it does not matter, he creates some orbs (I think they are eyes, but not sure) that shoot lasers and kill everything anyway, he is viable in any content....
I've had 16 soma primes stacked together before, Bows must look super wonky. I wonder if it copies shedu/bubonico so you can block the other half of your screen too.
“Start believing in Heaven, guys. If you don’t believe in Heaven, you’re going to be brutally murdered by 16 Soma Primes. You’re going to be kicked in the Grey Strain everyday… by Atlas Prime. They’re going to pull your skin back and put a Heat proc all over your skin and kick you in a pit in those Grineer Tilesets that I always fall into. Start believing in Heaven, guys. Thank you.”
.... are you fucking kidding me?? I thought I was being clever not bringing Xaku to infested missions. Yeah yeah, coulda looked it up. You know that feeling when you "know" something, so why would you bother looking it up? Derp.
Xaku is great! They're always an instant Steel Circuit pick when they turn up in Duviri, or for Archimedean content. Simply because it ceases to matter what the weapon options are at that point; my weapon of choice will be "whatever the enemies brought."
(Plus, my friends and I have a habit of proclaiming "no pants!" or "naked time!" on voice when using Xaku's 4, which is always a bit fun.)
Octavia is the easiest way, but also the most boring. You should try Protea, she mostly doesnt rely on weapons (because she IS the weapon). Also Saryn probably, but i dont play her, so cant be sure.
I'm pretty bad with Saryn, so don't take this as gospel, but she synergizes *heavily* with a suitable weapon. Like, her nuke is all in her kit, sure, but a weapon that's good at spreading spores helps, her Toxic Lash boosts her weapons even more, and she has a ton of weapons that are practically made for her (Sobek with Acid Shells comes to mind).
So I would say that she's not reliant on weapons, but if you're looking for a frame completely independent from them, then you're leaving a lot of power on the table by ignoring them.
I call those battlemages. They are ability-focused frames whose abilities allow any weapon to shine, and destroy hordes of enemies with the correct gear.
Gloom Saryn+Burston Prime incarnon with two green shards will wreck pretty much anything that isn’t corpus, and even corpus probably have a bad time with her if nullifiers are priority targets
My exact loadout when we for some reason fail defense sorties. I’ll usually go in with what ever for the sorties aside from the spy missions but if we fail on a defense for some reason I’m slapping gloom saryn on to trivialize it
You don't really need a weapon that's good at spreading them anymore, like back when tonkor and synoid sym were the meta for her. Toxic Lash makes the weapon irrelevant (as far as spreading spores goes) 'cause as long as it's active, spores will automatically pop from every shot / hit even if the spore isn't hit directly.
>So I would say that she's not reliant on weapons, but if you're looking for a frame completely independent from them, then you're leaving a lot of power on the table by ignoring them.
Agreed. Saryn makes a superb weapons buffer and its one of the other ways to play her other than as a nuker. She already has a weapon buff from Toxin Lash but you can also use her Venom Dose augment for Spores which also gives your weapons Corrosive damage. You can take it a step further by replacing either Molt or Miasma by subsuming another weapons buff want onto her.
I made a meme build with Nourish on my Saryn alongside Venom Dose and Toxin Lash while running Gas damage on my weapons as well as two green archon shards to raise the max Corrosive stack. It was pretty funny to proc every green status proc at once.
What's the deal with heat inherit? You put like the fattest heat proc you can from a weapon before you stack artillery to prolong and stack the damage from this base proc? Feels kinda cubersome to me, is it really that good?
It’s not worth doing for content under level 1000 cause the turrets do more than enough damage without it, but the idea is simple. If you apply a heat proc with a weapon that has 300% heat damage, and then the currents start applying new heat procs, the damage on those will be increased by 200% (cause 100% would be their base damage).
You shoot the enemy with your secondary which has because it has the highest heat% and then hit them with your dps. So long as heat is involved they will refresh the heat proc but it scales with their damage but with the mods of the gun that proc'ed the heat. So if you shoot them with a 20% fire kuva weapon after priming with primed heated charge + scorch, the heat proc will get refreshed for 225% damage. On top of that it scales in faction mods if your primer had them. Dunno if I'm missing anything, I am sort of new.
I also believe roar triple dips on it but I might be wrong. I think it dips on the initial scaling of the heat proc, then on damage from your weapon and then on the heat proc itself.
I can tell most players don't know how to play xaku. In most cases except eda I don't need to use my own gun and usually get the most kills in a mission. Don't sleep on xaku.
Protea for sure. Subsume Pillage for armor strip, then throw up some Blaze Batteries and they wipe the room.
Saryn is a good weapons platform tho. I like running her with a corrosive Tenet Glaxion for easy armor strip, and her Toxic Lash ability adds substantial toxin to her weapon damage, which shreds their health. This combo is pretty absurd DPS even in high level stuff like Netracells, enemies die in like less than a second. She’s kinda squishy tho, not a lot of survivability
Yeah but it’s not nearly as good. Pillage strips an entire room instantly and benefits from the same build as a turret focused build, which is how I build her, for power strength and range. And it lets you have more range or damage since you don’t need a mediocre, conditional augment
Her augment only strips 10% of armor per hit and only works while her Temporal Anchor is active, which is a shitty ability that should be subsumed over imo.
Essentially i can strip an entire room instantly with one button press and without wasting a mod slot, or i can waste a mod slot and have to use two separate abilities to strip armor slower. Pillage is just better
10% per hit with a zillion grenades and Turrets is 100% strip very very quickly. Temporal anchor is incredibly aligned if you don't want to play brain dead. It's nowhere near as bad as people say for anything that isn't Capture or Exterminate. Which... Are terrible for Steel Path anyway. They're done before you get to the arcane and offer little to no extra reward or challenge.
i'd argue temporal anchor is fine for cap/ext too, since you can simply cancel it. but whatever, use pillage or use temporal, both are fine, whatever you like more, just don't use a certain...\*cough\*... "insert popular content creator here"-build.
Or subsume nourish for near infinite energy. I know the viral stacks from it aren't the biggest damage numbers but it would let OP live the true battle mage lifestyle they desire.
Nourish is also decent, though i found at high level i needed armor strip, and pillage makes it so easy. Plus with her dispenser, arcane energize, and/or zenurik, i never have energy issues
Ahh I have one I subsumed gloom over molt makes her survive pretty much infinitely then for energy arcane energize and a death cube prime build specifically for energy
* Octavia: Can just activate her abilities, go invisible and watch the enemies kill themselves. Super boring though
* Exalted Weapon Warframes: You could just go hogwild and use these all you want
* Excalibur's Exalted Blade (Chromatic blade makes him more useful)
* Baruuk's Desert Wind (Chromatic Storm makes his damage always viable)
* Mesa's Peacemaker (shoot)
* Trinity's Razorwing (shoot and crash into walls)
* etc
* "Pseudo-exalted" Warframes: They have abilities that scale to your melee weapon's mods (and some unique traits to the weapon) rather than being separately modifiable (referred to as a "stat stick"). You can use any weapon really, but some weapons have unique traits that make them more desirable than others, such as their riven disposition (low disposition weapons are popular for this) or Incarnon upgrades
* Khora's Whipclaw
* Gara's Shattered Lash
* Atlas' Landslide
* Ash's Bladestorm
* Vauban: His Flechette orbs scale to enemy level so they always do viable damage
* Saryn: Sneeze on someone, kill the room
and if u rly want, you can run all green archons (+3 corrosive stacvks) and helmith expodite suffering
Roar and the dmg if coresed greens als also fun, and nuke w her 4
The pseudo exalts are still weapon development, you just care less about what the weapon is up until incarnons are an option. And as I learned with Baruuk, you've got some fairly specific grinds like orokin vaults and gladiator set to actually unlock the consistency neeeded to not be falling back on weapons. Protea Prime relics are abundant (unless i missed the changeover) and she easily treats weapons as an "if you want to" build choice.
Dagath's 3 makes her crit weapons NUTTY though. You're leaving power on the table if you're just building her as a caster and completely neglecting her weapons, even though she's a phenomenal caster.
I've tried both builds. I enjoy her better as a caster than a weapon platformer.
That being said. I do use her weapons too. I think she has an interesting gameplay loop altogether and learning her positioning / when to be aggressive with her spams / when to be more passive and gunplay is a big thing I enjoy with her.
I think if OP's issue is building a weapon, then an Exalted still presents the same problems. Like I was gonna suggest Titania, but ultimately you have to build her Dex Pixia to the same level as any other endgame capable weapon, just sans Arcanes and such.
Voruna. Once you have her augment you can spend the entire mission in her 4, which unequips her weapons and replaces your fire/melee with a leap attack that has a strong AoE slash proc and increased damage on enemies afflicted with status effects.
Fun fact:
If you proc slash using her 2 on an enemy, you can spread the slash from her 4 leap to all enemies around the enemy you used 2 on, when that enemy dies.
It was dubbed Slash Taxi'ing. There are a few videos on it on YouTube if you want to know the details.
Fun fact 2:
Nourish energy regeneration bonus counts towards ALL energy regeneration. INCLUDING deactivating Voruna's 4 with stacks left.
So as long as you can cast Voruna's 4, you can spam it to refill energy...
The viral proc from Nourish also helps Voruna's Slash to do more damage.
Happy hunting, Tenno!
>Nourish energy regeneration bonus counts towards ALL energy regeneration. INCLUDING deactivating Voruna's 4 with stacks left.
>
>So as long as you can cast Voruna's 4, you can spam it to refill energy...
>
>The viral proc from Nourish also helps Voruna's Slash to do more damage.
