If you missed your chance, don’t worry, Wolf beacons come around every so often. I believe I have some spares, send me a DM here if you’d like to organise some hunts.

Late answer, but Zephyr with a good melee beats basically everything in this game. You have to love her movement though.

Zephyr herself wants Funnel Clouds, and if you’re doing a slam build, you want Nira mods as well. After that it’s free, but she really likes range and duration, and strength is only necessary on Air Burst Rounds builds.

For a blast slam build, any arcane is fine, including no arcane. Retaliation is quite nice now that we have Primed Redirection, once you’ve acquired it. If you’re running Nira, or an Incarnon, you can skip base damage. You want initial combo, attack speed, Seismic Slam. Crit mods on most weapons. Electric if you’re running Melee Influence.

For survivability, I recommend getting your hands on some Ancient Protector spectres, either from Loka kill squads or from Loka directly. Investing in Protective Sling from Vazarin is huge as well, and I honestly recommend running Vaz in most cases, as it makes the game a lot more fun in my opinion. A Fortifier secondary is a huge asset as well: Grimoire, Akarius Prime, Lex Incarnon and Atomos Incarnon are all excellent choices.

Equilibrium sure does affect universal orbs, basically doubling Universal Fallout from 2.5 to 5.25 energy per enemy per rank. When I put it like that I think I can build around that.

How are you managing your energy?

Just regular orange shards I’ve scrounged up from weeklies, I don’t tauforge them because yellow shards are just too useful for my preferred build style, which is lots of parkour speed and a bit of casting speed.

Due to Fused Crucible’s uncapped energy drain, six of my mods are going to energy economy: umbral fiber/intensify/energy battery, equilibrium, fleeting expertise, primed continuity, boreal’s hatred. I have been and will continue to be spending all my pix chips on peely pix, so Universal Fallout is still only rank 1.

I’ll try the opposite approach to energy economy and build around a core of neutral efficiency, duration and equilibrium, and layer things in if I’m still struggling with energy economy. I was aggressive with energy since I wanted a build ready for level cap Duviri and Constricted ETAs.

I’m gonna be honest, I need help understanding how to build him. 235% range and get back to neutral strength? At the moment I’m running 190% range and 120% strength (95%+growing power) and finding his KPM isn’t good enough to self-sustain in Survival off kills alone. Last run I only pulled a bit over 60, and when I think that most of my Influence builds are 120-200, it’s a letdown. Theoretically he should have parity with a 54k Influence if I hit just 6 targets with Crucible, so maybe my issue is I’m not picking the right tiles to camp.

Fused Crucible is interesting, as it’s one of the more offensively-oriented invincibility effects in the game. Despite the nominal roll nerf, he’s still quite mobile and responsive with enough parkour speed and Amalgam Diffusion on his pistol.

Update since it’s been a while.

I did two runs:

• Set A, B. Leave after grabbing bonus chip from A.
• Set C, A, B. Full run. Grabbed remaining two bonus chips.

Seems the only flag is “did a run, this week, with a cursed sticker equipped to that mission.”

Ivara my beloved, my second most-used frame after Zephyr. I love the design on all of her various skins. Her outrageous power carried me through many phases of the game. Now that Overguard mitigates Disruption debuffs (and most EDA and ETA debuffs to boot) she’s highly effective at missions where you might want how much damage she brings, other than being relegated to just camping survivals or whatever. Navigator is honestly a really fun gimmick, especially now that we have Influence for a lot of the things you might want to Navigate ;)

I think so little about Artemis Bow, AKA Cernos Prime but not as much, that it honestly completely slipped my mind that it can equip arcanes now. I should go have a play around with it again.

That’s not quite true that she has nothing left. She’s one of two? frames that can force CC/CD onto Xata (other I know of is Dagath), which, combined with Prowl’s weak point multiplier means she has some of the highest damage potential in the game. She can stack enough multipliers that she was, at one point, essentially tied with Mirage as a weapons buffer frame, putting her in the second tier behind Banshee. I haven’t updated my strength scaling spreadsheets in a couple of years though.

I just saw wellplayedninjas’s video of her sweep Lash ignoring LoS checks, lol. Play her before the nerfs come!

After playing around with her a bit, I really don’t like how slow MV is (you’re talking to a Zephyr player, there is a certain way I need to play this game, and it starts but does not end at +90% parkour speed), so I think Storm at least lets you spread vuln further and faster than waiting for the cast to blanket enemies in nice warm glass.

