. This is the last part of the Lightfall expansion I wanted to talk about in-depth because I couldn’t fit it into the main post. But let’s get it started.

Strand is the new Darkness subclass that is featured prominently across the campaign, to the point where it felt more like an intro to the element as opposed to a story at times. While it did dedicate the basics to its implementation and tutorialization, it feels like a much smoother introduction into a new subclass than Stasis was in Beyond Light. Because back in Beyond Light, you also got Stasis unlocked at the end of the campaign. But the difference is that you had to do a lengthy quest to get access to all of your aspects and grenades. Thankfully, your grenades and aspects for Strand are unlocked from the initial acquisition. This is less busy work and anything that involves less busy work is good by me.

The main reason I didn’t touch on Strand until now is that a lot of the fragments that we now have full access to were all time-gated. I thought it wouldn’t be until after this year’s raid race that we would get them, but they were unlocked early and I needed to get them unlocked. This also gave me some time to throw together a simple build that I’m going to detail in a bit because even in the early stages, it feels incredibly silly. The three subclasses for Strand are the again aptly named Berserker Titans, the again thematically appropriate Threadrunner Hunters, and the class I play: the similarly spell-like Broodweaver Warlocks.

Because Warlock is my main these days, I‘ve stuck mostly with Broodweaver and I can tell you this much: It’s awesome. You have the universal Strand mechanics like the ability to create Tangles: balls of Strand matter that you can pick up and yeet at enemies for a big explosion, a shackle grenade that’s just a Strand Bola that webs enemies up and the Threadling grenades which send out little spider-like creatures called threadlings that attack anything in their path. These tie into the Strand Keywords: Tangles, which we’ve already discussed, Unravel which makes needles fly out of enemies for extra damage and cause nearby enemies to get unravelled themselves, Sever which lowers enemy damage output, Suspend which webs enemies up and keeps them from doing things (useful for dealing with Champions), and Woven Mail which grants you a buff to your damage resistance.

These are all tied into the subclasses in their own ways. With the Broodweaver, it’s all about unravelling targets with our ranged melee attack, Arcane Needle letting us throw out three projectiles in sequence to stack up Unravel on a big target, and threadlings which we can create a ton of with the right components. This tied into the build I was talking about. I’ve been experimenting with the two aspects we have along with some of the introduced Strand weapons to focus on creating as many threadlings as humanly possible. These are done through Weaver’s Call letting me summon three threadlings when I drop a rift, Mindspun Invocation letting me eat my threadling grenade for five perched threadlings, my weapon, this season’s auto rifle with the Hatchling perk making it so that rapid kills or precision kills summon a threadling AND all of my fragments picked in service of either generating more of the little suckers, making them better or just giving me more survivability through Woven Mail. It’s still missing some pieces, mainly the new exotic boots called the Swarmers, but so far, it's a barrel of laughs. And that’s before I mention our Super, Needlestorm, which throws a bunch of needles at the enemy which explodes and creates more threadlings. I am the motherfucking spider queen.

Oh and there’s a grappling hook. No need to elaborate. It’s a grappling hook and grappling hooks are rad.

Overall, I love the addition of Strand into Destiny 2. It doesn't come in as hot as Stasis did back in the day, but the implementation is much smoother, with more weapons supporting it, more perks playing off of it right out of the box, and giving us another means of interacting with the play space that isn’t just dumping a boatload of damage, in this case being more manipulation of minions and possible high mobility.

And with that, my three-part odyssey of Destiny 2 Lightfall is complete. That was a journey, but one I’m glad I undertook. I look forward to coming back before the Final Shape drops to give a recap of the year.

I promise I’ll talk about something different next week.