It’s time for the original sound based frame, the main cause of integer overflow damage numbers - Banshee!
Release date: 2013-03-18
Passive:All of Banshee’s equipped weapons, including Gunblades such as Redeemer, and weapons equipped on Sentinels should they be present, are treated as silent.
Sonic Boom - Banshee emits a sonic shockwave that pushes targets in range with enough force to incapacitate or kill attackers.
Sonar - Using acoustic location, Banshee’s Sonar power finds and tracks enemies, and exposes critical weak spots to everyone in your squad.
Silence - Using Silence surrounds Banshee in an aura that stuns enemies and will limit their perceptions and tactical response to gunfire and Warframe attacks.
Sound Quake - Channeling all of her acoustic energy into the environment, Banshee uses ultrasonic reverberations to violently shake the ground.
Acquisition: Banshee’s blueprints can be researched from the Tenno Lab in the Dojo.
Banshee is one of the warframes I tend to use pretty often, usually for Survival or Disruption.
Sonic Boom + Sonic Fracture
On it’s own, Sonic Boom isn’t very useful but combined with Sonic Fracture, it becomes a very cheap Armor Strip ability with some minor CC properties, although the effectiveness of CC has been reduced with the addition of Overguard. While the CC this ability provides does not “lockdown” enemies, it is able to interact with Demolysts to keep them away from conduits, and does not become less effective overtime the same way an ability like Ensnare would versus certain enemies.
Sonar + Resonance
This ability marks an enemy with weak points greatly increasing the damage your weapons do to enemies. With the Resonance augment, Sonar becomes even more powerful by allowing it to spread to new enemies, and marking existing enemies in range with additional weak points. The Resonance Augment also makes this ability extremely strong in crowds, where enemies can easily be primed by this debuff multiple times. You will need to find a good balance for Range between this ability and Silence, too much range prevents you from stunning enemies while too little range makes this ability less effective.
Silence + Savage Silence
This ability allows you to briefly stun nearby enemies. The Savage Silence Augment will open enemies not protected by Overguard to finishers during the stun animation, and will boost finisher damage to enemies. It pairs well with weapons that can force enemies to being opened to finishers such as a Dagger’s Heavy attack, Dizzying Rounds, or the Zakti. Using this ability with Arcane Ultimatum and Trickery was a great way to make Banshee less fragile before Helminth/Shield gating was added to warframe. This ability has been indirectly nerfed over the years unfortunately, self-stagger being added to Zakti with the changes AOE weapons made it very likely that you would stagger yourself when going for finishers, and more recently the addition of Overguard preventing enemies from being opened to finishers in the first place.
Sound Quake/Resonating Quake
Generally the ability that you replace with something else to increase Banshee’s survivability like Pillage or Condemn as the damage is very low. The Resonating Quake augment does make this ability usable for quick low level exterminate missions or some fun in fissure missions if you get the fissure buff more power strength + range.