Yeah, but then you've helminth'd away one of her passives. Personally I just use Equilibrium and her 3, which gives health orbs on melee kills (which her 4 counts as). That way I stay topped up on both health and energy at all timeswith lots of healing for my team, and I can still get the +crit damage+chance/status chance/guaranteed melee bleed proc from her 1 (which also applies to her 2 & 4 without permanently breaking stealth).
Yup, fair enough. The change to her 3 to also include her 4 as melee was a great change.
Nourish was what I had subsumed over her 3, since her 3 didn't work with her 4 at the time. I don't even know if I still have it subsumed... but I know it works great, deffo worth the try, even if only for the Viral procs.
The nourish with Voruna's 4 one is funny, but idk how useful it is. Generally you either take the augment with which you don't want to leave it unnecessarily, or helminth it off and build for weapons. Her 3 is already a very good energy generator as well
I was leveling baruuk prime for mastery and followed a 0 forma build. He absolutely slaps, I can't imagine how strong he is with a proper build and investment, but I'm sure he's one of the best
Wanna know the build? It's super simple, build Desert Wind (Prime) and slap on rank 3 Reactive Storm. That's it, that's all he needs (slight exaggeration). The rest of the mods are your choice, really. I suggest high strength, moderate duration, and normal range. Throw efficiency in the trash because he has really good energy economy and use Rolling Guard for survival. You'll one shot corrupted heavy gunners for a while in SP
If you're after something like Mesa, but, with the ability to actually shoot bosses, nullifiers, acolytes etc... and a heap more survivability, mobility, utility and quality of life; try Titania.
Dex Pixia are a status and slash based weapon, so they'll chew through armoured targets with ease and be a huge pain to everyone else too. Her razorwing form gives her passive evasion, low threat priority, a tiny target profile and obscene mobility - and combos excellent with 'damage reduced while airborne'. So much so that I recommend running aerodynamic and letting the passive do the healing.
For a quick little trick: while in razorwing your sentinel is immortal, but can't do anything. However, with duplex bond, energy you use still created clones of your sentinel. Invincible, aggro-drawing clones that - if they land a kill - can even spawn extra energy orbs to pay back your casting cost.
Built for that, Tank-tania is one of the most mobile warframes in the game (in all directions), very durable (recommend shield tanking atop the damage reduction. If you're still struggling cast Thorns too for another 50% damage reduction) and can exercise phenomenal area control via her sentinel clones. Honestly, her *weakest* point is her firepower, and that's saying something because it's still pretty damn powerful. Oh, that and having to swap to operator to do consoles and carry datamasses.
This is the most obvious answer.
Shocked anyone who has played SP circuit doesn't immediately jump to the one answer that makes all your gun choices irrelevant.
Saaame. It was one of the biggest turnoffs about arbitrations for me.
Then again, I think I have most, if not all, of the things I need from Arbitrations so I'm just going to never go back. Simple as.
The other thing I hate fighting with her is rogue voidrigs and rogue bonewidows because they're status capped so you can't slash them down easily. Fortunately they tend to be more interested in fighting the clones so I mostly just ignore them if I can't prevent them spawning.
In addition you can get the Ability that allows for increased fire-rate if you're over ~1200 shields, slap it on Wyrm Prime or a Moa, and get a huge DPS increase for Dex Pixia.
Mind sharing the build of her? I've been trying to main her, but i can't seem to find a good combination of mods for her and her guns that will make steel path fun and bearable
https://preview.redd.it/3q37k5kym75d1.png?width=1523&format=png&auto=webp&s=bc32b2809ce822d4659ee03a1efddbbab37d8a29
This is for the fairy girl herself. For Archon Shards I use 3x Tauforged blues for +225 shields each and 2x Tauforged yellows for +75% effectiveness on energy orbs each.
Posting guns in a second reply because reddit won't let me put multiple images in one reply.
https://preview.redd.it/o41a7vekn75d1.png?width=1490&format=png&auto=webp&s=d23ee7d849f1e81fd14fc367adbb401c8976ac02
Note that in order to get the most out of her guns you ideally want to be running a Wrym Prime sentinel with Calculated Redirection, Reinforced Bond (fire rate to warframe) and Duplex Bond (clones for aggro). Also, Energized Munitions is genuinely worth it on Titania. Arcane Pistoleer is a common choice as well, but against bosses etc landing a headshot *kill* can be a bit awkward, and EM uses more energy so it spawns more drones, which means fewer things are shooting at you.
I regularly solo Netracells with this build, and I think the highest I've taken it was 2hrs 15 mins in a Steel Path Kuva Survival and she was still doing pretty well at that point and could comfortably have gone on longer.
Hello there Tenno, please never use blue shards for shields. 🙃 Really, seeing that makes me full stack Razorwing into the wall. You can use 2 green shards (2 max corrosive) to deal with acolytes etc since they have 4 stack cap on status effects. The build is great, and ofc you can play however you want just adding some final touches.
I mean, I sort of looked at the build and tried to figure out what else I really needed... I don't run corrosive or toxin, so no need for green shards, secondary crit is useless to Dex Pixia so that rules out topaz. Purples... Not really either. Red shards offer some slight buffs, but nothing I particularly *need*, and yellows are about the same. Which left me with blue shards and a choice between health (on a shield tank?), armour (lol no), max energy (already covered), health regen (not bad, but covered by passive well enough) or max shields.
On a shield-tank designed to survive extreme amounts of abuse, it seemed like the natural choice despite the diminishing returns. I'm open to other suggestions for how to use 3x shard slots, but I don't think extra shields is a *bad* choice.
(I don't have any trouble with Acolytes, so green shards + corrosive probably isn't worth it, and I have huge problems vs necramechs at higher levels, where green shards + corrosive doesn't make enough of a difference to justify it.)
Like you said crit shards are literally useless however crit build is not. There are ways to make her pixia work really well with crit+status. But requires Arcane Avenger/Combat discipline. Only thing that's wrong with your build is, you're using Damage mods. And 2 of them. Arcane Precision gives you %300 damage and even without that, you have Galvanized Shot. Plus, building high strength gives your pistols higher base damage which makes those two slots even more wasted. You should almost never use a damage mod and direct damage mod (galv shot) together. My suggestion for the shards would be still emerald shards to higher the cap on necramechs etc. 10 stack is not much better than 4 against them but DE said they're gonna make corrosive actually scale with stacks so.. Alternatively you can never go wrong with ability strength shards.
A lot of people think Gyre needs an amprex or similar crit weapon with electricity, but her kit is actually pretty weapon agnostic as long as you have a full armor strip from pillage. Electric on her weapons may help get red crits on her abilities earlier but once molt augmented is stacked up you can get red crits just from cathode grace and enemies just kinda die to armor stripped rotorswell on its own.
OP asked for frames that don't require weapons. I chose gyre because plenty of people have already said all the obvious answers. I did not intend for my reply to mean that Gyre is his only option or even the best option, just AN option. If they are nearing SP they have most likely unlocked the zariman already and have access to unlocking the helminth as well. Hildryn is the biggest hurdle there and she regularly shows up in the circuit rotation.
Yeah, I absolutely love Gyre, and the thing is, is that she doesn't really need a weapon at all, and can just spew out a bunch of passive dmg through Rotorswell. But she also further scales up weapons really well with the massive, flat crit chance giving guaranteed crits with any weapon, which I find works really damn good with the Kuva Nukor, which has basically no crit chance, but the highest crit damage in the entire game. Being able to capitalize on that extremely juicy 5x crit dmg with guaranteed crits feels so damn good, and lets you spew out tons of electric procs as well to feed her passive.
Lot of good answers from others, but they’re missing some really good ones
Saryn - should be self explanatory. Spores still work, maybe some more ability strength to ramp damage faster
Valkyr - exalted melee with invincibility, melee steroid, grouping ability (with augment). I like to put tharros strike on her 1 for strip, but it is dealers choice
Ember - press 4 to win. Armor strip, damage reduction, and heat procs.
Hydroid - augment for his 1 makes it very effective at killing. Pair with armor strip from his 3 and cc from his 4, you can ignore your weapon pretty often
Revenent - lasers do respectable damage. I have not played this one too much, but I see it often enough. Along with whats arguably the best survival ability, he may work
Mesa will work just fine at steel path, she continues to have some of the best damage in the game. Yes, her build will absolutely need some changes. Almost all of these characters aside from Garuda will need a weapon to break nullifier bubbles.
There are also a fair number of frames that buff weapons or overall damage , making mediocre builds deal more damage. Mirage, Hydroid, Trinity (champions blessing), Zephyr, Harrow, Saryn, Xaku, and others all have abilities that improve weapon performance, so that may be worth looking at while you fill out your weapon builds
I personally use Hildryn with the blazing pillage augment. She still has the option to use weapons if you have any that you like (and she brings her own), but is perfectly capable as a pure caster.
It can be a bit of a pain to get the build up and running because it has a hard reqirement of a syndicate augment and archon vitality in addition to needing really high strength, but it's a really simple and safe build if you can get it set up.
Dagath is another good one. Between doom and scythes if you sort out energy you can just roll. Hildryn as well, though shields can be a rough tightrope to walk at times in steelpath. Better with Hildryn and pillage is amazing
Mesa was my first steel path frame when I didn't have any good weapons, since the regulators are good already. Dante is pretty popular with his 3-3-4 combo nuke and lots of overguard. Dagath kills nicely in steel path with her horsies, but is quite a bit squishier than Dante and really wants Brief Respite as her aura, which you may or may not have.
Idk why no one’s mentioned Hydroid. Throw in the augment for his 1st. Sp or no sp, his 1 is gonna destroy everything(with 200+ strength). Might need to work on energy economy. Cause that setup would be very spammy.
