“So did I fail? Or succeed?” “Yes.”

One nice thing I can say about Xaku is that they’ve aged magnificently. Essentially the gold standard for a high performance all-rounder. If you want a chill tank, Vampiric Grasp is great on health conversion tanks, and it might even be possible to get a functioning energy tank going, although the mod requirements for such a build might not fit. I’ll experiment once Xaku Prime is out of the oven.

The worst thing I can say about Xaku is they feel like they’re in the wrong game sometimes. Having six abilities sounds great, but the “ability wheel” style abilities always feel too slow for Warframe for me.

One very specific niche Xaku enjoys is as the best Syndicate mission runner, as combined Golden Instinct and Vast Untime make it very easy to quickly locate medallions while you’re getting a feel for where they can be for a given tileset.

Xaku is one of my basically never used frames: I use Zephyr for box breaking, and now Caliban’s kit has a lot of convergence with Xaku. Honestly the most exciting thing about Xaku for me is the weapons that came with their release… although I’m kind of sad they passed over the Sepulcrum for the shiny prime buffs.

I was on Yareli because she’s my comfort Xata tank pick (and I rolled her for the week). I believe her design is based on nudibranchs.

This week’s Deep Archimedea (Elite only? not sure) has infinitely spawning adds, so I just sat on the boss nuking everything.

I would love to immerse myself in the DE ecosystem, but on the other hand I’m simultaneously playing 3 different Phantasy Star Online games.

Combined with Lavos, she gives me total coverage for Sortie and Nightmare modifiers. I have an extremely cursed Perspicacity Hildryn when the mission type calls for it too, since she can just keep casting it at will.

With the new augment, she is highly functional as a tank, having high radial damage, a large AoE CC, and party survival support. Really the only thing she lacks is the ability to put Fortifier on her Balefire.

Also, having spreadsheet Avenger Outburst combos, Balefire actually benefits hugely from the combo, in case you want to pump more damage into your funny little death cannon. In a stroke of good fortune, Ceramic Dagger is coming back next week too, so you have the perfect Outburst companion!

Nourish is an interesting choice for Koumei due to how well she can supposedly energy tank with Omamori. Naturally high armour and decent health means she gets good Rage conversions and particularly high energy efficiency for Quick Thinking. Her good energy economy means she’s not drawing from her energy pool much either.

I say supposedly because I couldn’t really make an energy tank build fit with my build goals so I gave up. Something to experiment with at any rate.

Yeah, I took it down the status damage and duration evolutions. I settled on an Influence build, specifically viral/electric. The multi-CO means you can also build CO onto it and just mod pure electric for mag/cold/electric for much higher damage. The Okina and all melee incarnons are still strong enough to kill most priority targets anyway, even doing focused Influence builds.

The boilerplate Influence build I run with the new Galvanized Melees is (for incarnons with +100% melee damage when shifted): Weeping Wounds, Blood Rush, Elementalist, Galvanized Steel, Blast 60/60s, Shocking Touch, Elementalist, Discipline’s Merit on Exilus. On this weapon, if you’re trying to optimise for damage, you would swap the 60/60’s for CO and Berserker Fury.

The Okina are really good! There are a few quirks that make them exceptional: the first is that the cold procs are forced, so you get cold + any other cold-related elemental combos, like Blast, Viral or Magnetic. The second is that the spectral Okina obey glaive maths, so melee damage and swap damage (such as Holster Amp, Toxin Ward and so on) are multiplicative, and Eclipse and Vex Armour are self-multiplicative. I haven’t tested it, but word in my Alliance is that they have multiplicative Condition Overload, and these weapons are very proficient self-primers. Needless to say, Chroma is a monster with these bad boys.

Since they can be evolved for combo storage, all frames and loadouts have super easy access to a Melee Influence build, which means they can easily mass-freeze within 20m.

I still need to test if Afflictions builds are underperforming due to the multi-element bug, which is currently still afflicting Hate and Ack & Brunt. I also will test a Blata’s Influence build for general use and see how it compares to Eclipse builds.

I will update this post with the tests, and in a couple of days I should also have the Dera.

Update:

Dera is neat. It has a low proc rate due to its crippling base 2 fire rate, but you can also build it down having noticeably high crit factor if you build it down status. My corr/cold loadout is sitting at 57%/3x. I’m going to keep playing with builds, but I think optimising its proc rate is going to be my personal goal, so fire rate and SC. More goals will be seeing if I can get Frostbite to stack at an acceptable rate, otherwise I think Deadhead will continue to be the play.

The good news is that it hits like a truck: I was getting deadhead hits for 450k on a boilerplate hybrid build, and blast procs would onetap crowds of enemies.

