Out of all of the Warlock builds throughout the history of Destiny 2, one has remained head and shoulders above all. Even through the nerfs and the meta shifts, Well of Radiance has remained the cornerstone of Destiny team strategies, both for damage and survivability. In fact, it’s pretty difficult to find a DPS strategy that doesn’t include Well in some way, shape, or form.
If you’re a new player looking to take on the support role, or you’re simply just looking to move to being your team’s Well of Radiance user, look no further. This guide will help you figure out everything you need to know, so you can support your team and carve the way to victory.
In this guide, we’ll go over every aspect of the general Solar Support Warlock build, some variations you can use, and also go over how you can make sure that you can still output some crazy damage numbers even while helping support your team to meet their maximum potential.
Overview
Support Warlock, or ‘Welllock’, is a Solar Warlock build that’s based around doing one thing — supporting your teammates, and providing healing to help keep survivability up. It’s a lot less flashy than the high DPS or ad-clear builds that are commonplace in the game, but especially as you start to get into harder content, it becomes one of the most important builds in the game.
Well of Radiance is probably the strongest super in the game. It provides your team with a damage boost and survivability during a DPS phase, and often is the backbone of keeping a team alive and well to output the most DPS possible. Even with recent changes, such as the Well of Radiance rework in 2024 that was hailed to ‘kill’ the super, it’s still remained such an essential part of any team composition.
It might seem boring, but especially as a new player wanting to get better at endgame content, it is definitely worth picking up this build to have when nobody else wants to do it — throwing heals at your teammates while also being able to take advantage of the other benefits of the Solar class. Unlike in other games, playing support isn’t much different from playing the game normally — you just have the added benefit of being able to keep everyone alive.
Abilities, Aspects, and Fragments
Super
Well of Radiance
Description: Thrust your Sword into the ground, damaging and scorching nearby targets. The sword projects a continuous aura, granting radiant effects and restoration to nearby allies, protecting them from the effects of Stasis.
Well of Radiance is key to this build’s DPS strategy. You’ll be providing your team with sustain and survivability, all while being able to DPS yourself, and so you’ll be able to ensure that your whole team can stay alive for the duration of the DPS phase.
Alternative: Song of Flame
Description: Unleash your inner fire, making your equipped weapons radiant and enhancing your abilities.
[Melee]: Release a supercharged melee attack that launches additional projectiles.
[Grenade]: Create a sentient flame wisp that seeks out targets and detonates in a scorching explosion, then seeks out other nearby targets.
While Song of Flame is active, you and nearby allies regenerate abilities more quickly, are more resistant to incoming damage, and your Solar and Kinetic weapons scorch targets.
For boss fights where Well of Radiance is active (even if they are few and far between), Song of Flame is a great alternative to ensure damage resistance for those around you, as well as a healthy dose of Radiant and ability regeneration.
Abilities
Class Ability
Phoenix Dive
Description: Only usable while airborne.
Performs a dive to the ground in the direction of your movement input. Not inputting a movement direction results in a vertical downward dive.
Applies Cure x2 to you and allies within 9 meters upon landing.
Phoenix Dive is a great tool to be able to apply a burst of healing quickly to yourself and your teammates. While it’s more a matter of preference between this and a healing rift, I strongly prefer Phoenix Dive due to how much more quickly it applies healing.
Movement Ability
Burst Glide
Description: Jump while airborne to activate Glide and start an airborne drift with a strong initial boost of speed.
This is, in my opinion, easily the strongest of the Warlock movement options. It’s a matter of preference, of course, but most Warlocks tend to use this.
Melee
Incinerator Snap
Description: Snap your fingers to create a fan of burning sparks that explode and scorch targets.
Incinerator Snap is a potent ad-clear melee that can also burst some yellow bar enemies as well as minors.
Grenade
Healing Grenade
Description: A grenade that cures allies on impact and creates an Orb of benevolent Solar Light, granting restoration to allies when picked up.
Healing Grenade is essential to this build, as it’s a really quick and easy way to get healing out, and works out with our key piece of Exotic Armor in Speaker’s Sight.
Aspects
Touch of Flame
Description: Your Healing, Solar, Firebolt, and Fusion Grenades have enhanced functionality.
Healing Grenade: Improves the strength of cure and restoration effects applied. Consuming a Healing Grenade with Heat Rises also applies restoration to nearby allies.
Solar Grenade: Increases linger duration. Periodically emits blobs of lava around its perimeter.
Firebolt Grenade: Increases target search radius and maximum target count.
Fusion Grenade: Explodes twice.
