The posterboy, master of the sword, the ol’ reliable - Excalibur!
Release date: 2012-10-25
Passive: Excalibur has improved mastery in the Tenno art of the blade, receiving +10% Attack Speed and +10% damage bonuses for melee attacks while wielding swords, dual swords, nikanas and rapiers.
Slash Dash - Dash between enemies while slashing with the Exalted Blade.
Radial Blind - Emits a bright flash of light, blinding all enemies in a small radius for several seconds.
Radial Javelin - Launches javelins towards enemies, dealing high damage and impaling them to walls.
Exalted Blade - Summon a sword of pure light and immense power.
Acquisition: Available as one of the three starting Warframe options. Otherwise his main blueprint can be purchased from the Market, component blueprints can be obtained from defeating Lieutenant Lech Kril on War, Mars.
Furious Javelin is such a ridiculous buff that it makes up for exalted blade being powercrept. Run it with Chromatic Blade and a high ability strength and you’ll chew through everything with a couple cuts.
I’ve been kinda busy this week and I haven’t really touched the game in a while (waiting for 1999) so I thought I would just go back to the basics and bring back the starters! Also 1999 is bringing us the proto versions of these frames so there, that’s my excuse!
Excalibur is still a pretty damn solid frame, despite all the yeas. His Exalted Blade shows it’s age the most, being worse than your average melee weapon these days, but the rest of his kit stays solid. Slash Dash is weirdly enough his best damage dealing ability, as it scales with your actual melee weapon mods and procs guaranteed Slash. Blind remains a solid panic CC while also massively boosting your melee damage. And Radial Javelins with it’s augment is a Roar that applies to melee only, not bad! He’s probably the weakest of the starters late game, but I would still rate him as 2nd best choice for new players. Mag outscales him lategame, but her kit requires mods and specific weapons to really shine, something a new player won’t have. Volt is still the strongest starter, very cheap decent damage 1st ability, very cheap speed buff to get through missions faster, invincible directional shield that makes defending much easier that you can also pick up to provide yourself with great defense (it also boosts your guns damage while shooting through it) and to top it off a good AoE ability that remains competitive all the way until Steel Path.
I don’t Excal much, but I can tell you that Chromatic Blade lets him imbue Blast onto his Slash Dash.
Why is that meaningful? His #1 has a guaranteee slash proc but it doesn’t affect blast specifically?
it’s been a hot minute since i’ve played, did blast get a buff? iirc, it only decreased accuracy
Boy did it get a buff, lol. The label effect is that it deals 30% of modded base damage to the target and anything in 5 meters per stack. If an enemy dies with Blast on them, they detonate as if they had 10 stacks on them for 3x modded base damage. The reality is it’s complete spaghetti code: it double dips status and faction damage, and counts as a second weapon hit, meaning Xata builds get four hits (initial swing, Xata, blast, Xata again), each with successively more multiplication from faction and status damage. Not Excal related, but this excessive hit count is obvious on Blast snipers racking up thousands of sniper combo in a matter of minutes.
Even with just Furious Javelin, Chromatic Blastdash is a straight up nuke with high enough enemy densities. It’s also a nuke with iframes. It’s great.
oh boy, are snipers viable in normal missions now? hell yeah, that sounds like a great time.
Vectis and Rubico suffer from a low proc rate, and Perigale does too to a lesser extent, but Sporo and to a less extent Komo are dual action crowd clearers and priority killers. Lanka has some funny setups too with Xata and Nautilus, but it won’t really priority kill. Nautilus can spam Cordon back to back due to the new companion Bond mods too.
Sporo got a new augment too. And Komo has full fire rate when zoomed in with the new Semi-Rifle Cannonade mod.
It explodes now! Blast procs explode after like 1.5 seconds, or at reaching 10 procs, or when the target dies. You get a lot more damage if you trigger it with the latter two conditions
