Crystalline Force Build
This Warlock build is primarily PvE-focused, but plays very well in the right hands in the Crucible.
Components:
- Arbalest Exotic Kinetic Linear Fusion Rifle
- Chromatic Fire Exotic Warlock Chest Armour
Highlights:
- Arbalest’s high aim assist and large hitboxes make hitting critical shots easier
- Arbalest’s significant impact does massive damage
- Chromatic Fire’s primary perk creates elemental Dragonfly-like explosions around targets, allowing a player to wield additional elemental damage
Arbalest
The first-ever kinetic linear fusion, Arbalest brings a lot of silent benefits to the table for the player wielding it. While its primary perk, Compounding Force, is formidable, allowing players to cause “massive damage” to enemy elemental shields, this unique weapon is so much more than a one-trick pony. It has significant impact given its short charge time, inflicting massive damage to either enemy combatants or fellow Guardians. Its aim assist is very high, it has a large hitbox, and its bullet magnetism is up there with post-nerf Queensbreaker. It has a wide-view, open-format, low-zoom scope that allows the user to maintain situational awareness while drawing down on a target’s head — whether that head is across the battlefield, half a metre away, or rapidly closing the intervening distances.
Chromatic Fire
Chromatic Fire is absolutely a sleeper exotic, with many Warlocks allowing this beast to languish in their vaults and collections so they can wear Contraverse Hold, Phoenix Protocol, Geomag Stabilisers, or some other “meta” exotic armour piece.
Aside from working with every Warlock subclass and perk tree, this unique exotic chest piece also works with any kinetic weapon. It’s main perk, Crystalline Transistor, causes a Dragonfly-like elemental explosion when a critical kill is earned with a kinetic weapon. The element of the explosion matches the element of the user’s currently equipped subclass (which, of course, could be varied at-will—assuming there was even a good reason to burn any ability charges currently unused).
This ability pairs very well with any exotic kinetic weapon, such as Thorn, Jade Rabbit, MIDA Multi-tool, Wish-Ender, Izunagi’s Burden, or Ace of Spades — just to name a few! (See my “Spade of Many Colours” Build coming soon for the benefits of Ace of Spades with Chromatic Fire!) The ability to generate area-of-effect elemental damage off a kinetic weapon is helpful in many situations: activities with elemental singe, “Match Game” modifiers, “Prism” modifiers, and many others. It can make an already powerful exotic weapon even stronger, and is useful (if no other time) when no other exotic is immediately apparent or necessary in a loadout.
Putting It All Together: Crystalline Force
How do these perks work well together? The ideal situation for using this build flows something like this:
- Break an opponent’s shield with Arbalest
- Crit-kill that opponent (or another nearby opponent)
- Take out or damage surrounding combatants
This build is superb in nearly any PvE or Gambit activity. The hordes of trash mobs found in these sorts of activities easily fall to the elemental explosions of Chromatic Fire. But, this is truly a sleeper build for the Crucible, too. The impact of Arbalest allows the player to two-tap most full-health opponents, or single shot an already-weakened opponent. Game modes like Control, Countdown, Supremacy, Breakthrough, Lockdown, and Showdown — where opponents tend to cluster around objectives and teammates are particularly suited to this loadout.
Next build: Spade of Many Colours (Another Chromatic Fire loadout)
