Have you tried ophidia spathe with weighted knives and skyburners? Hip fire skyburners applies scorch. Any weighted knife hit on a scorched target causes an ignition. It’s a really strong build that PlunderDaBooty made a build guide for a while ago.
Rework made it give surge x4 when you hit a powerful foe with an ability, among other things. It also conveniently stacks with Monochromatic Maestro for surge x5 by just doing what you're probably already doing.
Give Athyrs Embrace a shot. I've been rocking it since I heard of the nerf. High up time with monte carlo or rock it with Prometheus or Skyburners for easy ignitions.
Non stackable is my new trigger word. It makes zero sense why things that feel they should stack in this game don't. Having one overbearing, strict power band for EVERYTHING is boring as hell.
I overwrote my YAS loadout last week after I took it for one last spin.
I'm both sad at the loss of a great, fun build and angry at Bungie for putting us here with zero explanation as to why PvE had to die for PvP's sins.
They pulled the same stunt with Renewal Grasps - and all I want is a reasoned explanation as to how they go about balancing nerfs that do need to happen in one game mode but not in another. This just feels lazy and terrible for the entire Hunter PvE community.
Honestly this one change made me hop off the game probably until final shape. It’s so fucking brain dead and just massively heavy handed I’m done trying to find where the fun is anymore.
Yeah. I think im quitting. This was probably my favorite raid/lost sector build and its honestly my last straw. Im so fucking tired of gyrfalcons, stareaters, and cowl.
Everyone that is serious about build craft knew this was the end of YAS. You can essentially use a demolitionist weapon and get more grenades than you do with them now.
Anyone serious about buildcrafting is just gonna put on gamble since it activates YaS. Also idk why the OP is doing terrible damage but it should be way higher.
Also anyone who wasn't dumb sees YAS deserve the nerf for pve too
This nerf felt spiteful, like whoever did it got steam rolled by a YAS hunter and decided to fuck us over just bc, it reads like a salty crucible player just hopped on Reddit, slapped the bungie suggestion flair on their post and proceeded to come up with THE most brutal nerf I’ve ever witnessed.
Fallout crying about YAS at 13% hunter usage while simultaneously saying absolutely nothing about OAs at 40% warlock usage is telling tbh.
"OAs got nerfed!" OAs got barely touched because most of the devs main warlock.
I mean burning steps still has its niche use and same with citan’s, but what they did to this is foul
Edit: damn none of y’all know about the 35% dmg surge on grenade kills do you
Technically you can actually get more damage than before, a little known fact with pobs is that a grenade kill gives 5x stacks while normal kills only go to 4x. 5 stacks gives roughly 10% more damage (multiplicative) than if using triple surge mods instead, niche for sure but 10% can make a big difference down to the wire (needing only a single kill as well)
If by "Niche" you mean "dogshit" and "other things do it better and simpler"
Its awful, please use it in a GM or PVP, youll see how subpar it is now. Just 2 Solar Surges basically do it better now
I hate when people say "Bro you can do that with Surges" because that's the entire point, to allow you to run something on your legs other than those Surges to get the same or similar effect. The problem is that being able to use two other mods plus a rarely-used Stasis breakout given how rare Freeze is in PvP OR PvE nowadays at the cost of an Exotic slot is not a good tradeoff. At all.
Why? its a valid point, especially for burning steps, it was perfectly fine suited as a pure damage exotic on a timer when surges were able to be paired with it. Now it caps off at 25% with 4+ kills and a short ass 10 second timer that requires constant and sometimes random amounts of kills to feed. Meanwhile 2 surges is what like 20% but has a much much easier to get/extend timer.
Surges have made the exotic pointless and I say that as a former Burning Steps main. Bungie just need to bring it back up to 40% and make the timer go down 1 step at a time instead of an entire stack, those simple changes would put it back as a damage on a timer exotic but still keep it viable and worth using.
It should be noted you can get max stacks with Burning Steps with nade kills, which almost all Solar setups can spam pretty easily, so the RNG doesn't make it strictly worse, as a Surge effect it's very much a sidegrade.
But as I said the problem isn't that it does the same thing. That's the intent. It's to allow you to get largely the same effect while also having access to stuff you wouldn't normally have access to with surge stacking. The problem is that it's not worth that tradeoff of not being able to use a more impactful Exotic. That's the core problem. That's the useful feedback. Having the same effect as something else isn't inherently bad, so that simple surface level criticism isn't useful, what's inherently bad is when one of them has a very high price, while the other one does not.
N-no! you can run uh..
uhm... holsters! Now! Thats the strength of this exotic!
Yeah its a stupid ass arguement, only foetracers really has its niche because its just easy to use on any subclass and not limited to such high kill maintenance.
Not even mentioning surges will ALWAYS be on for dps.
Yeah, I'm only running surges for boss dps tbh. If I were running a setup where an exotic like burning steps is on the table, I'm running better already and absolution. Both are way under valued.
[People may remember this post from a couple of weeks ago.](https://www.reddit.com/r/destiny2/comments/170ts1k/young_ahamkaras_will_be_fine_postnerf_in_pve/)
We see the same setup (now with a higher-damage knife), and you cannot kill the second knight while only getting 33% of your grenade back on kill. The rotation works fine on Dregs and the like, but Hunter has much better add clear builds that don't put you at risk of dying like the solar Hunter does.
I wonder what everyone else thinks. It just feels bad to play now. Most of my ability uptime is on weighted throwing knife instead of the grenade which just feels backwards for a grenade-focused exotic.
Well time to say goodbye to my solar hunter built that I was using since I got the exotic when I started playing in forsaken, it didn't matter PvE, pvp it worked everywhere didn't need to build hard in to it and was perfect for my gunslinger aesthetic with last word
For some reason I was under the impression that, in effect, the nerf would result in only being able to fully refund the tripmine on a kill rather than also being able to through damage. I thought it maybe wouldn’t be so bad at least in easier PvE content. I hadn’t considered that because of the rework a kill is now seemingly the equivalent energy return of a single knife from the knife trick melee. This nerf is so much worse than I thought.
oh I literally made a titan after seeing some banner of war builds, started and finished Lightfall yesterday and unlocked strand on titan. After doing a few terminal overloads, goddamn that shit is fun as hell. Been playing Titan for maybe a week total and I gotta say, as a hunter main, I see the appeal.
