Foetracer
Of all the things I expected to happen in Destiny 2’s Season of the Witch, Foetracer becoming meta was not one of them. Oh, but not PvP meta, but PvE meta. Wait what?
This is because of a total rework of the Hunter exotic as of this season.
Here’s the old functionality, which was erased and flat-out handed to Knucklehead Radar: “Visually marks targets. Deals more damage to low-health marked targets. Provides a small benefit to the airborne effectiveness stat of all weapons.”
Very boring. Occasionally useful in PvP. But now? Here’s the grand redesign, via the TWAB a few weeks ago:
“We took some cues from the popular Monochromatic Maestro artifact perk for this one. When you deal damage with one of your abilities, you gain a damage bonus with weapons that have damage types matching your subclass damage type. Additionally, when you defeat an enemy you’ve damaged with one of your abilities (either with another ability or with a weapon with a damage type matching your subclass type), you will spawn one of the collectible objects associated with your subclass, such as Ionic Traces or Firesprites.”
Testing reveals that the “damage bonus” is 25% for 10 seconds, a huge amount. There’s a good thread from Revenant (via Weeegiee) about how this works, this is how it works to become a top DPS exotic through this change:
So in summary:
- The 25% damage buff can be activated from a shackle throw or even a grapple, because the grapple itself does a tiny bit of Strand damage on hit.
- The 25% buff goes to your Strand weapons, and the best thing to use right now is Cataphract, the new Legendary Trials Strand Grenade launcher with top-end burst DPS
- Then you use Thread of Ascent to instantly reload the grenade launcher and keep going.
Combine that with traditional damage/weaken buffs like Tether and Well and others and you’ve got yourself a 3x damage increase on the grenade launcher. Nuts.
This goes to show that when Bungie reworks old exotics they can become just as useful as new exotics. They’ve really been going hard lately on buffing past exotics if not reworking them entirely, and they have created some extremely useful options. Is this so good it’s going to get nerfed? Eh, I sort of doubt it, as nothing here seems like a bugged damage interaction, just a good combo of the rework, a new weapon and traditional DPS buffs. Very cool, I’m going to give it a shot.
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