The first warframe, master of the sword, influence goes brrrr - Excalibur!
Passive: Excalibur has improved mastery in the Tenno art of the blade, receiving +10% Attack Speed and +10% damage bonuses for melee attacks while wielding swords, dual swords, nikanas and rapiers.
Slash Dash - Dash between enemies while slashing with the Exalted Blade.
Radial Blind - Emits a bright flash of light, blinding all enemies in a small radius for several seconds.
Radial Javelin - Launches javelins towards enemies, dealing high damage and impaling them to walls.
Exalted Blade - Summon a sword of pure light and immense power.
Acquisition: Available as one of the three starting Warframe options. Otherwise his main blueprint can be purchased from the Market, component blueprints can be obtained from defeating Lieutenant Lech Kril on War, Mars.
Slap Pillage over his 2 or 3 depending on what you’re more comfortable losing between Furious Javelin augment or vanilla Radial Blind/Howl. That’s my Circuit build. Condemn is honestly great too if you: get used to parkour cancelling* the animation, and always run a Fortifier secondary.
Otherwise do Health Conversion + Eclipse, and optionally Arcane Aegis so you have super chunky shields and then >90% DR if anything does make it to your health pool. Obviously doesn’t scale, but it takes you through most content. With Molt Reconstruct, Slash Dash is an iframe ability that heals you and nukes everything.
* What’s parkour cancelling? Many animations, including ability animations, have a lower priority than parkour. For Condemn, simply being in the bullet jump animation turns it into a one-handed ability and cancels the slam and freeze animations. Double jumping will work too. Incidentally, double jumping will also prevent archguns with a recoil animation, like charged Mandonel and Larkspur.
Disappointed to hear that the best options are the usual helminth suspects, at that point I might as well just play baruuk for sth that will feel more cohesive… or even atlas perhaps who is allegedly stupid broken atm
Pretty unfortunate that it seems the best way to survive is just nuking everything. It seems like buffed elements (Shock Trooper/Thermal Transfer) don’t buff Exalted Blade, I was hoping that I could use Melee Influence to force cold procs onto everything.
The current best non-subsume I can think of is making use of Arcane Trickery and opening enemies up to finishers with Radial Blind/Zakti/Dizzying rounds.
I tried Baruuk but I missed the mobility from Slash Dash too much, lol. I also can’t get the same numbers or speed from Baruuk that I get from Exalted Blade.
In terms of native survivability, you build around Slash Dash since it iframes you, albeit without protecting your shields, and I don’t believe Overguard either. For Circuit, as long as you’re running Fortifier on your secondary, there’s a bug with the decrees where one (or several?) will actually inherit Fortifier onto all of your weapons, although I don’t know which one/s. The melee kills -> overguard decree will do you too.
Otherwise it’s just Vaz spam, hope you like Magus Cloud.