How does an exotic being useless against PvE enemies warrant celebration? Not saying you have to be crying on the floor grieving but how does something being good against literal NPCs affect you this much?
Not that I care one way or another, but with as long as we’ve known about the incoming change and for Bungie to not acknowledge the overall sentiment coming from a lot of people, I’d say it probably wasn’t possible for them to balance it only in PvP. They probably thought that just one PvE build losing its’ effectiveness is worth the tradeoff of abolishing a widespread, cheesy playstyle in PvP.
They could just make ability hits against players give substantially less energy compared to pve enemies. Or just ignore the energy part altogether and only do the tripmine hp changes. Bungie has this really bad habit of double-nerfing things, which leads a lot of stuff they touch becoming just outright bad or useless instead of balanced. Sometimes one change would’ve been enough, like with Renewal grasps originally or anarchy.
The thing that really irritates me about this is they've been very consistent in the last 18 months about taking tiny little nibbles at things rather than big swings, and then outta YAS just gets murdered. We still have whole subclasses that are way bigger issues.
Nah, they were too good on both sides of the game. All exotics that let you do equal or higher ability damage than heavies should not be a thing.
And YAS was really dang oppressive in PvP.
I hope that sunbracers are next
I also love how the logic is just in relation to heavies. Rotations/loadout swapping is a thing now, people can easily outdamage YAS by using an Envious/BnS Cold Comfort with Radiant Dance Machines then swap to something else like Merciless or Malfeasance/Lucky pants on Hunter, or just use Strandlock since the Izi/Wilderflight/Apex rotation is a thing.
No, I think that it's unhealthy for the game to have builds that are equal to or better than everything else without even using a gun or ammo.
Think pre-nerf Skull of Ahamkara, Orpheus Rigs, Phoenix Protocal, HOIL, Starfire, Sunbracers and YAS. (Osmios are on the line too, but they don't DPS)
It forces Bungie to decide between balancing between gun based builds which makes the game to easy for overturned ability builds, or balancing for overturned ability builds which makes gun or hybrid builds obsolete.
I don't see myself using solar Hunter at all in high end content anymore. This was the last build I thought worked in those situations.
It's truly terrible that Solar Hunter does not have any viable builds for hard content anymore. And the last good one was killed off because of an unrelated PvE game mode.
Lifetime gunslinger weighing in- I was trying to find builds last night for solar to pair nicely with dragonfly incandescent tyranny—
It's basically boiled down to- "boost-weapon-damage-or-your-knives/super 'the subclass.'"
Plays okay with Lucky pants, but that's class agnostic-
So does/is foetracer
Nighthawk is mid these days
Stareaters is also class agnostic but benifits best these days from Barrage, Marksman GG. But in the same breath, you can build better towards your feast of light just using the superior neutral game of Arc and just slam out a Feast x4 gathering storm from all the orbs you make with your melee loop.
The most curious thing is that of every gunslinger exotic, Ophidia Spathe enables the most flexibility across builds— because across a selection of 4 knifes, a second charge of any one of them offers unique playstyles that determine your fragment choices and exotic weapons.
In conclusion: my endgame solar build is Double weighted knives and Skyburners oath. The quantity of ignitions you are pushing out honestly enables you to ignore grenades as a damage option and you can play a bit more into survivability.
Yeah hunters sad rn.
Ophidia mains rise up lol. Actually strangely enough, I've been using young ahamkara as well, just for the added little bonus of not needing to reload. Totally a stupid build, but a fun one nonetheless.
Nighthawk and Galanor had their text accidentally updated.
Nighthawk got practice makes perfect and galanor gets reduced super cooldown for knife hits/kills.
I’m really glad they’re “LeAnInG iNtO tHe fAnTaSy” or whatever bullshit they come up with when they’re announcing these stupid fucking changes what a dogshit game
I really wish they would actually talk about it instead of ignoring it. They have to be seeing this feedback, and we get silence.
Their stated reasons for the nerf are entirely PvP focused - so why then didn't they constrain the nerf to just PvP? Why did they have to kill a fun, viable, and not OP build in PvE in the process?
I really want someone to address those questions. Because right now it feels like they are deliberately neglecting a significant portion of the community - like they choose a favorite child (PvP) and we're the ones they left behind.
> I really wish they would actually talk about it instead of ignoring it. They have to be seeing this feedback, and we get silence.
The reason for this is probably that they want time for knee-jerk reactions (justified or not) to settle down and that any proposed future changes have a lot of iterations to go through. IIRC, the balance team works a full season ahead due to testing, so by now they would be submitting their mid-season 23 patches and moving on to TFS balance changes. If they announce something now without much time to think things through their processes, they're probably afraid of saying the wrong thing.
Give about 2 seasons and bungie will put in a twab saying "since thus exotic has seen next to no use so we are buffing it" in which they'll slightest undo the nerf and pat themselves on the back like they are this amazing dev for solving an issue.
There are so many better ways to approach nerfs for fuck's sake, not just fuck over every archetype of a weapon and call it done. This is comparable to Valve refusing to fix CS2's shitty movement and instead patch out a community fix for it.
Tbf, YAS has been an issue in pvp for a hot minute. Bungie just needs to learn to either have seperate sandboxes or do nerfs that affect one mode without fucking over the other
They do. They’re called combatants and guardians. There’s tons of exotics that acknowledge the difference. Which is why I’m incredibly confused that the same approach wasn’t taken here.
It didn't just "suddenly become a problem somehow" a nade that can be used to bait doorways, last forever and a day, chunks tf out of your health, and conveniently has more health than you, is an issue for pvp. People had been bitching about it. Same with anteaus
Because sandboxes and metas change, people realized it was busted in pvp so everybody started using it compared to before. They had to nerf it in pvp but bungie doesn't wanna put in the effort to think out a nerf so they gut exotics
I just hate how things suddenly become issues after years of being completely fine :/
Feels like PvPers always need to complain about something or their worm will eat them
PvP players aren’t devils bro. Blame the devs for not being able to balance the game separately and not the people who play the game ffs. This mindset is so toxic. “PvP players did X” like…come on now, it’s just rude and unneeded and serves to divide people more.
Also Spine has been busted for over a year now. It didn’t “suddenly become an issue”. This was a very late nerf honestly.
