Weekly(?) Warframe:Excalibur

Preface I had mentioned doing something like this before and had some positive reception, if not allowed or any recommendations please feel free to let me know.

Excalibur epitomizes the warrior spirit. His master swordsmanship deals high damage. He is the embodiment of martial excellence.

1ST ABILITY Slash Dash-Slice through enemies, becoming invincible throughout

2ND ABILITY Radial Blind-Send out a blinding wave, briefly stunning enemies in an area

3RD ABILITY Radial Javelin-Throw out projectiles around you, causing damage to enemies

4TH ABILITY Exalted Blade-Summon a powerful sword, equipped with mods of your choosing

Subsumed ability-Radial Blind

Progenitor Element-Electricity

Released in Vanilla 10-25-2012

One of the three starting frames offered, he also comes in the form Excalibur Umbra earned in the main quest line and the exclusive Excalibur Prime-This prime is only for the original founders who supported Warframe in its inception.

The parts if not selected at the start come from Lech Kril on Mars, and he can be bought fully assembled from Teshin through Conclave once you have achieved Typhoon rank.

8 comments

I think Excal sits at a perfect power level for a "starter" frame. Not so powerful as to discourage you from seeking other frames but perfectly capable of getting you through the entire star chart with his balanced all arounder kit. And you can even push him to Steel Path levels with some augments and subsumes if you like him a lot. He's also aged surprisingly well for a frame that was here since the beginning, he's got some reworks but his core abilities remained mostly the same (except super jump, but good riddance to that one).

Personally I am a big fan of Excalibur, I first played in 2014 and of course he was my first frame. I started playing again in 2020 or so with a new account and went with my boy again, I was very happy with Umbra whenever I did his storyline

Thanks for making this post! I'm still working on the automated version of such a weekly post, and this gives me a great idea of what people would like to see in the post body.
As for Excalibur, I don't use him often anymore, but I enjoyed the Chromatic Blade augment a great deal.
- No problem, I was worried about stepping on toes so I am glad it's not a problem. I think ideally I would have had more detail on the abilities or linked to them, but that caused some formatting issues on the app I use so I'll probably do the same thing next week if that is alright.
  I really enjoy his dash, especially with enough strength or low enough level it one shots. I kinda miss the old days where he used the equipped melee weapon for it so you'd get Excal slashing with Obex or something like that

Sadly Excalibur is kind of a middle tier frame. I say this as someone who has a chromatic blade steel path excalibur build. I play steel path with him mostly as a joke (I have him fashionframed to look like a MR0 noob) but it's a struggle at times because he lacks a truly good survival ability. Radial Blind can help take some pressure off, but he lacks the armor, shields, health, or damage reducing abilities that allow other frames to soak heavy damage.
Additionally outside of very specific niche builds (E.G. previously mentioned chromatic blade) his damage potential is weak. He lacks the large area nuke capabilities of someone like Saryn or Volt, and has minimal utility (mostly just radial blind).
He's not useless, and there are definitely worse frames out there, but he's not going to be anyone's top pick either. Pretty much any viable builds with him are going to end up being very melee focused with all the advantages and disadvantages that implies.
- Just FYI, Chromatic Blade actually replaces the slash damage with element on the Exalted Blade. I’ve been running Furious Javelin since I found out about that.
  
  Yeah I know that, you just need to go all in on the elemental damage and status mods. It pairs well with some weapon builds that don't do much damage on their own but splash a bunch of status debuffs. Stacking a few different status and then smacking them with chromatic blade can really dish out some hefty damage numbers.
- The invincibility frames on his 1 can help with survival but it really doesn't have enough power to handle Steel Path unfortunately, plus can't be used in a lot of harder or boss fights. I do think his abilities could use a buff across the board but that will be a long time if ever coming

8 comments