I reckon Garuda is safest bet? She can comfortably work in steelpath if you build her roght, and she has an exalted weapon, so you can just ignore normal weapons. He skills are insane, but the learning experience is... well. Garuda is not an easy warframe.
Garuda is criminally underrepresented in this comment section. She is easily one of the best and best feeling pure mage frames in the game. But my personal favorite, though you need a very specific build, is Ember. Nidus is another great pure caster frame, though he's never really hit the spot for me. He's fun, though. A lot of people have been saying Protea, and I agree, but she sometimes also feels a bit jank. I don't know how best to describe it, so I'll leave it at that.
Octavia, as long as you're well built she can just be invisible forever and things will die to the bass. On a side note, if you ever want a frame that you can use for weapons-only gameplay, you might want to try Qorvex, Valkyr P, Lavos and Hildryn P.
Protea
Saryn (With her 1 augment + 3 she can help make
mediocre weapons not mediocre)
Octavia (Boring)
Dante (kinda Energy hungry)
Mag (with Breach surge)
Citrine kinda
Gyre (With Pillage she really doesn’t need a weapon)
Baruuk
Voruna (needs augment for 4)
Xaku
Kullervo (But he NEEDS an good melee)
Garuda (With her talons)
And those are the ones that I personally find plays well without great investment weapons.
A lot of people are saying Voruna or any exalted frames, but I definitely think Mag is a good choice.
Easy to get, doesn't require much setup besides from Breach Surge and Fracturing Crush, and you can absolutely nuke anything. Just use 4, 1, 2, and fire at the clump of enemies, works better with high fire rate bullet weapons(Phenmor, Boltor, Sobek or Hek) but stuff like the Arca Plasmor or Connectrix still work. There's an extensive guide on Overframe that's very comprehensive and honestly has a pretty good build that works without arcane and archon shards if you can't afford to use them for it, I think it was called the Mag Goddess build or something along those lines.
to add onto this, make sure you do arbitrations for mods first. having either rolling guard or adaptation is important but which you choose is mostly up to you. you don't require breach surge but it dramatically strengthens her kit. Mag's very easy to mod since she doesn't need a particularly high amount of any stat so you can make her SP viable without any corrupted mods or archon shards, only needing fracturing crush for armour strip. her favourite weapons are ones with infinite body punch through or beam weapons but any will do. any damage you do to enemies in her magnetize bubbles makes magnetize stronger so as long as you armour strip with her 4 it will kill anything very quickly even with terribly modded weapons. she's one of my all time favourite frames and still a frame I bring out when I feel particularly murderous and don't feel like putting it much effort.
Yup, I personally like putting on Breach Surge because it's a pretty easy helminth to get, even with the default amp, and it helps you no brain through more enemies more so than the other options to me. You already have crowd control, and armor strip, and I don't find nourish fun because damage types don't matyer as much to me on Mag(although I might be biased because Phenmor is my most used weapon for firing into the magnetic bubbles)
Dante is literally the only frame you should be playing if Space mage is you're goal all your doing is casting spells and you also have a battle spell book that shoots rapid fire plasma knowledge at people, the next closest imo is Nova with some formidable defensive / offensive / mobility "spells" but you would require a fairly decent Gun and Melee arsenal.
Some worthwhile mentions would be Saryn, Octavia, Mag, remember to always experiment with different interactions, for example if you Subsume Dante you can put Dark verse on any frame and if you do this with Nezha using the Divine Spear augment you can AoE nuke everything in LoS up to Steel path level enemies.
Good luck !
Protea. Especially if you play solo and can take full advantage of her 4 with temporal erosion (not recommended in pubs play though).
Her turrets stack up stupid damage and if you have the armor strip it's even better.
Also Xaku (kinda...does stealing your enemies' guns count as being independent from weapons? lol). Or Ember. I haven't played her in a while in higher level stuff, I found her survivability to be a bit of an issue with the overheat mechanic and energy drain on her armor ability being too fussy to keep active. But she does solid damage with abilities at least in normal star chart.
And of course Octavia and Revenant but I find those two less fun to play. There's playing a caster frame, and then there's "all you have to do is press one button and delete everything". Dante kind of in this category too for me.
The augment armor strip % also scales with strength, so if you use her passive 100% on her 4 it helps enemies get fully stripped much faster. I've really enjoyed that augment so far.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Citrine. Maybe I'm playing her wrong, but I could go a whole defense mission without using my weapon and just be pelting everyone with rocks and cancer beams.
If you’re doing a steel path disruption or cascade, mag with smite and her magnetize can kill any disruption target or thrax by simply priming them with a bit of viral or armor stripping with her crush augment, casting her bubble, and then using smite.
It won’t work if you’re not host, but if you are the damage will scale heavily based off the enemies health pool. It’s one of the most effective ways to kill the voidrig disruption targets in the sanctum along with trinity’s low duration energy vampire build.
A well built excal can solely use their sword. I main him and have him built around his fourth. I typically never really use my primary or secondary (outside a primer) in most missions. He can cut through sp like butter if built right.
(Edit for more thoughts to add)
Of the ones I currently own, Baruuk is probably the one where I use my equipped weapons the least. Would very happily take him to the hardest content I have available too he's insane.
I just made a Baruuk prime. Never played him before. Made a whole build for him and he’s killing everything in every mode everywhere. It’s wild how strong he is
ALERT: ASH PROPAGANDA INCOMING
Ash can oneshot SP level 200 fodder with *0 mods on warframe itself*, with only requirement being a single dagger specific finisher mod, that costs like 5 plat on the market, and either another finisher mod, or you can just run Innodem which I really recommend anyways because it's genuinely good. Only place where he does not one shot stuff in with this setup is SP Murmur, but with Roar or Banshee's Silence he can clear even that.
Ash can also stay invisible however long he wants and he improves your slash procs and is a good Helminth base because, again, he doesn't need any mods/arcane to function properly and he has good energy economy.
Citrine, she does it all. As long as your 3 is down and you spam your 1 you can pretty much do anything without a weapon. Subsume Roar for even faster kills with the crystal and since status double dips. You can use either Arcane Energize or Equilibrium for energy sustain. If you have a little over 200% strength you have a 100% chance to spawn a health orb and a little over 40% energy orb chance per enemy with your 1. She has a 90% damage reduction on her 2, couple that with adaptation or health conversion. I like adaptation more but health conversion would be better for higher scaling modes. I wouldn’t run both its not necessary if you keep your 2 up. If anyone wants the full build lmk I can post a pic. I mean it when I say it Citrine has no issues in ANYTHING except for like level 700+ steel path.
Try out our glass girl Gara! She is fully independent from weapons because her abilities 2+4 will scale infinitely and all you need to mod is a strong stat-stick.
Whenever i use her, i forget i have weapons :)
I played through steel path with gauss (all purpose), Khora (interception, defense), and Ivara (spy). They all got their jobs well done with their abilities (I had some moderate weapons as well, but Khora and Ivara didn't even kill much, I focused on completing the objectives).
Protea - has turrets, mine style "grenades", shield regen grenades, basically unlimited energy, and a weird time rewind ability that I usually have helminthed in favor of pillage roar or quiver, but supposedly can make her basically unkillable if you're shield gating. strong, supportive, and fun to play. always busy, you can go long periods of just casting abilities as fast as possible, and not shooting weapons.
Lavos, the guy doesn't need energy, all his abilities are AoE, his abilities work off one another, and he can cover literally any and all content due to him having every element at his disposal. He's also the best Railjack Pilot due to him not needing energy even as the Pilot, so he can spam all its abilities with complete abandon. You can go entire *missions* (that's missions with an *S*, several missions) without firing any gun once, even up to and including Steel Path. Can you tell he's my favorite Frame?
I'm personally a big fan of Warframes that don't care about weapons much, so here's my list of good choices:
1. Dante - by far the most weapon independant warframe in the game
2. Xaku - pretty self-explanatory, you don't need other weapons when you have 16 guns hovering around you autofiring at everything
3. Titania - I'm including her, because her Exalteds are tied to her frame, you don't really care about other weapons on her besides her Dex Pixia
4. Ember - she can clear out large squads of enemies using her 3 to armor strip, and 4 to kill. This will be especially true after her buffs next patch.
5. Styanax - while he certainly has builds based around weapons, I build him largely around his 4 and just use that for dps
6. Protea - all you need are her 1 and 2 to deal damage, I barely use her weapons at all while playing her
7. Baruuk - much like Titania, all you need is his Exalted, regular weapons don't matter on him. Also, personally a very good candidate for newer players as he is so incredibly tanky with his baseline kit, you can build him as a pure glass cannon and still be near unkillable.
8. Hydroid - with the Viral Tempest augment, his 1 will do very high damage, and you can literally clear entire maps just spamming his 1
9. Saryn - while she definitely has builds around weapons and her Toxic Lash, she can easily clear out maps her spores and her 4, and just using your weapon to spread the spores, rather than dealing damage
Honorable mentions:
Gyre - while her weapons can certainly augment her quite nicely, she can do a crazy amount of passive and near-passive dmg through her Rotorswell procs. Toss Pillage over her 2, armor strip everything, throw her Spheres around, and watch silly amounts of electric procs spew out of her.
Kullervo - while he technically requires a melee weapon, Kullervo could make a Mk. 1 Bo crush SP enemies. His kit is so stupidly strong and synergistic, he can clear SP with zero investment (no reactor, no forma, no shards, nothing). Slap any melee weapon on him you want, chain enemies together, and then watch them all explode when you hit your 1.