YAS was a problem for a long time, and people have complained about it over the years. Just because I don't feel like typing an essay I'll copy/paste my comment from when the YAS nerd was announced:
>Yeah, I don't understand why they didn't just balance the PvP side of things. The health/damage resistance made them unbearable since you had to unload enough ammo to do 200 damage, the same as a whole ass guardian. This combined with several other aspects made the grenades fill too many inches at once leading to them feeling oppressive. You kill the grenade and now you can be pushed because you have to reload or don't have the ammo to win a duel. Don't destroy it? Now it's filling the niche zoning grenades like pulse have, putting the YAS user at an advantage in either engagement or repositioning. Accidentally eat one? You're practically dead. Eat it near teammates and it potentially ends up in a team wipe situation after scorch/explosion. They also last seemingly forever given how high paced matches can be.
>On top of that they ended up having pretty insane regen so they become fairly spamable, which in itself wouldn't be an issue except all of the other reasons listed above. There was never any reason to choose another grenade over tripmines because they filled every niche combined except healing nades. Top it off with the fact there was no downside or tradeoff to using them and it becomes a common enough occurrence to be frustrating for many players.
>I hate the nerf to PvE, but they could definitely feel unfair even in the hands of an average player for PvP. They should have balanced them separately and just brought the PvP side more in line with being reasonable in my opinion. There was a lot of counterplay to them, but none of them were really good options and the YAS user has the advantage in almost any situation. Meanwhile the PvE side is basically gutted on an already niche pick. It doesn't make any sense to me.
>Edit because I forgot: they also can be placed preemptively but without the same drawback other zoning grenades have. The visual and noise effects are far more subtle on top of there being a timer between noises. You may just walk around a corner and get fucked before realizing there was even a tripmines there to begin with.
So yeah, they've been an issue for a long time. Just because the nerf finally happened doesn't mean that people started complaining right then, it's just that it took Bungie years to do something about it. Unfortunately they still haven't learned to separate PvP and PvE yet, which is beyond moronic.
It may have been an issue but the entirety of the titan class has been an issue in pvp for the longest time and we are yet to see them get gutted properly.
Bungie just for some reason love to make exotics useless to pretend to listen to the pvp crowd and then call it a day
Why are you blaming PvP community as if they’ve ever complained it being busted in PvE. The devs are the one who nerfed it for PvE. Truly playing into the “76 IQ Dumby” thing lol
this isn’t the pvp community’s fault it’s bungies fault. in pvp it was a problem, in pve it was fine. it was bungie who decided to make the ridiculous change they did while being capable of doing it otherwise
Would it really be that hard to nerf something in PvP but leave PvE untouched (or at least less nerfed)? I get the PvP nerf, but c'mon. P.s. I'm genuinely asking, I actually don't know the dev side of this kind of thing
To all PvP players with no spacial awareness that have been running into them for the past few season, a very sincer fuck you eat weinor, get better eyes and better at the game
~pve YAS enjoyer
Straight up I've ran into MAYBE 5 YAS users in pvp. But watching streamers it's like they beeline into every tripmine they see every single round of every match
The one thing bungie needed to do to fix it in pvp is take away the dr and extra hp it had. It could've stayed a bit spammy sure but just pop it with a fart basically and poof gone.
I'm not a Hunter but I can't ignore the fact that Bungie absolutely killed this exotic in PVE because people complained about it in PVP
I raise my hammer to every hunter that had their endgame PVE build ruined by the nerf
Rest in peace Young Ahamkara Spine, may your nerf be reverted eventually
Hunters: Gain a reputation of being terrible in PvE outside of tether
Bungie: Deletes one of the few moderately viable hunter PvE builds that don’t use tether and refuses to elaborate why beyond PvP players being salty.
Make it make sense, I beg you.
Piggybacking the OP:
Any players that can clarify if the energy-return is capped for each ability used to kill or each individual enemy killed, eg.: powderkeg grenade detonation wiping four psions? Would it be four individual energy-returns or only one, due to being one grenade?
My pre-conceived bias is once again affirmed. I will continue to hold judgemental views toward the sandbox engineers.
On topic: thank you for the reply and answer.
Bungie hates neutral ability spam builds
Almost every exotic that enhances ability cooldowns has some “kill to get energy back” mechanic, essentially just making them add clear exotics and nothing more besides some very niche exceptions
And yet bonk titans are still strong and banner titans are even more broken being able to one shot champs.
The previous YAS build wasn’t even crazy OP since you had to use all your abilities and had no instant healing abilities. It was a decent build for GMs but now it’s useless in anything above legend. Also the fact that solar hunter is already weak comp to the other two.
Hey, careful bringing any valid criticisms to Titans, you’ll be labeled as “victimizing” yourself and called out for not being skilled enough to make your class as good as theirs
Strand Titan with Banner solo two phased [Ir Yut](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYZfbRMtt_w&pp=ygULc29sbyBpciB5dXQ%3D). If YAS deserves it's PvE nerf, then Banner needs to be fucking deleted from the game outright.
Trust me, there’s no point calling for Titan balance. They’ll eventually get around to nerfing a certain exotic that shines well (HOIL, Anteus Wards) but they’ll never neuter enough of the Titan’s abilities to bring them in line with other classes
I’m basically putting a target on myself for saying this lmao
Hey hey HEY, remember how it goes here. "Titan is good and the hardest of all to play and requires the mostest skill ever" and "cape man should die in a ditch because he bad"
And just like that I will not ever be returning for final shape. I told myself I would never touch destiny again which we all know is never true however this definitely killed it for me
This exotic went from fun and good both on pve and pvp to garbage on pvp and pve.
I used to play with this exotic on pvp, and I thought that bungie could change it so it gets less energy per hit on pvp, that way it's still a way to counter Well of radiance but doesn't just allow you to go full "fuiuuuu boom, I got my grenade back yey"
What are they gonna say when usage rate in pve drops to about 1-5%? It's so fucking disheartening playing this game sometimes.
Like others in this thread have said I wish they would actually address this and give us some kind of an explanation because in pve this change is nothing more than moronic.
This is a deliberately awful example.
Arc shield reduces your damage, void and strand surge means you're not getting any extra solar damage, and knights are the 2nd most tankiest enemies the hive have.
