Heart of Inmost Light (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Saturday, October 27, 2018, 09:56 (2295 days ago)

During the 23+ hours of our Raid I managed to snag my first piece of Forsaken armor: the Heart of Inmost Light. And it has become one of my favorite Exotics in D2.

Here's what it does:

Using an ability (grenade, melee, or Barricade) empowers the other two abilities. Empowered means abilities have faster regen, melees and grenades do more damage, and Barricades have more hit points.

What this means in practice, is if you activate your Barricade, your Grenade and Melee recharge much quicker for the next 10 second. Where my grenade usually takes 80 seconds to recharge with no boosts or bonuses, by using my melee and my barrier in turn, I was able to reduce the recharge to 40 second. And this sort of reduction applies to your melee and barrier as well. So if you're just playing you basically have a 2x boost to all three of your abilities assuming you keep using your powers in turn. And, it turns out, you don't need a charged melee to get the empowered boost. Just punch someone and your other two abilities start recharging quickly.

They also get a substantial damage boost. Melee seemed like it got a 50% boost going from the 6,000s to the 9,000s in the Dreaming City. Grenades was similar, but was probably closer to 25%. It's hard to test the barrier hit points, so I never did. I assume its somewhere between 25 and 50%.

All in all, this chest piece is one of the best in the game at recharging abilities. Hallowfire Heart provides a similar boost to your grenade and melee recharge... but only when your Super is fully charged. Crown of Tempests, for Warlocks, is similar but requires kills meaning fighting against bosses or tough enemies puts a hard limit on its advantages.

With the Heart of Inmost Light, you don't need kills, you just need an enemy nearby to roughly double your recharge rates. Combine that with class and armor buffs and you can make some great builds:

• With Code of the Protector + Impact armor mods I can get my melee recharge down to 20 seconds, meaning I can keep Force Barrier active 100% of the time like I could in D1.
  
• With Code of the Commander's built in grenade and melee recharge on void kills you can pretty much always have at least one ability ready at all times.
  
• For a Code of the Missile Titan, you can have access to your Death From Above melee ability often enough that you don't feel so limited by recharge times.
  
• For a Code of the Devastator, you can use your throwing hammer much more freely since it will be back roughly twice as quickly if you bounce it off an enemy and down a bottomless pit.