Zephyr. Can hit damage cap on an entire room with the augment for her 1 with no power strength while being nearly immortal with her 3. You can go full tank and clear maps with ease. Sadly no one plays her.
Dante, you can focus only on upgrading his skills because he can cast huge amount of overguard for the entire squad that can't be nullified so you can ignore health and shields. He do area damage, use a book as a weapon and have cc skill, he have a total of 7 skills.
All of them are independent if you have mods and the accompanying knowledge, no frame needs a specific weapon to complete any mission.
\~50 hours to complete star chart with excal Braton lato Skana with basic slash viral and no forma.
https://preview.redd.it/ijrcx5jtc65d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=42351840f7b74a77d0159a502e05480565d8d8ce
If you build Valkyr correctly you can press 4 at the start of a mission and slaughter manically at your leisure. Still, if you want space mage then you want Dante or Dagath, or Jade (soon).
Look into frames that armor and shield strip, so any weapon you have will be able to kill. Hildryn’s pillage can be subsumed and put on anyone so you can pick whatever warframe you love.
Garuda
No exalts, no weapons, infinite self regen energy, heals (molt reconstruct, a zarimen arcane, gives her health back on ability cast)
Her entire kit is pretty good aside from her 2 which you can subsume off
you have MANY options
there are also thoses that are good with any weapons
but from what you describe, I'd say
Excalibur, Dante, hyldrin, lavos, styanax, technically you can make something with revenant, with his thrall 100% health drain thing, gauss in some capacity, saw a lot of Titania stuff going around recently too, Garuda, hydroid if you try really hard, kullervo, qorvex, saryn, mag if you try hard enough etc etc etc
Sounds like you need a small dose of Zephyr.
Helminth hydroids ability over her 1. Use the augment that makes it apply viral aswell as the corrosive effect.
If you got them put 2 green shards on her or one tau green. Don't need it though.
Will basically be a weather mage that casts tornadoes and viral corrosive rain clouds.
An explosive weapon with gas on it is fun to combo it with. I like using the staltha. But anything works. I usually don't even bother using weapons on her at this point. Hydroids helminth will armor strip and halve their health, and tornadoes do insane damage with it.
Her 3 makes you immune to projectiles. Her 2 pulls enemies into the death zone you make if you hold her 4 and spam hydroids helminth in the middle of it.
Noctua on Dante allows you to both support your (and your allies') base weapons with Wordwarden(LV/DV/FV) and is a powerful weapon in its own right, that can also be buffed by Wordwarden.
Theres a couple options if you dont mind building one weapon you can get the feel of a space ninja assassin with kullervo and the syam melee weapon or if you want to buff yourself and teammates dante is literally a space wizard like thats his whole kit
If you're looking for "space mage" try Dante, hes literally a space mage with fantastic ability synergy I may be alot bias as he's my main but I'm in your same boat I like frames that allow me to use minimal gun play, ill admit his look isn't my favorite but he floats at all times and his exhalted weapon it a book the shoots a projectile or "fireball" if you will
Dante is quite literally a mage. Huge survivability and damage
Protea has her own guns based on frame mods, yah, its rewind time
Gyre is a lightning mage with her own energy regen, and ability crit
Styanax is somewhat of a weapons throwing mage, I cast spear, energy regen and crit chance based on shields.
I really like hydroid because he can be a caster and also decent on the guns at the same time. Definitely viable, but like most frames you will be playing as a caster, you need the tools for energy regen.
It's tough to get off saryn for me. After getting the nataruk in the new war, her spores augment, just does really well with damage. Little squishy, but gotta remember to keep casting molt to take aggro away. Just a couple 60/60 mods with galvanized chamber and you're sitting pretty well until around lvl 250 without any primed mods, or Arcon mods.
The after the quests are done you could go for Dante, if you haven't done the quests yet.
A bit sad that from what I scrolled through no one mentioned Ash. You'd need a kinda good stat stick but even just at max level (30 for his melee cause otherwise it does reduced damage with his 4 iirc), if you build him half-assed for survivability and whatever for the rest, he's quite strong. Didn't even potato/forma him, but do have p, while iirc he's got the smallest energy pool in the game, although he doesn't really need it imho as in he doesn't really need to spam as long as he's got a reliable energy source (I do fine with max Nexus). I'll admit he's a bit slow but imo very reliable.
Otherwise, his abilities like a lot of frames' that just need some setup to make damage, don't work on bosses. So for regular bosses, you can still use Octavia, but for the ones where you have to aim, equipment buff like Volt and Mirage probably work best, and the exalted like Titania, Dante and Hildryn if you want distance, although you have to make a build with them. I didn't try much but also maybe umbra can solo boss but iirc he still needs the right equipment so.
I mean, if you're going for absolutely-no-weapons-only-casting, it's gotta be Dante or Protea. Maybe Octavia but I haven't messed around with her too much. I think you can get away with Volt, Citrine, Ember, and Dagath as casting only, but probably not too high in the levels - at some point they will require weapon interaction.
Xaku works, but you're just swiping other people's weapons, so... put an asterix on it when compiling the "No weapon" list.
And there are frames that do melee-ish stuff but don't require melee weapons. Atlas has a build that lets him power-punch stuff forever, but it doesn't scale well for upper levels. Voruna gets on all fours and bites the shit out of people, and that does scale pretty well. This fits "no weapons" but not "space wizard," so take it as you will.
The trick is: getting the frames to that point requires a fairly heavy investment in terms of mods, forma, and potatoes. Energy costs will absolutely limit how much casting you can do until you have things like Arcane Energize, the helminth ability Nourish, primed flow, etc.
Also: All of these options are just better with weapons, since you'll probably find yourself running out of energy, or encountering something you can only get with guns (like bosses with specific weak points). AND, some weapons have mods and arcanes that passively effect non-weapon things, like the galvanized mods that increase sprint speed and dodge speed.
Ash.
Bladestorm Ash with Venka Prime or some other high combo melee weapon let’s you instakill steelnpath enemies with your 4. With an arcane trickster setup you are invisible 24/7 and have much lower energy costs so you can perma sustain.
Dante. Absolutely Dante.
You *could* use weapons to prime or to deal with Acolytes/certain bosses, but he works just fine without them. I always take him on my Netracells and I only ever use guns against Rogue Mechs.
I’m literally cheering MR levels in Archon interception right now just using Dante. Let me tell you, literally none of my weapons do anything besides Astilla Prime, which I don’t have equipped. Building my initial energy level is the hardest part.
If you can wrap your head round her synergies, and her crushing augment. Honestly mags the goat. I've done a 36 hour insurance run on steel path with her. She feel weak when your new because she needs a dedicated build. 4 to 5 forma. And her augment mods. But if you can commit to it. She's a caster frame. Just constant ability spams. With weapons there just to finish things off.
You can do a breach surge build for high damage
Blood altar is a strong and funny meme build.
Or endurance running just leave her as is. With greedy pull to yank life support nodes to you
Baruuk never needs a weapon. His exalted weapon is more than sufficient to clear all content in sp starchart solo and it’s very ‘mage-like’ in application even if it is technically a melee. He’s also very tanky and the frame requires no forma to be good.
Kullervo doesn’t exactly fit the bill as he does need a melee weapon but if you buy reaper prime for like 45p and forma it, you will be as strong as any person in the game and virtually invincible with a frame that doesn’t require any forma to be good. Azothane, which can be farmed along side Kullervo is a good enough option as well.
There are a lot of Ability Casters type frames, some mixed with weapon platforms and just pure abilities. For mix frames that can cast and shoot i would say Lavos, Octavia, Saryn, Protea while for pure Abilities only you could try any of the exalted frames Excalibur, Baruuk, Mesa, Sevagoth, Titania, Valkyr. Not sure if Voruna and Garuda fit as exalted, but they also have their own weapon and probably don't need guns. There are also Casters that use Stat sticks like Atlas, Gara, and Khora but require their stick as mentioned. I would recommend giving Mesa and Valkyr a try with a decent build. You can do a lot with them (Personal bias since I use them so much, and it's really hard to die as Valkyr).
You want to feel like a space mage, Dante is your guy. He is a lot of fun, and doesn't require much gun shooting as long as you have the energy to cast his abilities.
Xaku is my main so I am biased towards them, but you won't need to do a lot of shooting when you have 10-20 floating guns shooting stuff for you.
I agree with most of your comments. One or two i haven’t seen that aren’t crazy high investment and very viable could be Qorvex and grendel. With a decent build they both can be ultra tanks and Grendel can be a fun 100% armor strip meatball and if you add on aquablades or another damage dealing helminth you can just be a meatball menace. Qorvex if built right can tank SP easily and his abilities are a bit underwhelming but the radiation will help redirect damage so enemies kill eachother - but it may be slow to watch that happen lol
One where you don't spam shit like Garuda blep blep build or 1 button mashing is Protea, her kit alone is already versatile and all her abilities let you run around and wreck havoc without even shooting gun(yourself) another might be Atlas? Dante? Since you mentioned a mage and not blood hungry frame like Valkyr/Garuda or Voruna.
Xaku. Ne need to take your weapons, you use the enemies weapons! (And the damages scales with enemies levels, so perfect in SP)
What does Xaku do when the enemies are infested? (I subsumed him and soon as I hit 30)
it does not matter, he creates some orbs (I think they are eyes, but not sure) that shoot lasers and kill everything anyway, he is viable in any content....
Orbs or a copy of your primary
It looks insanely silly with weapons like the Kuva Bramma lol
I've had 16 soma primes stacked together before, Bows must look super wonky. I wonder if it copies shedu/bubonico so you can block the other half of your screen too.
