How to Best Use Spike Grenades in Destiny 2

How to best use Spike Grenades in Destiny 2 has always been something of a hot topic, especially just prior to Ligthfall’s drop. Bungie certainly doesn’t make damage calculations easy for us, even at the best of times. Well, Spike Grenades certainly are not the best of times when it comes to maths. Luckily for you, though, I’m a certified space-magic mathematician.

I’ll be taking a deep dive into Spike Grenades in Destiny 2. I’ll go over the damage numbers, what influences those numbers, and why that Wendgio roll you spent so long farming for might actually be sub-optimal.

For the sake of simplicity, any time I talk about Spike Grenades, I’m going to be discussing them on the Wendigo Grenade Launcher. The same rules and logic apply to other weapons with the perk, but everyone’s running Wendigo, so that’s where our focus will be.

Before we talk about how to best use Spike Grenades in Destiny 2, we need to discuss how they work. The perk is a column-two ammo perk that increases the direct-impact damage of your grenades.

Destiny 2’s explosion damage calculation is quirky – though. Due to the relationship between how explosive and impact damage is calculated, Spike Grenades will provide a bigger damage bonus the smaller your blast radius is. The percentage range of potential increased damage from Spike Grenades is between 6.25% and 15% for drum-loaded GLs, and 12.5% to 25% for breech-loaded GLs.

So, to best use Spike Grenades in Destiny 2, you need to make sure it’s on a weapon with as little blast radius as possible. The lower the blast radius, the higher the damage buff.

That brings us on to the most popular use-case for Spike Grenades – on the Wendigo GL3 Heavy Grenade Launcher. This Nightfall GL has moved in and out of the META for years but was more popular than ever coming up to the release of Lightfall.

Most players are running this perk setup on their Wendigo:

• Quick Launch/Volatile Launch
• Spike Grenades
• Auto-Loading Holster
• Explosive Light

On paper, that sounds great – right? Yes, it does, and it is. This Wendigo GL3 god roll is exceptional, but it’s not 100% optimized.

Even without Volatile Launch (which increases blast radius), this roll is sub-optimal. Why? Explosive Light and Spike Grenades.

There’s no doubt that Explosive Light is the best column-four perk for Wendigo. It’s going to give up to an 84% damage buff – it’s what makes the weapon viable. However, it also sets the weapon’s blast radius to 100 for each Explosive Light shot. This automatically sets Spike-nades to the lowest possible buff value – around 7%.

Destiny 2 Wendigo GL3 – The Actual God Roll

If you have a long enough DPS phase to empty all your reserves, the roll I listed is great. For every other type of damage phase, you’re better off replacing Spike Grenades with Augmented Drum. This will give you an extra grenade per reload.

Even if you don’t have Explosive Light active on that last grenade, you’ll still be dealing more damage per second with this roll than the Spike Grenade one.

Of course, if you happen to roll with Spikes and no Augmented Drum on an Explosive Light Wendigo – it’s not the end of the world. As long as you have Explosive Light and either Auto-Loading or Field Prep, the rest of the weapon’s perks don’t matter too much.