There's been a lot of talk recently about Titans,
about how they're not good, their Prismatic kit is bad, so, how much of that is actually
justified and how much of that is just cope. The "Titans aren't good," sentiment originally
stemmed from Salvation's Edge, contest version. If you were following the race, you will have noticed
that a very, very, very small percentage of teams actually had a Titan in their group for their
completion. I played a Titan for about 24 hours or so, and then ended up switching to Hunter after
seeing how easily people were clearing the damage check. It was the first time ever that I didn't
complete the contest mode on my Titan. Titans struggled in The Witness encounter specifically
because their toolkit compared to that of Hunters and Warlocks didn't offer as much. Hunters are
quite dominant right now because of Still Hunt and Celestial Nighthawk, Warlocks have Well of
Radiance at an absolute baseline of usefulness, but also have some good Prismatic setups that
enabled them to slay out pretty nicely, namely the Getaway Artist setup with lots of different
elemental buddies and Bleak Watcher turrets. TItans, on the other hand, were easily
replaceable with either another Hunter or Warlock, not really bringing much to the
table outside of being a power ammo bot, using Aeons to hit finishers on subjugators,
most of the time having to burn their super on them for an easy kill. Their damage
was also relegated to Still Hunt or whatever Titans could dig up in the depths
of their vault. Their Prismatic kit heavily revolves around melee attacks if you wish
to play offensively and as we'll discuss, that isn't really the safest option, nor was
it even really that smart in the contest raid. You know what's not easily replaceable? Your
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Thanks to manscaped for sponsoring this video. In the grand scheme, do I think Titans are really
in trouble in the raid currently? Not really. I run the normal version of the raid every week
and frequently see myself at the top of the damage charts using a Microcosm on The Witness.
My Titan-ness is not a problem or detrimental on any of the other encounters either, it's
mainly a Witness specific, contest issue. But, even on the most competitive of days, it doesn't
feel great knowing that simply by being on a Titan that I am probably being a detriment to my team.
Their defensive capabilities are simply not strong or useful enough to warrant bringing and the Well
of Radiance nerf did very little, if outright nothing to impact the raid race as a whole.
Which brings us to Prismatic. I wanna preface this by saying that Bungie has said they're already
having discussions about Titan and Prismatic, but let's look at why some people
aren't too happy with Prismatic Titan. The main issue that people are having is that
it feels like there is only 1 practical build for Prismatic Titan and that's Knockout and
Consecration w/ Frenzied Blade so that you can get 3 melees. When I was at the preview
event for Final Shape, I ran Knockout and Diamond Lance w/ Point-Contact Cannon and
while I do feel like that is another option to run in the kit, especially with Contact
being on the exotic class item, most people have leaned towards Consecration. Either way, both
of these setups heavily revolve around the use of melee attacks, which for Titan isn't the most
unwarranted, but that's ALL they really have. The other 2 aspects are Unbreakable, which is
a short duration shield that uses your grenade and reflects damage back, and Drengr's Lash, which
sends out a suspension wave from your wall or from your character if using thruster. These are both
very defensive in nature, offering very little in the way of extra firepower. Unbreakable
feels like it's more tuned with Void in mind, which makes sense, but Prismatic offers very
little way to regenerate grenade energy, making the uptime on it very low. All of this
might be fine, if there were a lot of places where that defensive capability was valuable
or if these abilities lead to more offense. This is the issue that I had with the Ward of
Dawn adjustments when those were announced: there are not many times in the game, if ANY,
that investing my entire super into a defensively driven effect is worth it over just throwing a
giant axe at an enemy's head and calling it a day. Full defense has not really needed to
be a thing in the game for many years now, it's pretty much always better to go nearly full
offense to handle any sort of difficult terrain. Even Stasis Warlock, which can be thought
of at least slightly in a defensive way, has a lot of firepower backing it up. What
would you rather bring, a Bleak Watcher turret that can very rapidly refresh a grenade
charge, freezing and slowing enemies everywhere, or Drengr's Lash, which could halt a
champion for a couple of seconds at best or maybe tag a couple of dinky enemies?
