Another week, another Warframe! Following the release schedule, it’s time for our sneaky assassin - Ash!
Release date: 2012-10-25
Abilities:
Passive: Slash procs inflicted by Ash’s weapons and abilities deal 25% more damage and last 50% longer.
Shuriken - Launches a spinning blade of pain, dealing high damage and impaling enemies to walls.
Smoke Screen - Drops a smoke bomb that stuns enemies and obscures their vision, rendering Ash invisible for a short time.
Teleport - Ash teleports towards the target, bringing him into melee range and making enemies vulnerable to finishers.
Blade Storm - Project fierce shadow clones of Ash upon groups of distant enemies. Join the fray using Teleport.
Acquisition: Blueprint purchasable from the market, components drop from Venus Proxima (Systems), Neptune Proxima (Neuroptics), and Pluto Proxima (Chassis) Survival, Defense, Exterminate, and Volatile missions.
Ash is the damage orientated stealth frame and works great for dealing with high level enemies thanks to being able to Armor strip and Forced Slash procs. A couple drawbacks have been how hard it has been to acquire his parts, and inconsistency with his third ability activating, often only teleporting you to the target instead of opening the enemy to a finisher/performing a finisher with the augment.
The missions types that I like to use Ash for are Disruption and Survival, and while Ash works for Spy, there are other better options depending on how fast/easy you want to be on these missions.
Shuriken + Seeking Shuriken - A pretty basic ability and works great for quickly striping the armor off of important targets like Demolysts and Acolytes.
Smoke Screen + Smoke Shadow - The ability offer’s great survivability, while I probably wouldn’t bother with the Smoke Shadow augment. It might be useful for anyone trying to push a Kubrow to 50% crit chance for the Tenacious Bond bonus though.
*I think invisibility still prevents sentinels from attacking, so you’re probably better off taking an animal based companion if you want a companion that does anything beyond being a vacuum in a mission.
Teleport + Fatal Teleport - Works great (*when it does work) with weapons that have Forced Slash procs on Finisher attacks like Rapiers. Unfortunately Mercy kills have priority over finisher kills, so if you were relying on this ability for gimmicks like charging the Arca Titron’s Slam Capacitor, an enemy in Mercy Kill range will not provide a charge towards it. Enemies with Overguard are not opened to finisher attacks making this ability less useful.
With the current state of game balance around Overguard, I would probably remove this ability and replace it with Kullervo’s Wrathful Advance, as this ability synergizes with Blade Storm’s ability to quickly build 12x melee combo, and also provides teleport to Crosshair on hold which is very useful for bypassing lasers in Spy Vaults. Unfortunately I think this subsume has a high barrier to obtaining due to Kullervo being in Duviri and locked behind certain cycles.
Wrathful Advance Teleport
Blade Storm + Rising Storm - This ability generally works pretty good for clearing out groups of enemies thanks to its forced slash procs bypassing armor, mild CC, and quickly building combo for his third ability to scale off of. The augment provides both combo duration and increases the amount of combo gained/hit by Blade Storm, making 12x Heavy Attack builds more appealing.