The posterboy, master of the sword, the ol’ reliable - Excalibur!
Release date: 2012-10-25
Passive: Excalibur has improved mastery in the Tenno art of the blade, receiving +10% Attack Speed and +10% damage bonuses for melee attacks while wielding swords, dual swords, nikanas and rapiers.
Slash Dash - Dash between enemies while slashing with the Exalted Blade.
Radial Blind - Emits a bright flash of light, blinding all enemies in a small radius for several seconds.
Radial Javelin - Launches javelins towards enemies, dealing high damage and impaling them to walls.
Exalted Blade - Summon a sword of pure light and immense power.
Acquisition: Available as one of the three starting Warframe options. Otherwise his main blueprint can be purchased from the Market, component blueprints can be obtained from defeating Lieutenant Lech Kril on War, Mars.
Boy did it get a buff, lol. The label effect is that it deals 30% of modded base damage to the target and anything in 5 meters per stack. If an enemy dies with Blast on them, they detonate as if they had 10 stacks on them for 3x modded base damage. The reality is it’s complete spaghetti code: it double dips status and faction damage, and counts as a second weapon hit, meaning Xata builds get four hits (initial swing, Xata, blast, Xata again), each with successively more multiplication from faction and status damage. Not Excal related, but this excessive hit count is obvious on Blast snipers racking up thousands of sniper combo in a matter of minutes.
Even with just Furious Javelin, Chromatic Blastdash is a straight up nuke with high enough enemy densities. It’s also a nuke with iframes. It’s great.
oh boy, are snipers viable in normal missions now? hell yeah, that sounds like a great time.
Vectis and Rubico suffer from a low proc rate, and Perigale does too to a lesser extent, but Sporo and to a less extent Komo are dual action crowd clearers and priority killers. Lanka has some funny setups too with Xata and Nautilus, but it won’t really priority kill. Nautilus can spam Cordon back to back due to the new companion Bond mods too.
Sporo got a new augment too. And Komo has full fire rate when zoomed in with the new Semi-Rifle Cannonade mod.