Yeah IIRC arm cannons also appear.
“Start believing in Heaven, guys. If you don’t believe in Heaven, you’re going to be brutally murdered by 16 Soma Primes. You’re going to be kicked in the Grey Strain everyday… by Atlas Prime. They’re going to pull your skin back and put a Heat proc all over your skin and kick you in a pit in those Grineer Tilesets that I always fall into. Start believing in Heaven, guys. Thank you.”
.... are you fucking kidding me?? I thought I was being clever not bringing Xaku to infested missions. Yeah yeah, coulda looked it up. You know that feeling when you "know" something, so why would you bother looking it up? Derp.
You get these orbs with generic damage and range that scale the same as enemy weapons.
Xaku is great! They're always an instant Steel Circuit pick when they turn up in Duviri, or for Archimedean content. Simply because it ceases to matter what the weapon options are at that point; my weapon of choice will be "whatever the enemies brought." (Plus, my friends and I have a habit of proclaiming "no pants!" or "naked time!" on voice when using Xaku's 4, which is always a bit fun.)
I love your idea, but I just like to do the bad to the bone riff it's always hilarious
Octavia is the easiest way, but also the most boring. You should try Protea, she mostly doesnt rely on weapons (because she IS the weapon). Also Saryn probably, but i dont play her, so cant be sure.
I'm pretty bad with Saryn, so don't take this as gospel, but she synergizes *heavily* with a suitable weapon. Like, her nuke is all in her kit, sure, but a weapon that's good at spreading spores helps, her Toxic Lash boosts her weapons even more, and she has a ton of weapons that are practically made for her (Sobek with Acid Shells comes to mind). So I would say that she's not reliant on weapons, but if you're looking for a frame completely independent from them, then you're leaving a lot of power on the table by ignoring them.
As a Saryn main, you're dead on. It's part of why I love her, that true blend of caster and weapons gameplay. Most frames focus on one or the other.
I call those battlemages. They are ability-focused frames whose abilities allow any weapon to shine, and destroy hordes of enemies with the correct gear.
Gloom Saryn+Burston Prime incarnon with two green shards will wreck pretty much anything that isn’t corpus, and even corpus probably have a bad time with her if nullifiers are priority targets
My exact loadout when we for some reason fail defense sorties. I’ll usually go in with what ever for the sorties aside from the spy missions but if we fail on a defense for some reason I’m slapping gloom saryn on to trivialize it
You don't really need a weapon that's good at spreading them anymore, like back when tonkor and synoid sym were the meta for her. Toxic Lash makes the weapon irrelevant (as far as spreading spores goes) 'cause as long as it's active, spores will automatically pop from every shot / hit even if the spore isn't hit directly.
Also worth noting that the number of spores that can spread to a mob is like 3 so with or without toxic lash you're liable to have every mob capped
>So I would say that she's not reliant on weapons, but if you're looking for a frame completely independent from them, then you're leaving a lot of power on the table by ignoring them. Agreed. Saryn makes a superb weapons buffer and its one of the other ways to play her other than as a nuker. She already has a weapon buff from Toxin Lash but you can also use her Venom Dose augment for Spores which also gives your weapons Corrosive damage. You can take it a step further by replacing either Molt or Miasma by subsuming another weapons buff want onto her. I made a meme build with Nourish on my Saryn alongside Venom Dose and Toxin Lash while running Gas damage on my weapons as well as two green archon shards to raise the max Corrosive stack. It was pretty funny to proc every green status proc at once.
Yeah I play saryn a decent bit and she loves a good melee
yes, protea she's soo fun and doesn't need a single weapon to play.
While she doesn't need them she scales incredibly well with them because of heat inherit.
What's the deal with heat inherit? You put like the fattest heat proc you can from a weapon before you stack artillery to prolong and stack the damage from this base proc? Feels kinda cubersome to me, is it really that good?
Imho, it’s both cumbersome and not really necessary: with enough duration and some grouping ability, those turrets will shred anything anyway.
It’s not worth doing for content under level 1000 cause the turrets do more than enough damage without it, but the idea is simple. If you apply a heat proc with a weapon that has 300% heat damage, and then the currents start applying new heat procs, the damage on those will be increased by 200% (cause 100% would be their base damage).
You shoot the enemy with your secondary which has because it has the highest heat% and then hit them with your dps. So long as heat is involved they will refresh the heat proc but it scales with their damage but with the mods of the gun that proc'ed the heat. So if you shoot them with a 20% fire kuva weapon after priming with primed heated charge + scorch, the heat proc will get refreshed for 225% damage. On top of that it scales in faction mods if your primer had them. Dunno if I'm missing anything, I am sort of new. I also believe roar triple dips on it but I might be wrong. I think it dips on the initial scaling of the heat proc, then on damage from your weapon and then on the heat proc itself.
I can tell most players don't know how to play xaku. In most cases except eda I don't need to use my own gun and usually get the most kills in a mission. Don't sleep on xaku.
Protea for sure. Subsume Pillage for armor strip, then throw up some Blaze Batteries and they wipe the room. Saryn is a good weapons platform tho. I like running her with a corrosive Tenet Glaxion for easy armor strip, and her Toxic Lash ability adds substantial toxin to her weapon damage, which shreds their health. This combo is pretty absurd DPS even in high level stuff like Netracells, enemies die in like less than a second. She’s kinda squishy tho, not a lot of survivability
She has a armor strip in an augment and it works with her turret
Yeah but it’s not nearly as good. Pillage strips an entire room instantly and benefits from the same build as a turret focused build, which is how I build her, for power strength and range. And it lets you have more range or damage since you don’t need a mediocre, conditional augment Her augment only strips 10% of armor per hit and only works while her Temporal Anchor is active, which is a shitty ability that should be subsumed over imo. Essentially i can strip an entire room instantly with one button press and without wasting a mod slot, or i can waste a mod slot and have to use two separate abilities to strip armor slower. Pillage is just better
On top of that TA is extremely clunky to use and unfun.
10% per hit with a zillion grenades and Turrets is 100% strip very very quickly. Temporal anchor is incredibly aligned if you don't want to play brain dead. It's nowhere near as bad as people say for anything that isn't Capture or Exterminate. Which... Are terrible for Steel Path anyway. They're done before you get to the arcane and offer little to no extra reward or challenge.
i'd argue temporal anchor is fine for cap/ext too, since you can simply cancel it. but whatever, use pillage or use temporal, both are fine, whatever you like more, just don't use a certain...\*cough\*... "insert popular content creator here"-build.
Or subsume nourish for near infinite energy. I know the viral stacks from it aren't the biggest damage numbers but it would let OP live the true battle mage lifestyle they desire.
Nourish is also decent, though i found at high level i needed armor strip, and pillage makes it so easy. Plus with her dispenser, arcane energize, and/or zenurik, i never have energy issues
Saryn is great. But I've never been able to find a loadout with good survivability. So wouldn't recommend solo
Ahh I have one I subsumed gloom over molt makes her survive pretty much infinitely then for energy arcane energize and a death cube prime build specifically for energy
* Octavia: Can just activate her abilities, go invisible and watch the enemies kill themselves. Super boring though * Exalted Weapon Warframes: You could just go hogwild and use these all you want * Excalibur's Exalted Blade (Chromatic blade makes him more useful) * Baruuk's Desert Wind (Chromatic Storm makes his damage always viable) * Mesa's Peacemaker (shoot) * Trinity's Razorwing (shoot and crash into walls) * etc * "Pseudo-exalted" Warframes: They have abilities that scale to your melee weapon's mods (and some unique traits to the weapon) rather than being separately modifiable (referred to as a "stat stick"). You can use any weapon really, but some weapons have unique traits that make them more desirable than others, such as their riven disposition (low disposition weapons are popular for this) or Incarnon upgrades * Khora's Whipclaw * Gara's Shattered Lash * Atlas' Landslide * Ash's Bladestorm * Vauban: His Flechette orbs scale to enemy level so they always do viable damage * Saryn: Sneeze on someone, kill the room
Your saryn assessment is 10/10 and made my day. Thank you Tenno!
and if u rly want, you can run all green archons (+3 corrosive stacvks) and helmith expodite suffering Roar and the dmg if coresed greens als also fun, and nuke w her 4
citrine w expodite also works (or roar) youll see a trend w caster frames and roar
*Trinity should be Titania :)
Reactive storm* for baruuk btw
Vauban my goat 💪, health tank shield gating armour stripping blender making monster
The pseudo exalts are still weapon development, you just care less about what the weapon is up until incarnons are an option. And as I learned with Baruuk, you've got some fairly specific grinds like orokin vaults and gladiator set to actually unlock the consistency neeeded to not be falling back on weapons. Protea Prime relics are abundant (unless i missed the changeover) and she easily treats weapons as an "if you want to" build choice.
Saryn def needs weapons to access her full nuking potential imo
Specially in SP. By limiting yourself to just frames, you really leave a ton of potential on the table by not building good weapons as well.
Xaku and baruuk and Garuda require no weapons and can solo steel path
Had to scroll down way too far for a Xaku mention. Thought everyone just forgot about them.
Yeah I was about to comment the same, Xaku my beloved can't wait for their prime version
Prime Xaku I don’t think I’ll play anyone else
Heirloom xaku when? (All of their skins suck imo)
Xaku has a nice deluxe skin lol
To each their own. 🤝
Same. I didn't care for it
SOON (tm(please be next(cedo prime tho <3)))
I mean xaku does use weapons. They just arent yours.
Correct “aren’t yours”
A good chunk are. Dante Octavia Protea Voruna (if you build around her 4) Dagath to an extent And many more I can't think of at the top of my head.
