Destiny 2: The Best Exotic Armor from Beyond Light

Hunter Exotics

While I could only choose 1 exotic to represent the Hunter Class, I would be remiss if I didn’t give an honorable mention to the Star-Eater Scales leg exotic. This exotic armor piece is very popular amongst speed runners and DPS enthusiasts. The main purpose this exotic serves is completely shredding boss health bars with your overcharged superattack. This can be worth it even against Champions, but this exotic requires you to have your super to have any effect, and even then, you just gain extra damage while using it. With the nerf to the orb generation mods like Reaper and the overall effectiveness of our weapons exceeding that of our super damage, I can help but feel this exotic misses the mark for this list by just a hair. I’d rather run something that is active all through an activity instead of only being available every 3-5 minutes.

Athrys’s Embrace

Athrys’s Embrace are a pair of exotic gauntlets that focus on buffing the Weighted Throwing Knife ability. With this exotic equipped, our Weighted Throwing Knife ability gains an extra bounce when thrown and increased tracking. This exotic also grants the user the Strengthened Throwing Knife buff whenever you score three precision hits with a weapon within 2.5 seconds of each other. This buff will last for 10 seconds, but the duration can be increased by 5 seconds up to a max of 30 seconds by landing additional precision hits. 

The Strengthened Throwing Knife buff provides the user with a few really powerful effects. First off the buff grants a 50-point increase to the user’s strength stat which can be great for getting your melee back faster. Do keep in mind that the 50-point increase will not carry over 100 total Strength, so you can best maximize this buff by leaving your Strength stat at around 50. This buff also provides a 200% damage increase to your Throwing Knife’s damage and it also allows your Throwing Knife to stun Unstoppable Champions. Any exotic that grants Champion stun to our weapons or abilities is instantly placed higher up on my list, as it opens up opportunities to use different combinations of weapons while in Champion-level content. 

Titan Exotics

Just like with Hunter’s, I have an honorable mention exotic. This one is the Cuirass of the Falling Star. This exotic buffs your Thunder Crash super’s damage by 100% and grants an Overshield after landing the super. It’s very fun to use but it just isn’t as nice as an exotic that keeps you alive or improves your weapon damage, which you’ll be using much more often than your super.

Precious Scars

This exotic helmet is best run with a fireteam. Considering the fact that the in-game Fireteam Finder is available in season 23, running Raids, Dungeons, and Nightfalls will become more common amongst solo players, as a result, an exotic like this one is bound to become quite useful. Precious Scars grants the user and their allies within a 15-meter radius a 100hp Void Overshield every time the user revives an ally or is revived themselves. The buff is limited to that 15-meter radius, so anyone who leaves that area, will instantly lose the Overshield. The Overshield will also go away after 10 seconds.

The best part of this exotic is its second effect, which restores 60hp to yourself and nearby allies within 15 meters each time you get a kill with a weapon that matches your subclass. This buff also applies restoration x1 to you and those nearby allies for a couple of seconds. Both of these effects are on a 3-second cooldown. The recent nerfs to some of the game’s best methods of sustain is why I think this exotic could potentially make some waves. When ran in a Solar build this exotic can help trigger Restoration without the need of an ability or Fragment. When being run outside of the Solar Subclass it grants other subclasses that might be lacking proper healing effects, some much-needed healing like Arc and Stasis Titan. I feel this is definitely one to mess around with next time you’re running an activity with a fireteam.

Warlock Exotics

My honorable mention for the Warlock’s exotic armor piece is the Boots of the Assembler leg exotic. This exotic makes your rifts spawn noble seekers that seek out your allies and grant them buffs based on the type of rift you’re running. Healing Rift Seekers will restore 75 HP to an ally and start health regen while Empowered Seekers will grant the ally a 35% damage boost for 5 seconds. The only reason this exotic wasn’t chosen for this list is because Warlock Rifts are kind of clunky to use and in end-game content standing still in a rift is a great way to get killed.  

Mantle of Battle Harmony

The Mantle of Battle Harmony is an exotic chest piece that centers around your super. While your super ability is fully charged, getting a kill with a weapon that matches your subclass element will grant you 4 stacks of weapon surge damage matching your subclass type for 11 seconds. Even in most endgame content, this is fairly easy to obtain and the damage increase is definitely noticeable. This effect can be quite devastating when combined with Aspects and Fragments that benefit from elemental weapon kills like Ember of Empyrean extending our Restoration effects on Solar weapon kills.

This exotic’s second effect triggers while your super isn’t fully charged and you get a kill with a weapon that matches your subclass element. You are granted the Energy Siphon buff which generates 3% super energy over the course of 2 seconds. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but season 23 nerfed a lot of the super energy-generating mods and 3% adds up quite a bit over the course of an activity. In all honesty, most of the Warlock supers are just okay for mob clearing and boss damage. The main reason I’d run this is for faster generation of Well of Radiance, and the Weapon Surge effect while I have max super energy. Well is still the best super in the game and the more often you can drop it the easier time you’ll have in most end-game content.