Flashbacks to Ecaflip in one of the early Wakfu betas where your entire skillset was randomly allocated every level, lol.

There’s an introductory video, but basically:

• Passive: Koumei rolls 5d6 on every ability. If she gets three sixes, the ability powers up. One of her weapons also gets status procs, with the enchantment jumping weapon to weapon.
• 1: Koumei spreads some string around, dealing a random status at some interval to enemies touching strings. Three sixes means the strings inflict every status.
• 2: Koumei gets a challenge with a curse attached. Once she does the challenge, she gets a Duviri decree. Stacks infinitely, but they said they might change it. Triple sixes skips the challenge and awards the decree immediately.
• 3: (Helminth). Koumei gets some charms that randomly turn incoming damage into healing. Three sixes gives her complete invulnerability for the duration.
• 4: Stacks status and CCs enemies in a cone. Three sixes maxes out the status stacks and turns it into a radial ability.

Vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZIftZwjGNI

Dagath is cool, her entire kit facilitates both weapon support and “uninstall enemies in a line”. Grave Spirit alone makes her extremely rare as a crit damage buffer, but combined with Doom powering up crits and cutting enemy health by up to half, she’s an absolute monster of a weapon platform. If that’s not enough, her 4 is an extremely potent nuke with an armour strip.

Her augment is interesting. Rather than being a Kinda Cool damage semi-passive, it flips it into a mixed defensive tool and offensive turbomurder utility. Dagath immediately becomes intangible, applies Doom with all damage instances, gains 200% of her Ability Strength as critical damage, and spawns health orbs like they’re delicious strawberry jellies. For a base 10s of duration, scaling with duration mods. In exchange, you are forced to reckon with a 25s cooldown after the duration, although it diminishes at 1s per kill, so it’s over in the blink of an eye.

The passive Doom during Grave Spirit’s spectral phase also means that Wyrd Scythes can be used to mass-spread Doom, opening up support playstyles for Dagath, although keep in mind that Doom is currently bugged and the scythes will steal kills from on-kill arcanes.

She also has some quite interesting setups between Scythes and Cavalry. The slow from Scythes will pin priority targets in place so you can properly space Rakhali. The horses have active hitboxes during the startup, so you can rapidly dump large amounts of damage in front of you, useful for killing things that need to be controlled and then killed.

Like Sevagoth, I think she’s burdened by very tantalising but also eye-wateringly high Strength softcaps.

Overall, I love Dagath. I think gun buffers are a fairly competitive frame archetype, but she can throw down with the best of them. Very few frames have the unbridled turbo murder capacity of Dagath, to the point that, like Frost, she can elevate the dusty old weapons in your arsenal into off-meta monstrosities. I rate this frame “I can nuke with Staticor again?!” out of 10.

Even without Grave Spirit running, the armour strip and viral from her horse blast essentially just demotes enemies off Steel Path, so the 25s cooldown is more like a 3s cooldown… if you’re soloing. Finding enough enemies on a squad is pain though.

Don’t forget to check out Arthuss’s weekly video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wai93stOoKc

Given it’s only worth 4p on the market, I’ll just gift you Heavy Caliber, I have four spares.

But yeah, I wouldn’t suggest using it on the Fulmin. Heavy Caliber is a massive drain of credits and endo for something you’ll basically never use. What build are you planning?

I have some Heavy Calibers to trade. If I may offer some additional considerations, unless the weapon just does not crit the critical acolyte mods are also worth considering. For Rifle that’s Argon Scope and Bladed Rounds, which I can also trade you. Otherwise they can be farmed from Entrati bounties.

I’m looking to trade for Catalyzed Shields if you have one.

Ah yes, Kullervo, the reason Overguard finally got fixed. Wrathful Advance is cool, but I actually really appreciate how you can also play him as a nuker due to the quadratic scaling off Collective Curse and Ukko’s Storm.

Ukko’s Advance is a fun augment because it streamlines his gameplay to bringing a combo charger with you as you hack and slap your way to epic victory with his 1.

Not Kullervo specific, but because Blast is currently coded a la Xata as an entire second hit, this means Blast Rauta can actually charge extra combo over what it says it does. Same mechanic behind why Blast on Snipers leads to extremely rapid combo racking. Not sure how it interacts with Xata and Collective Curse, but I imagine Nautilus might enable one-tap combo maxes with such a setup.

Stealth frames with Xata and an Influence nuke weapon can actually enjoy similar levels of KPM and damage output as Kullervo due to the somehow still broken interaction between Xata and stealth bonus. Even Loki can exploit this to have a 20m oneshot nuke, which I find hilarious.

Sure did! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Fsh2brPlM

Translation is in the comments, by akisame-akiko.