Now, I don't want to get this twisted with "Prismatic Titan isn't good," because in the
content that the average player probably plays, the Knockout + Consecration setup is quite potent.
But the higher you venture into end game content, into content that's -10, 15, 20 levels, the
less and less appealing Prismatic gets. Could you make it work in some end game content? I'm
sure many people are making it work. But does that mean everything is fine, no, it doesn't.
This is exclusively a melee based setup, both aspects revolve around getting melee kills and I
don't care how much range Consecration has, you're still gonna need to get closer to the enemy in
order to make it work. Facet of Balance also does a lot of heavy lifting. I know any time I don't
actually slide and try to melee attack, I'm not seeing those melee charges come back for a WHILE.
Diamond Lance is a nice middle ground between the two extremes, but the synergy with Consecration
isn't exactly gamebreaking. Sure, ability kills aren't hard to come by with Consecration in lower
end content or if you wanted to run Unbreakable, those reflect kills aren't too bad, but the
combat flow of using Consecration still feels very familiar. Consecration + Knockout isn't
really THAT much different from just playing Consecration on a solar subclass with
restoration peppered in. The combat flow is the same as playing on solar. As someone who
played a Consecration build as their main build for the past 6 months now, I don't hate it,
but my experience is only changed by adding in Transcendence and making sure I have a mix of
damage types. Unbreakable in lower end content doesn't really ever feel justified since I never
really need to protect myself to such a degree in the first place, nor do the enemies really do
enough on average to even warrant a response. Now, when it comes to Unbreakable
and Drengr's Lash in a GM experience, where defense DOES have a bit more value, these
two have basically no synergy with each other at all. I'd rather just play Void or Strand outright,
like why only get the dinkier parts of each one of those subclasses, when I could fully invest
in Void overshields, ability regen and defense or the crowd control and defense of Strand?
Ability kills will also be harder to come by, which gives Diamond Lance less value too,
the only other slightly defensive option. Even their exotic class item isn't really that
thrilling. There are only a small handful of perks that have any actual synergy. Sure, you have
things like Assassin/Contact or Assassin/Syntho, but I'd argue going invis isn't really a big part
of the Titan experience. Inmost Light synergizes with most things, but at that point... when
do you just throw on Heart of Inmost Light and call it a day? All of the better options for
the Titan exotic class item is melee driven, all the top tier combinations, which we'll
talk about in another video, are melee driven: Severance Enclosure, melees/finishers, Assassin,
melees/finisher, Inmost Light, half melee, Contact, powered melee, Synthocepts, melee when
surrounded. I'm not saying that other combinations of perks don't work or can't be built around, but
of all the research I've done on the class items, most people lean in the direction of those perks.
The crazy thing too is that Hunters arguably get to do the melee thing even better than Titans
with specific setups. Stuff like Calibans or Inmost Light w/ Assassin, Liar or Syntho; they
are capable of putting out some ridiculous damage thanks to Combination Blow. Granted, the combat
flow of Combination Blow is still familiar, but Hunters at least get a lot more fanfare
with their combat and the damage to boot. Not to mention their grapple melee capabilities.
Swapping out Unbreakable and Drengr's Lash for other things might not be the worst idea if Bungie
wanted to experiment. The problem is that the exotic class items are all tuned specifically for
the aspects that we have available on each class, so you'd need to swap those perks too. Can't
have Bear without Unbreakable. Can't have Abeyant without Drengr's. Something like Controlled
Demolition doesn't have an exotic perk attached to it in any way, although Flechette Storm's
effect on Wishful Ignorance feels like it could be rotated in. Removing some of the defensive
capabilities MIGHT affect Titans in stuff like Master/GM Nightfalls where it's at least a
little valuable though. I don't see Bungie giving Banner of War to Prismatic any time soon
though, even Into the Fray would be an upgrade. I think that's all I have for Prismatic
Titan. Again, it's not a BAD subclass, but it does feel limited in effective builds
for what was meant to be a place to explore a bit more. While other builds that don't involve
Consecration, Knockout or Diamond Lance can work, they just don't really feel warranted in a world
where Hunters and Warlocks have crazy setups of their own and can do more than Titans can.
Thanks for watching, I'll see you next time.
