Edit: An important note I forgot in the title, this is meant for PvE.

Introduction

I'll be using Flux grenade as an example since that's the grenade Bungie chose as their example. Keep in mind that this discussion will apply to all new high cool down grenades, not just Flux.

People often complain about armor affinities, but were you aware that switching them around isn't as necessary as you may think? Arc affinity is all about melee, Void is about class abilities and super, and Solar is grenades. With this in mind, you can have three dedicated legendary armor sets to suite 95% of your needs in this game. One Arc with high strength, void with high intellect/class ability, and solar with discipline. For builds that require dipping over, you simply swap out your chest piece or class item as those are the most negligible. Chest piece, because its affinity specific mods are resistances and class item, because it doesn't have a bearing on your stats. I did a detailed write up on the nuance of armor affinities sometime ago if you care to go into more detail. Just know this going forward, it's a lot better system than the average player gives it credit for.

For what I'm discussing here, we will be looking at a kitted Solar affinity armor set with 100 discipline.

Decreasing Ability Cooldowns

With that out of the way, let's look at the new cooldown for Flux grenades at 182 seconds and how this is a suggestion that you don't have to listen to.

The base cooldown of 182 seconds is factored in to assume that you have tier 3 discipline. Assuming that the cooldown percentages for each tier of discipline stays the same as they are now, rocking tier 10 will result in a 40% reduction to your grenade recharge timer. This already drops the cooldown from 182 seconds to 109 seconds.

Let's take this further. Firepower is an easy-to-use Solar charged with light mod that should be in every grenade build. For each stack of Firepower you have, you reduce your grenade cooldown by 15% after you throw a grenade. For practical purposes, you can only run 4x of these for a total of 60% as you still need one combat mod slot opened to generate CwL, often Taking Charge.

Innervation is a Solar boots mod that restores 12/18% of your grenade when picking up a small/large orb of power. Bomber is a Solar class item mod that restores your grenade when using your class ability. It restores 14% on Hunter, 16% on Titan, and 25% on Warlock as the effect is tied to the base cooldown of your class ability.

The Math

Using all of this as our basis, let's do some math on the Flux grenade.

• 182s base cooldown
• 40% reduction from 100 discipline
  • New cooldown of 109s
• 4x Firepower mods
  • Taking the new cooldown of 109s
  • 109 - (109 * .6) = 44s

Now, we reach a cooldown of 44s. These 44s can be easily shaved off by our remaining armor mods. They reduce the total time as such:

• Innervation (Boots)
  • Small Orb
    • -13s
    • Remaining Time: 31s
  • Large Orb
    • -20s
    • Remaining Time: 22s
• Bomber (Class Item) - Using Hunter as Example
  • -15s
  • Remaining Time: 29s

Keep in mind that these can be done independent of each other and repetitively. You can effectively make your grenade cooldown 0s if you build into it properly.

So what are we getting out of this? Flux grenade damage was increased by a whopping 92% after factoring in the base damage increase on top of the 15% increase to PvE targets. This was already a hard hitting grenade in its own right, now it's a monster with its damage almost doubled. Have fun trying this out on Atheon.

Why This is Good

Build diversity is a good thing for the health of a game. You may be getting ready to type it right now. Sure I can have no cooldown on my grenade if I do all of this, but I sacrifice everything else!

1. No you don't
2. That's the purpose of builds
   1. Even then, the armor energy cost for what I listed actually isn't high - especially if you create your armor sets as I suggested at the beginning of this post.
   2. You leave plenty of room for scavenger, finder, reloader, and reserve mods to be slotted.

Solar helmet mods like Ashes to Assets give you super energy for landing grenade blows, so your lack of intellect is accounted for. Yes, you do sacrifice your melee, but that's how builds become balanced. You can't have it all in a game for a game to be balanced in a healthy way. Making important decisions on which things you rather have is true build crafting, something this game has needed! However, for the case of Hunters, they can make up for the low strength stat with Gambler's Dodge.

Since we're speccing into solar mods with the focus of discipline, it's not too hard to get the required stats. On Hunters, 100 mobility, good recovery, and 100 discipline. That's extremely easy to do, especially with the new ghost mods that allow you to target stat allocations. You don't even need high stat armor! You just need the spikes in the correct places.

The same things I listed off here are directly applicable to other abilities and affinities as well. You can do the exact same for your melees on an Arc subclass or your class ability/super on a void subclass! You don't need to try and get one armor set that maximizes everything. Aim for three sets that do one thing well and switch pieces as you need to. If you truly want something hybrid, then that's what the new Stasis armor mods are for! Their kickstart mods allow you to be a jack-of-all-trades master-of-none scenario.

This hasn't even began to dip into additional things you can add on such as exotics, subclass perks, and weapon perks. Demolitionist anybody? How about the Adrenaline Junkie buff that's coming out soon? This game is going further and further towards a true build crafting experience - at least as much as we're gonna get in a MMO lite offering.

I'll leave you with this - cooldowns in PvE are suggestions, not mandatory. Taking the time to build into it isn't stupid or pointless. It's how creating builds work. With the new changes coming, our abilities are becoming more impactful at the cost of having to think about how you build craft more. This is absolutely the right call to be made.

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