The best(?) Warlock exotic class items. If you even need one.

Pre-Final Shape release I never would've guessed that I would use Getaway Artist over an Exotic class item lol

I don't see myself taking getaway artist off anytime soon

I think the main thing I noticed about warlock exotic class item sets is that outside of star eater, they’re all just doing what a single warlock exotic does, slightly worse, but less element dependent. Osmio Harmony, for example, is just a weaker, elemental agnostic version of crown or nezerac

Osmio/Star Eater gives you essentially the best Voidwalker experience: constant weakening Vortex uptime, and 1 million damage Nova Bombs

I really hope some of the “rift” effects become “class ability” on the exotic class item. example - spirit of filaments changed from “empowering rift” to “class ability”

Been using Necro/Star-Eater this week in GMs and it gets you transcendent so ridiculously quick!

I feel like everyone is REALLY sleeping on Mataidoxia. Instant barrier breaks without a weapon, and when you go transcendent you can effortlessly string up and entire room in suspend since you don't even need to kill the enemy to trigger it.

I am LOVING Felwinter's Helm for those lightning surge builds. When you run it with buried bloodline and imminence you can swap seamlessly between unravelling and volatile rounds. Use the lightning surge to finish off low health enemies and inflict massive AOE weakens and suppressions to take down the rest of the group and neuter things like subjugators. And keep devour running to throw nades and reproc volatile. Necrotic/synthos seems decent but the subclass keywords go crazy with Felwinter.

What Datto said at the end has been my findings. The Getaway Warlock build is so good that I feel like I'm self nerfing when I take it off for an exotic class item build.

Hot take (maybe), the Warlock class item is good if you want a build that covers multiple aspects of play, but doesn’t excel as much as a focused build with a singular exotic. For example, osmiomancy and star-eaters for decent grenade regen and boosted super. But, for example, I would take base Verity’s Brow over a combination of osmiomancy and Verity. There are too many times when you won’t get enough hits or osmiomancy (on the bond) isn’t consistent enough, whilst using the full Verity helmet provides a more deterministic consisted regen, plus it boosts you teammates as well. Plus the biggest part. No RNG

HOIL + stareaters is my go to. It’s noticeable. I get it, no arc buddy. However, I can throw down a turret consistently while spamming melee and rift/dive. The super damage multiplier is great too

Warlocks, don't sleep on a HOIL/Claw class item. Using incinerator snap with this makes your transcendence feel like a mini song of flame. Not to mention snaps fill the light bar near instantly with ignition procs. Can personally say it's at least a 7/10 or 8/10 roll in terms of power.

Tbh The tuning of the exotic class items (for warlock anyway) would be appropriate if they were available to use outside of prismatic...

I've been running Verity's Brow in almost all of my prismatic builds. The damage buff, regen (when combined with Devour) and support abilities are so strong. I just wish the fuckin' thing had an ornament.

How did Datto get 4 rockets in the mag for his Dr. Disrespect I mean Apex Predator?

I got a inmost/harmony one a few weeks back and I love it. You just don't have to think too much about it. You can pair it with Graviton if running Nova or Sunshot if running with Song. With storm grenades, arcane needle and hellion, you just have constant ability uptime and spam. It's a ton of fun just cycling abilities, unravelling, jolting and scorching everything. As you said, you can't see the inmost light buff on the hud but I just don't even bother looking at the buffs tbh. I just cycle my abilities as soon as they are available. What I really like about this build is that everything benefits my playstyle, abilities help each other and weapon use brings my super back quickly and ofcourse keeps devour up to get my grenade back quickly. It really helps that the 2 best supers on prismatic have really good exotic primary weapons (Sunshot, Graviton) to pair with.

To reinforce Datto's point, there really isn't much reason to run anything other than Getaway Artist. The only scenarios I find myself swapping to a Star-Eater setup is when the boss is so far away that my Arc Soul, Stasis Turret, and Helion can't reach it. Those Arc Soul (which is exclusive to Getaway Artist on Prismatic) only deals about 15k DPS, or 300k total over the 20 seconds. This isn't quite as much as say a Nova Bomb being increased from 600k to 1 million damage, but offers far superior neutral game abilities by comparison.

my first bond to drop was assassins synthos, can make for a really strong melee focused build that carries through GMs as long as youre not yeeting yourself into exploder units like the vex that sacrifice themselves or cursed thrall it can handle GMS very easily. just run the fragment where orb pick up gives a buff based on super type and use needle storm so that you get woven mail. then its a simple generate orb on melee kill go invis plus woven mail plus devour and you can just keep on spamming it out. throw either threadling grenades or use the stasis turret to maintain darkness transcendent energy generation as well as make light abilities doe even more damage and bamm you can just keep sliding and electrocuting everything quite easily. ive also got osmio/stareaters to drop and find that it works well but like you said most of the grenades we have access to as warlocks need to be perfectly placed for good regen. i also find they are slow to kill in higher tier content like GMs. i find my fire team (mostly our titan running the new rocket chest exotic, or consecration spam build) is killing things faster than my grenades will so they will quite literally kill stuff ive already hit with a grenade interrupting my build's flow and preventing me from using it fully.

As always Warlocks land somewhere in the exact middle of busted and wasted.

I think something important to note is that for verity, it really starts, for me at least, to show in higher level content. I was using a storm grenade setup and what made verity amazing was not that it made my grenades like nukes or anything like that, but that it was able to consistently get ability kills to keep up devour, or funnel into my abilities like osmio or inmost. It gives a consistency especially with storm grenades that you appreciate when you swap off of it imo.