General use [Valkyr Prime Talons]. You can see my Valkyr Prime build there, but I haven't written a guide for it yet as I'm still making little tweaks and adjustments as I play more. [Valkyr Prime] is my favorite Warframe, so I hope to have her perfected before long!

For best results, pair this with the following:

• Arcane Fury and/or Arcane Strike
• A primary and secondary using Primary/Secondary Dexterity
• A melee holding Gladiator Vice/Might/Rush
• Naramon focus school
• Slide Attacks for daaays

Mod Choices

• [Sacrificial Steel]: This gives the cat as much base critical chance as possible. Whether we use [Sacrificial Pressure] or [Primed Pressure Point], the only other option is [True Steel], which doesn't even come close. Talons have an insanely high base critical chance, so every point of modded critical chance goes just that much further.
• [Sacrificial Pressure]: Hoo boy, is this one a doozy. It turns out that there's no simple answer for which mod is better between Primed Pressure Point and Sacrificial Pressure. Now, if you don't care about the highest level of min-maxing, just use whichever you have leveled more. If they're the same level, use Sacrificial Pressure, since it gives you that extra bonus Sentient damage. If you care to hear the nitty-gritty details, I'll make an extra section waaay at the bottom of this guide discussing the differences. Also look there if you plan to use more or less than 3 Gladiator mods across your non-Talons melee and Valkyr herself.
• [Organ Shatter]: This girl can crit like a truck. Repeatedly. Since her base critical chance is over 100%, and nearly 200% at that, critical damage is just a straight up damage multiplier for these talons.
• [Gladiator Might]: Same as above. [Gladiator Might] doesn't add to or benefit from any set bonus, but critical damage is critical damage. As a note however, [Talons] will benefit from the set bonus of Gladiator mods placed on her equipped melee and Warframe, though I personally only do the former.
• Primed Fever Strike: +165% elemental damage for the cost of only a single mod slot. Definitely worth it.
• [Shocking Touch]: This mod's probably the most replaceable one, in my opinion. I mostly chose this to save a Forma while still providing a decent damage boost and the occasional Corrosive proc.
• [Primed Reach]: You wanna hit things, right? This makes it easier to do that. Considering aiming while slide attacking into oblivion can be as difficult as catching that sliding cat, this is a must-have for me.
• [Berserker Fury]: Highest attack speed in a single slot, and cheaper than the next best (Primed Fury) to boot. Remember when I said slide attacks for days? Yeah, I meant it. Cat got the zoomies.

Notable Exclusions

• [Condition Overload]: The king of melee damage mods. If you enjoy using a primer to set up for massive melee hits, you can consider swapping [Sacrificial Pressure] out for this, which would save you an Umbra Forma and only require a regular one in its place. I personally like to spam slide attack until my hands fall off and then some, so I prefer to skip the primer, but to each their own. Damage should still be enough to murder The Everything either way.
• Primed Pressure Point: See Sacrificial Pressure above, and/or the section at the end of this guide.
• Primed Smite <Faction>: This might be worth it over something in here, but I honestly don't care for faction mods in general, so I haven't bothered to check. [Shocking Touch] is the most likely candidate to swap out for this, but you do the math yourself, cause these still might come out behind. Non-Primed versions are probably never worth it. Make sure to remember to always bring the right faction.
• [Carnis Mandible]: Is this one really that notable an exclusion? Regardless, this gives less damage than a 90% elemental mod and we're not really trying to apply statuses with this build, so neither the Slash weight nor the status chance really ends up doing all that much. Hard pass for me, as much as I like the mod in general.
• [Quickening]: This one has more of an argument for it. If you find yourself dipping out of Hysteria too much and want to make it easier to build back your combo for the Gladiator set bonus, swapping this in for [Berserker Fury] might be for you. It could still end up being worse on account of the slower attack speed, but it's hard to test that in any meaningful way. I prefer to just embrace the zoomies.

Feel free to ask about any I haven't listed here and I might edit this post to add it.

