Destiny 2: Star-Eaters Scales Strand Hunter Build Guide

Exotic Overview

Many D2 players may claim that Celestial Night Hawk is the better super-focused exotic, but I have to disagree. Celestial is fantastic, but it limits the user to the Solar subclass and requires you to have fairly good aim. Star-Eaters doesn’t have this problem since it can be used with any subclass.

I like running it with strand since at 4 stacks of overcharge, you get the increased damage and an overshield. This lets you use the super in many more situations to deal with especially enemy-dense encounters or when dealing with champions or minibosses.

Abilities

This build doesn’t really have any abilities that are integral to the build since Star-Eaters doest really affect any of our day-to-day abilities. Also, because Strand is so new, there aren’t many alternatives to these abilities outside of the grenade ability. Still, I’ll provide you with what I used in this build and how it comes together to make one of my personal favorite Hunter builds to play.

• SilkStrike: This roaming super allows us to deal high damage from a decent distance away from enemies. Great for clearing rooms of enemies and for damaging bosses.
• Gambler’s Dodge: Not 100% necessary, but I like having my melee ability available on demand.
• Threaded Spike: A very satisfying ability to use Severs enemies and can be caught on its return to refund a portion of your melee energy. It’s a ranged melee attack that does good damage, so it’s good a must-run in my book.
• Grapple Grenade: I personally prefer the Grapple Grenade ability because its easier to trigger grenade-focused mods with this ability. It can also be used as a second melee ability which can also trigger armor mod effects. Suspend grenades are a perfectly reasonable alternative.

Aspects

Ensaring Slam is our first Aspect for this build and it is a staple for pretty much any Strand Hunter build. We use it in this build for the crowd control it provides and the ability energy it will generate in combination with our Fragments and Armor mods.

Our second Aspect is Whirling Maelstrom. I like running this Aspect for its mob-clearing potential. We can very easily generate Tangles with this build so this Aspect gets a lot of milage. 

Fragments

When it comes to Strand Fragments I love running Thread of Generation. It grants grenade energy whenever you cause damage and is a must-run if you decide to take Suspension Grenades. Our only other ability-generating Fragment is Thread of Mind which grants class ability energy whenever you defeat suspended foes.

Thread of Wisdom helps us create orbs of power by defeating suspended targets, which helps us get our abilities back faster and gives us super energy. Finally, we have Thread of Warding which grants us Woven Mail whenever we pick up an Orb of Power. With a single use of our class ability, we can suspend targets, generate class ability energy, create an orb of power, and gain Woven Mail. 

Armor Mods

You have a lot of freedom when it comes to your armor mods for this build. Keep your focus on creating Orbs of Power and Generating Super energy. Here are some mods I found really useful for this build;

• Ashes to Assets: Grant’s super energy on grenade kills.
• Solar/Strand Siphon(Artifact): Creates Orbs of Power on multikills with Strand or Solar weapons.
• Utility Finisher: Grants class ability energy when you perform a finisher with 3 or more stacks of armor charge.
• Charged Up: Grants the user an extra armor charge slot.
• Stacks on Stacks: Grants an additional armor charge stack from all sources.
• Orbs of Recuperation: Provides the build with some healing when you pick up an Orb of Power.

Heavy Handed/Firepower: Spawns an Orb of power on Melee/Grenade kills.