All cats can get to over 75% crit chance with Bite alone, and a +1,2 crit multiplier is well worth 2 mod slots on a companion. Adarza just also has Cat’s Eye, so you get to often double dip on the buffed crit damage with orange/red crits. Whether that’s better than something like a Panzer is up to your frame/weapons, but it’s a worthy contender now.
You want Dethcube to tag as many enemies as possible so he gets credit for Energy Generator, gas leaves a lingering AoE on enemies so if they run next to a guy your Helstrum didn’t hit, that enemy is now damaged by Dethcube and contributes to Energy Generator stacks.
Edit: I also forgot to mention that Gas procs linger on the spot even after the afflicted enemy dies, so you get even more chances for free tags for our dethly cube to generate energy for you.
Dethcube is awesome for reliable energy generation with gas moded Helstrum, Adarza is great with Tenacious Bond and Bite, Nautilus is really good now with it’s Cordon ability and Manifold Bond (and Helstrum to help apply statuses). I haven’t touched any of the dogs (either biological or robotic) or Moas as their abilities were rather unimpressive even if they could stay alive forever. Here’s hoping Phase 2 makes them better with it’s companion ability rework. Oh, and good old Panzer is still really good, baseline 30sec revive while still spitting viral everywhere makes it remain a reliable option (it’s also hella tanky now).
Mesa Prime is 100% worth it, one of the most effective and fun frames in the game (I’m totally not biased because Mesa is my favorite frame, not at all!)
My favourite combo is the “Rolling Gunslinger” Mesa, taking the power of Mesa’s Waltz to it’s extreme. The required ingredients are 2 Parkour Velocity Archon Shards (or 1 Tauforged, which is what I prefer) and a mod you never see used, Amalgam Barrel Diffusion (put it on your secondary, not Regulators). With all things combined, Mesa turns from the turret frame she’s known for into one of the most mobile killing machine frames in the game, rivalling even Titania. Once you get used to how much forward momentum her roll gives, you can traverse all but the most maze-like tilesets without ever turning Peacemaker off, shooting everything that moves all the way to extraction.
This, this build is an absolute overkill supreme in terms of high-cost low-effect mods. Shield mods on companions? Why? A single Bond mod that speeds up revives in place of Pack Leader is all you need, if you really need to have your companion right now you can just revive them like before. And considering both Fetch and Animal Instinct remain active now even while they’re down, there is no reason to hurry. Damage mods are still very much irrelevant, Bite has a use if you wanna run the one crit damage bond mod on cats to boost your weapons but that’s about it.
So cheeky for DE to put a no shield modifier on the alert for the new shield gating mod!
I vastly underestimated Tempest Barrage’s damage potential, for some reason I incorrectly assumed the game surely wouldn’t let you overlap the ability multiple times in one spot. With it’s augment, fast cast time and cheap cost, this thing is deceptively good at killing. It does tend to stagger tougher enemies out of it’s range, but anything other than heavies and eximuses gets shredded by the corroding/viral rain.
Plunder + the new passive is insane.
That’s the tl;dr version, at least. Tempest Barrage is absolutely worthless for it’s damage, nothing changed there, but it’s absolutely amazing at applying tons of Corrosive and (with the augument) Viral procs to everything in an area. Tidal Surge is still very much worthless, it’s too fast to reliably control and I found myself crashing into walls all the time and just never bothering to waste 50 energy on it. It does grab enemies very well now, though! Here comes the star of the show, Plunder! This ability is crazy good, but ONLY because of Hydroid’s new passive. The armor buff was enough to make me able to survive rather comfortably with this janky no forma build I slapped together for testing on Steel Path Taveuni, Kuva Fortress with the exception of Slash procs forcing me to heal through them with my Operator. The Corrosive damage buff is straight up insane on anything with decent status chance and fire rate. I brought my Incarnon Torid and proceeded to melt everything, including the Acolyte, like it was a lvl 20 mission. Tentacle Swarm is a lot more useful now, but I still only used it once for testing purposes. It’s an OK CC, but it still makes it hard to shoot at enemies and I would rather have Larva in it’s place instead (or other grouping ability).
