This review covers the unique mechanics, performance metrics, and potential uses of the new exotic strand rocket launcher, Rolling Ovation, following its release from the Desert Perpetual contest mode in Destiny 2.

Rolling Ovation Overview and Exotic Traits

• Rolling Ovation is a strand rocket launcher with charge-based firing and no required reload between shots.

• The main trait, Coronal Culmination, lets players hold to charge and release to fire, creating a delayed solar payload.

• Maximum charged shot delivers 6,324 damage (3,158 impact + 3,166 delayed explosion).

• The secondary trait, Anticipation, speeds up charge rate as players deal damage with other weapons, especially noticeable with Mint Retrograde.

• The anticipation meter fills slowly unless other weapons are used to increase charge speed.

Damage Comparisons and Performance

• Rolling Ovation outperforms most legendary and exotic rocket launchers in single-shot damage.

• Key comparisons: legendary rocket launcher with bait and switch (2,386), Truth (1,629), Two-Tailed Fox (2,638), Warcliff Coil (2,184), Eyes of Tomorrow (3,678), Gjallarhorn (1,732), Dragon's Breath (3,417), Parasite (4,467).

• Damage scoreboard in the firing range underestimates true boss damage by about 1.5x.

• Mint Retrograde synergizes well for boosting the launcher’s anticipation meter and overall DPS.

Build Synergy and Optimization

• Builds with hazardous propulsion (Titan class) further boost rocket launcher damage.

• Combining Mint Retrograde and Rolling Ovation leverages double buffs for higher output.

• Firing with anticipation meter full cuts charge time by more than half (from 325 to 149 frames).

• Damage rotations with certain setups achieved 103,317 total damage and 2,768 DPS (with Rolling Ovation + Mint Retrograde), beating other top weapons like Hezen's Vengeance, Queenbreaker, and Thunderlord.

Practical Application and Endgame Use

• Rolling Ovation is viable for high damage single shots, ad clearing, and dealing with champions in Nightfalls and other high-end activities.

• Charge time can be a drawback in high-pressure encounters unless a teammate helps stun enemies.

• Works well for both strand and solar surge mods, but each mod only buffs part of the weapon’s damage.

• Can generate orbs with both Strand and Solar Siphon mods (solar explosion needed for solar orbs).

• Limited synergy with subclasses or artifact perks beyond threaded blast for certain builds.

Exotic Acquisition and RNG Details

• Rolling Ovation drops as an RNG reward from the final boss of Desert Perpetual.

• Completing triumphs in Desert Perpetual increases the drop chance for the exotic and provides feat slots.

Recommendations / Advice

• Focus on building anticipation meter with synergistic weapons (e.g., Mint Retrograde) for optimal charge speed and DPS.

• Complete Desert Perpetual triumphs to maximize drop rates for Rolling Ovation.

• Consider using hazardous propulsion for additional damage boosts in Titan builds.

• Explore both strand and solar surge/siphon mods for partial damage and orb generation benefits.

Rolling Ovation Rocket Launcher

After the completion of our contest mode, Desert Perpetual, we received the new exotic, Rolling Ovation. This is a strand rocket launcher that's extremely unique in multiple ways. From its charge rate, yes, you heard that right, charge rate, to how you don't need to reload it to its damage potential, and also how it is one of the sexiest weapons in the game.

Now, let me just say this, rocket launchers don't really tickle the pickle for me. You know, I'm just letting you know right out front, like in terms of exotic rocket launchers, we had eyes of tomorrow. And we got Gjallarhorn.

We've got Two-Tailed Fox. My PvP players, you got Truth. What I'm really trying to say with this is that Rolling Ovation has really got to bring it, at least for myself. So let's break things down.

First up, our exotic trait, Coronal Culmination. It reads, hold to charge, release to fire. Charge projectiles have a delayed solar payload. Essentially, guys, this rocket launcher, you have to charge it up. And let me just say, it's got a hefty charge time.

If we take a look over at the weapon stats, you can see that it has a 5,000 charge time, which beats out 1,000 voices by a substantial margin. Now, looking at how this works in-game, as you hold to charge the weapon, you'll see an indicator both when hip-firing or when aiming down sights that will show your charge meter progress. Now, at base, without charging at all, the rocket deals 1,012 damage here, and you do not get the delayed solar payload explosion. which we're going to be breaking down in just a moment.

But charging the rocket to fill one bar of the meter increases our damage to 1,564. And you'll notice that the delayed solar payload procs dealing an extra 1,542 damage. So roughly a little over 3,100 here.

Now when charging up to the second meter, we deal 2,116 damage from the initial impact and then another 2,083 damage from that solar delayed explosion, equaling almost 4,200. Then finally, when charging the rocket up all the way. Our initial impact deals 3,158 damage, with the solar explosion dealing 3,166 damage, for a total of 6,324.

