Hello everyone and welcome to another Warframe build article. Today we’re gonna take a quick look at Excalibur Umbra.
Now start wise Umbra is the same as Excalibur Prime. He has 300 armor, 150 energy, 100 health, 100 shields, and sprint speed of one at base rank. Now of course these go up as you rank him up. So, health and shields will go from 100 to 300 and his energy will go from 150 to 225.
Differences between Excalibur Prime and Excalibur Umbra
There are three things that are pretty different about Umbra though. First up is the passive because on top of having the standard Excalibur passive Umbra is also completely sentient when you’re in operator mod. He pretty much acts like a specter when you are in transference. He will follow you around, attack enemies with all the weapons that he has, and he also use abilities every now and then. This can be pretty strong if you equip him with the right weapons.
The second difference is Radial Howl which replace Radial Blind. This is fairly comparable to Radial Blind with the addition of it’s stripping away enemy resistances. So, if you for example fighting the Sentient or even the Stalker they eventually develop resistances to the type of damage that you do to them. This strips them away just like your operators weapon.
It also seems like they speed up the cast time on Radial Howl quite a bit. It used to have a much longer cast time than Radial Blind but now it seems pretty much the same.
And finally, number three Excalibur Umbra is so far at least the only frame that possesses umbra polarities, three of them in fact, which only match with the new Umbra Vitality, Umbra Fiber, and Umbra Intensify.
Excalibur Umbra Exalted Blade Build
Now, I ended up using a zero forma build that’s actually rather nice and focuses mostly on Exalted Blade and the Chromatic Blade augment mod. It’s also pretty chunky. It can tank quite a bit. The aura I’m using here is Steel Charge which is a fantastic aura that gives you a ton of flexibility because it gives you more capacity than any other aura. But it also works pretty well with this Excalibur Umbra Exalted Blade build because it does actually add extra damage to your Exalted Blade.
Then I have the Umbra mods. So, Vitality for health, Fiber for armor, and then I have Umbra Intensify which is combined with Power Drift for a nice chunk of power strength.
Then I decided to use the Chromatic Blade augment which converts all the physical damage on your Exalted Blade into elemental damage that’s based on your warframes energy color where blue is electricity, white is cold, green is toxin, and red is heat. It also gives you a bunch of status chance which is very cool as well.
Then I have Hunter Adrenaline which converts a portion of the damage done to your health into energy and this is how you’re gonna sustain energy during Exalted Blade on top of energy orbs.
Next on the menu we have Streamline to make our abilities a little bit cheaper and to reduce the drain on Exalted Blade. And we top it all off with Augur Message and Primed Continuity which gives us more duration on Radial Howl. And it will also reduce the energy drain of Exalted Blade because of how duration effects the efficiency of abilities that drain energy.
And I’m once again running Arcane Guardian for the armor and Arcane Victory for the healing because if you aim your Exalted Blade just right you can actually score headshots on the enemies. I’m also using a four forma build on the Exalted Umbra Blade where I’ve added a V and three dashes.
Exalted Umbra Blade Build
And it’s a pretty straightforward Exalted crit build with the two Sacrificial mods for the Umbra polarities with a little bit of sustainability. So, we have Sacrificial Pressure for damage, Sacrificial Steel for crit chance, Primed Fury for attack speed, Organ Shatter for some crit damage.
Then I have an unranked Life Strike for healing because I really don’t think it’s worth using a fully ranked Life Strike nowadays on most weapons. And this is because of how much damage we can do with them. So, just keep the channeling efficiency not too low and use an unranked one. If you’re using the Chromatic Blade augment you can use Healing Return instead. It’s not gonna heal you for as much but it’s gonna heal you all the time and it’s passive so you don’t have to channel to trigger it.
And then I have Molten Impact for some heat damage and Primed Fever Strike with Shocking Touch for corrosive damage. You can also see that I have 97.5% status chance and this is thanks to Chromatic Blade and all the power strengths that I have because the status chance from Chromatic Blade is affected by power strength.
Now the damage is unsurprisingly really damn good. It’s not busted levels of good. It will take a couple of swings for some of the tougher enemies but combined with the immense amount of crowd control from Radial Howl and the survivability you get from having a ton of health, armor, and Life Strike it’s more than enough. Plus if you do want to do a lot of damage you can always blind the enemies beforehand.
This Excalibur Umbra Build, and you know Excalibur Umbra in general, it’s just really good for many things. Not as many as Oberon but you know there’s a reason why Excalibur is a starter frame he’s a good all-around frame. And this is just a better version of Excalibur that’s you know also sentient when you’re running around in your operator mod and some people actually build Excalibur Umbra just to afk farm with him. They go into operator mod and just let Umbra kill everything. He has Radial Howl instead of Radial Blind and a scarf a fancy scarf. And I almost forgot, Excalibur Umbra is also free. You get him during the Sacrifice questline. You don’t really have to do anything special and even the Umbra and Sacrificial mods we’ll be halfway through their ranks as well.
So, that’s pretty much it for the article. I thank you very much for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed the Excalibur Umbra Build and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.
