The cat with anger issues and severe trauma - Valkyr!
Release date: 2013-11-20
Passive: Valkyr is nimble, able to recover from knockdown 50% faster and is immune to Hard Landings, landing with no touchdown delay.
Rip Line - Valkyr hurls forth a hook. If it hits an enemy, she pulls them to her. If it hits terrain, she pulls herself to the hook’s location.
Warcry - Valkyr lets out a rallying cry that bolsters her allies melee speed while slowing down nearby enemies.
Paralysis - Valkyr unleashes her shields, stunning and damaging enemies around her.
Hysteria - Valkyr is imbued with energy and becomes a ball of vicious rage, capable of unleashing a torrent of deadly claw attacks on unsuspecting foes.
Acquisition: Main blueprint can be purchased from the Market. Component blueprints can be obtained from defeating Alad V on Themisto, Jupiter.
I wish Valkyr was better, her theme (berserker) is one of my favorite in games to play. She just aged horribly, and her signature ability, Hysteria, forces her into a boring slide attack spam gameplay loop.
Rip Line was pretty cool before we had bullet jumps and modern parkour. Now, it’s a gimmick ability you might sometimes use just to ragdoll an enemy purely for the fun of it. It’s in the same place as Vauban’s Bounce effectiveness wise.
Warcry is her best ability by far. Except any frame can have it with Helminth, so why play her?
Paralysis is an ancient design ability, and even when it was freshly released it was worthless. You can sort of salvage it with it’s augment, but there are so many better subsumes that not only group better, but don’t require an augment to do so.
Hysteria is the other ability that sorta works, with slide attacks it can do some work but it forces you into the old school Attarax Maiming Strike meta and pretty much requires Arcane Energize to maintain it’s extreme energy demands. It doesn’t invoke the traditional image of a berserker either, big tough guy/gal with a giant weapon crushing everything.Valkyr is my personal 2nd top pick for a frame needing a rework (Limbo is nr.1). Sprinkle some Pablo magic on there and maybe she could be as fun to play as the new Hydroid is.
Valkyr was the first frame I built and I loved her at the time. The rope grapple was such a boon before I got void dashing. Then void dashing came in and the need for extra airtime vanished, and all I was left with was a claws excalibur.
Valkyr is one of my friend’s main frame, and it’s always fun to see him slide attack and rip line through the map faster than I can parkour. He’s MR8, and likely will stay that way forever, but don’t let that fool you if you ever see him. Content, no matter how easy or hard, all gets reduced to trying to keep up with that spinning top of death, who already completed the objective and is at extraction before the last guy made it out of the spawn room.
Semi-joking about friends aside, Valkyr is an awesome, yet often undervalued frame, and easily one of the strongest and most versatile frames.
Her passive is honestly one of my favourite quality of life things, and I’m happy we got a mod that replicates it, so I can do dumb stuff occasionally, and not be punished with a hard landing animation.
Rip Line trivialises rooms that otherwise requires more than a single bullet jump to get through. It feels almost as fast as Zephyr’s 1 at times, and to me is much more fun than going spoiler mode and void slinging past the parkour rooms I’m slow at.
Warcry takes any awful weapon and makes it workable, if not directly fun, with an argument for easy infinite duration. Honestly, there isn’t a singular weapon in the game where you’d go “You know, I feel like this is the perfect amount of speed, more would ruin it” (Except some throwables, but you don’t use them for the melee anyway).
Paralysis… At least you can put something useful there with helminth.
Hysteria is well… It’s meme(ing) strike from the days of old, but I honestly kinda liked that play style. Smack some corrosive on the claws, and they take out any steel path enemy comfortably. If you want to make it really dumb, slot Shattering Impact instead, and you’ve got a passive full armour strip that works on everything. The energy requirements can get a bit silly, but we’ve got a lot of ways to deal with that now.
And unlike the other murder mayhem frame, Garuda, you get to actually equip a melee weapon in addition to your perfectly balanced IPS claws. Something I’m very jealous of, as Garuda’s claws are neither a proper melee (in melee only sorties) nor an ability, so they sometimes just end up taking all your screen space when aiming.
Awesome frame and one I have 50% of all my playtime with. Its been sad to see her get more and more outdated as time goes on though with paralysis being outright broken (in a bad way), warcry being power crept by other frames, and hysteria just being increasingly outdated as the melee system leaves exalted weapons behind.
It’s crazy how badly designed melee Exalted Weapons are. Galvanized mods work just fine on Regulators, why is it that Blood Rush and other Acolyte mods arbitrarily cannot be used on melee Exalteds? Add to that lack of stance capacity, despite having a stance mod, making them require a lot more Forma. Wukong’s one is the most sad, it’s literally worse than any other half-decent staff weapon that doesn’t cost energy to use!
Valkyr’s a guilty pleasure of mine. There are better frames for what she does, and you’re trolling if you don’t spam slide attacks and only slide attacks with her, but I like the power fantasy of a berserker frame running amok. I’ve farmed Kullervo just so I could put his 1 on Valkyr and a few other frames.