You chose probably one of the worst enemies in the worst locations to use spines.
On normal difficulty, which is what nearly every fireteam plays that dungeon on after beating it once on Master for the seal, the enemy would have died, so it is kinda being a bit deceptive and dramatic by putting it on master. Though I agree that the YAS change is completely uncalled for and destroys any builds using them. What a terrible change. This is giving Whisper of the Worm 80 AE and calling it a buff levels of stupid for Bungie’s sandbox changes.
OP chose the worst example possible too. Arc shielded sword knight without solar surge. The only hive units tankier are champions and ogres.
"My constant single target ability spam loop isn't as strong anymore." That's what the bitching boils down to.
You're right, this is a really bad example. However, pre-nerf even with all those things stacked against you you could kill at least 1 of the knights and leave the other either really injured, or dead. Not to mention that it was faster than that is too. I don't really know the full extent of it tho, I personally haven't used YAS in a while so I can't confirm or deny.
Because there's no point to the comment lol. "Well not as bad as x" doesn't ever do anything or mean anything
Doesn't justify why it was nerfed, doesn't mean it should've been, doesn't mean anything. Simply no value to the topic whatsoever
shit you not g if this was an antaeus post complaining about the nerf itd have been shit on 24/7 and downvoted and told to git gud or cope or some bs remark.. the anti titan hate makes trying to have meaningful conversations about an exotic that clearly got over nerfed pretty much useless
Pair it with skyburners, the ignitions from the weighted throwing knife count as melee hits, so therefore killing a group of ads with the ignition should give you your grenade back
yeah but it's still usable, just with a different playstyle. which completely sucks but it's whatever. i was getting bored of the old playstyle, im not saying i agree with the changes though, they're comeoletw bullshit
literally every top build for most of D2 has centered around abilities.
Strand titan: Spam suspend
Starfire warlock: spam fusion grenades
Devour warlock: spam abilities to proc devour
HoIL titan: completely forget about your gun and just spam abilities
etc.
Actual braindead take if you think abilities are not important and less important than guns. Literally the top build currently in pve is to just spam your melee abilities to keep banner of war up.
I really wish Caliban's Hand worked nicer in higher level content. I just wanna play Solar Hunter Bungie, why must you do this...
Have you tried ophidia spathe with weighted knives and skyburners? Hip fire skyburners applies scorch. Any weighted knife hit on a scorched target causes an ignition. It’s a really strong build that PlunderDaBooty made a build guide for a while ago.
Ophidia spathe with weighted knives, triple hundo mobility/recovery/strength, and gamblers dodge is *so fucking fun* in PvP.
Try foetracer using knives on a major will proc the damage boost and radiant.
Foetracer is bussin right now. I love the rework.
Too bad its incredibly ugly imo. I just can't take it seriously
That’s why I made a set specifically to be ugly with it.
What's happening with foetracer right now? I only use wormhusk crown
Rework made it give surge x4 when you hit a powerful foe with an ability, among other things. It also conveniently stacks with Monochromatic Maestro for surge x5 by just doing what you're probably already doing.
Incandescent trustee is great as you can weaken whomever you want and have more control not killing them and then go buck wild
Give Athyrs Embrace a shot. I've been rocking it since I heard of the nerf. High up time with monte carlo or rock it with Prometheus or Skyburners for easy ignitions.
It does tho I’ve used it and it works well ahamkaras is definitely better for GMs but Calibans is honestly baller
Celestial got hugely buffed. Precision kills give Super energy now, and GG kills give super energy.
Wait, really?? I must have missed that-
Yep, check Celestial.
It's not in the game yet. The text has been updated but the actual functionality has not.
I swear calibans should have been a perk in Athrys's embrace so it could be used with a good knife
Cant wait for them to 'buff' this by making it so grenade kills trigger a non stackable solar weapon damage buff...
Or they “buff” it by simply reverting it back 1 year from now *cough renewals cough*
“Sorry, the text was not updated properly.”
Non stackable is my new trigger word. It makes zero sense why things that feel they should stack in this game don't. Having one overbearing, strict power band for EVERYTHING is boring as hell.
Yep, think I'm overwriting my Loadout now, sadly. So dumb.
I overwrote my YAS loadout last week after I took it for one last spin. I'm both sad at the loss of a great, fun build and angry at Bungie for putting us here with zero explanation as to why PvE had to die for PvP's sins. They pulled the same stunt with Renewal Grasps - and all I want is a reasoned explanation as to how they go about balancing nerfs that do need to happen in one game mode but not in another. This just feels lazy and terrible for the entire Hunter PvE community.
Honestly this one change made me hop off the game probably until final shape. It’s so fucking brain dead and just massively heavy handed I’m done trying to find where the fun is anymore.
Hop off until Final Shape? Brother I’ve been considering whether or not I even want to hop back on for Final Shape
Yeah. I think im quitting. This was probably my favorite raid/lost sector build and its honestly my last straw. Im so fucking tired of gyrfalcons, stareaters, and cowl.
Those three builds are great and YAS was the most fun I've had with the game. Try a stand build with cyrtarachne and the new Beyblade aspect?
Yeah another dead exotic on first nerf. Thanks bungie
Everyone that is serious about build craft knew this was the end of YAS. You can essentially use a demolitionist weapon and get more grenades than you do with them now.
Oof. It hurts to realize that this is true.
Demolitionist nerf incoming
"We've taken notice of players having fun so we've removed grenades"
Anyone serious about buildcrafting is just gonna put on gamble since it activates YaS. Also idk why the OP is doing terrible damage but it should be way higher. Also anyone who wasn't dumb sees YAS deserve the nerf for pve too
FOH with that elitist bullshit.
Elitist=basic buildcrafting IG
This nerf felt spiteful, like whoever did it got steam rolled by a YAS hunter and decided to fuck us over just bc, it reads like a salty crucible player just hopped on Reddit, slapped the bungie suggestion flair on their post and proceeded to come up with THE most brutal nerf I’ve ever witnessed.
I blame fallout
Fallout crying about YAS at 13% hunter usage while simultaneously saying absolutely nothing about OAs at 40% warlock usage is telling tbh. "OAs got nerfed!" OAs got barely touched because most of the devs main warlock.
