The conditions for the +dmg/-acc corrupted mods are basically “high accuracy, low crit, low status”. I use Magnum Force on Hildryn’s Balefire.

Stacking base damage always grows linearly, which can beat crit on weapons with bad crit stats, and can beat status on weapons with low status chance, but will very rarely beat both, and usually on very old weapons.

I think the shield gating changes and Secondary Fortifier have done wonders for his survivability and chill factor.

More broadly it sounds like I should cover his survivability techniques and tools?

I think the Limbomb build is essentially dead on SP. I couldn’t get it scaling properly even with Panzer viral and fullstrip. For all I know it’s bugged and doesn’t properly account for the SP health multiplier, like how Oberon’s Reckoning didn’t used to account for the SP armour multiplier.

Limbo has been through a few iterations, how about his current state and how the game has changed to give him tools to mitigate his pain points? For example, Zariman was kind of the Limbocalypse due to Overguard, but he has Fortifier and Magnetic to deal with that mechanic now. I also didn’t join until 2015/didn’t get seriously into Warframe until 2021, so I personally just can’t speak for launch Limbo.

Styanax is a beast in Circuit since his Final Stand spears scale off the amount of decrees you have. He’s easily one of the best Circuit frames, standing alongside Nova, Vauban, Gyre and Protea for hard-scaling Circuit nukers.

To be fair, Styanax is a beast everywhere due to the raw power of Final Stand (especially augmented with Overguard) and Tharros Strike. If you’re not in Duviri, the projectile ability scaling can be tapped with Arcane Arachne.

I was on Switch at the time, and even with the godawful load times it was my favourite content. Whenever I had relics to crack I’d drag the clan with me into Void Storms, or even just solo Corpus Void Storms. The thing that killed Railjack for me was the introduction of SP fissures, since the value proposition of doing a soft-endurance endless fissure is way ahead of anything else in the game.

I’d still recommend Void Storms in a heartbeat to new players though. They’re hugely valuable everything farms with credits, endo, and preradded relics.

As for Railjack itself, I really like the quality of life of universal affinity and shared loot, as well as the collaborative nature of the objectives. It’s cool playing with my friends and operating as a team, which is basically unique in Warframe in its current state.

I like your idea. Instead of Overguard I think your idea of exceptional DR plus party-wide status immunity would put her on par with Dante’s utility.

I misremembered, Steve read out someone who commented that during the preview devstream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Vy7OkcXc8

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Madurai helps with that too, since Power Transfer gives you faster casting, and you can naturally get Sling Strength by rapidly void dashing to the first pack of enemies.

Gyre herself is the “nobody else gets to play” frame. I run 155% duration so I just need to get a handful of kills at the start and the buffs are self-sustaining. Enemies only need to be tagged by Rotorswell or Coil Horizon to get the duration extension, so after a point you just have to keep up and keep throwing Coil Horizon.

Yeah, while it’s a powerful nuke, it works best with her 2. It also has redundancy with her 4 in that both are “deal electric damage”. I’ve tried replacing her 2, but the utility of an absolutely massive grouping ability is too hard to pass up.

If you don’t like shield gating and want a more passive build for general play, eclipse+primed redirection+arcane aegis+adaptation passively tanks for a while, although I haven’t tried to see how far it scales. Her damage output and CC are good enough that she doesn’t actually take that much damage to begin with.

If you want to avoid the squishiness, the new holy trinity of passive defensive tools is Eclipse+Primed Redirection+Arcane Aegis, but Health Conversion+Arcane Blessing+Fractured Blast/Lycath’s Hunt is still good. The Eclipse build can tank really well for a few hundred levels, and it’s my daily driver Gyre build. Anything more and Pillage sadly does just kind of win for survivability, and is what I use for Circuit.

Primed Redirection on Pillage is super comfy now, since you’re basically always at your 2.5s shieldgate.

In the immortal words of Pablo, “Skirt goes up, enemies go down”

Yeah, two big changes came down the wire (hee hee) for Gyre: the first was Cathode Current, which makes enemy deaths trigger a double damage Rotorswell discharge, and also keeps it self-refreshing the way Cathode Grace does. The second was the capping of enemy armour at 90%, so now her lightning hits hard.

I believe ragdolled enemies take electric radial ticks to every individual body part too, so just suctioning enemies into Coil Horizon will heavily damage them, if not killing weaker factions outright.

Instead of “Volt but not as much” I’d compare Gyre to grape flavoured Saryn. She’s all about abusing the hell out of electric mechanics to blanket the map in huge amounts of damage.

Definitely curious to see what the Stalker weapon augments will do!

No Vital Sense? Does it not stack well with Photon Overcharge, I thought they’d go hand in hand and stack crit dmg to ludicrous amounts?

I actually forgot, but critical stats define a curved surface (a hyperbolic paraboloid if you’re curious), so they’re actually a bit better than the linear growth seen in base damage and elemental damage. When you’re considering ratios of mod configs, they’re a bit more than the linear growth class, but much less than the exponential growth class (like adding on a Faction mod).

edit: I missed something and worded the above in a misleading way as a consequence. You get quadratic growth along the combined axis CC and CD, but you get linear growth just adding one. Crit has the unique property from that curved growth pattern that the complementary crit stat props up the other. Depending on the weapon’s base stats, the linear growth in one or the other crit stat can outpace other kinds of linear scaling like base damage or more elements.

