I hope I understood your question right: if you Slash Dash with Exalted Blade, you get the blade beams, and Chromatic Blade’s status chance buff means it’s easy to get guaranteed procs. If it’s Blast, you get blast beams.
I played around with the build a bit, and depending on how enemies oblige Furious Javelin, I was getting blast dashes for 120k~2M, so it’s quite powerful.
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.
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.
I don’t Excal much, but I can tell you that Chromatic Blade lets him imbue Blast onto his Slash Dash.
Clips and comments. Builds and loadout at the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdT9c4JmWI4
“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:
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.
Great guide, thanks for the writeup!
For the maneuver kills challenges, bringing a nuke secondary can be good too. I’ve tried: Surge Grimoire, Fortifier Akarius, and Fortifier and Outburst Atomos. The “while sliding” condition also counts jump kicks (aka aerial slides), even though Akimbo Slipshot doesn’t for whatever reason, lol.
Some more weapons I’ve been playing with:
I think Hate could be interesting too since the melee heat decree solves the problem of how to activate Burning Hate on an Influence build.