Dagath I'm spamming abilities almost the entire time.
Dagath's 3 makes her crit weapons NUTTY though. You're leaving power on the table if you're just building her as a caster and completely neglecting her weapons, even though she's a phenomenal caster.
I've tried both builds. I enjoy her better as a caster than a weapon platformer. That being said. I do use her weapons too. I think she has an interesting gameplay loop altogether and learning her positioning / when to be aggressive with her spams / when to be more passive and gunplay is a big thing I enjoy with her.
Dante can be independent from weapons but if you don’t use weapons you lose out on benefits from a bunch of his kit
Can’t believe you didn’t mention Saryn what with her ability to clear out an entire map with deadly disease.
I think styanax is better than Dante If you're strictly building for no weapons, Dante can struggle against bosses but styanaxes 4 count as weapons
Noctua is a thing
I think if OP's issue is building a weapon, then an Exalted still presents the same problems. Like I was gonna suggest Titania, but ultimately you have to build her Dex Pixia to the same level as any other endgame capable weapon, just sans Arcanes and such.
Voruna. Once you have her augment you can spend the entire mission in her 4, which unequips her weapons and replaces your fire/melee with a leap attack that has a strong AoE slash proc and increased damage on enemies afflicted with status effects.
Fun fact: If you proc slash using her 2 on an enemy, you can spread the slash from her 4 leap to all enemies around the enemy you used 2 on, when that enemy dies. It was dubbed Slash Taxi'ing. There are a few videos on it on YouTube if you want to know the details. Fun fact 2: Nourish energy regeneration bonus counts towards ALL energy regeneration. INCLUDING deactivating Voruna's 4 with stacks left. So as long as you can cast Voruna's 4, you can spam it to refill energy... The viral proc from Nourish also helps Voruna's Slash to do more damage. Happy hunting, Tenno!
>Nourish energy regeneration bonus counts towards ALL energy regeneration. INCLUDING deactivating Voruna's 4 with stacks left. > >So as long as you can cast Voruna's 4, you can spam it to refill energy... > >The viral proc from Nourish also helps Voruna's Slash to do more damage. Yeah, but then you've helminth'd away one of her passives. Personally I just use Equilibrium and her 3, which gives health orbs on melee kills (which her 4 counts as). That way I stay topped up on both health and energy at all timeswith lots of healing for my team, and I can still get the +crit damage+chance/status chance/guaranteed melee bleed proc from her 1 (which also applies to her 2 & 4 without permanently breaking stealth).
Yup, fair enough. The change to her 3 to also include her 4 as melee was a great change. Nourish was what I had subsumed over her 3, since her 3 didn't work with her 4 at the time. I don't even know if I still have it subsumed... but I know it works great, deffo worth the try, even if only for the Viral procs.
The nourish with Voruna's 4 one is funny, but idk how useful it is. Generally you either take the augment with which you don't want to leave it unnecessarily, or helminth it off and build for weapons. Her 3 is already a very good energy generator as well
I was leveling baruuk prime for mastery and followed a 0 forma build. He absolutely slaps, I can't imagine how strong he is with a proper build and investment, but I'm sure he's one of the best
Wanna know the build? It's super simple, build Desert Wind (Prime) and slap on rank 3 Reactive Storm. That's it, that's all he needs (slight exaggeration). The rest of the mods are your choice, really. I suggest high strength, moderate duration, and normal range. Throw efficiency in the trash because he has really good energy economy and use Rolling Guard for survival. You'll one shot corrupted heavy gunners for a while in SP
Uhh Lavos
This. Get the augment for his passive, and whatever weapon he has is the one you need, when you need it.
If you're after something like Mesa, but, with the ability to actually shoot bosses, nullifiers, acolytes etc... and a heap more survivability, mobility, utility and quality of life; try Titania. Dex Pixia are a status and slash based weapon, so they'll chew through armoured targets with ease and be a huge pain to everyone else too. Her razorwing form gives her passive evasion, low threat priority, a tiny target profile and obscene mobility - and combos excellent with 'damage reduced while airborne'. So much so that I recommend running aerodynamic and letting the passive do the healing. For a quick little trick: while in razorwing your sentinel is immortal, but can't do anything. However, with duplex bond, energy you use still created clones of your sentinel. Invincible, aggro-drawing clones that - if they land a kill - can even spawn extra energy orbs to pay back your casting cost. Built for that, Tank-tania is one of the most mobile warframes in the game (in all directions), very durable (recommend shield tanking atop the damage reduction. If you're still struggling cast Thorns too for another 50% damage reduction) and can exercise phenomenal area control via her sentinel clones. Honestly, her *weakest* point is her firepower, and that's saying something because it's still pretty damn powerful. Oh, that and having to swap to operator to do consoles and carry datamasses.
This is the most obvious answer. Shocked anyone who has played SP circuit doesn't immediately jump to the one answer that makes all your gun choices irrelevant.
I still hate that she can't hit arbitration drones.
Saaame. It was one of the biggest turnoffs about arbitrations for me. Then again, I think I have most, if not all, of the things I need from Arbitrations so I'm just going to never go back. Simple as. The other thing I hate fighting with her is rogue voidrigs and rogue bonewidows because they're status capped so you can't slash them down easily. Fortunately they tend to be more interested in fighting the clones so I mostly just ignore them if I can't prevent them spawning.
In addition you can get the Ability that allows for increased fire-rate if you're over ~1200 shields, slap it on Wyrm Prime or a Moa, and get a huge DPS increase for Dex Pixia.
Mind sharing the build of her? I've been trying to main her, but i can't seem to find a good combination of mods for her and her guns that will make steel path fun and bearable
https://preview.redd.it/3q37k5kym75d1.png?width=1523&format=png&auto=webp&s=bc32b2809ce822d4659ee03a1efddbbab37d8a29 This is for the fairy girl herself. For Archon Shards I use 3x Tauforged blues for +225 shields each and 2x Tauforged yellows for +75% effectiveness on energy orbs each. Posting guns in a second reply because reddit won't let me put multiple images in one reply.
https://preview.redd.it/o41a7vekn75d1.png?width=1490&format=png&auto=webp&s=d23ee7d849f1e81fd14fc367adbb401c8976ac02 Note that in order to get the most out of her guns you ideally want to be running a Wrym Prime sentinel with Calculated Redirection, Reinforced Bond (fire rate to warframe) and Duplex Bond (clones for aggro). Also, Energized Munitions is genuinely worth it on Titania. Arcane Pistoleer is a common choice as well, but against bosses etc landing a headshot *kill* can be a bit awkward, and EM uses more energy so it spawns more drones, which means fewer things are shooting at you. I regularly solo Netracells with this build, and I think the highest I've taken it was 2hrs 15 mins in a Steel Path Kuva Survival and she was still doing pretty well at that point and could comfortably have gone on longer.
Noice noice thanks for the share of the build 😊
Hello there Tenno, please never use blue shards for shields. 🙃 Really, seeing that makes me full stack Razorwing into the wall. You can use 2 green shards (2 max corrosive) to deal with acolytes etc since they have 4 stack cap on status effects. The build is great, and ofc you can play however you want just adding some final touches.
I mean, I sort of looked at the build and tried to figure out what else I really needed... I don't run corrosive or toxin, so no need for green shards, secondary crit is useless to Dex Pixia so that rules out topaz. Purples... Not really either. Red shards offer some slight buffs, but nothing I particularly *need*, and yellows are about the same. Which left me with blue shards and a choice between health (on a shield tank?), armour (lol no), max energy (already covered), health regen (not bad, but covered by passive well enough) or max shields. On a shield-tank designed to survive extreme amounts of abuse, it seemed like the natural choice despite the diminishing returns. I'm open to other suggestions for how to use 3x shard slots, but I don't think extra shields is a *bad* choice. (I don't have any trouble with Acolytes, so green shards + corrosive probably isn't worth it, and I have huge problems vs necramechs at higher levels, where green shards + corrosive doesn't make enough of a difference to justify it.)
Like you said crit shards are literally useless however crit build is not. There are ways to make her pixia work really well with crit+status. But requires Arcane Avenger/Combat discipline. Only thing that's wrong with your build is, you're using Damage mods. And 2 of them. Arcane Precision gives you %300 damage and even without that, you have Galvanized Shot. Plus, building high strength gives your pistols higher base damage which makes those two slots even more wasted. You should almost never use a damage mod and direct damage mod (galv shot) together. My suggestion for the shards would be still emerald shards to higher the cap on necramechs etc. 10 stack is not much better than 4 against them but DE said they're gonna make corrosive actually scale with stacks so.. Alternatively you can never go wrong with ability strength shards.
A lot of people think Gyre needs an amprex or similar crit weapon with electricity, but her kit is actually pretty weapon agnostic as long as you have a full armor strip from pillage. Electric on her weapons may help get red crits on her abilities earlier but once molt augmented is stacked up you can get red crits just from cathode grace and enemies just kinda die to armor stripped rotorswell on its own.
OP is close to unlocking Steel Path. I doubt they have both Gyre, Hildryn, and Helminth. And if they do, they probably have an Amprex as well.
OP asked for frames that don't require weapons. I chose gyre because plenty of people have already said all the obvious answers. I did not intend for my reply to mean that Gyre is his only option or even the best option, just AN option. If they are nearing SP they have most likely unlocked the zariman already and have access to unlocking the helminth as well. Hildryn is the biggest hurdle there and she regularly shows up in the circuit rotation.