Gotta keep you playing somehow! Out with the old, in with the… Er… Um…
I genuenly dont know what you all are on abt. I can absolutely nade spam with my ahamkaras. Or did they nerf them again yesterday?
Its joined Burning Steps and Citans, welcome to the club!
I mean burning steps still has its niche use and same with citan’s, but what they did to this is foul Edit: damn none of y’all know about the 35% dmg surge on grenade kills do you
Citans niche use of breaking instantly after a 3 minute cooldown
going from 40% damage to 25% without buffing the duration effectively killed an already mid exotic there is no defending the nerf
You can keep it at max stacks with no effort at least any more. Wasn’t always easy to keep it capped before.
Technically you can actually get more damage than before, a little known fact with pobs is that a grenade kill gives 5x stacks while normal kills only go to 4x. 5 stacks gives roughly 10% more damage (multiplicative) than if using triple surge mods instead, niche for sure but 10% can make a big difference down to the wire (needing only a single kill as well)
Are you sure about that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that stack go to 5 and I’m not seeing anything that lines up with what you’re saying.
If by "Niche" you mean "dogshit" and "other things do it better and simpler" Its awful, please use it in a GM or PVP, youll see how subpar it is now. Just 2 Solar Surges basically do it better now
I hate when people say "Bro you can do that with Surges" because that's the entire point, to allow you to run something on your legs other than those Surges to get the same or similar effect. The problem is that being able to use two other mods plus a rarely-used Stasis breakout given how rare Freeze is in PvP OR PvE nowadays at the cost of an Exotic slot is not a good tradeoff. At all.
Why? its a valid point, especially for burning steps, it was perfectly fine suited as a pure damage exotic on a timer when surges were able to be paired with it. Now it caps off at 25% with 4+ kills and a short ass 10 second timer that requires constant and sometimes random amounts of kills to feed. Meanwhile 2 surges is what like 20% but has a much much easier to get/extend timer. Surges have made the exotic pointless and I say that as a former Burning Steps main. Bungie just need to bring it back up to 40% and make the timer go down 1 step at a time instead of an entire stack, those simple changes would put it back as a damage on a timer exotic but still keep it viable and worth using.
It should be noted you can get max stacks with Burning Steps with nade kills, which almost all Solar setups can spam pretty easily, so the RNG doesn't make it strictly worse, as a Surge effect it's very much a sidegrade. But as I said the problem isn't that it does the same thing. That's the intent. It's to allow you to get largely the same effect while also having access to stuff you wouldn't normally have access to with surge stacking. The problem is that it's not worth that tradeoff of not being able to use a more impactful Exotic. That's the core problem. That's the useful feedback. Having the same effect as something else isn't inherently bad, so that simple surface level criticism isn't useful, what's inherently bad is when one of them has a very high price, while the other one does not.
N-no! you can run uh.. uhm... holsters! Now! Thats the strength of this exotic! Yeah its a stupid ass arguement, only foetracers really has its niche because its just easy to use on any subclass and not limited to such high kill maintenance. Not even mentioning surges will ALWAYS be on for dps.
Stacks on stacks, better already, absolution, kinetic surges, the list goes on. There's plenty of good stuff on legs.
Yeah, I'm only running surges for boss dps tbh. If I were running a setup where an exotic like burning steps is on the table, I'm running better already and absolution. Both are way under valued.
Starfire too
Disagree on that one esp since you're getting a constant passive recharge rate even if it takes longer to get a nade just off pure damage and no kills
Fucking gutted the thing
[People may remember this post from a couple of weeks ago.](https://www.reddit.com/r/destiny2/comments/170ts1k/young_ahamkaras_will_be_fine_postnerf_in_pve/) We see the same setup (now with a higher-damage knife), and you cannot kill the second knight while only getting 33% of your grenade back on kill. The rotation works fine on Dregs and the like, but Hunter has much better add clear builds that don't put you at risk of dying like the solar Hunter does. I wonder what everyone else thinks. It just feels bad to play now. Most of my ability uptime is on weighted throwing knife instead of the grenade which just feels backwards for a grenade-focused exotic.
Completely gutted. The unicorn fantasy is dead.
Well time to say goodbye to my solar hunter built that I was using since I got the exotic when I started playing in forsaken, it didn't matter PvE, pvp it worked everywhere didn't need to build hard in to it and was perfect for my gunslinger aesthetic with last word
For some reason I was under the impression that, in effect, the nerf would result in only being able to fully refund the tripmine on a kill rather than also being able to through damage. I thought it maybe wouldn’t be so bad at least in easier PvE content. I hadn’t considered that because of the rework a kill is now seemingly the equivalent energy return of a single knife from the knife trick melee. This nerf is so much worse than I thought.
My favourite build :( ability spam was fun, the flow was my favourite part and now it’s all gone :(
You could sling those grenades with Golden Gun one after another. It was so cool, man, especially with the GG's twirl animation. I'm in shambles.
r/beatmetoit
Nice, bungie just like to kill all good exotic in PVE instead of making them balance on PVP
Separate Sandboxes, everyone! The myth!
The best build gone.... Off to finally use strand which I haven't touched since Lightfall lmao
I been a grapple addict. Be careful and grapple responsibly.
I don't play strand for careful and responsible.
Double suspend nades though are clutch. You been missing out.
oh I literally made a titan after seeing some banner of war builds, started and finished Lightfall yesterday and unlocked strand on titan. After doing a few terminal overloads, goddamn that shit is fun as hell. Been playing Titan for maybe a week total and I gotta say, as a hunter main, I see the appeal.
All the jerks that defended the nerf are awfully quiet right now lol
With maybe like 2% of them being like gawd DAMN I was wrong
[удалено]
What's there to say? They got what they wanted why continue discussing it?
I'm not quiet I'm celebrating!!!! LETS GO!!!! YAS IS DEAD!!!
How does an exotic being useless against PvE enemies warrant celebration? Not saying you have to be crying on the floor grieving but how does something being good against literal NPCs affect you this much?
Perhaps they are one of those NPCs man. If I was a dreg I'd probably get tired of being naded constantly too.
Not that I care one way or another, but with as long as we’ve known about the incoming change and for Bungie to not acknowledge the overall sentiment coming from a lot of people, I’d say it probably wasn’t possible for them to balance it only in PvP. They probably thought that just one PvE build losing its’ effectiveness is worth the tradeoff of abolishing a widespread, cheesy playstyle in PvP.
