Casual Tank [Inaros] build for base steel path (e.g. approximately under level 500).

EHP CALCULATIONS

Note that Scarab Shell and Arcane [Guardian] is a flat amount of armor applied after mods, meaning they give more than any armor mods can give. With [Vitality], [Adaptation], Scarab Shell and Arcane [Guardian], we end up with the following stats:
Health: 4830
Armor: 240 (base) + 994(scarab shell) + 900 (arcane guardian) = 2134 armor for 87.67% DR
Adaptation: 90% maximum DR
Total EHP: 4830/(1-0.8767)*(1-0.9) = 391k EHP.

A level 200 SP Ballista deals about 4000 damage per shot.

Triumbral?
Three Umbral mods give 7245 health and 672 base armor at the cost of requiring Umbral Forma as well as requiring you to swap out Blind Rage for Umbral Intensify and either Primed Flow/Primed Continuity/[Hunter Adrenaline] for [Umbral Fiber] meaning you end up with worse overall quality of life but higher EHP of about 650k (approximately 70% increase in EHP). This is up to you if you want to invest more in EHP over making the frame feel better to play.

BUILD SPECIFICS

Duration
Keep positive to improve the uptime of Sandstorm and Scarab Swarm.

Efficiency/Energy Economy
Can dump since we run [Hunter Adrenaline] which constantly gives energy when you take damage (although note you need to be outside of sandstorm) and sandstorm has a very low base cost.

Range
Keep positive for the suction radius of sandstorm, although this not need to be excessive since you can control the direction of the tornado and pick up enemies. The base range of Scarab swarm and Dessication are quite high.

Strength
Strength is needed to boost the armor bonus from Scarab Shell, damage of sandstorm and status chance of elemental sandstorm (strength essentially double dips sandstorm's status DPS).

ARCHON SHARDS

• TWO regular Emerald +2 Corrosive stack shards: allows Scarab Swarm to full strip at 14 corrosive stacks
• THREE Crimson duration shards: increases sandstorm and scarab swarm uptime.

ARSENAL

Melee
The elemental mods placed on your melee and the melees base IPS/elemental distribution affects the elemental weighting of [Elemental Sandstorm], and changes how often a status is activated. Melee arcanes such as Melee exposure appear to work, while Melee influence has no specific interaction. Melee mods such as damage, crit, attack speed, status duration do NOT affect Sandstorm at all.

Primer:
If you want your sandstorm to be a pure condition overload/viral primer, simply place viral + heat/electric + radiation mods on a weapon with innate corrosive, such as Caustacyst. This will allow sandstorm to proc 6-7 statuses (IPS, corrosive, viral, heat, radiation), which can feed into certain guns that work well with priming and grouping e.g. Nataruk/Cinta, Lex incarnon, Tenet Arca Plasmor.

Viral Electric/Viral Heat:
If you want your sandstorm to actually nuke enemies, you want to mod for viral + electric but with higher electric weighting so it is procced more often. A very popular weapon that is forced to mod exactly like this is Dual Ichor Incarnon with Melee influence: https://overframe.gg/build/572811/

Electric Influence:
If you are running a priming companion such as Panzer/[Diriga] that can prime viral for you and would like to do a combination of sandstorm DPS and direct melee DPS, you can simply run a pure electric melee with Melee Influence, which doubles as an [Elemental Sandstorm] DPS statstick AND a DPS melee. Once sandstorm ends, enemies are often grouped and knocked down, making it very easy for the next few melee hits to naturally perform ground finishers. Weapons in the fist, sparring and claws category have the highest ground finisher multiplier of 30x, followed by tonfas at 20x.

The best of these for influence use are:
Furax Wraith Incarnon: https://overframe.gg/build/642135/
Prisma Obex:
Ruvox Incarnon:
Venka Prime:
Prisma Ohma: https://overframe.gg/build/601313