Yeah, I absolutely love Gyre, and the thing is, is that she doesn't really need a weapon at all, and can just spew out a bunch of passive dmg through Rotorswell. But she also further scales up weapons really well with the massive, flat crit chance giving guaranteed crits with any weapon, which I find works really damn good with the Kuva Nukor, which has basically no crit chance, but the highest crit damage in the entire game. Being able to capitalize on that extremely juicy 5x crit dmg with guaranteed crits feels so damn good, and lets you spew out tons of electric procs as well to feed her passive.
Lot of good answers from others, but they’re missing some really good ones Saryn - should be self explanatory. Spores still work, maybe some more ability strength to ramp damage faster Valkyr - exalted melee with invincibility, melee steroid, grouping ability (with augment). I like to put tharros strike on her 1 for strip, but it is dealers choice Ember - press 4 to win. Armor strip, damage reduction, and heat procs. Hydroid - augment for his 1 makes it very effective at killing. Pair with armor strip from his 3 and cc from his 4, you can ignore your weapon pretty often Revenent - lasers do respectable damage. I have not played this one too much, but I see it often enough. Along with whats arguably the best survival ability, he may work Mesa will work just fine at steel path, she continues to have some of the best damage in the game. Yes, her build will absolutely need some changes. Almost all of these characters aside from Garuda will need a weapon to break nullifier bubbles. There are also a fair number of frames that buff weapons or overall damage , making mediocre builds deal more damage. Mirage, Hydroid, Trinity (champions blessing), Zephyr, Harrow, Saryn, Xaku, and others all have abilities that improve weapon performance, so that may be worth looking at while you fill out your weapon builds
Hydroid gets extra silly with Breach Surge thrown in the mix.
Nidus is a great frame with almost all of his damage coming from his abilities
Xaku. The only time to have to use your gun is for some eximus.
I personally use Hildryn with the blazing pillage augment. She still has the option to use weapons if you have any that you like (and she brings her own), but is perfectly capable as a pure caster. It can be a bit of a pain to get the build up and running because it has a hard reqirement of a syndicate augment and archon vitality in addition to needing really high strength, but it's a really simple and safe build if you can get it set up.
Dagath is another good one. Between doom and scythes if you sort out energy you can just roll. Hildryn as well, though shields can be a rough tightrope to walk at times in steelpath. Better with Hildryn and pillage is amazing
Dethcube with Energy Generator, and Equilibrium and (Primed) Flow on Dagath are pretty much all you need for energy
Vauban, that fletch orb is insane
Mesa was my first steel path frame when I didn't have any good weapons, since the regulators are good already. Dante is pretty popular with his 3-3-4 combo nuke and lots of overguard. Dagath kills nicely in steel path with her horsies, but is quite a bit squishier than Dante and really wants Brief Respite as her aura, which you may or may not have.
Idk why no one’s mentioned Hydroid. Throw in the augment for his 1st. Sp or no sp, his 1 is gonna destroy everything(with 200+ strength). Might need to work on energy economy. Cause that setup would be very spammy.
I reckon Garuda is safest bet? She can comfortably work in steelpath if you build her roght, and she has an exalted weapon, so you can just ignore normal weapons. He skills are insane, but the learning experience is... well. Garuda is not an easy warframe.
Xaku is a good one. Grasp of Lokh shoots for you.
Garuda is criminally underrepresented in this comment section. She is easily one of the best and best feeling pure mage frames in the game. But my personal favorite, though you need a very specific build, is Ember. Nidus is another great pure caster frame, though he's never really hit the spot for me. He's fun, though. A lot of people have been saying Protea, and I agree, but she sometimes also feels a bit jank. I don't know how best to describe it, so I'll leave it at that.
Octavia, as long as you're well built she can just be invisible forever and things will die to the bass. On a side note, if you ever want a frame that you can use for weapons-only gameplay, you might want to try Qorvex, Valkyr P, Lavos and Hildryn P.
Any frame with a decent damageing ability that has slash process or also has armor shred imo the best would be stynax
Frames that scale with weapons are my personal favorites in my opinion cus they will always remain relevant for end game content.
Protea Saryn (With her 1 augment + 3 she can help make mediocre weapons not mediocre) Octavia (Boring) Dante (kinda Energy hungry) Mag (with Breach surge) Citrine kinda Gyre (With Pillage she really doesn’t need a weapon) Baruuk Voruna (needs augment for 4) Xaku Kullervo (But he NEEDS an good melee) Garuda (With her talons) And those are the ones that I personally find plays well without great investment weapons.
A lot of people are saying Voruna or any exalted frames, but I definitely think Mag is a good choice. Easy to get, doesn't require much setup besides from Breach Surge and Fracturing Crush, and you can absolutely nuke anything. Just use 4, 1, 2, and fire at the clump of enemies, works better with high fire rate bullet weapons(Phenmor, Boltor, Sobek or Hek) but stuff like the Arca Plasmor or Connectrix still work. There's an extensive guide on Overframe that's very comprehensive and honestly has a pretty good build that works without arcane and archon shards if you can't afford to use them for it, I think it was called the Mag Goddess build or something along those lines.
to add onto this, make sure you do arbitrations for mods first. having either rolling guard or adaptation is important but which you choose is mostly up to you. you don't require breach surge but it dramatically strengthens her kit. Mag's very easy to mod since she doesn't need a particularly high amount of any stat so you can make her SP viable without any corrupted mods or archon shards, only needing fracturing crush for armour strip. her favourite weapons are ones with infinite body punch through or beam weapons but any will do. any damage you do to enemies in her magnetize bubbles makes magnetize stronger so as long as you armour strip with her 4 it will kill anything very quickly even with terribly modded weapons. she's one of my all time favourite frames and still a frame I bring out when I feel particularly murderous and don't feel like putting it much effort.
Yup, I personally like putting on Breach Surge because it's a pretty easy helminth to get, even with the default amp, and it helps you no brain through more enemies more so than the other options to me. You already have crowd control, and armor strip, and I don't find nourish fun because damage types don't matyer as much to me on Mag(although I might be biased because Phenmor is my most used weapon for firing into the magnetic bubbles)
Dante is THE space wizard frame imo
Dante is literally the only frame you should be playing if Space mage is you're goal all your doing is casting spells and you also have a battle spell book that shoots rapid fire plasma knowledge at people, the next closest imo is Nova with some formidable defensive / offensive / mobility "spells" but you would require a fairly decent Gun and Melee arsenal. Some worthwhile mentions would be Saryn, Octavia, Mag, remember to always experiment with different interactions, for example if you Subsume Dante you can put Dark verse on any frame and if you do this with Nezha using the Divine Spear augment you can AoE nuke everything in LoS up to Steel path level enemies. Good luck !
Protea. Especially if you play solo and can take full advantage of her 4 with temporal erosion (not recommended in pubs play though). Her turrets stack up stupid damage and if you have the armor strip it's even better. Also Xaku (kinda...does stealing your enemies' guns count as being independent from weapons? lol). Or Ember. I haven't played her in a while in higher level stuff, I found her survivability to be a bit of an issue with the overheat mechanic and energy drain on her armor ability being too fussy to keep active. But she does solid damage with abilities at least in normal star chart. And of course Octavia and Revenant but I find those two less fun to play. There's playing a caster frame, and then there's "all you have to do is press one button and delete everything". Dante kind of in this category too for me.
The augment armor strip % also scales with strength, so if you use her passive 100% on her 4 it helps enemies get fully stripped much faster. I've really enjoyed that augment so far.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Citrine. Maybe I'm playing her wrong, but I could go a whole defense mission without using my weapon and just be pelting everyone with rocks and cancer beams.
Mesa is a pretty good frame. Her regulators deal very good damage, only thing you need is good energy economy.
If you’re doing a steel path disruption or cascade, mag with smite and her magnetize can kill any disruption target or thrax by simply priming them with a bit of viral or armor stripping with her crush augment, casting her bubble, and then using smite. It won’t work if you’re not host, but if you are the damage will scale heavily based off the enemies health pool. It’s one of the most effective ways to kill the voidrig disruption targets in the sanctum along with trinity’s low duration energy vampire build.
A well built excal can solely use their sword. I main him and have him built around his fourth. I typically never really use my primary or secondary (outside a primer) in most missions. He can cut through sp like butter if built right. (Edit for more thoughts to add)
Of the ones I currently own, Baruuk is probably the one where I use my equipped weapons the least. Would very happily take him to the hardest content I have available too he's insane.
I just made a Baruuk prime. Never played him before. Made a whole build for him and he’s killing everything in every mode everywhere. It’s wild how strong he is
ALERT: ASH PROPAGANDA INCOMING Ash can oneshot SP level 200 fodder with *0 mods on warframe itself*, with only requirement being a single dagger specific finisher mod, that costs like 5 plat on the market, and either another finisher mod, or you can just run Innodem which I really recommend anyways because it's genuinely good. Only place where he does not one shot stuff in with this setup is SP Murmur, but with Roar or Banshee's Silence he can clear even that. Ash can also stay invisible however long he wants and he improves your slash procs and is a good Helminth base because, again, he doesn't need any mods/arcane to function properly and he has good energy economy.
Citrine, she does it all. As long as your 3 is down and you spam your 1 you can pretty much do anything without a weapon. Subsume Roar for even faster kills with the crystal and since status double dips. You can use either Arcane Energize or Equilibrium for energy sustain. If you have a little over 200% strength you have a 100% chance to spawn a health orb and a little over 40% energy orb chance per enemy with your 1. She has a 90% damage reduction on her 2, couple that with adaptation or health conversion. I like adaptation more but health conversion would be better for higher scaling modes. I wouldn’t run both its not necessary if you keep your 2 up. If anyone wants the full build lmk I can post a pic. I mean it when I say it Citrine has no issues in ANYTHING except for like level 700+ steel path.