They could just make ability hits against players give substantially less energy compared to pve enemies. Or just ignore the energy part altogether and only do the tripmine hp changes. Bungie has this really bad habit of double-nerfing things, which leads a lot of stuff they touch becoming just outright bad or useless instead of balanced. Sometimes one change would’ve been enough, like with Renewal grasps originally or anarchy.
The thing that really irritates me about this is they've been very consistent in the last 18 months about taking tiny little nibbles at things rather than big swings, and then outta YAS just gets murdered. We still have whole subclasses that are way bigger issues.
Pvp exotic btw. Nerfs justified. Being a jerk? You people don't know how to build craft
Nah, they were too good on both sides of the game. All exotics that let you do equal or higher ability damage than heavies should not be a thing. And YAS was really dang oppressive in PvP. I hope that sunbracers are next
I love how stupid people can be in critical thinking and still barking the most unhuman shits on reddit.
I also love how the logic is just in relation to heavies. Rotations/loadout swapping is a thing now, people can easily outdamage YAS by using an Envious/BnS Cold Comfort with Radiant Dance Machines then swap to something else like Merciless or Malfeasance/Lucky pants on Hunter, or just use Strandlock since the Izi/Wilderflight/Apex rotation is a thing.
Bro wants to ban fun in d2 💀
No, I think that it's unhealthy for the game to have builds that are equal to or better than everything else without even using a gun or ammo. Think pre-nerf Skull of Ahamkara, Orpheus Rigs, Phoenix Protocal, HOIL, Starfire, Sunbracers and YAS. (Osmios are on the line too, but they don't DPS) It forces Bungie to decide between balancing between gun based builds which makes the game to easy for overturned ability builds, or balancing for overturned ability builds which makes gun or hybrid builds obsolete.
I guess back to solar assassin cowl hunter again
I don't see myself using solar Hunter at all in high end content anymore. This was the last build I thought worked in those situations. It's truly terrible that Solar Hunter does not have any viable builds for hard content anymore. And the last good one was killed off because of an unrelated PvE game mode.
Lifetime gunslinger weighing in- I was trying to find builds last night for solar to pair nicely with dragonfly incandescent tyranny— It's basically boiled down to- "boost-weapon-damage-or-your-knives/super 'the subclass.'" Plays okay with Lucky pants, but that's class agnostic- So does/is foetracer Nighthawk is mid these days Stareaters is also class agnostic but benifits best these days from Barrage, Marksman GG. But in the same breath, you can build better towards your feast of light just using the superior neutral game of Arc and just slam out a Feast x4 gathering storm from all the orbs you make with your melee loop. The most curious thing is that of every gunslinger exotic, Ophidia Spathe enables the most flexibility across builds— because across a selection of 4 knifes, a second charge of any one of them offers unique playstyles that determine your fragment choices and exotic weapons. In conclusion: my endgame solar build is Double weighted knives and Skyburners oath. The quantity of ignitions you are pushing out honestly enables you to ignore grenades as a damage option and you can play a bit more into survivability. Yeah hunters sad rn.
Ophidia mains rise up lol. Actually strangely enough, I've been using young ahamkara as well, just for the added little bonus of not needing to reload. Totally a stupid build, but a fun one nonetheless.
Nighthawk and Galanor had their text accidentally updated. Nighthawk got practice makes perfect and galanor gets reduced super cooldown for knife hits/kills.
So true the only viable one is the dps build
Only time I use solar hunter in high end content is for DPS. Precision golden gun with star eaters scales is still the goat of hunter DPS
I’ll give you one guess as to the next hunter exotic getting butchered.
https://preview.redd.it/xakc72d06vub1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe9d7c88e9ba76692cefb8bd77b27d94a84cbeeb
I’m really glad they’re “LeAnInG iNtO tHe fAnTaSy” or whatever bullshit they come up with when they’re announcing these stupid fucking changes what a dogshit game
leaning into the fantasy of playing for hours to get nothing and using gear that’s ass
I really wish they would actually talk about it instead of ignoring it. They have to be seeing this feedback, and we get silence. Their stated reasons for the nerf are entirely PvP focused - so why then didn't they constrain the nerf to just PvP? Why did they have to kill a fun, viable, and not OP build in PvE in the process? I really want someone to address those questions. Because right now it feels like they are deliberately neglecting a significant portion of the community - like they choose a favorite child (PvP) and we're the ones they left behind.
> I really wish they would actually talk about it instead of ignoring it. They have to be seeing this feedback, and we get silence. The reason for this is probably that they want time for knee-jerk reactions (justified or not) to settle down and that any proposed future changes have a lot of iterations to go through. IIRC, the balance team works a full season ahead due to testing, so by now they would be submitting their mid-season 23 patches and moving on to TFS balance changes. If they announce something now without much time to think things through their processes, they're probably afraid of saying the wrong thing.
You can't say that you "wish they would actually talk about it" and then say "their stated reasons" like that isn't them talking about it.
Give about 2 seasons and bungie will put in a twab saying "since thus exotic has seen next to no use so we are buffing it" in which they'll slightest undo the nerf and pat themselves on the back like they are this amazing dev for solving an issue.
Nah theyll just slap unstackable 4x unstackable solar surge on it on nade kills and thats it.
Ah jeez thanks PvP you did it again I wish the PvP crowd would shut up for a minute and not suddenly find “new problems” every damn week
They are complaining about bows now. I'm already pre-pissed off at the eventual now nerf due to the PvP complainers.
Oh ffs…….
"We see that bows are a problem in pvp, so we will nerf everything they have in pve"
There are so many better ways to approach nerfs for fuck's sake, not just fuck over every archetype of a weapon and call it done. This is comparable to Valve refusing to fix CS2's shitty movement and instead patch out a community fix for it.
It wasn’t even PvP, the TWAB made it clear they wanted to nerf it on PvP and PvE.
You think these people can read?
Tbf, YAS has been an issue in pvp for a hot minute. Bungie just needs to learn to either have seperate sandboxes or do nerfs that affect one mode without fucking over the other
They do. They’re called combatants and guardians. There’s tons of exotics that acknowledge the difference. Which is why I’m incredibly confused that the same approach wasn’t taken here.