Potential Modifications

• [Shocking Touch] can be replaced by any other elemental if you use another Forma. Alternatively, you could use a second Umbra Forma to overwrite the Naramon (dash) polarity that Shocking Touch is on (keeping one slot with no polarity). This would allow you to be able to swap between Corrosive/Viral/Gas as needed by slotting on Shocking Touch/North Wind/Molten Impact respectively in the non-polarized slot. It's not recommended to take off Primed Fever Strike, however as the +165% elemental damage is quite a bit of damage for just one mod slot.
• [Quickening] could also go in [Shocking Touch]'s place, but would require an extra Forma or an Umbra Forma exactly as described above. It's hard to tell if this would be a DPS increase or not, since I haven't been able to find the framedata for Hysteria's slide attacks, so running the numbers would be difficult at best unless I timed it myself, which I'm not exactly wont to do. This would, however, further embrace the zoomies... Something to look into, then.
• [Sacrificial Steel] and Pressure can be replaced with [True Steel] and (Primed) [Pressure Point] if your Sacrificial mods aren't leveled enough or you don't have them yet, or if you can't get your hands on an Umbra Forma. To do this, all you need to do is drop the Umbra polarity; even [Primed Pressure Point] will fit without a fourth Forma to replace it. To upgrade later on, just add on the Umbra Forma. Simple as that. You can even swap [True Steel] out for [Sacrificial Pressure] and leave [Primed Pressure Point] in if you'd like, as that will also fit after you add the Umbra Forma.

[Primed Pressure Point] vs. [Sacrificial Pressure]

This decision is a tricky one, and also happens to be the least important, at least for most people. The thing that makes it difficult is that, as our combo multiplier goes up, [Sacrificial Pressure] gets worse in comparison to [Primed Pressure Point]. From here on out, I'll just call them "Sacrificial" or "Primed" for brevity. The reason for this is the Gladiator set mod bonus. (Do note that the Gladiator mod on our [Talons] will have zero effect on this, regardless of what the visuals show). As our total critical chance goes up, the contribution that [Sacrificial Steel] makes on our total average DPH (damage per hit) decreases, and the contribution that either Pressure mod makes increases. This should make some sort of sense; the more total crit we have, the less percentage of the total any one source provides, and the more times our melee damage will be multiplied by the crit multiplier (on average). It's a balancing act, and an interesting one at that. After doing the math, I worked out the following (assuming 3 Gladiator set mods):

• From combo multiplier 1x up through 4x, Sacrificial is better. From 5x up through 12x, Primed is better. Against Sentients, Sacrificial will always be better (and significantly so).

However, the differences due to combo multiplier are very small. At 1x, there's a 2.90% difference in Sacrificial's favor; at 12x, there's a 3.39% difference in Primed's favor. Even at 12x combo multiplier, the difference in average DPH is 31828.0 for Sacrificial, and 32926.3 for Primed. Honestly, the difference here is so negligible that even assuming I could stay at 12x for the entirety of every mission ever, I'd still just go for Sacrificial, since I'd never have to change it to get the damage bonus against Sentients.

To finish this section, and this guide, off, I'll give a quick reference for what the differences are in the best case and worst case for different numbers of Gladiator mods, and where their turnover point (that is, the point where Primed starts being better than Sacrificial) is. Sacrificial is always 2.90% better at 1x, so I'll leave that out, and it will generally change fairly linearly from that to whatever the difference at 12x is. Keep in mind that these calculations are using all of the mods at the veeery top, with the only changes made swapping [Sacrificial Pressure] for [Primed Pressure Point], and assume you're not fighting Sentients.

(Number of Gladiator mods | Primed's advantage over Sacrificial's at 12x combo | turnover point)

• 0 Primed is always worse by 2.90%.
• 1 | 0.11% | 12x.
• 2 | 2.04% | 7x.
• 3 | 3.39% | 5x
• 4 | 4.39% | 4x
• 5 | 5.15% | 4x
• 6 | 5.76% | 3x

And with that, I'm done here! I hope you enjoyed this guide and found it helpful. If you did, please give it a vote~ If you have any questions or comments or corrections, feel free to leave a comment and I'll most likely get around to responding to it. Have a lovely day! <3