Helminth update: The Helminth system is not kind towards low-duration builds. The overwhelming majority of available abilities scale with duration, and most of them cannot even function with 12.5% duration. Empower may seem like the obvious first choice ability, but it's a pitfall: when you already have over 300% strength, an additional 50% strength only results in a ~16% increase in damage. Larva is a popular duration-independent ability, but after the nerf it doesn't even reach 1/3 of the range of Lull, which defeats the purpose of using Larva to group up enemies for Lull.

Instead, I have opted for Pillage. Even with minimum duration, Pillage will still reach about 16m, which is not room-clearing but definitely usable. Crucially, it patches up some of [Baruuk]'s offensive and defensive weaknesses.

On offense, [Baruuk] has no way of dealing with alloy armour besides radiation damage, which will get outscaled eventually. With this build, Pillage will strip 80% armour with each cast, letting you blow past that barrier.

On defense, [Baruuk] is a frame with gargantuan amounts of damage reduction in his kit, but very bad base stats to work with. He is near the bottom of the roster for both health and shields, and is barely above average for armour. Pillage gives him a much-needed way to instantly generate max overshields without sacrificing mod slots, and the status cleanse is just the cherry on top.

If you feel that the insane overshield generation from Pillage is unnecessary, [Ember]'s Fire Blast is another excellent option. It's 75% armour strip instead of 80%, 75 energy instead of 50, and it doesn't create overshields for you, but it has a whopping 36m of range compared to Pillage's ~16m with this build. I'd say that both of them are equally valid and which one you choose will be up to personal preference.

This is an idealised [Baruuk] build, obviously there are ways to reduce the mod costs if you don't want to invest so much forma in him. You can use normal [Vitality] instead of Umbral, and [Power Drift] is pretty extra as well.

The aim of this build is to get your Restraint down quickly using Lull, so duration becomes your dump stat. This is great for many reasons, because

• 3 seconds of sleep duration is more than enough for you to kill anyone caught in your Lull area.
• You cannot recast Lull while it is still active, so low duration lets you "farm" Restraint from the same group of enemies over and over again in endless missions
• Not caring about duration lets you use [Fleeting Expertise], which means that you won't have any energy issues

[Stretch] is there to give Lull a bit more range to catch more enemies per cast, so that you can lower your Restraint more quickly. [Reactive Storm] is an amazing augment that singlehandedly turns [Desert Wind] into the best exalted weapon in the game (better than [Mesa]'s [Regulators], I will go on record saying that). [Adaptation] and [Umbral Vitality] for survivability (side note: if you don't want to commit to [Umbral Vitality], [Vitality] and [Redirection] are both viable as your second survivability mod because of how much damage reduction you have affecting your shields), and everything else goes into pushing your strength as high as it will go.

Your gameplan is simple:

• Elude is completely useless with this build, so ignore it
• Cast Lull in big crowds of enemies to lower your Restraint quickly. Don't forget to keep doing this even while Serene Storm is active
• Recast Desolate Hands whenever you go below 9 daggers to maintain your 90% damage reduction
• Keep Serene Storm up as long possible and push everyone's faces in. In endless missions with high enemy density like survival and disruption, you should be able to keep it active permanently with little issue

Arcane Strike and Arcane [Fury] for maximum damage. Energise is not required because Serene Storm is not an energy drain ability, which means that Zenurik Energising Dash can be used even when it's on.