Now, I know 6,000 damage doesn't seem like a whole lot, but keep in mind, guys, our damage numbers are squished. Hell, even in the raid, I was doing like 60 damage per shot for Thunderlord. So, what I'm trying to say is that 6,000 damage from a single shot is actually pretty impressive.

Now, to compare damage, we have a legendary rocket launcher here with bait and switch. This does 2386 damage from a single bait and switch shot. When testing against other exotic rocket launchers, you'll notice that nothing really comes close in terms of just single shot damage.

For instance, Truth is 1629 damage. Two-tailed Fox with its exotic catalyst does 2638 damage. With Warcliff Coil, we've got 2184 damage. Eyes of Tamar, with Adaptive Ordinance being procced, sits at 3678 damage.

Gjallarhorn at 1732 damage. And then finally, we have Dragon's Breath with 5 stacks with Composite Prevalence, and that deals 3417 damage. Now, for those wondering, what about Deathbringer? I know I've got some folks out there, part of the Deathbringer cult.

The problem with Deathbringer is the shooting range is really not built for it, at least to truly optimize Deathbringer. You know, you want to shoot it up in the air and then let it track down to the target. Now, some other comparisons. Parasite at Worm Hunger times 20 deals 4,467 damage from a single shot. So the point is, across the board, this rocket launcher, despite what everyone said when we came out of the raid saying it's garbage and that it does no damage, actually does pretty good damage here, at least in terms of...

of single shots. But this brings us to our other exotic traits, anticipation. It reads, the charge speed of this weapon's next shot slowly increases over time.

Anticipation builds more quickly as you deal more damage with other weapons. Now, you may have noticed that there is a meter on the bottom left-hand corner of your HUD, which will slowly fill up on its own. However, it is very slow. So you definitely want to be using your other weapons to charge it up. I'm sure more testing is going to come out over the next few days as to what charges this the fastest.

But at least in our testing, Mint Retrograde actually charges it very quickly. In just about seven shots. And on top of that, this is a rocket pulse that does tremendous amounts of damage.

Now, we did test out other options. We tested out a rocket sidearm. Essentially, after about 15 shots, it charged three out of the five bars on that meter.

We also tried a rapid fire sniper rifle, 14 shots, charged four out of the five bars on the meter. And yes, we did try kinetic tremors with this as well, which after 14 shots still was just at four bars on the meter. So unfortunately, tremors is not contributing to this or at least nothing noticeable. For my build crafters out there though, A build that I'm going to be utilizing is actually going to be a very high weapon stats with hazardous propulsion. This exotic is on Titan class and it literally boosts the damage of our rocket launchers.

And this applies not just to our exotic rocket launcher here, Rolling Ovation, but also to our rocket-assisted frame, sidearms, and pulse rifle. Meaning, if you rock Mint Retrograde and its rocket launcher together, you'll be getting double buffs, essentially, between the two of them for hazardous propulsion. Now, does this meter make a big difference in terms of charge time? Just holding down the trigger here.

and letting it fire normally took about 325 frames. But with the meter for anticipation full, this then took 149 frames to get the shot off. Guys, that is a substantial drop. You're cutting down your timer by a little over half, which helps this Exotic tremendously. Now this had us thinking, what would be the best way to optimize this weapon?

and there's likely gonna be many variations. But this is what I did with the weapons I had on hand. For all these tests, we used the Well of Radiance, along with the Divinity, just to make things a little bit easier.

The test along with the same weapon stat values for all tests. Now one last thing real quick before getting into the numbers. You'll notice that the damage scoreboard in the firing range will show different from what we are telling you. That's because against bosses, the numbers displayed are not correct. Essentially, you need to take whatever the number is that's getting spit out and multiply it by 1.5 to give you the true damage value of what you're doing.

Now I will say the numbers will be a bit less because we do have a divinity here, but it's not really that substantial. But first up, I have my mint retrograde here with rewind rounds and elemental honing since this weapon already does a tremendous amount of damage. And considering our exotic rocket deals strand and solar damage, this actually helps us gain stacks of elemental honing.

Then we also ran psychopop, which gives us our arc damage. This too has envious arsenal and elemental honing. Then on prismatic, I'm rocking a Glacier grenade, a shield throw for those last two elemental buffs. And essentially with this damage rotation, we just went until our mint retrograde ran out of ammo, since at that point, we couldn't charge our rocket very fast anymore. But this damage rotation dealt a total of 103,317 damage and gave us a DPS value of 2,768.

Now we tried out a similar rotation using Hezen's Vengeance with time loss being procced. Hezen's Vengeance with Envious Arsenal and Elemental Honing is considered the highest tier of rocket launcher in the game, mainly due to its origin traits. But along with the same perks as before, I meant retrograde and cycle bomb.