Touch of Flame is a great aspect for improving the strength of your Healing Grenades, letting you dish out more healing.
Hellion
Description: Activate your class ability to summon a Solar mortar that lobs flaming projectiles at distant targets. Targets damaged by the mortar are scorched.
Hellion is great for additional ad-clear for a very low cost of activating your activated ability, which pairs well with Phoenix Dive to be able to get a turret very easily. Hellion also acts as passive boss DPS.
Alternative: Icarus Dash
Description: [Air Dodge]: Dodge quickly while airborne.
While Heat Rises is active, you have an additional dodge.
While airborne, rapidly defeating targets with your Super or weapons cures you.
Icarus Dash is a great piece of movement tech and very usable, just not always applicable. You can swap this out with Hellion if you think it’s required, though.
Fragments
Ember of Benevolence
Description: Applying restoration, cure, or radiant to allies grants increased grenade, melee, and class ability regeneration for a short duration.
Ember of Benevolence is crucial to the support build, as it ensures that you can get your Healing Grenade back as fast as possible.
Ember of Singeing
Description: Your class ability recharges faster when you scorch targets.
Ember of Singeing works well with Hellion, as it recharges Hellion back while also being triggered by Hellion (and Incinerator Snap).
Ember of Empyrean
Description: Solar weapon or ability final blows extend the duration of restoration and radiant effects applied to you.
Ember of Empyrean is essential to keep restoration, when combined with Hellion and Incinerator Snap. Even if you decide not to run Solar ad-clear weapons, keep this aspect on for survivability.
Ember of Solace
Description: Radiant and restoration effects applied to you have increased duration.
Ember of Solace lets you keep restoration even longer, helping you stay alive as you also heal your teammates.
Weapons
The best thing about Support Warlock is that there’s no set weapon that you have to use. It’s incredibly dependent on the encounter, your team composition, and what role you want to provide to the team.
It can just be a case of using your usual Lord of Wolves or Queenbreaker DPS strategy, or changing your loadout depending on what the team needs. Generally speaking, you’ll need to find a way to put out damage even as the support, meaning that your loadouts will still be ‘meta’ to an extent.
However, here are some key ‘support’ weapons that you should get your hands on to help your team even more.
Divinity
Rarity: Exotic
Type: Trace Rifle
Element: Arc
Exotic Perks:
Judgment
Sustained damage with this weapon envelops the target in a field that weakens and stuns them. Strong against [Disruption] Overload Champions.
Penance
Targets under the effects of Judgment long enough are struck with a burst of damage.
Source: Garden of Salvation Raid
Divinity is an essential weapon for acting as a support in Destiny 2. For any boss where hitting crit damage can be difficult, or where you’re wanting to hit crits and don’t have another debuff, using Divinity can boost everyone else’s damage.
Essentially, sustained fire with Divinity will weaken the target, as well as create a ‘bubble’ around the target that acts as a massive crit spot. Good Divinity players will still be able to DPS with other weapons while switching back to Divinity to keep the ‘Div Bubble’ up, so make sure to practice so you can get the most out of using it.
No Hesistation
Rarity: Legendary
Type: Auto Rifle (Support Frame)
Element: Solar
God Roll:
Physic
Rapidly healing allies grants restoration to you and your allies.
Incandescent
Defeating a target spreads scorch to those nearby.
More powerful combatants and opposing Guardians cause scorch in a larger radius.
Source: The Pale Heart
Support Frame Auto Rifles are great at keeping your team alive even further, and No Hesitation does so while providing great ad clear in Incandescent.
They do require some getting used to, but using them correctly should result in a great deal of survivability for your team.
Edge of Intent
Rarity: Exotic
Type: Glaive
Element: Solar
Exotic Perks:
Edge of Intent
Melee and projectile damage charge this weapon. When fully charged, [Alternate Weapon Action] to enable a special projectile attack.
Projectile final blows scorch nearby targets.
Restorative Turret
[Alternate Weapon Action]: When weapon is fully charged, consume charge before firing to make your next shot deploy a healing turret on impact that provides Cure and Restoration to nearby allies.
Source: The Witch Queen Post-Campaign
Glaives are a massive meme in the Destiny community, but Edge of Intent has been making waves with its recent buffs due to its ability to not only provide great ad clear with protection, but also spawn a Speaker’s Sight style restorative turret on demand. It’s definitely worth a try, especially combined with Karnstein Armlets for what can essentially be compared to immortality for as long as you can get melee kills.
Lumina
Rarity: Exotic
Type: Hand Cannon
Element: Kinetic
Exotic Perks:
Noble Rounds
Kills with this weapon leave behind Remnants. Absorbing a Remnant converts your next hipfired shot into an ally-seeking Noble Round and partially refills the magazine.