How does she scale off cast speed in general? I notice the sweep variant of Lash is a full body cast, although I’m not sure if it’s subject to parkour cancels. I don’t think I’m going to click with this frame if I can’t remedy how much she needs to stop moving.

Awesome, thanks for testing this! Next week I’ll try some TA runs where I move a specific sticker up through successive missions. (Like, AXX then XAX where A is a cursed sticker.)

Siphon + Eruption also augments her CC kit, and now that she’s an Influence nuker the enemies getting yeeted away isn’t as much of a KPM drag any more.

The chicken bones bae herself. Or the not stonks frame. What? She’s the glass frame? Sure I guess!

I want to get into Gara but she just doesn’t seem to have helminth slots, so she’s kind of confusing for Circuit. Mass Vitrify is kind of cool but scales poorly, so you’re locked into Spectrorage, and possibly also Siphon/Eruption too. I do appreciate how much CC she brings to the table, and honestly Spectrorage is kind of cracked.

Theoretically, Mending Splinters gives her extraordinary DR, since the health regen opens her up to exploit the RageThinking loop for a whole lot of DR. You know, on top of 90% from Splinter Storm. If you like that kind of build.

I think Gara has a lot of room for experimentation due to how powerful and interesting her augments are. But this is also a curse because she only has so many augment slots, and wants to go in so many directions at once. I still have not cracked the code!

Shattered Storm looks interesting due to applying Damage Vuln to everything hit. I assume it suffers from LoS checks though.

Any thoughts as a Gara player?

I wonder if I need to keep Splinter Storm if I’m doing a Shattered Storm build, given it’s an augment for her 1 and triggers off her 4…

Weird, last week I didn’t get extra pix chips when I did my second run for the week to help friends catch up. I had my cursed peely pix in the same order as my first run that week.

I’ll try doing a run with them reordered, but maybe the lockout is per cursed peely pix?

That Citrine DX though… DE’s really coming straight for my wallet right after the new Protoframes and that Gyre DX

Despite the Motovore’s heavy slam being oddball and containing physical, it’s pretty frighteningly effective as a light attack and tennokai heavy weapon I’ve found. 60% electric is amazing if you don’t want to spend any vices on it.

Personally, my melees are staying Electric because none of them really need Magnetic for Vortex, and I don’t like how Vortex gets messed up by terrain on weapons that aren’t Okina and Ichor. Guns are all going Magnetic because it’s a free overguard shredder and stays flexible with combinations. As my Vice collection grows I’ll be experimenting with more Cold weapons now that we have directly moddable Magnetic, and which usually comes with nice stats. Think Bassocyst will be staying magnetic though since Chilling Reload is such a nice QoL cold mod.

If you’re finding ADS annoying, it might not be worth it. Always optimise for fun! Galv Scope and similar mods are more like enhancements for a specific playstyle for people that already enjoy it. I like aiming because it induces a flow state for me, the extreme damage output from Galv Scope+Acuity builds is just a little extra seasoning, haha.

But yeah, Bassocyst is overshadowing most of the primaries I think. I have a feeling Pathocyst is going to be washing most of the melees out too.

To be fair, I think today was the first really interesting day for their story, assuming you’ve been doing your KIM chats daily.

On the crit build, I think you could put Elementalist and be done with it. Due to the way Blast works, getting even a single proc on an enemy before they die is equivalent to another 2.7x modded base damage from Elementalist. While weapon only has 15% status per tick, and I think ~8% blast per tick, the tick rate is quite high and I find in practice I was reliably proccing anyway.

What’s the performance like on your blast build? I think if you play frames that can debuff enemies you can dump Serration to free up a slot for a crit mod, since Aptitude just needs a handful of weak enemies to get the ball rolling. Running both is for multiplicative GunCO weapons, which no beams are.

Well, you don’t have to run blastcuity, I just used it for levelling since it’s the highest KPM option available in my opinion. I tried a pure Frostbite build with no acuity and it’s also quite performant.

What sort of build are you thinking of when you say there isn’t room for crit and status? For crit I do: acuity, galv scope, vital sense. For status I do heat+cold and elementalist, leaving two flex slots. In my opinion, status dilution doesn’t matter as much for Blast since the only proc that really matters is the one that’s on the enemy when it dies and takes all its friends with it.