Overall Hydroid seems really good now, he’s a classic weapon’s platform frame, with tools to help him survive and buff his weapon damage vastly! Will forma him when I have some time to play during weekend and try him out on a tougher Steel Path mission, like a 20min Circulus run to stress test him some more.
Loki is actually the warframe I started the game with! I had no idea how to use him properly at the start, but once I figured him out he was a powerhouse! Radial Disarm was what allowed me and my friend to go well beyond what out gear should allow us to handle in Tier 3 Void Keys! It’s funny how far the mighty has fallen, with Loki nowadays being relegated to Switch Teleporting moving objectives to get them to their destination faster as his only job.
Invisibility and Radial Disarm are still really good abilities, just that other frames can do both things better (cough Octavia cough). Switch Teleport has it’s niche gimmick but outside of it, it’s completely useless. And Decoy really ought to not have limited hitpoints, it’s a holdover from ye old days that should have been removed long ago.
The shield gating change is likely to be pretty controversial but I’m very glad they made it, I always hated the Decaying Dragon Key cheese, turning it into a mod preserves the playstyle while legitimizing it. Scaling shield gate duration with shield size was long overdue, it was always incredibly stupid that having less shields was better than more shields. I wonder if this will also fix Arcane Aegis making you invincible during it’s duration even when at rank 0.
Companion rework looks great, here’s hoping that the rebalanced abilities will make it so all or at least most of companions are viable.
Hydroid looks really strong. His 2 still looks pretty meh, but that just means it’s a free subsume slot at worst. The biggest issue with Corrosive procs is they don’t go all the way to 100%, Hydroid fixes that making them very potent. Excited to try the changes out in-game when they arrive!
No details yet, just confirmation that he’s getting a rework by Pablo. I hope they completely scrap his entire kit and re-make him from the beginning, the poor guy was only ever relevant as a loot frame, and even that was stolen from him by Khora, he deserves to have a good, fun and functional kit for once in his existence!
Really excited about this one! They shown a ton of cool stuff during TennoCon, now we get to see the teased content in action! I’m personally hoping for more info on the Hydroid rework, poor guy has been waiting for one for ages.
TIL! I knew it worked on bosses (I remember relying on it early in the game to help me with Lephantis) but the fact that it works on Eximi (or is it Eximuses?) seems like a bug, I wouldn’t count on it staying that way.
Rhino! The frame that has aged like fine wine, the true rock that stands the test of time unwavered (sorry Atlas). A perfect first non starter frame for new players to obtain, giving them both the durability to withstand any challenge and the damage boost to take it down. And he never falls off like some other frames, his Iron Skin isn’t the best survivability skill, but its far from the worst, and Roar (even if it is subsumable) remains the best party friendly damage buff in the game. Stomp is a decent crowd control, especially early game. Charge is his only bad ability, but even that one can be salvaged with it’s augment, or just subsumed over. Fantastic warframe overall, praise be his mighty codpiece!
Ability to display certain ability duration/buffs near the aiming reticule (something like what Harrow gets for his healing caused during Peneace) so I don’t have to constantly keep looking to the bottom right or top right. With how many Arcanes we have that rely on procing/have CDs and how often Warframes have some buffs that need constant maintenance this would be massive help to reduce the eye strain while using those.
I have done it when the event was first introduced (mostly by using the old AFK on a rock strat) and have not touched it ever since. The PTSD is still too strong for me to ever go back. No reward they could introduce is worth going through this again.
His Avalanche only actually needs 167% power strength to reach 100% armor strip, the thing that limits it is it’s mediocre 15m base range which kinda forces you to run Overextended and thus have to add another 60% strength to compensate.
And I agree, he is perfectly playable, his play style just really only works against Grineer/Corrputed or lower level other factions and it boils down to casting 4 over and over, his only good ability. He is still in a much better spot than the likes of Hydroid, Limbo or Inaros.
It’s actually around 40% uptime with Tek Enchance. It’s pretty useless during high mobility missions when your kavat spends most of it’s time trying to catch up to you, but during more stationary ones it’s pretty good. It’s also affects teammates, so that’s a little extra added utility.