My pick for the best starter. Volt’s got it all! A very cheap 1st ability that does enough damage to nuke low level enemies with ease while also stunning them. Speed boost that makes running through missions easier without being a master of parkour. An invincible shield that boosts your damage while shooting through it, that can also be picked up to provide solid personal defense. A nuke powerful enough to stay relevant even in ESO that can also give you all the shields you could even want with it’s augment. Just a damn good frame, easy to build, easy to use, versatile kit and an amazing early game passive that lets you build up precious extra damage by just running around. If I was to start the game again, I would 100% pick Volt.

Volt’s pretty good as is, but he’s potentially got an absolutely ludicrous buff in the pipeline, per a Pablo tweet. I’ll cover what is, before I cover what could be.

• Shock: Mostly notable for Shock Trooper. Gives you a cheap way of triggering Archon Stretch and priming enemies for purple shards, if you’re going that route.
• Speed: Underrated offensive buff, and it’s fallen off a bit with the extremely high duty cycle of Incarnon weapons. Helps you shift your Incarnons quicker, and weapons with long reloads come back in a flash. The movement is nice. The attack speed also benefits glaives and Exodia Contagion quite significantly. Slam builds also flow way better with turbo buffed animation speeds, which I think means Arca Titron is secretly Volt’s signature weapon. Theoretically, Shocking Speed might give you a nice way to keep Archon Stretch flowing, but I’ve honestly never even considered using it.
• Electric Shield: Now we’re playing with fire! Conal invulnerability, self stagger immunity, double damage on crit. Transistor Shield also gives you a rolling electric proc to spread around due to keeping your Static passive rolling, and opens up a Support Volt build which I don’t run because triple augs is pain.
• Discharge: Has staying power as a massive CC. Due to forcing enemies into the “shocked” animation, opens their heads for easy Incarnon charging and Volt’s deadly headcrits. Running Fortifier on your secondary means you can even use this to easily CC Eximus. People love this due to the Capacitance augment, which feeds Volt and friends a steady stream of shields. With the armour cap, you can either enjoy a 2.4 or 2.5s shield gate or use it to buffer down periods between Arcane Aegis god mode cheats. You know, against enemies that are somehow shooting you between Electric Shield and having the worst muscle cramps of their lives from Discharge itself.

Okay, now what’s this potential buff? Pablo was tweeting about having “element enchant” type augments be non-combining, the way Valence Formation on Lavos works and to give the primary elemental enchantments parity with Venom Dose, which innately doesn’t combine anyway. (And Smite Infusion if you’re still thinking about that poor old relic.) Having a big chunk of non-combining Electric always active is kind of massive? This is going to give Volt near Lavos levels of Influence nuke. Using projectile melees also means his Influence nukes will also benefit from Electric Shield. With the propagation of heat projectiles on incarnons, this means we can unleash the power of Blastfluence from a single cold mod… absolutely incredible.