Delicate Tomb — Trace Engine (Hunter)

Weapon: Delicate Tomb (Fusion Rifle · Special · Arc) · Subclass: Arcstrider · Role: Ionic-Trace battery that feeds Bolt Charge + permanent Amplified Sandbox: 9.7.0 · Created 2026-06-16

A free Exotic that does one rare thing: every kill makes Arc fuel. Delicate Tomb spits Ionic Traces on final blows, and the whole Arc 3.0 economy is built to eat Traces — they grant Bolt Charge, they regen abilities, they keep you Amplified. Wrap the gun in Rain of Fire (air-dodge reload + Radiant) and the Tomb never stops firing, never stops charging, and never leaves the Amplified state. The gun is the build battery; everything else just spends what it prints.

The weapon

Traitor's Vessel (verbatim): "Fires a wide horizontal spread when shot from the hip. Final blows with this weapon have a chance to generate Ionic Traces. Powerful foes and opposing Guardians always generate Ionic Traces."

Catalyst — Ionic Interment (verbatim): "Collecting an Ionic Trace partially reloads the magazine from reserves."

So: it's a hip-fire-spread Arc Special Fusion whose kills print Arc pickups, and its catalyst turns each pickup back into ammo — a self-reloading loop the moment Traces are flowing. Powerful foes/Guardians are a guaranteed Trace, so it scales up into hard content where most ammo engines dry out. The hip-fire spread makes it a close-range add-clear shotgun-fusion; ADS tightens it for a single target. Every Trace it makes is the input to the entire Arc Hunter kit below.

Loadout

Slot	Pick	Why
Subclass	Arcstrider	Native Ionic-Trace → Bolt Charge → Amplified economy; Tomb is the Trace source.
Super	Gathering Storm	Stick the staff into the pack/boss → standing jolt field; jolted kills make more Traces (Spark of Ions). (Storm's Edge if you want roaming burst.)
Class ability	Marksman's Dodge	Reloads the Tomb on demand; pairs with Lethal Current's empowered melee.
Melee	Combination Blow	Dodge → empowered melee chain; melee kills refund dodge → another reload. (Any Arc melee works; this keeps the loop spinning.)
Grenade	Storm Grenade	With Touch of Thunder, a roaming thundercloud — extra jolt source feeding Spark of Ions Traces.
Aspect 1	Flow State	Defeating a jolted target makes you Amplified — and the Tomb/grenade/Super jolt constantly. Amplified = +reload/handling/move on the Tomb.
Aspect 2	Lethal Current	After dodging, next melee jolts + aftershock — manufactures the jolted targets Flow State and Spark of Ions both want.

Exotic armour — Rain of Fire (Leg Armor)

Soaring Fusilier (verbatim): "Air dodge reloads all of your weapons and improves the airborne effectiveness of Fusion Rifles and Linear Fusion Rifles; final blows with these weapons make you radiant. Provides a moderate benefit to the airborne effectiveness stat of Fusion Rifles and Linear Fusion Rifles."

This is the Hunter Fusion exotic. Air-dodge = a full instant reload of the Tomb with zero animation, and Fusion final blows make you Radiant (≈+10% weapon damage to the whole team's guns). The Tomb stays loaded two ways — Rain of Fire's air-dodge and the catalyst's Trace-reload — so it effectively never stops to reload. Radiant on Tomb kills layers a flat damage buff on top of the Arc economy.

Why this works (the mechanics)

• The gun is the fuel source, not just the damage. Delicate Tomb's intrinsic makes Ionic Traces on kills (always from powerful foes/Guardians). Arc 3.0's entire defensive/offensive loop runs on Traces — this is the rare weapon whose kills are the build's input resource. You don't farm uptime; you shoot adds.
• Two Trace sources stack on the gun. The intrinsic prints Traces, and Spark of Discharge adds a second roll on every Arc weapon kill. Trace density goes from "sometimes" to "constant," which means the catalyst (Ionic Interment) keeps partial-reloading the mag off pickups — the Tomb self-feeds in any fight with bodies.
• Traces → Bolt Charge, jolt → Traces — a closed ring. Lethal Current and Storm Grenade (Touch of Thunder) blanket the room in jolt; Spark of Ions turns every jolted kill into another Trace; collecting Traces builds Bolt Charge; Bolt-Charge kills also make Traces (Ions again). The ring never empties while you're killing.
• Permanent Amplified via Flow State. Defeating a jolted target → Amplified. Your jolt is everywhere (melee, grenade, Super, Bolt Charge), so you're killing jolted things nonstop → Amplified stays pinned. Amplified hands the Tomb faster reload/handling and +sprint/slide, and Rain of Fire wants you airborne/sliding.
• Amplified turns the Tomb into a stun-and-blind add cannon. Spark of Beacons triggers on Arc Special-ammo final blows while Amplified — the Tomb is exactly that — so every Amplified kill drops a blinding explosion. Blind is crowd control and the Arc soft-stun. Spark of Amplitude turns the rapid Amplified kills into Orbs of Power for the team.
• Rain of Fire keeps it loaded for free and pays Radiant. Air-dodge = instant full reload + the Fusion-kill Radiant buff. Between that and the catalyst Trace-reload, you almost never see the reload animation, and Radiant stacks a flat ~10% on top of everything.

Stats & mods

Weapons 200 → Health 100 → Class 100+. Weapons maxes the Tomb's PvE output and reload/handling; Health is cheap survivability under near-constant Amplified DR; Class feeds Marksman's Dodge (the reload + Lethal Current enabler) and Combination Blow refunds. Grenade/Super as leftover (the grenade is a jolt utility, not the damage).

Mods: Fusion Rifle Loader + Fusion Rifle Scavenger (the Tomb is your workhorse), Arc Weapon Surge ×2/×3 on boots (straight onto the Tomb), Harmonic/Arc Siphon (helmet → Orbs off Arc kills, stacking with Spark of Amplitude), Special Ammo Finder/Finisher to keep reserves topped for the catalyst loop, Orbs of Restoration (Orb pickup → ability energy). Champions: lean on jolt + blind + your archetype frames (below), not the Tomb's own stun.

Where it shines

• Add-dense PvE — GMs, Nightfalls, dungeons, Onslaught. Hip-fire spread melts packs at close-mid range; every kill is a Trace, so the more enemies, the more the economy snowballs. Guaranteed Traces from powerful foes/minibosses mean the loop strengthens in −power content instead of starving.
• Champion coverage — flag this: Delicate Tomb has no bespoke champion stun; Special Fusion is not an intrinsic-stun archetype under Anti-Champion 2.0. You cover champions with the subclass, not the gun — Blind (Spark of Beacons, the Arc soft-stun on Amplified kills) staggers/Overload-style controls them, and jolt + Gathering Storm lock them down. Bring a kinetic/heavy with a real stun archetype (Barrier/Unstoppable) for guaranteed coverage; the Tomb handles the room, not the champion's stun bar.
• Other two slots: Heavy — Machine Gun or Rocket for bosses/the damage the Tomb's Special profile can't close (a non-Arc heavy is fine; Surge mods follow the Tomb). Kinetic/Primary — a champion-stun frame (e.g. a Barrier or Unstoppable archetype) to fill the coverage the Tomb lacks, ideally Arc to feed Spark of Discharge Traces too.

Mod selection (masterworked — full allocation)

All 15 sockets used, 10 energy per masterworked piece; costs from the manifest. Core mods are the build's engine; fill mods are strong defaults — swap freely (chest resists should match the activity's damage types). Flex/loadout-dependent: stacking with Spark of Amplitude); not the Tomb's own stun.