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Excalibur

New Player Build Guide WIP

by last updated 10 months ago

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Excalibur epitomizes the warrior spirit. His master swordsmanship deals high damage. He is the embodiment of martial excellence.

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ITEM RANK

30

30 / 30

APPLY CONDITIONALS

ENERGY
150
HEALTH
370
SHIELD
370
SPRINT SPEED
1
DURATION
100%
EFFICIENCY
100%
RANGE
100%
STRENGTH
100%
ARMOR
240
Damage Reduction
44.4%
EFFECTIVE HIT POINTS
1,159
Guide
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Excalibur builds
Builds by TwistedBOLT

New Player Build Guide WIP

Prelude:

Warframes modding system can be very daunting for newer players, there's thousands of mods to collect, each one with potentially multiple uses and billions of possible combinations to create a full build. With that being said a new player will not have access to most good mods which severely limits what they can do during the early game resulting in all new player builds being a cookie cutter set of staple mods that are safe to invest in to, borderline regardless of the playstyle they are trying to achieve.

Information on where to find most of these mods can be found here, if you're unsure about what some term in this guide means scroll to the bottom of the page where you can find the term index that will hopefully clear some stuff up. Lastly, before we begin feel free to liberally use the "find on page" function of your browser (ctrl+F) to navigate this massive wall of text instead of reading everything.

The purpose of this guide is to give you an understanding of the fundamentals of building frames as well as give you a builders perspective on certain aspects of said builds. Warframe is an easy game and almost any build you make will be able to beat most of the games content, but just because something works does not mean it works well. This guide is primarily for those that want to learn how to build efficiently. If your goal isn't to build efficiently and you just want to put the minimum amount of effort to continue progressing this guide might not be for you.

Chapter 1: The structure of a balanced build:

All useful frame mods fall in to at least one of the following categories, core, economy, survivability and QoL (quality of life).

1. Core:
Core mods are the mods that allow your build to accomplish the task you set out to do while unimpeded and without resource supply issues.
Core mods consist of mods that increase the strength/range/duration of your abilities, augment your abilities to make them more potent or do miscellaneous thing like improve information gathering to allow for better decision making (radar mods), provide buffs to you or your allies or debuff the enemy. These mods are very frame specific due to the diversity of needs that each frame possesses so balancing out how many of them are needed for a task comes down to experience and testing.
Ideally, having more of these mods on a build should allow you to complete your objective faster and on higher levels, do more damage, increase your kill count and so on.
In theory a build consisting solely of core mods would be the most optimal way to build but in practice that's not possible without a dedicated well rounded team. If you can get a person to do nothing but follow you around providing support for your massive damage output then pure-core builds can technically work but as even expecting random people in public games to follow basic instructions is borderline delusional you'll need to support yourself with economy and survivability mods.

2. Economy:
Economy mods are mods that allow your build to function consistently, to regenerate resources your abilities require as well as to act as a buffer to give you more time to regenerate your resources. Unlike core mods your objective isn't to squeeze as many of these in to a build, instead the idea is to use the least amount of them while nearly always being able to play at full tempo. If you're always full or close to full energy, for example, and never think about resource management during the mission you might just be overcommitting in to economy. Try to tinker with the build, shave off an economy mod to slot in a core mod experiment with rations until you have a good balance between consistency and power output.
Economy mods consist of efficiency mods that lower the cost of your skills, duration mods that allow your skills to be cast less often meaning the invested energy goes further, mods like [Flow] to smooth out big spikes in energy regeneration as well as mods like [Equilibrium] or augments that generate energy under certain conditions. On frames that have abilities that generate resources by hitting multiple enemies, range mods can also be considered economy mods and if resource generation scales with strength then strength mods can be considered a part of the economy as well.

3. Survivability:
Survivability mods are mods that allow your build to function reliably, regardless of what the enemies throw at you. Survivability itself is very frame dependent and each frame has their own dedicated methods to survive ranging from crowd control (CC), invisibility, abusing shield gating, facetanking and others... Anything that allows you to cast crowd control (CC) abilities more often (economy/cast speed mods), more potently (strength mods), or over a larger area (range) as well as anything that allows you to stun enemies longer or be invisible for a longer period of time (dur mods) or provides a boost to facetanking (health, armour, shield, damage reduction mods) can be considered a survivability mod. Just like with economy mods it is fairly easy to go overboard with survivability. Going over 200% duration on frames has an invisibility skill or stacking health/armour/shield mods are very common pitfalls for newer players and should be avoided. Keep in mind that you don't lose anything except for affinity if you die during a mission. Revives are just another resource at your disposal so if you're never using them you might be overvaluing your survivability.