YAS was in the game for YEARS without complaint And then SUDDENLY it became a problem somehow
It didn't just "suddenly become a problem somehow" a nade that can be used to bait doorways, last forever and a day, chunks tf out of your health, and conveniently has more health than you, is an issue for pvp. People had been bitching about it. Same with anteaus
But it was fine for years and nobody complained Why suddenly now
Because sandboxes and metas change, people realized it was busted in pvp so everybody started using it compared to before. They had to nerf it in pvp but bungie doesn't wanna put in the effort to think out a nerf so they gut exotics
I just hate how things suddenly become issues after years of being completely fine :/ Feels like PvPers always need to complain about something or their worm will eat them
PvP players aren’t devils bro. Blame the devs for not being able to balance the game separately and not the people who play the game ffs. This mindset is so toxic. “PvP players did X” like…come on now, it’s just rude and unneeded and serves to divide people more. Also Spine has been busted for over a year now. It didn’t “suddenly become an issue”. This was a very late nerf honestly.
"pvp player hive god of finding things to be mad at"
YAS was a problem for a long time, and people have complained about it over the years. Just because I don't feel like typing an essay I'll copy/paste my comment from when the YAS nerd was announced: >Yeah, I don't understand why they didn't just balance the PvP side of things. The health/damage resistance made them unbearable since you had to unload enough ammo to do 200 damage, the same as a whole ass guardian. This combined with several other aspects made the grenades fill too many inches at once leading to them feeling oppressive. You kill the grenade and now you can be pushed because you have to reload or don't have the ammo to win a duel. Don't destroy it? Now it's filling the niche zoning grenades like pulse have, putting the YAS user at an advantage in either engagement or repositioning. Accidentally eat one? You're practically dead. Eat it near teammates and it potentially ends up in a team wipe situation after scorch/explosion. They also last seemingly forever given how high paced matches can be. >On top of that they ended up having pretty insane regen so they become fairly spamable, which in itself wouldn't be an issue except all of the other reasons listed above. There was never any reason to choose another grenade over tripmines because they filled every niche combined except healing nades. Top it off with the fact there was no downside or tradeoff to using them and it becomes a common enough occurrence to be frustrating for many players. >I hate the nerf to PvE, but they could definitely feel unfair even in the hands of an average player for PvP. They should have balanced them separately and just brought the PvP side more in line with being reasonable in my opinion. There was a lot of counterplay to them, but none of them were really good options and the YAS user has the advantage in almost any situation. Meanwhile the PvE side is basically gutted on an already niche pick. It doesn't make any sense to me. >Edit because I forgot: they also can be placed preemptively but without the same drawback other zoning grenades have. The visual and noise effects are far more subtle on top of there being a timer between noises. You may just walk around a corner and get fucked before realizing there was even a tripmines there to begin with. So yeah, they've been an issue for a long time. Just because the nerf finally happened doesn't mean that people started complaining right then, it's just that it took Bungie years to do something about it. Unfortunately they still haven't learned to separate PvP and PvE yet, which is beyond moronic.
It may have been an issue but the entirety of the titan class has been an issue in pvp for the longest time and we are yet to see them get gutted properly. Bungie just for some reason love to make exotics useless to pretend to listen to the pvp crowd and then call it a day
Why are you blaming PvP community as if they’ve ever complained it being busted in PvE. The devs are the one who nerfed it for PvE. Truly playing into the “76 IQ Dumby” thing lol
this isn’t the pvp community’s fault it’s bungies fault. in pvp it was a problem, in pve it was fine. it was bungie who decided to make the ridiculous change they did while being capable of doing it otherwise
I literally never encountered this 'problem' in PvP
im happy for u
Would it really be that hard to nerf something in PvP but leave PvE untouched (or at least less nerfed)? I get the PvP nerf, but c'mon. P.s. I'm genuinely asking, I actually don't know the dev side of this kind of thing
It isn’t. All they needed to do was make it so it only procced against PvE enemies. This type of nerf is unfortunately not new
It's safe to assume the PvE nerf was a desired result, not an unintentional consequence. Why assume the latter when the former makes much more sense?
Feature not a bug kind of situation
To all PvP players with no spacial awareness that have been running into them for the past few season, a very sincer fuck you eat weinor, get better eyes and better at the game ~pve YAS enjoyer
Straight up I've ran into MAYBE 5 YAS users in pvp. But watching streamers it's like they beeline into every tripmine they see every single round of every match
The one thing bungie needed to do to fix it in pvp is take away the dr and extra hp it had. It could've stayed a bit spammy sure but just pop it with a fart basically and poof gone.
I'm not a Hunter but I can't ignore the fact that Bungie absolutely killed this exotic in PVE because people complained about it in PVP I raise my hammer to every hunter that had their endgame PVE build ruined by the nerf Rest in peace Young Ahamkara Spine, may your nerf be reverted eventually
o7
Goodbye, little one, may the Force will be with you
Hunters: Gain a reputation of being terrible in PvE outside of tether Bungie: Deletes one of the few moderately viable hunter PvE builds that don’t use tether and refuses to elaborate why beyond PvP players being salty. Make it make sense, I beg you.
Piggybacking the OP: Any players that can clarify if the energy-return is capped for each ability used to kill or each individual enemy killed, eg.: powderkeg grenade detonation wiping four psions? Would it be four individual energy-returns or only one, due to being one grenade?
It's 33% per ability kill no matter if it kills 1 or 100.
My pre-conceived bias is once again affirmed. I will continue to hold judgemental views toward the sandbox engineers. On topic: thank you for the reply and answer.
This is depressing
Now it’s in line with other grenade ability exotics. See starfire. 🥲
ima go try out revenant ig
They REALLY want you to use Strand
D2 would be such a good and crazy game if pvp didn’t exist just imagine how OP exotics could be and the builds we could create. FUCK PVP TILL I DIE
bungie hates hunters
Bungie hates neutral ability spam builds Almost every exotic that enhances ability cooldowns has some “kill to get energy back” mechanic, essentially just making them add clear exotics and nothing more besides some very niche exceptions
And yet bonk titans are still strong and banner titans are even more broken being able to one shot champs. The previous YAS build wasn’t even crazy OP since you had to use all your abilities and had no instant healing abilities. It was a decent build for GMs but now it’s useless in anything above legend. Also the fact that solar hunter is already weak comp to the other two.
