Destiny 2: Gyrfalcon’s Bloodline – When a Titan Main Builds a Hunter

If you want to know about what this build does before recreating yourself, feel free to check the Conclusion – Having Our Cake and Eating it Too section first.

Weapons & Armour

Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk

Buried Bloodline, with its Catalyst.

Kinetic & Heavy are both up to personal preference, but I run a Timelost Fatebringer along with an Adept Braytech Osprey. These two synergise well with the build, but more on that later.

Mods

You have a surprising degree of freedom here, but you will want to have 2x Special Ammo Finder in your Helm mods. Doing this, I’ve never run out of ammo for the Buried Bloodline. You’ll notice the lack of a Siphon mod, but we’ll get into that later. Here’s a list of the mods I use:

Head: [4-cost Stat Mod], 2x Special Ammo Finder

Arms: [4-cost Stat Mod], Firepower, Harmonic Loader, Fastball

Chest: [4-cost Stat Mod], Harmonic Resistance, Charged Up, Harmonic Reserves

Legs: [4-cost Stat Mod], 2x Void Weapon Surge

Class Item: [4-cost Stat Mod], Time Dilation, Reaper

If you find yourself running out of ammo, you can drop a Weapon Surge in favour of a Harmonic Scavenger. If you do, I suggest adding a Recuperation or Insulation mod, for a bit more healing/more frequent dodges respectively.

This is where we set up the Buried Bloodline and Gyrfalcon to allow us to ignore using Siphon mods and grant us Devour, Volatile Rounds and Weakening without using their respective Fragments. To do that, we use the following:

Aspects: Vanishing Step, Stylish Executioner

Fragments: Echoes of Persistence, Harvest, Remnants, and Obscurity. You can replace this last one according to your preference, but it works well with Gyrfalcon’s. More on that later.

Abilities: Marksman’s Dodge, Triple Jump, Snare Bomb, Vortex Grenade.

Super: Largely personal preference, I use the Deadfall tether. I’d recommend against using Spectral Blades in anything challenging.

Right, so the way this works is that we rely on the Buried Bloodline catalyst for a few things. Once we activate Devour, a feature of the standard gun, the Catalyst makes any shot fired with the Bloodline apply Weaken to the target.

This in turn enables Echo of Harvest, spawning Void Breaches which helps fuel our Dodge, and Orbs of Power for the weapon damage and super energy. The Breaches have a five-second cooldown, the Orbs a 10-second cooldown.

Being a Void weapon, it benefits from the Volatile buff from Gyrfalcons.

Gyrfalcon’s grants us a 35% weapon damage buff to all weapons for 6 seconds, if we perform a finisher while invisible. Thanks to Echo of Obscurity, we can get that finisher and immediately become invisible again, making the process much safer in more dangerous activities.

With Stylish Executioner, killing a target affected by Weakened or Volatile makes us invisible.

Since we’re creating a bunch of Void Breaches, our Dodge cooldown is reduced drastically.

With this in mind, the goal is to trigger the Bloodline’s Catalyst as soon as a fight begins. it can be done in one of two ways:

1. Kill four regular enemies. Killing the fourth will trigger Devour.

2. Kill one Major (orange bar) enemy or higher.

Once Devour is active, the gameplay loop begins.

Now that you know what to use and understand the mechanics, you have two main ways to open a fight:

1. Simply kill four enemies with Buried Bloodline until Devour kicks in, or kill one Major. This is your best opener if there’s no real danger of the enemies killing you.

2. Dodge to become invisible, hunt down and kill a Major enemy with the Buried Bloodline or simply catch four regular ones by surprise.

Since Devour can be maintained by any kill, you can use a combination of your abilities and weapons. If you don’t want to use a rocket, a Void Machine gun like Retrofit Escapade or Commemoration are both fantastic options, for slightly different playstyles.

An important thing to remember is that Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk’s ability to grant you Volatile Rounds happens after you go Invisible for any reason, you do not have to go invisible via a dodge or smoke bomb. This means that Buried Bloodline will gain Volatile Rounds whenever you become invisible after a kill, finisher, or dodge. Additionally, make sure that you break your invisibility before the buff duration expires, or you won’t get the Volatile Rounds buff.

You can do a lot of cheeky shenanigans with this build, but here’s my favourite with my specific loadout for dealing with Champions in Legend Lost Sectors/GM Nightfalls where I enter the fight without Devour active.

1. Fire a Lasting Impression rocket into the target.

2. Dodge to reload & become invisible. (Skip this if the Rocket stuns the target, since the Stunning Recovery trait reloads it automatically and if it’s stunned, you usually don’t need to be invisible.)

3. Stun the target with the primary, if the rocket itself hasn’t stunned it already.

4. Swap to Buried Bloodline and finish off the Champion.

With this opener, you’ve already wombo-combo’d a champion to death and enabled Buried Bloodline. If you used your Dodge, Reaper in combination with Echo of Harvest will create 2x Orbs of Power and a Void breach, while you just became Invisible, activated Devour, and whenever you come out of your invisibility, your Buried Bloodline will benefit from Volatile Rounds while Weakening anything it shoots, repeatedly triggering Echo of Harvest whenever its 5s Breach and 10s orb cooldowns expire.

Playing like this, it’s entirely feasible to solo flawless Skydock IV in 83 seconds and still get your Super despite having an Intellect stat of literally 14. Rememver as well that this time’s achieved without any relevant Artifact mods as none of them boost Void, there are no Overload champions in that lost sector, and none of the activity surges today (12/02/2024) benefit Void or the weapons I used whatsoever.

In summary, this build allows you to benefit from near-infinite Devour, Volatile Rounds (which in turns grants your Void weapons the anti-barrier effect), and the ability to Weaken your enemies without actually running a single Fragment that ties into them or spending any ability energy whatsoever.

This in turn means we can use our free fragment slots to create an incredibly annoying invisible pest that can still hit for monstrous amounts of damage. It feeds itself Dodge energy thanks to spawning Void Breaches, and thanks to the fact that Firepower, Echo of Harvest and Reaper all operate on separate cooldowns/criteria, you can easily maintain several stacks of armour charge.

Outside of the core elements, the build’s very flexible. You can swap out Echo of Obscurity according to taste, and the same goes for your Kinetic & Heavy weapons. Personally I use the Adept Braytech Osprey as its origin trait allows me to use it as an anti-champion weapon against Barrier Champions thanks to Volatile Rounds from Gyrfalcon’s and have it auto-reload itself instantly when it stuns them. You could easily make the case for any other good heavy weapon, but I suggest picking a Void one so you can boost both it and your Buried Bloodline with the same armour mods.

All in all, this build is a blast and surprisingly effective, even in the hands of a thoroughly mediocre Hunter player. I’ve spent the absolute majority of my time in the game on my Titan, yet I find myself spending more and more time playing this Hunter build.

Maybe I need to see a doctor.