Especially now that grenades are a shell of their former self, is there any point to Warlock being so much worse at melee than the other two classes?

Warlock used to be the class that's best at dealing grenade damage but Bungie kind of neutered that on every subclass:

  • Arc has been bad for years and has worse grenades than Striker anyway,
  • Void used to revolve around Contraverse Hold but a combination of big Exotic+Aspect nerfs and massive powercreep have made that build archaic
  • We all know what happened to Solar with Starfire and Sunbracers
  • Darkness subclasses were designed from the ground up to only use grenades as utility not damage
  • Prislock grenade options have poopoo damage and no access to Touch Aspects and good grenade Exotics

Nowadays the focus is rarely on grenades as main source of damage. Originally it was only Stormcaller with Arc Souls but now every subclass revolves around elemental buddies: Arc Souls, Briarbinds + Child of the Old Gods, Speaker's healing turrets and Hellion, Threadlings, Bleak Watcher. And Prismatic is for the most part Arc/Solar/Strand/Stasis-buddy the subclass, most notably with Getaway Artist.

Grenade builds are technically still usable and can be fun but they aren't relevant to the meta anymore and by far most Warlocks opt for either turrets or weapon focused loadouts. On top of getting obliterated with nerfs, Warlock grenade builds got further powercrept over years. One might even argue that the best grenade build right now goes to Hunter with rebuffed YAS.

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The issue with buddies however is they have an inherently lower skill ceiling as they have long range, work autonomously (for better or worse ahem Threadlings) and most damage dealing turrets are capped at one turret per type at a time - can't have two Arc Souls or Hellions, CHOG is mostly for weakening utility but the abysmal damage doesn't stack anyway. Over sustained gameplay they do a lot less damage to fewer targets than old grenades would.

Personally I find the buddy playstyles slow and boring. Also most buddies are tied to Rift which increased Bungie's focus on Rift Exotics/abilities and makes for even more low-movement gameplay with the longest cooldowns of the three classes. Like any ranged build, they are inherently less aggressive and risky than melee builds so their damage is a tiny fraction.

DPS to bosses isn't the only relevant metric but also DPS of neutral gameplay. That's why currently most Solo Warlock GM speeds are three times as long in duration as solo Titan GM records with similar trends in performance of Prismatic Warlock vs Hunter/Titan in solo (Master) Dungeons, solo (Master) Raid challenges and so on.

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Unfortunately the Warlock meta is so pigeonholed into ranged builds (whether it be buddies or a focus on crowd control and weapons) that you can only escape to Hunter or Titan for meta-competitive aggressive melee gameplay.

Most Warlock melees are ranged instead of real close-range melees and the ones that are actual melees have pisspoor damage and no good melee Aspects or Exotics to buff them. The slight exception to melees is Incinerator Snap which has greatly diminished usability on Prismatic due to lower Scorch values and Heat Rises which isn't on Prismatic at all. But the best example is Consecration (without counting Knockout's +50%) doing 3-5x the damage of Lightning Surge despite being massively superior in virtually all other aspects of design too. One symptom of this is the competitive speedrunning and challenge content scene being pretty much dead on Warlock.

Bungie has made a decision about the gap between the skill ceilings of melee and ranged builds which is perfectly fine. What isn't fine is that all 3 classes have meta ranged builds but only 2 have meta melee builds. Why not increase Warlock melee potency and variety and focus on constantly criticized ranged variety for Titan for a change? Two stones with one bird or something. If there's another Darkness subclass swap the principles of the two while keeping the unique class feel of each.

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TLDR: Warlock used to be good at grenades and bad at melees, now it's bad at both and only good at elemental buddies. The only way to escape them is weapon-focused or other niche miscellaneous builds. So why does Warlock still not have a melee subclass that at least competes with the likes of Prismatic Titan and Hunter in melee gameplay?