Destiny 2: Best Hunter Strand Builds for PVE

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Human Made

Penned by Brett Moss

I've been playing video games pretty much nonstop ever since I got my first 360. I love arena shooters, MMOs, and MOBAs, but I'll pretty much try any kind of game.

Reviewed by Benjamin Barr

Hunters have lots of great build options for their Strand subclass. In this guide, we’ll cover the best Hunter Strand builds in Destiny 2 to help you get started with this new subclass! We’ll start with a build featuring Star-Eater Scales with tons of Orbs and super regeneration, then we’ll look at a simple Sixth Coyote build.

Let’s get to it!

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Hunter Strand Subclass Build #1 — Star-Eater Scales

Orbs of Power are the most important resource for our first build. It utilizes the Star-Eater Scales Exotic to overcharge the Strand super, Silkstrike, for maximum damage. When using this build, you’ll want to focus on making tons of Orbs. This will help with super damage thanks to SES, but also your other mods as well. Here’s a detailed look at SES to get started.

Exotic Armor — Star-Eater Scales

Star-Eater Scales allows you to overcharge your super ability by picking up Orbs of Power. Any Orbs you pickup while your super energy is already filled will grant it an overcharge, up to 4 stacks/Orbs. When you have max charges, you’ll get an overshield and a health boost upon casting your super. According to light.gg, it’ll also do up to 70% increased damage. Here are the rest of the stats from that page:

• Super damage increase per Orb of Power: 27.3 / 54.6 / 62.3 / 70%
• HP restoration on super cast per Orb: 125 / 170 / 190 / 200 HP
• Overshield stats (only available with max Orbs): 100 HP for 16 seconds

Aspects

• Ensnaring Slam: Using your air move consumes your class ability energy, but allows you to crash to the ground and suspend nearby enemies. Doing so will make your class ability cooldown longer than usual.
• Widow’s Silk: Improved Grapple. When you use Grapple, it creates a grapple point that you and others can Grapple to for free. You also gain an additional grenade charge.

For this build, neither aspect is essential for what it does. However, both are generally strong and help out a lot. Ensnaring Slam is a consistent way to suspend enemies easily, and Widow’s Silk allows us to fly around the room constantly. They’re strong for ad-clear and mobility, both of which will come into play one way or another, even if the build isn’t focused around them.

Essential Fragments

• Thread of Warding: Picking up an Orb of Power grants Woven Mail. (-10 Resilience)
• Thread of Transmutation: While you have Woven Mail, weapon final blows create a Tangle. (+10 Strength)
• Thread of Continuity: Suspend, unravel, and sever effects applied to targets have increased duration. (+10 Strength)

It’s all about Orbs with this build, so there’s no way we wouldn’t include Thread of Warding. It grants Woven Mail on each Orb pickup, which grants about 70% damage resistance while active. It’s easily the strongest fragment for this build. Thread of Transmutation works great alongside Warding, as once you get Woven Mail, you’ll be able to easily spawn Tangles with weapon final blows. Then there’s Thread of Continuity, which works with every Strand build. It improves the suspend, unravel, and sever effects, so it’s good anytime those are in play.

Other Fragments

• Thread of Mind: Defeating suspended targets grants class ability energy.
• Thread of Ascent: Activating your grenade ability reloads your currently equipped weapon and grants increased weapon handling and airborne effectiveness for a short time. (+10 Mobility)
• Thread of Propagation: Powered melee final blows grant your Strand weapons Unraveling Rounds.
• Thread of Generation: Dealing damage generates grenade energy. (-10 Discipline)

You can really have your pick of any of these you like, since any of them can work with this build. Thread of Mind synergizes well with the Ensnaring Slam aspect, and Thread of Ascent is better on Hunters than anyone else since they get two Grapples. The other two, Threads of Propagation and Generation, are both generally good, but don’t really synergize too much. Propagation grants Unraveling Rounds on empowered melee kill, and Generation grants extra grenade energy when dealing damage.

Grenade

The grenade you use doesn’t really matter with this build, but Grapple is the best overall on Hunter. If you aren’t using Grapple on Hunter, you’re missing out entirely on one of your aspects. And since each class only has two so far, you really can’t afford to miss out on it.

Weapons

• Strand kinetic weapon
• Void heavy weapon

You’ll want a Strand weapon to take advantage of Artifact perks, and maybe a Void one as well this season. Strand weapons get bonuses from some fragments and Artifact perks, and so do Void weapons. They make a fantastic combo this season, and they probably will in the future too.

Best Armor Mods

• Siphon Mods (Helmet)
• Font of Wisdom (Helmet)
• Ashes to Assets / Hands-On (Helmet)
• Firepower / Heavy Handed (Arms)
• Grenade Kickstart (Arms)
• Loader Mods (Arms)
• Damage Resist Mods (Chest)
• Reserves Mods (Chest)
• Better Already (Legs)
• Weapon Surge Mods (Legs)
• Bomber (Class Item)
• Time Dilation (Class Item)
• Reaper (Class Item)

For armor mods, you’ll mostly want survivability, super regen, and ways to make Orbs. This often means you’ll want something like Grenade Kickstart to help you keep spamming abilities and making more Orbs. The Siphon Mods allow you to spawn Orbs of Power from rapid weapon kills, so they’re essential to this build. If you could only have one type of mod for this build, it’d be the Siphon mods. Feel free to experiment with new mods as you wish, as long as you’re able to keep making tons of Orbs.

Best Artifact Perks (S20)

• Authorized Mods: Grenades
• Multi-Siphon Mods
• Defiant Armory
• Origin Hones
• Untangler
• Threaded Blast
• Prismatic Transfer
• Volatile Flow*
• Bricks From Beyond*

*Only work with Void weapons, so only use them if that’s the strat you wanna go with.