This was able to do 69,919 total damage and gave us a DPS value of 2,331. Next, we try it out Queen Breaker, since it's already pretty strong on its own, just to give us a good baseline. This deals 72,983 total damage with a DPS of 2,643. Now, finally, we tried out the undisputed king of Desert Perpetual, Thunderlord.

I can't believe I'm saying that right now. Dude, so many people memed on this weapon and Thunderlord absolutely carried everyone in contests. This deals a total of 79,598 and a DPS value of 2,414.

Now, point of comparison, we did want to test this with an elemental honing kinetic sniper rifle. But big shout out to my chat last week for making us delete it. Thanks guys. It's not like I needed it in three different encounters during the raid this past week. Some of you are like, Cross, why don't you just get the craftable version?

Why would I need it when I had the god-wrote time-loss version? The main point of this testing though is just to acknowledge that the rocket does put out. Not only by itself, but it has a role in damage rotations. And we didn't even bring hazardous propulsion into the mix, which would be boosting that even further. By the way, forgive me for some of these damage rotations.

We were up for 40 hours, so this is the best I can do right now. For me though, guys, I'm gonna try to make this viable in many areas in the game. Maybe not for DPS, but just for running and gunning and high-end content and for the sheer total damage that it could put out.

We're gonna use it, man. And it may be worth running in the new Conquest activities when they open up to deal with the many bosses and champions. and any other higher health targets.

I ran a Nightfall with it, and granted, it helps when someone stuns the champion for you, since the charge can take a while, but there were also times that I was just able to flat out kill a champion without even stunning it. It would also work pretty good in terms of the ad clear. When shooting a higher health enemy, it takes out the ads around them.

Grant, this is an expert difficulty. We'll see how it continues to perform the higher we go. Now, before finishing off this video, I do want to go over a few other miscellaneous things to note about this rocket launcher. At least some things I find useful. The first we covered earlier about you hardly ever needing to reload this rocket launcher.

By default, it holds all all of its ammo, and the only thing you need to worry about is charging it up. However, if you do pick up ammo, it won't just fill the mag, you will then have to manually reload it. But that seems to be the only case. Something else we found out is that the weapon benefits from both strand and solar surge mods.

However, they only buff half the shots. So for instance, if you use a strand surge mod, it only will buff the initial strand shots, not the solar explosion, and vice versa with the solar surge mod, which means instead of getting a 10% increase in damage from surge mods like you're supposed to, you'll only get half, as it's not applying to both, which is kind of I would just prefer maybe even just Strand Surge, but it applies to the entirety of the weapon, just to pump the damage up a bit more. Or the ability to go through both. Like I think a unique factor could be both Strand and Solar Surge mods can completely buff the weapon.

Now we also tested its ability to generate orbs with Siphon mods. And as you can see here, it works with both. Both Strand and Solar Siphon mods are able to create orbs. But in order to create orbs on the solar side, you will need the solar explosion in order for it to proc. Now in terms of subclass and artifact synergy, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot since there isn't any subclass verbs helping here with the weapon.

Same thing in the artifact as there doesn't seem to be anything directly buffing rocket launchers. You could use threaded blast though. Granted, I wouldn't necessarily go out of my way to break a tangle with a rocket launcher, but as it's getting into the mix of you doing damage and synergizing with maybe some of your strand builds, there is a number of ways you can synergize this weapon even further just simply for it being strand. So guys, that's it. We're actually going to be running some runs today with it.

I'm going to see how it really fleshes out in endgame. If we get a really good build cooking, I'll have one linked in the description below. You can plug and go for those of you that get the exotic.

And for those that are about to begin their grind for the exotic, do keep in mind, when you go look at the triumphs for Desert Perpetual, you can, in fact, increase the drop chances of this exotic. Yes, it's an RNG drop chance from the final boss, but each one of these triumphs increases the chance of rolling Ovation and drop. And you also want to do these triumphs anyways because they give you feat slots. We're going to be talking about feats more this week, and no, not those feats. Raid feats.

We'll be breaking that down in more detail. Well, that's it guys. That is our review. Let me know in the comments below what you think.

If you want to see us live testing this rocket launcher out, we'll be live over on our Twitch stream or right here on YouTube. We'd love to have you join us. Fellas and ladies, thank you all for coming and watching. And as always, slap that like button like your mama told you right.

Today we have our review for the Desert Perpetual Raid Exotic, Whirling Ovation. This Strand Exotic rocket launcher is quite unique and in today's video we'll be breaking down all you need to know about it.

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Coronal Culmination 2:11

Damage Comparisons 3:28

Anticipation 5:23

Damage Rotations 7:58

Use case 8:36

Other random notes 10:16

Final Thoughts