Wisp enjoyers, I need your help!
For context, I have 4000 hours logged in missions, and I primarily play crowd control/weapon support frames like Nyx, Limbo, Caliban, Frost, Banshee, and so on. That is to say, while I’m not a new player by any means, I think I may have some biases that prevent me from fully appreciating a frame vaunted as the “best support in the game”.
I’m not here to gainsay her power as a damage frame, as frankly anyone with a blind can run Xata and propel themselves into the upper echelons of damage potential, and Wisp comes with an invisibility kit to boot. I also think she has great quality of life as a solo frame due to her ability to disengage and control enemy aggression.
Instead, I think I’m missing something about her support toolkit. Here’s where I’m coming from:
- Haste Mote looks nice on paper, but in my opinion fire rate is generally less valuable than reload speed, which is hard to get and mostly only available from fairly weak mods. Wisp also needs an eye-watering 300% strength just to replicate the effects of a single speed arcane.
- Vitality mote is fine, but certain maps such as T4 void, Zariman, and Deimos Labs have enemies with severe alpha strikes, so I think health tanking is generally more situational and requires Eclipse or another DR on top to really work and be comfortable.
- I think Breach Surge is becoming less useful as the strongest weapons have shifted to conal, punchthrough, and chaining weapons that rapidly kill enemies approaching from a single tile entry point. I believe it also has a fairly significant propagation delay between when it casts and when the effect radius reaches far targets? Correct me if I’m wrong, please!
The problem with support Wisp/support frames in general is that if you’re already going into endgame content, you can usually expect your team’s kits to already be sufficient for that content. You can increase their survivability further by making use of shock motes to stun enemies and rad procs but this typically just slows down missions (especially the shock motes in defense missions) if they’re used in situations where they aren’t really needed, and can cause issues with builds that make use of enemies clumping together like if you’re trying to make use of Gas/Blast or have a Harrow in the squad trying to buff with Covenant. Rad procs from breach surge usually aren’t as much of an issue though.
If you are willing to give up fashion, you can subsume Elemental Ward and use a green energy colour for a reload buff to complement Wisp’s Haste mote, along with the Everlasting Ward augment mod so the buff is actually useful to your team.
Breach Surge is a lot less useful now that enemies are often protected by overguard, ignoring the blind effect and being immune to the CC effects of Radiation procs, I think they might even be immune to friendly fire too (they aren’t targetted, and I think they’re immune enemy AOE attacks like a Bombard’s rockets). You can still try to make use of it though, there’s only so many enemies that can attack at the same time so you can still reduce the number of enemies attacking your team/the objective at the same time.
Pillage/Fire Walker for status cleanse; Pillage gives you Armor Strip at the same time while Fire Walker gives to a movement speed boost for memes. Your team still needs to walk through the flames though but it’s a more passive in its use versus Pillage which requires you to cast every time you want to use it. With Overguard being on everything now, status cleansing is a lot less useful, but it was still nice to have for Sorties.
I think you’re much better off modding to specialize for your loadout and letting your team pick up the buffs passively instead of trying to directly buff your team.