Banshee Gameplay Guide

[Banshee] has a varied toolkit capable of multiplying damage, crowd controlling enemies, and nuking entire rooms. She also has some mild stealth capability through her sound manipulation but it's best used as a supportive survivability tool rather than a replacement for invisibility. Silence is able to crowd control enemies while you're moving without any additional input.

📝 Build Overview 📝

Silence and Sound Quake are already reasonably useful crowd control abilities but they can be augmented by the Helminth system to cripple enemies even further. This build attempts to use the strongest options but there are several different variants that can have similar results.

🔢 Helminth Options 🔢

Sonic Boom is fairly weak without the [Sonic Fracture] augment and due to the Helminth system it can replaced by abilities that provide more flexible armor stripping options anyway.

Gloom is one of the strongest crowd control abilities in the game but requires a specific stat spread and some way of stunning enemies. The stun is elongated from a few seconds to over a minute.

Breach Surge has small crowd control effects in the form of temporarily blinding enemies but it grants massive damage potential from the spark propagation.

Ensnare and Larva both provide ways to group enemies into one area so they can be safely crowd controlled by Sound Quake. Ensnare has more range but is slower and costs more. Larva has some issues with picking up certain enemies.

Resonator can lock down an area of the map while you use Sound Quake to lock down another side. Duration may need to be increased or the [Conductor] augment may need to be run for more consistency.

Other abilities are decent but provide a lot of redundancy due to the existence of operator mode and the previously mentioned abilities.

📊 Ability Stats 📊

Strength and Range are the primary stats on this build as it looks to crowd control enemies and dispatch them quickly with high damage. Duration is slightly boosted to increase our energy economy but this comes at the cost of some Efficiency.

Helminth Invigorations, Arbitration Buffs, Ally Abilities, Arcanes, and other external stat boosts can save you multiple mod slots but may rely on specific team compositions, loadouts, or sheer luck. Plan around these situations and modify your loadout to hit desired ability stat breakpoints.

⏲️ Duration ⏲️

Duration is slightly increased to allow various crowd control abilities to have a more standardized upkeep. It should be tweaked in either direction depending on which subsumed ability is chosen.

⛽ Efficiency ⛽

Efficiency is lowered by Blind Rage but raised back up by Streamline. Many abilities should still have a normalized energy economy but if you're having issues you may have to drop Blind Rage. This creates other issues that are explained in the Strength section.

📏 Range 📏

Range is boosted by a few mods to allow crowd control abilities to be useful in larger areas. Augur Reach can be considered a flex mod on smaller tilesets.

💪 Strength 💪

Strength is kept at a very specific breakpoint on this build. Gloom requires ~272% Strength to maximize its slow and many build decisions are made around this breakpoint. There are many ways to go above and beyond this specific Strength number but most require tools that are outside of this singular frame.

↔️ Alternate Playstyles ↔️

Most builds utilize tools that can be swapped out to serve the same purpose albeit in a different manner. The following suggestions are an outline and aren't exhaustive.

🔧 Mods 🔧

• Growing Power is necessary to hit the Strength breakpoint. Only replace it if you have other means of increasing Strength.
• [Primed Sure Footed] is a powerful survival tool that completely negates many forms of hostile crowd control. It also allows weapons with a large area of effect to be fired with impunity. It's an expensive login reward so replace it if you have other forms of status effect immunity.
• Streamline is a flex mod if you have great energy recovery or support from another frame.
• [Rolling Guard] may be necessary against high level enemies. Damage reduction and raw health doesn't scale as well as shield gating and invincibility and your crowd control abilities may not be good enough with high enemy density. Replace it as as you see fit.
• Augments for subsumed abilities can easily be fit in and there's room for mods that increase your quality of life.

⚙️ Arcanes ⚙️

Arcane Energize synergizes with high Efficiency and [Primed Flow] which allows you to be greedy with your ability casts. It can be replaced if you're confident with your energy economy. Quality of life arcanes like Arcane Nullifier or Arcane Consequence are usually the call.

Arcane Aegis provides emergency survivability when it procs. It should be replaced if you don't like the inconsistency. Defensive arcanes like Arcane Guardian or Arcane Resistance are usually the call.

📋 Final Notes 📋

Sonar doesn't increase the damage of secondary effects like Slash procs or Toxin procs so the damage potential can be limited against some enemies. Spamming it enough times will eventually allow you outpace any enemy damage resistance scaling but at any point DE could change the secondary damage resistance formula to scale properly with damage buffs similar to Sonar.

Silence is a redundant stealth ability due to [Banshee]'s passive. After it was added as a Helminth ability many builds that use Silence are now better on other frames. If you're confused why a specific Silence interaction isn't being used it's most likely because the build has been moved to another frame that uses it better. Loadout slots are limited and putting the exact same gimmick build on multiple frames isn't suggested unless there's a good reason to run that frame instead such as Arbitration buffs or utilizing a specific ability interaction.

🔄 Linked Builds 🔄

Frames

• General Use Shared Polarities
• Damage Buffs Shared Polarities
• Resonating Quake Shared Polarities
• Finisher Nuke Shared Polarities
• Stealth Affinity Shared Polarities

Weapons

• Kuva Nukor: Condition Overload Primer Shared Loadout
• Kronen Prime: General Use Melee Loadout
• Kronen Prime: Naramon Alternate Melee Loadout

Other Necessary Tools

• Smeeta Kavat: General Use Shared Loadout
• Panzer Vulpaphyla: General Use Alternate Loadout
• Adarza Kavat: General Use Critical Chance Loadout

📧 Contact Information 📧

Remnants of the Void / Phantom Vanguard Discord Server
If you have any questions or concerns please contact us through the Discord server. We appreciate all forms of support and welcome any criticism designed to help us improve. If you enjoyed this guide you can also support us by giving it a 👍 and sharing it with your friends!

This build is part of a collection that you can either find on the builder's profile or through a special bot we have in the Discord server. We have builds for every item in the game and we're adding new ones frequently. Come check it out!

🏆 Credits 🏆

• NICHE - Developed tools that made generating builds far easier.
• Dragazer - Helped to clarify certain melee interactions.
• Marr - Helped with proofreading original build format.
• Fz0ul - Optimized overarching polarity plans to save forma.
• Dystopia - Tested several strategies to the level cap.

🛑 Disclaimers 🛑

This build may make certain assumptions about mechanics that can change after a patch. Multiple unnecessary forma may be used to facilitate more options across multiple builds with one polarity plan. Certain sub-optimal mods may be run to fit them into the forma polarity plan. We do not make builds that purposely attempt to abuse mechanics that aren't intended by the developers. None of these previous statements are excuses for a fundamentally incorrect build and we ask that you please contact us when we're wrong. We do not consent to anyone other than the original author of this guide posting it without permission.