This is a Desmos 3D graph of the Tenet Glaxion’s critical growth that should hopefully help tie what I’m saying to something concrete. It’s vertically flattened by a factor of 10, but if you rotate the graph side on you can see the curve still. https://www.desmos.com/3d/czqqgsg13l

I’m using a basic stretch over overextended since strength affects the added cold modifier of Freeze Force too, and I don’t want to be freezing enemies too far from objectives anyway. With just BR+OE the armor strip on #4 is below 100% too so I’d need more mods, archon shards or molt augmented to get it back to over 100%.

And yeah I forgor that I put 40% ability strength shards in Frost basically as soon as I was able, lol.

Unhinged Caliban enjoyer here with some thoughts about the funny space man.

In overview: despite his bad reputation, Caliban is a crowd controller-debuffer type character, which gives him incredible offensive potential and a corresponding wide and flexible arsenal of weapons to play with. His reign as the spicier Nyx was short, however, with Zariman adversely affecting his playstyle due to the Overpocalypse killing all CC not named Chaos or Irradiating Disarm (or Resonator at the time; RIP Octavia).

So, let’s talk abilities.

The passive is kind of meh, but, I did stress test a hyper-offensive mod build that only ran Aegis and Brief Respite, and it comfortably went to the mid 200s in Conjunction Survival, which is honestly pretty impressive. After the shield rework, it jumped to providing up to 75% DR on his very rapidly regenerating shields. I’m going to keep tinkering with the build until he can Eclipse tank Mot and EDAs.

Razor Gyre is rightly considered his helminth slot. It’s broken in a basic way. The damage is acceptable given the synergy with his Sentient Wrath, but that’s about it. He can AoE knockdown with it, and use it to dash to an enemy. It also heals him if for some reason you’re trying to health tank on Caliban… which I may have tried when Veilbreaker dropped… In Pablo’s teaser, he showed it functioning as a forward dash, albeit with no visible knockdown. May have Gloom synergies in the future? We shall see.

Sentient Wrath, my beloved. A big spicy combined CC and DV, kind of like a souped up Sea Snares. The target cap has gotten worse now that Precision Intensify exists. Has glacial vertical tracking, in tilesets where that matters such as Lua and Entrati Labs. It also scales harder than Roar, and does not trigger the mutually exclusive damage Helminth lockout, so you can slap it on Rhino or Mirage if you please. Works really well with the new Blast and its weird buggy calculations. Combined with Fusion Strike, Caliban is a spicy boy.

Lethal Progeny is great. Regenerating up to 75 shields at base is a huge deal, and they provide some minor distractions. I wouldn’t call this CC, but they do keep the heat off Caliban. Basically a budget Aegis provided you use the Augur set or Brief Respite to stay above 0 shields, and combine very well with Aegis itself. That all said, this is the first of Caliban’s ridiculous energy drains. At base, devours 150 energy every ~28s. A 95% duration, 175% efficiency build makes this much more manageable. In the rework teaser, this is shown summoning all your li’l sentient buddies at once, so hopefully this fixes the time spent casting and the energy burden.

And finally, Fusion Strike. The cooler Gaze, almost a functional nuke, and a horrific energy tax, all in one! Arguably poor scaling for endurance content due to the debilitating animation lock, although it might be a bit better with the Primed Redirection shield gate nowadays; in my experience not an issue in teams either, having gone into the 1000s in Circuit. For everyday use though, it’s fantastic. Up to three fullstrip fields can be placed, which in most tiles is enough to ensure all enemies approaching have 0 armour or shields. But let’s talk about that energy burden… fields last 15s. That 95-175 build I mentioned earlier will be eating 1.35 energy a second to keep all fields up, and with Lethal Progeny it’s around 2.8, just a bit over energy neutral with Energy Nexus. The rework teaser showed the Conculyst buddies contributing their own beams, so I feel like this is going to become a powerful linear-style nuke, like Qorvex’s laser.

Overall, I can’t wait for the deluxe skin, and I hope the future is bright for one of my favourite, secretly OP Warframes.

Pre-rework Hydroid is definitely overselling how bad he is, lol. Pre-rework Hydroid couldn’t even shieldgate without a Helmnith once they “fixed” his energy economy; pre-rework Hydroid had obnoxious charge casts and long casting animations all over his kit. Pre-rework Hydroid was a relic and clearly built around hiding in his puddle to get his crowd control off so he could play for a bit before repeating the cycle. Pre-rework Hydroid was what people who don’t play Loki think Loki is: a slow, weak, pure CC frame.

In my opinion as an active Caliban player, there are four core criticisms of him that all appear to being addressed by the rework:

• his energy economy is absurdly stringent and even Dispensary/Equilibrium can only just keep up if you’re trying to juggle all 3 of his buddies and all 3 fallout fields; good luck trying to manage a shield gating Helminth without Duviri decrees.
• his 1 was fundamentally bad at everything it tried to do (another CC, a mobility tool, and a nuke).
• his 4 is so close to being a functional nuke, but falls juuust short.
• much less time spent casting.

And as a bonus I seriously hope they unbug Sentient Wrath so it applies its DV through Overguard again, like it’s supposed to. It works fine on Demos and Acolytes! Why is it broken suddenly!

Even though I think there are frames that genuinely need it more, I’m overjoyed he’s getting a rework. I genuinely love the frame and how strong he already is, so I can’t wait for what is hopefully another golden age for a hidden boss, like what happened with Sevagoth and Yareli.