Strand, Spider-Man, and the Grapple That Rewired My Destiny

Destiny 2 Strand and its grappling hook transformed Neomuna into a high-speed playground, blending brutal combat, bold mobility, and creative chaos.

I still remember the first time I saw the neon skyline of Neomuna. It was 2022, and Lightfall was just a rumor stitched together from trailer frames and developer interviews. I was sitting in my apartment, reading Joe Blackburn’s comments in GamesRadar, and I felt that familiar itch: the itch of a new subclass that promised to pull on the interconnected strings of life and fate. Strand wasn’t just another elemental flavor. It was a third eye opening. It was peering into the matrix and finding that the matrix was made of threads.

Now, in 2026, I can look back at that moment with the clarity of someone who has spent hundreds of hours swinging, missing, and occasionally landing a grapple-finisher into a shotgun blast. Strand has been part of Destiny 2 for years, but the original design notes still read like a love letter to movement and violence. The subclass was surgical. Warlocks could fire out a dozen telekinetic knives, each one a sentence in a language of severance. Titans threw twin fists that slashed through an enemy’s very life force, as if they were tearing pages out of a book. And every class got a grappling hook.

That grappling hook was the headline. It let us swing across Neomuna, a city of chrome and vaporwave dreams, and for a moment it felt like Bungie was making its own Spider-Man. But Blackburn was quick to kill that fantasy. The grapple had a base cooldown, so you couldn’t just websling endlessly. Certain spots in Neomuna would instantly reset the cooldown, giving you a chance for high-flying, chained swings. The city itself became a playground with invisible rails, a skate park built from light and data.

The bigger sacrifice was mechanical. The grapple replaced the grenade ability on each subclass. I remember arguing with my clan about it. No grenade? That felt like losing a limb. But Blackburn explained that because it sat in the grenade slot, the grapple had offensive capabilities. There was a finisher on the grapple. You could grapple in, mess somebody up at the end of it, then pull out your shotgun. Some Guardians would use it as an escape. Some would use it to be aggressive. That duality was the point.

I fell into the aggressive camp. I would grapple into a room, panic, and then somehow shotgun a Titan in the face. It was not elegant. It was like trying to conduct an orchestra while falling down a staircase. But when it worked, it felt like I had rewritten the geometry of the fight.

Bungie assistant general manager Dan McAuliffe admitted he was a little nervous about how Strand’s massive mobility boost would affect older content and PvP. I understood that fear. Destiny 2 is a game held together by invisible rubber bands, and adding a grappling hook is like giving every player a pair of scissors. But McAuliffe said he had faith in the team’s ability to test and vet that kind of thing. In 2026, after years of sandbox changes, I can say that faith was not misplaced, even if PvP still occasionally feels like a circus with no ringmaster.

The other thread from that interview was Power. Blackburn talked about big changes coming to Destiny 2’s notorious Power grind, but he didn’t offer a time frame or details. He said there was good stuff Power did for the game, and really bad stuff it was doing to Destiny right now. The plan was experiments—ways to understand if Bungie was making the right long-term plays for Power. That quote aged like a prophecy. Power has been dialed up, dialed down, and reworked so many times that I stopped treating it as a number and started treating it as weather.

What I love most about Strand, even now, is that it still feels like a borrowed power. It is not fire. It is not void. It is not electricity. It is the idea that everything is connected, and that connection can be yanked. The grapple is a tool for that yank. The knives and fists are the punctuation. The cooldown is the comma that forces you to breathe.

Would I trade my grenade for it again? In a heartbeat. Strand gave me a way to move through Destiny 2 that felt like swinging through a city made of frozen lightning. It made Neomuna feel vertical. It made old strikes feel new. It made me laugh when I missed a grapple and fell into the void. And it made me appreciate that Bungie didn’t just make Spider-Man. They made something stranger: a thread you can pull until the whole world moves.