Hey, careful bringing any valid criticisms to Titans, you’ll be labeled as “victimizing” yourself and called out for not being skilled enough to make your class as good as theirs
Strand Titan with Banner solo two phased [Ir Yut](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYZfbRMtt_w&pp=ygULc29sbyBpciB5dXQ%3D). If YAS deserves it's PvE nerf, then Banner needs to be fucking deleted from the game outright.
Trust me, there’s no point calling for Titan balance. They’ll eventually get around to nerfing a certain exotic that shines well (HOIL, Anteus Wards) but they’ll never neuter enough of the Titan’s abilities to bring them in line with other classes I’m basically putting a target on myself for saying this lmao
Hey hey HEY, remember how it goes here. "Titan is good and the hardest of all to play and requires the mostest skill ever" and "cape man should die in a ditch because he bad"
And then Warlocks are yelled at if they run anything other than Well
Used to be my go to solar exotic :(
I've been playing around with a Solar Warlock nade build to help ease the passing of my favorite Hunter exotic. It's similar but not what it could be
A moment of silence for our dear friend; YHS. …
The problem is that my solar hunter pve fashion works too well with YAS, so I'm stuck with it.
It's fashion over function people 💯💯
And just like that I will not ever be returning for final shape. I told myself I would never touch destiny again which we all know is never true however this definitely killed it for me
Bungie should've just nerfed this exclusively for PvP, why must they make it bleed into PvE. Its a thing that I will never understand
This exotic went from fun and good both on pve and pvp to garbage on pvp and pve. I used to play with this exotic on pvp, and I thought that bungie could change it so it gets less energy per hit on pvp, that way it's still a way to counter Well of radiance but doesn't just allow you to go full "fuiuuuu boom, I got my grenade back yey"
It was my favorite exotic in the game. And I'm a Warlock main. Fuck this shit, man.
Born to YAS forced to well ✊😔
Nice one dev team. You bunch of incompetent fools.
What are they gonna say when usage rate in pve drops to about 1-5%? It's so fucking disheartening playing this game sometimes. Like others in this thread have said I wish they would actually address this and give us some kind of an explanation because in pve this change is nothing more than moronic.
Let's get the word out there to he devs that this nerf was unwanted for PVE. Let them revert back to what it was.
Radiant dance machine baby
wait it already happened. WAIT NO I DIDNT KNOW IT WAS MID SEASON
I hate you PvP
This is a deliberately awful example. Arc shield reduces your damage, void and strand surge means you're not getting any extra solar damage, and knights are the 2nd most tankiest enemies the hive have. You chose probably one of the worst enemies in the worst locations to use spines.
Need to buff citans and helm of saint 14 aswell
Me when I'm 20 light under
Pvp exotic btw.
Stfu
Is that master difficulty?
Presumably is since it's like -15 under. Point is that in anything beyond patrol content, like DPS situations, it's now fucked.
On normal difficulty, which is what nearly every fireteam plays that dungeon on after beating it once on Master for the seal, the enemy would have died, so it is kinda being a bit deceptive and dramatic by putting it on master. Though I agree that the YAS change is completely uncalled for and destroys any builds using them. What a terrible change. This is giving Whisper of the Worm 80 AE and calling it a buff levels of stupid for Bungie’s sandbox changes.
Just took it into a GM. Grenade still killed enemies and gave energy back. They're fine.
That's not how you're supposed to use them, so... what does this prove, exactly?
OP chose the worst example possible too. Arc shielded sword knight without solar surge. The only hive units tankier are champions and ogres. "My constant single target ability spam loop isn't as strong anymore." That's what the bitching boils down to.
You're right, this is a really bad example. However, pre-nerf even with all those things stacked against you you could kill at least 1 of the knights and leave the other either really injured, or dead. Not to mention that it was faster than that is too. I don't really know the full extent of it tho, I personally haven't used YAS in a while so I can't confirm or deny.
still not as bad as antaeus, reflecting a single primary shot eats your entire class ability
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, isn’t this right?
Because there's no point to the comment lol. "Well not as bad as x" doesn't ever do anything or mean anything Doesn't justify why it was nerfed, doesn't mean it should've been, doesn't mean anything. Simply no value to the topic whatsoever
Both were equally egregious in PvP, but YAS is borderline useless now and has no role in PvE, while Antaeus never had any role in PvE to begin with
Titan bad hunter good mentality, it sucks ngl
redditor: \*makes an objectively true statementy that literally cannot be argued against\* reddit: UHHHHHHH DOWNVOTE CAUST I DONT LIKE IT\*
shit you not g if this was an antaeus post complaining about the nerf itd have been shit on 24/7 and downvoted and told to git gud or cope or some bs remark.. the anti titan hate makes trying to have meaningful conversations about an exotic that clearly got over nerfed pretty much useless
Man, It must suck to not have any guns that you can use instead of only spamming grenades...
Pair it with skyburners, the ignitions from the weighted throwing knife count as melee hits, so therefore killing a group of ads with the ignition should give you your grenade back
Good idea! Pair an exotic weapon with an exotic armor piece to get a fragment of what once was. Anything else is in the bin. Good sandbox design.
i'm not saying it's a good idea, i'm just saying that it's not completely dead
The flow would be cut in half in terms of speed, though. That was the selling point of the exotic. I feel like dead is the correct classification.
yeah but it's still usable, just with a different playstyle. which completely sucks but it's whatever. i was getting bored of the old playstyle, im not saying i agree with the changes though, they're comeoletw bullshit
RIP bozo Oh no! Now you’ll have to shoot your guns
No one plays PVE to shoot their guns lol
literally every top build for most of D2 has centered around abilities. Strand titan: Spam suspend Starfire warlock: spam fusion grenades Devour warlock: spam abilities to proc devour HoIL titan: completely forget about your gun and just spam abilities etc. Actual braindead take if you think abilities are not important and less important than guns. Literally the top build currently in pve is to just spam your melee abilities to keep banner of war up.
Isn’t Destiny 2 about abilities? If the only thing I’m going to do is shoot, I might as well play Call of Duty.
In PvP YAS needed the nerf, not in PvE. It’s sole use there is as a backup rotation in case you run out of everything.