Destiny Rising‘s Estela may look complicated at first glance, but she’s actually incredibly simple to build around, requiring very little in the way of gear investment to get the ball rolling.
Mythic-rarity characters are generally considered to be the best of the best in Destiny Rising. Owing to their rarity, they often have the most potent abilities and gameplay loop. Estela is all about maintaining her summons’ uptime while using her Pulse Rifle and Machine Gun to generate Corruption stacks, each increasing her summons’ damage.
While she’s still relatively new, early testing puts Estela near the top of the pack in Destiny Rising’s overall tier list when she’s built properly. If you’ve already mastered other top-tier DPS characters like Gwynn and Wolf and fancy spicing up your roster, spice up your daily grind with this solar-powered, S-tier build for Estela.
Best Estela build
By far, Estela’s most important ability is her Passive, Corruption. This is what allows her to build stacks of the buff of the same name simply by dealing damage with her weapons. Bewitched Illusion cashes out these stacks to increase the damage of the sprite summoned by the ability.
- Best Abilities: Corruption & Bewitched Illusion
- Best Artifacts: Warding Pact, Siphoning Pact, Bellicose Pact, Resonating Pact
- Best Weapons: Furies III & Gallows
Summon-based builds can often be a little wonky, failing to attack the desired opponent. This is where Misfortune’s Guide comes in. In addition to instantly generating Corruption, any enemy hit by the ability will cause any summons to focus their attacks on them, dealing a massive 35% additional damage to boot.
Rounding out Estela’s kit is Violent Reverie, which summons a massive dragon-like entity to dish out serious single-target damage. If you’re worried about the beast’s AoE damage, don’t be – its high damage and attack speed mean it can make short work of even large groups.
Abilities
See below for a rundown of Estela’s three primary abilities:
- Corruption (Passive): Attacking combatants with weapons accumulates Corruption, up to 10 times per second. Casting Bewitched Illusion consumes Corruption. This ability cannot be cast without sufficient energy.
- Bewitched Illusion (Signature 1): Estela summons a Bewitched Illusion to join the battlefield and fight combatants on its own. The more Corruption she has accumulated, the higher the level of the summoned Bewitched Illusion will be. Higher level Bewitched Illusions deal greater damage.
- Misfortune’s Guide (Signature 2): Unleashes contaminated energy, dealing damage to hit combatants and inflicting them with Misfortune.
- Violent Reverie (Super): Summons a powerful Violent Reverie to continuously attack combatants by firing a contaminating beam.
Artifacts
Artifacts are powerful build-around buffs that augment a character’s playstyle with additional effects. Remember that each Artifact can only be equipped in a certain slot, and each slot can only have a maximum of one Artifact equipped at any given time.
For this build, we’ve gone for a mix of healing and damage buffs. Estela naturally has no accessible source of healing, so Siphoning Pact is essential to ensure she stays in the fight to maintain her summons. With it equipped, she’ll restore just under 6% of her total health every time a summon scores an assisted kill on an opponent. Bellicose Pact is a simple shoo-in, owing to its flat damage increase for Estela’s summons.
For the remaining two Artifacts, Warding Pact confers some additional survivability by granting Estela damage reduction for each active summon, while Resonating Pact buffs her summons’ damage even further when attacking the same target as her. Thanks to Misfortune’s Guide, you can guarantee this scenario at almost all times.
Artifact | Effect |
|---|---|
Warding Pact (Slot 1) | Gain 1 stack of Ward for every active summon. Each stack reduces damage by 3.85% |
Siphoning Pact (Slot 2) | Active summons restore 5.94% health when assisting with any final blow |
Bellicose Pact (Slot 3) | The user's summons deal +12.95% damage |
Resonating Pact (Slot 4) | Summons deal +16.45% damage when attacking the same target as the user |
Weapons
While weapon DPS isn’t particularly important for Estela, as the majority of her damage comes from abilities, they’re not to be ignored. Due to Corruption being generated on hit, weapons with a high rate of fire are an absolute must.
Fortunately, two weapons fit that bill perfectly are Furies III and Gallows. The former’s Neural Currents perk provides a ramping fire rate increase with continued fire, while the latter naturally has a high fire rate due to its archetype.
However, we’ve singled out Gallows for this build as one of its Catalysts increases fire rate by a further 20%. With both, you’ll be generating more Corruption than you know what to do with. As an added bonus, Furies III is incredibly easy to get hold of, being a reward from Destiny Rising’s battle pass. For Gallows, you’ll have to rely on RNG to get one from an Exotic Engram.
Weapon | Archetype | Perks | How to get |
|---|---|---|---|
Furies III (Primary)  | Rapid-Fire | Neural Currents: Continued fire increases fire rate up to a maximum of 540 War Machine Learning: Repeated hits cause weak points to appear on enemies that deal extra damage when hit | Battle Pass reward |
Gallows (Heavy)  | Rapid-Fire | Bosenova Grenades: Dealing continued damage loads the weapon with two homing Void grenades Polarized Rifling: Being in combat increases range until leaving combat | Random or Choice Exotic Weapon Engram |
How to play Estela
Now that you’re equipped with the knowledge of how Estela works, you’ll probably be wondering how all of these elements fit together.
The answer, fortunately for your fingers and thumbs, is that Estela is remarkably low effort. With Furies III and Gallows, spray enemies until you reach maximum Corruption stacks. Cast Bewitched Illusion with full stacks and watch your fiery friend lay waste to the battlefield.
If you come across any beefier enemies, use Misfortune’s Guide to ensure you and your summons are targeting the same enemy for additional damage, and hold Violent Reverie in reserve for when you need some on-demand burst damage. Rinse and repeat.
With that, you’re up to speed on everything there is to know about Estela in Destiny Rising. If you’re a little overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content in the mobile looter shooter, check out our Fishing guide and keep tabs on all the current and upcoming events.