Blessing of the Sky
Using a Noble Round on an ally heals them and grants both you and them a weapon damage bonus for a short duration.
Source: Exotic Archive
A bit more of a higher-level strategy, Lumina is incredibly underrated by the general Destiny 2 community. It creates Remnants that allow you to heal and boost your teammates’ damage, giving you a way to help boost your team’s damage wholly. It’s not always applicable to every loadout, but when it is, it’s really good.
Armor and Mods
Exotic Armor
Speaker’s Sight
Description: Healing grenades spawn a Restorative Turret. Healing allies occasionally spawns an Orb of Power.
Speaker’s Sight is essential to this build, as it turns your Healing Grenades into turrets that fire healing at you and your teammates. This is huge for survivability and should be your main piece of Exotic Armor.
Sanguine Alchemy
Description: While standing in any rift, damaging a target will mark it. You deal extra damage to marked targets, and gain additional bonus damage with weapons that have a damage type matching your equipped Super. Weapon final blows while standing in any rift pause the rift's countdown, extending its duration.
When it comes to DPS, switching to Sanugine Alchemy once you place your Well of Radiance will ensure that you output more damage during DPS. This is a higher-tier strategy, so don’t worry about it until you’re ready, but switch to this armor before placing your Well of Radiance to massively increase your damage output. (If Notswap is active, place your Well first.)
Cenotaph Mask
Description: Steadily reloads a portion of your equipped Trace Rifle's magazine from reserves. Damaging a vehicle, boss, or Champion with a Trace Rifle marks them as the target. When an ally defeats the marked target, Special ammo is generated for you and Heavy ammo for your allies.
In some endgame situations, such as Raids or Contest Dungeons, you’ll need to be able to generate ammo to help your team be able to have enough ammo to kill within the enrage. Cenotaph Mask is great for this, as it allows you to generate ammo for your teammates during ad clear segments, though you’ll have to swap off of Speaker’s Sight for this.
Stats and Mods
Stats and Mods will be changing with The Edge of Fate, so be aware that this information could become outdated as time goes on. It will be updated post-release once we have a full understanding of the new armor system and what it entails.
When it comes to stats, you’ll want to prioritise Resilience, Discipline, and Recovery. The other three stats don’t matter, just get them as high as you can without wasted stats, but try to push all three of those stats as close as you can to 100 (you’ll usually only be able to get Recovery to 80 or so, unless you have really good armor).
For mods, these are the mods you’ll want on each piece of armor, in order of importance:
Head
Mods: Heavy Ammo Finder/Scout, Orb Siphon, Dynamo
Heavy Ammo Finder is vital to generate DPS ammo for the team, but can also be switched to Special if required. Orb Siphon of your chosen element (usually Solar/Harmonic) will let you generate more Orbs of Power, which provide more healing and regen. Dynamo helps you get your Well of Radiance back more quickly.
Arms
Mods: Focusing Strike, Impact Induction, Solar Loader
Arm mods are kind of inconsequential, and so we want to take abilities that will help us get our class ability back as fast as possible (to link to our Class Item mods). A loader mod is never terrible, either.
Chest
Mods: Resistance Mods
Depending on the encounter, you’ll need to match your resistances to the encounter to ensure you’ve got elemental resistance from the types of damage you’ll face. You can sometimes use a reserve mod here, too, but if you’re not sure, then you probably shouldn’t.
Legs
Mods: Recuperation, Better Already, Absolution (Switch to 3x Surges during DPS)
Recuperation and Better Already turn Orbs of Power into healing, and Absolution turns them into ability regeneration, so they’re all great choices. Make sure to switch to your weapon’s corresponding Surge Mods during DPS for maximum damage output.
Class Item
Mods: Special Finisher, Reaper, Bomber (Switch to 3 x Time Dilation during DPS)
Special Finisher lets you generate Special Ammo, as well as keep Armor Charges for your Surge swap during DPS. Reaper lets you create Orbs on demand for regeneration and healing, and Bomber helps you get your healing grenade back faster, and works with your arm mods to be able to create a kind of loop. Switching to Time Dilation during DPS will help your surges stick around longer.
Closing Time
Support Warlock is an essential part of Destiny 2, and learning how to build and play it will help take your Warlock gameplay for Endgame to a whole new level.
If you’re looking for a team to try out your new build, check out our guide on LFGs, or come and join us on our Discord to participate in Raid and Dungeon runs with me and other welcoming players!
Otherwise, thank you for your time, and I’ll see you in the stars.