4. Quality of Life:
Quality of Life (QOL) mods are mods that don't directly contribute to any of the above categories but still help you reach your goals by either making the experience more comfortable/less clunky or simply more streamlined or faster. These mods include but are not limited to:

Speed mods: Mods that boost movement speed, sprint speed, cast speed or bullet jump velocity such as Rush, Natural Talent, Mobilize, Firewalker/Ice Spring. Considering you'll barely ever run/walk once you master the maneuvering system you'll gravitate more towards parkour velocity mods.
Information Gathering: Additional radar mods above the at least one, single core mod for either loot or enemies.
Augments that allow you to cast your abilities less frequently ([Eternal War] or [Fused Reservoir]).

Structure:
If it's not clear already the importance of these mods are ordered something like this: Core>Economy>=Survivability>Quality of Life. If we define a "good" build as a build that can accomplish its goals effectively then that build should mostly consist of core mods, containing enough economy mods to rarely have consistency issues, an equally low number of survivability mods, depending on the frames abilities) and the rest of the slots, if any, should be QoL mods. If possible some of these aspects would also be externalized as to not take up valuable mod slots.

Chapter 2: Frames:

Term Index:

This is a table of definitions explaining terms you might not be familiar with. I don't expect anyone to read this massive list, instead, if you're unsure about anything use find on page (ctrl+f) and type whatever you want explained. Hopefully you'll find the information you require below, if not, leave a comment and I'll add anything that needs to be cleared up.

