Best Melee Hunter Arc 3.0 Build with Liar’s Handshake in Destiny 2

Arc 3.0 brings a significant upgrade to Hunters including speed, aggression and most importantly electrocuting enemies on demand. Today I am going to go through the best melee Hunter Arc 3.0 build. I’ll talk through the Arc 3.0 set-up, the aspects, fragments, plus the exotic armour, weapons and mods. This build is going to turn your Hunter into a deadly assassin with electric fists, and you’ll be punching, shooting and electrifying everyone that gets in your way.

Arc 3.0 Setup

• Super: Gathering Storm – Hurl your Arc Staff forward, embedding it into surfaces or large targets and jolting nearby targets. After a short time, a devastating lightning bolt strikes the staff, overcharging it with Arc energy. While overcharged, your staff discharges lightning at nearby foes.
• Grenade: Arc Bolt
• Melee: Combination Blow – A quick strike that temporarily increases your melee damage when defeating a target, stacking three times.
• Class Ability: Gambler’s Dodge – Dodge to perform a deft tumble, avoiding enemy attacks. Dodging near enemies fully recharges your Melee Ability.

Aspects

Flow State – Defeating a jolted target makes you amplified. While you are amplified, your dodge recharges more quickly, you are more resilient while dodging, and your reload speed is greatly increased.

Lethal Current – After dodging, your next melee attack has increased lunge range, jolts the target, and creates a damaging aftershock. Damaging any jolted target with melee attacks also blinds them.

Fragments

• Spark of Shock – Your arc grenade jolts targets. -10 Discipline
• Spark of Recharge – While critically wounded, your melee and grenade energy regenerates more quickly
• Spark of Frequency – Melee hits greatly increase reload speed for a short duration
• Spark of Volts – Finishers make you amplified

Exotic Armor

Liar’s Handshake is Exotic Hunter Gauntlets

Cross Counter – Using your Arc melee ability or being hit by a melee attack will allow you to follow up with an extremely powerful melee counterpunch that will heal you.

Mobility Enhancement Mod – Increased mobility.

You can get these from Xur or as part of the gift from Season of the Plunder, in the H.E.L.M.

Weapons

Kinetic – Wastelander M5 (Shotgun)

Wastelander M5 is a Legendary Kinetic Shotgun with a Lightweight Frame meaning it has superb handling. Move faster with this weapon equipped.

For PVE Rifled Barrel, Assault Mag, Perpetual Motion and Trench Barrel would be a decent roll. While that is a good roll, I’m using this because of One-Two Punch, that’s a great perk for melee-focused builds. Hitting an enemy with every pellet in a shot increases melee damage for a short duration.

Energy – Riskrunner (Sub Machinegun)

Riskrunner is an Exotic Energy Submachine Gun

Arc Conductor – When taking Arc Damage, this weapon becomes more powerful and resists incoming Arc Damage. Kills extend the time in this overcharged state.

Superconductor – When Arc Conductor is active, shots fired have the chance to become chain lightning and return ammo.

Get this one from Xur or the New Light quest, I have a guide on the quest steps on the channel.

Power – Half-Truths (Sword)

Half-Truths is a Legendary Power Sword with an Adaptive Frame meaning you can launch a heavy uppercut attack. Heavy attacks are stronger with full energy.

For PVE Hungry Edge, Balanced Guard, Relentless Strikes, and Eager Edge would be a good roll. Hungry Edge gives you increased sword ammo and Balanced Guard has overall balance defences. Relentless Strikes will grant you sword ammo after three light attacks and the Whirlwind blade increases the sword’s damage for a short duration. Eager Edge is where you gain increased sword lunge distance immediately after switching to the weapon, which makes it very much like the Halo energy sword.

Mods

• Melee Wellmaker – Powered melee combatant final blows spawn elemental wells matching your subclass energy type.
• Bountiful Wells – Elemental well mods that cause you to spawn elemental wells can now stack, spawning additional wells for each additional copy of the mod you have equipped.
• Well of Striking – Picking up an Arc elemental well grants you additional melee energy. Multiple copies of this mod increase this effect.
• Outreach – Reduces melee cooldown when using your class ability.
• Distribution – Reduces all ability cooldowns when using your class ability near targets.

That’s the build, but let’s have a look at why this is good. First, let’s have a look at the Arc 3.0 keywords and how they are going to improve our Hunters.

Amplified – An amplified Guardian is faster—both in terms of movement speed and in terms of their weapon handling—and more agile, able to perform long slides that can function as a devastating setup for some of the attacks that follow. By default, all Arc classes become amplified after rapidly defeating targets with any Arc damage, and equipped Aspects and Fragments offer additional ways to become or benefit from being amplified.

Jolt – Jolted opponents who are damaged will periodically send slivers of chain lightning out to nearby enemies, damaging them in the process.

Blind – Blinded opponents in PvE won’t be able to see and will also be disoriented and unable to fire their weapons. In PvP, blinded opponents will have their screen whited out and their HUD removed for a short period of time alongside a distorted, washed-out audio effect.

This build is focused on melee action, dodging in and out of attacks, punching, and then regenerating abilities quickly to create a ton of elemental wells, which in turn allow us to doge, punch and throw grenades more often. Paired with our Arc weapons and super, this allows us to electrocute enemies at will, destroying rooms of enemies in seconds, and also laying bid DPS down on bosses.

Through this build, we are focused on getting Jolt to proc, plus get Amplified to refresh our dodge and charged melee ability. Through Flow State, we’re going to be more resilient and reload speed increases. Through Lethal Current we’re going to be Jolting targets, setting up the loop all over again, also creating aftershocks and blinding opponents. Given we’re using Liar’s Handshake, our powered melee ability is also going to heal us, plus deal more damage through an improved melee attack.

The gameplay loop for this build should begin with a melee, roll into a dodge, melee again and repeat, throwing in some arc weapon kills and grenades when you want to. One-two punch through our shotgun is going to increase that melee damage, plus we have Liar’s handshake stacking on there too, meaning our Arc 3.0 Hunters are going to pack a real punch and cause major damage to red and yellow bar enemies. When you encounter a boss, simply build up your super and unleash Gathering Storm, and they won’t last very long.

Let me know in the comments what you think of the build, and let me know if you have any improvements.

That is it for this Best Melee Hunter Arc 3.0 build with Liar’s Handshake in Destiny 2. For more Destiny 2 content like this check out This Week In Video Games on YouTube and subscribe today.