None of the Artifact perks interact much with SES or the rest of our build, but these are the best ones to use anyway. Defiant Armory and Origin Hones are good with the new Season of Defiance weapons and other weapons they buff, which includes some Strand weapons. Multi-Siphon Mods is here because it allows you to combine the effects of both Void/Solar and Strand Siphon mods, which is necessary if you use the standard Strand + Void loadout. Untangler and Threaded Blast both improve the effects of shooting Tangles with Strand weapons, so obviously it’s worth using, too.

Prismatic Transfer is the only other last-slot perk, but it doesn’t always work out. When you cast your super, it grants a weapon damage bonus to all players on different subclasses than you. So you’ll want to make sure that at least someone on your team is using a different subclass, otherwise it’s a waste.

Hunter Strand Subclass Build #2 — The Sixth Coyote

This build focuses on suspending enemies constantly with The Sixth Coyote. It’s not a complicated build, so it’s fairly easy to change as well if you prefer a different playstyle. What it’ll focus on is chaining as many air move class abilities as possible and utilizing fragments and mods to help do so. We’ll get started with a very quick explanation of The Sixth Coyote.

Exotic Armor — The Sixth Coyote

The Sixth Coyote is probably the easiest Exotic in the game to understand. All it does is give you a second dodge charge. Nothing more, nothing less. Two dodges are twice as good as one, so we’ll be abusing that to suspend targets thanks to the new Strand aspects.

Aspects

• Ensnaring Slam: Using your air move consumes your class ability energy, but allows you to crash to the ground and suspend nearby enemies. Doing so will make your class ability cooldown longer than usual.
• Widow’s Silk: Improved Grapple. When you use Grapple, it creates a grapple point that you and others can Grapple to for free. You also gain an additional grenade charge.

While Widow’s Silk is great and helps with mobility a lot, Ensnaring Slam is the most important for this build. It allows you to consume your class ability energy to initiate an air move that suspends enemies when you hit the ground. Since The Sixth Coyote gives a second dodge/class ability charge, that means you can spam this more often. That’s the core mechanic of this build. It really is that simple. (And it’s incredibly fun as well.)

Essential Fragments

• Thread of Mind: Defeating suspended targets grants class ability energy.
• Thread of Continuity: Suspend, unravel, and sever effects applied to targets have increased duration.

Since we’re just trying to spam class abilities to suspend enemies all the time anyway, Thread of Mind is an easy choice. Use your class ability to suspend, then defeat suspended enemies to get energy back and do it again quicker. Thread of Continuity improves the suspend effects (along with unravel and sever), so it obviously works well in this build.

Other Fragments

• Thread of Warding: Picking up an Orb of Power grants Woven Mail. (-10 Resilience)
• Thread of Wisdom: Defeating suspended targets with precision final blows creates an Orb of Power.
• Thread of Transmutation: While you have Woven Mail, weapon final blows create a Tangle. (+10 Strength)
• Thread of Ascent: Activating your grenade ability reloads your currently equipped weapon and grants increased weapon handling and airborne effectiveness for a short time. (+10 Mobility)
• Thread of Generation: Dealing damage generates grenade energy. (-10 Discipline)

These are all good options for your other two fragments, and you can pick any you want as long as it works for you. The strongest two here are probably Threads of Warding and Wisdom for this build, but it all depends on your playstyle and preferences.

Grenade

For your grenade, Grapple is the best choice. Since Hunters get an aspect which improves their Grapple, it’s almost required. It also allows you to get up high so you can dive in with the air move to suspend more enemies. Grapple is amazing for Hunter especially, but if you really wanted you could go with Shackle Grenade for even more suspend.

Weapons

• Strand kinetic weapon
• Void heavy weapon

Once again, the Strand and Void combo is the best way to go. Both get great Artifact perks and don’t overlap too much with one another negatively, so it works the best this way.

Best Armor Mods

• Dynamo (Helmet)
• Void/Strand Dual Siphon (Helmet)
• Grenade Kickstart (Arms)
• Heavy Handed (Arms)
• Damage Resist Mods (Chest)
• Font of Endurance (Chest)*
• Better Already (Legs)
• Weapon Surge Mods (Legs)
• Insulation (Legs)
• Distribution (Class Item)
• Time Dilation (Class Item)
• Reaper (Class Item)

*You cannot go above 100 in any stat, even with these mods. If you’re already capped on a stat, don’t use its respective Font mod, which raises it temporarily.

Same as always, you should mess around with these mods to see which work best for your playstyle. The best for this build specifically are the ones which synergize with your class ability (Dynamo, Insulation, Distribution, and Reaper). The rest are generally effective and will help keep you in the fight, but they aren’t necessary for the build to work.

Best Artifact Perks (S20)

• Multi-Siphon Mods
• Defiant Armory
• Origin Hones
• Untangler
• Threaded Blast
• Volatile Flow
• Bricks From Beyond

Every Strand build we’ve recommended so far for PVE has involved Void weapons and perks, but that’s perfectly fine. Void weapons are undeniably strong this season thanks to Volatile Flow and Bricks From Beyond, so they’re worth splashing in whenever you can. Since Strand weapons are mostly kinetic, this works out well because we can have both without having to choose one.

Related Video: Best Hunter Builds

Join the High Ground

That’s it for our breakdown of the two best Hunter Strand builds in Destiny 2 — thanks for reading! Strand is incredibly fun to use on Hunter, so it’s nice to see how many viable builds there are. Let us know your favorite build in the comments, and subscribe to our newsletter for more Destiny 2 articles like this.

Happy gaming!