  • Affinity: Affinity is synonymous with experience. For additional info on how it works check this infograph. >FIX BROKEN LINK<
  • Equipment: Your weapons, frames, companions and vehicles.
  • Rank: The rank of your equipment or account (mastery rank).
  • Aura Mods: Aura mods are warframe mods that go in to the aura slot (top left one), they provide a benefit to the entire squad and increase the maximum drain
  • Mod Slots: The space to fit mods in to items. Different item types can have a different number of slots as well as special slots such as aura/stance and exilus slots.
  • Aura/Stance Mod Slots: These slots only accept aura/stance mods on frames/melee weapons respectively. Instead of decreasing the capacity like all other mods these instead INCREASE IT the increase is doubled/halved if the polarity matches/mismatches.
  • Exilus Mods: Exilus mods are thematically less powerful mods that usually provide quality of life benefits to frames/weapons. They CAN be slotted in to normal slots but are usually too weak for this to be justified. To unlock an exilus mod slot on a piece of moddable equipment you need an exilus adapter.
  • Mod Drain: The number in the top right of a mod, designating how much it costs to equip.
  • Mod Polarity: The symbol next to the drain of a mod as well as the top right corner of mod slots. If the polarity of the mod matches that of the slot the drain of the mod is halved. If the slot has no polarity the cost will match the cost of the mod. If the polarities of the slot and mod do not match the drain cost of the mod will be 50% higher.
  • Mod Capacity: The total amount of mod drain you can fit on a piece of moddable equipment. (Can be doubled with potatoes).
  • Potatoes: Potatoes refer to orokin reactors (Gold potato, frames, vehicles, companions) and orokin catalysts (Blue potato, weapons, companion weapons). There consumable items permanently double the capacity of a single piece of moddable equipment.
  • Forma: Consumable items that change the polarity of a single slot of moddable equipment in to a different polarity at the cost of resetting its rank to unranked.
  • Aura Forma: YOU DO NOT NEED THIS TO CHANGE THE POLARITY OF AN AURA, normal forma do that just fine. Aura formas are used to put a universal polarity in to the aura slot allowing for easy swapping between auras.
  • Stance Forma: Like aura formas but for weapons stances. These aren't great as there's rarely a good reason to swap between stances.
  • Umbral Forma: A special, hard to get type of forma that can change a slot in to the special "umbral" polarity. These are quite rare and are rarely actually required for a full build. Avoid using them if you can.
  • Exilus Adapters: Consumable items that can be used to unlock the exilus slot on a single warframe.
  • Exilus Weapon Adapters: Like Exilus adapters but only for weapons.
  • Equipment Ranks: By collecting affinity your gears rank increases (usually up to Rank 30) all moddable equipment gain mod capacity as their rank increases. The capacity of an item is equal to either your mastery rank or the items rank, whichever is the higher. Warframes also get boosts to their stats, there are additive to mods that provide the same type of stats.
  • Mastery Rank: Mastery rank is your account level. You gain new mastery ranks by getting enough mastery points and then completing a mastery test.
  • Mastery Points: Mastery points are MOSTLY gained by maxing out a piece of equipment for the first time. (Making new copies of the item or using forma will NOT give additional mastery points).
  • Health: Your basic survivability resource/stat if it falls to 0, you go in to bleedout and if you do not get rescued your die. By default you can revive 4 times in a mission. Damage to health is reduced by armour.
  • Armour: Provides a damage resistance to health damage equal to: "Total armour / (Total Armour + 300)"
  • Shields: A passively regenerative barrier that prevents non-toxin damage. Armour has no effect on the amount of damage the shield can take before breaking.
  • Shield Gate: If a shield is broken by an instance of damage, that damage instance does not damage health but instead it gets nullified and the frame gets a brief period of invulnerably depending on if the frame had their shields filled out since the last gate. If you had full shields since the last gate you get the big, 1.3 second damage immunity, otherwise you get the small, 0.33 seconds immunity.
  • Shield Gate Abuse/Shield Gating: Considering you only really need a single point of shield to tank an infinite amount of damage that doesn't bypass it using mods that give shields on cast as well as decreasing the maximum amount of shields allow you to constantly be in an invulnerable state or at least often enough to hardly ever be vulnerable to health damage.
  • Face tanking: A deprecated type of survivability consisting of stacking health, armour and damage reduction mods. Builds that use this method spend more slots on survivability than optimal builds while also being less survivable, all these tradeoffs are sometimes justified by allowing for a less engaging and lazier playstyle which some people prefer.
  • Channeling abilities: Abilities that drain a recourse (usually energy) over time rather than on cast. Their cost is affected both by the frame's duration and efficiency stats.
  • Pseudo Channeling abilities: Abilities that are activated as channeling abilities but instead of draining a resource (usually energy) constantly they either drain them only if a specific condition is met (Gloom slowing down enemies) or drain a set amount when a condition is met (Ivara shooting her Artemis bow).
  • Ability attributes: The 4 ability attributes (Strength, Duration, Range, Efficiency) are arguably the most important aspect of warframe building you can master they form the core of the build. All other mods help the build be more reliable via being able to perform consistently (economy), reliably (survivability) or improve the "quality of life". Each one of these does different things for different abilities and sometimes there's borderline no rhyme or reason for why something works as it does, you have to simply read the wiki or test in-game to see how stuff works.
  • Strength (STR): Usually affects the damage or potency of abilities. (Armour stripping strips more, slows become stronger...)
  • Duration (DUR): Usually affects how long an ability lasts, also decreases the cost of channeling abilities.
  • Range (RANG): Usually affects the range of abilities allowing them to cover a wider area.
  • Efficiency (EFF): Usually affects the cost of casting/channeling abilities. The higher the efficiency the cheaper the ability and vice versa. This cost is hard capped at 25% of the original cost and abilities CANNOT be cheaper than that. Non-channeling abilities cap out at 175% efficiency but channeling abilities can can put on lower or higher values depending on the duration stat. The UI is capped at 175% efficiency but for the purpose of channeling abilities efficiency can cap out up to 200%.
  • Prime Equipment: Upgraded versions of the standard, non-prime, equipment. Usually coming with a useful increase in stats. For weapons, primes can severely outclass the original version. But when it comes to frames, primes are usually a very minor boost (in the best case scenario a boost to the frame's base energy.) and on very rare occasion primes can be worse than base frames. (Mesa/Vauban)
  • Externalization: The process of using arcanes, operator abilities, designated weapons, companion slots instead of using your weapon or frame slots on mods that accomplish the same or similar function.