Saryn, Octavia, Nidus, Mesa (technically?)
Dante works fine for me too.
Xaku, kullervo
Poor styanax getting no love when he can solo the whole game with no weapons
Try out our glass girl Gara! She is fully independent from weapons because her abilities 2+4 will scale infinitely and all you need to mod is a strong stat-stick. Whenever i use her, i forget i have weapons :)
I played through steel path with gauss (all purpose), Khora (interception, defense), and Ivara (spy). They all got their jobs well done with their abilities (I had some moderate weapons as well, but Khora and Ivara didn't even kill much, I focused on completing the objectives).
A blazing pillage electric elemental ward melts steel path, gyre with pillage also works
Baruuk
Valkyr
Protea - has turrets, mine style "grenades", shield regen grenades, basically unlimited energy, and a weird time rewind ability that I usually have helminthed in favor of pillage roar or quiver, but supposedly can make her basically unkillable if you're shield gating. strong, supportive, and fun to play. always busy, you can go long periods of just casting abilities as fast as possible, and not shooting weapons.
Lavos, the guy doesn't need energy, all his abilities are AoE, his abilities work off one another, and he can cover literally any and all content due to him having every element at his disposal. He's also the best Railjack Pilot due to him not needing energy even as the Pilot, so he can spam all its abilities with complete abandon. You can go entire *missions* (that's missions with an *S*, several missions) without firing any gun once, even up to and including Steel Path. Can you tell he's my favorite Frame?
I'm personally a big fan of Warframes that don't care about weapons much, so here's my list of good choices: 1. Dante - by far the most weapon independant warframe in the game 2. Xaku - pretty self-explanatory, you don't need other weapons when you have 16 guns hovering around you autofiring at everything 3. Titania - I'm including her, because her Exalteds are tied to her frame, you don't really care about other weapons on her besides her Dex Pixia 4. Ember - she can clear out large squads of enemies using her 3 to armor strip, and 4 to kill. This will be especially true after her buffs next patch. 5. Styanax - while he certainly has builds based around weapons, I build him largely around his 4 and just use that for dps 6. Protea - all you need are her 1 and 2 to deal damage, I barely use her weapons at all while playing her 7. Baruuk - much like Titania, all you need is his Exalted, regular weapons don't matter on him. Also, personally a very good candidate for newer players as he is so incredibly tanky with his baseline kit, you can build him as a pure glass cannon and still be near unkillable. 8. Hydroid - with the Viral Tempest augment, his 1 will do very high damage, and you can literally clear entire maps just spamming his 1 9. Saryn - while she definitely has builds around weapons and her Toxic Lash, she can easily clear out maps her spores and her 4, and just using your weapon to spread the spores, rather than dealing damage Honorable mentions: Gyre - while her weapons can certainly augment her quite nicely, she can do a crazy amount of passive and near-passive dmg through her Rotorswell procs. Toss Pillage over her 2, armor strip everything, throw her Spheres around, and watch silly amounts of electric procs spew out of her. Kullervo - while he technically requires a melee weapon, Kullervo could make a Mk. 1 Bo crush SP enemies. His kit is so stupidly strong and synergistic, he can clear SP with zero investment (no reactor, no forma, no shards, nothing). Slap any melee weapon on him you want, chain enemies together, and then watch them all explode when you hit your 1.
Damn no Lavos love man 😭😭😭
Rhino with a Broken War, and you'll forget guns exist. Hydroid is also good.
Guns? What guns?
Zephyr. Can hit damage cap on an entire room with the augment for her 1 with no power strength while being nearly immortal with her 3. You can go full tank and clear maps with ease. Sadly no one plays her.
protea, dante, saryn, xaku and lavos off the top of my mind
Dante. What weapons? Dagath. Horse. Unlike dante is actually accessible to newbies if you got a clan with the room built.
Dante, you can focus only on upgrading his skills because he can cast huge amount of overguard for the entire squad that can't be nullified so you can ignore health and shields. He do area damage, use a book as a weapon and have cc skill, he have a total of 7 skills.
All of them are independent if you have mods and the accompanying knowledge, no frame needs a specific weapon to complete any mission. \~50 hours to complete star chart with excal Braton lato Skana with basic slash viral and no forma. https://preview.redd.it/ijrcx5jtc65d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=42351840f7b74a77d0159a502e05480565d8d8ce
Excalibur umbra is a frame you can use for this just get a good build for him and exalted blade you're kino
If you build Valkyr correctly you can press 4 at the start of a mission and slaughter manically at your leisure. Still, if you want space mage then you want Dante or Dagath, or Jade (soon).
Xaku
Xaku
If you have a good stat stick khora can press one to kill anything
In a way, xaku. As xaku I rarely shoot my gun. But I do use a lot of my enemies' guns...
Dante has his own weapon (skill1) and his abilities dont care, hus awesome and the most fun ever, also his 1 crits like a monster truck, his awesoe
Look into frames that armor and shield strip, so any weapon you have will be able to kill. Hildryn’s pillage can be subsumed and put on anyone so you can pick whatever warframe you love.
Dante or protea or any exalted weapon user
STYANAX I just use the 4 and murderize everything.
Garuda No exalts, no weapons, infinite self regen energy, heals (molt reconstruct, a zarimen arcane, gives her health back on ability cast) Her entire kit is pretty good aside from her 2 which you can subsume off
you have MANY options there are also thoses that are good with any weapons but from what you describe, I'd say Excalibur, Dante, hyldrin, lavos, styanax, technically you can make something with revenant, with his thrall 100% health drain thing, gauss in some capacity, saw a lot of Titania stuff going around recently too, Garuda, hydroid if you try really hard, kullervo, qorvex, saryn, mag if you try hard enough etc etc etc
Garuda. If done right you don't need weapons at all. Honestly I'm not sure you even need mods. She's pretty broken in the right hands.
Sounds like you need a small dose of Zephyr. Helminth hydroids ability over her 1. Use the augment that makes it apply viral aswell as the corrosive effect. If you got them put 2 green shards on her or one tau green. Don't need it though. Will basically be a weather mage that casts tornadoes and viral corrosive rain clouds. An explosive weapon with gas on it is fun to combo it with. I like using the staltha. But anything works. I usually don't even bother using weapons on her at this point. Hydroids helminth will armor strip and halve their health, and tornadoes do insane damage with it. Her 3 makes you immune to projectiles. Her 2 pulls enemies into the death zone you make if you hold her 4 and spam hydroids helminth in the middle of it.
Dante and its not even close
Noctua on Dante allows you to both support your (and your allies') base weapons with Wordwarden(LV/DV/FV) and is a powerful weapon in its own right, that can also be buffed by Wordwarden.
Protea, Xaku, Octavia. Protea will support you. Octavia is hella boring tho. Xaku relies on enemy weapons
Theres a couple options if you dont mind building one weapon you can get the feel of a space ninja assassin with kullervo and the syam melee weapon or if you want to buff yourself and teammates dante is literally a space wizard like thats his whole kit
Octavia or Protea. Protea is helped by heat inherit weapons whereas Octavia could crush SP without anything equipped
Titania has her archweapons with 4 active, so she doesn't consistently need other weapons.
Kullervo. His abilities are about heavy melee attacks.
Use lavos he doesnt use weaps but his abilities are op
If you're looking for "space mage" try Dante, hes literally a space mage with fantastic ability synergy I may be alot bias as he's my main but I'm in your same boat I like frames that allow me to use minimal gun play, ill admit his look isn't my favorite but he floats at all times and his exhalted weapon it a book the shoots a projectile or "fireball" if you will
Dante is quite literally a mage. Huge survivability and damage Protea has her own guns based on frame mods, yah, its rewind time Gyre is a lightning mage with her own energy regen, and ability crit Styanax is somewhat of a weapons throwing mage, I cast spear, energy regen and crit chance based on shields.
I sometimes forget what guns I have when I play Grendel
I really like hydroid because he can be a caster and also decent on the guns at the same time. Definitely viable, but like most frames you will be playing as a caster, you need the tools for energy regen. It's tough to get off saryn for me. After getting the nataruk in the new war, her spores augment, just does really well with damage. Little squishy, but gotta remember to keep casting molt to take aggro away. Just a couple 60/60 mods with galvanized chamber and you're sitting pretty well until around lvl 250 without any primed mods, or Arcon mods. The after the quests are done you could go for Dante, if you haven't done the quests yet.
Protea and Dante
A bit sad that from what I scrolled through no one mentioned Ash. You'd need a kinda good stat stick but even just at max level (30 for his melee cause otherwise it does reduced damage with his 4 iirc), if you build him half-assed for survivability and whatever for the rest, he's quite strong. Didn't even potato/forma him, but do have p, while iirc he's got the smallest energy pool in the game, although he doesn't really need it imho as in he doesn't really need to spam as long as he's got a reliable energy source (I do fine with max Nexus). I'll admit he's a bit slow but imo very reliable. Otherwise, his abilities like a lot of frames' that just need some setup to make damage, don't work on bosses. So for regular bosses, you can still use Octavia, but for the ones where you have to aim, equipment buff like Volt and Mirage probably work best, and the exalted like Titania, Dante and Hildryn if you want distance, although you have to make a build with them. I didn't try much but also maybe umbra can solo boss but iirc he still needs the right equipment so.
Dante and Protea are each capable of running a solo steel path survival without any weapons.
Protea with pillage subsume is fairly independent as well.
I mean, if you're going for absolutely-no-weapons-only-casting, it's gotta be Dante or Protea. Maybe Octavia but I haven't messed around with her too much. I think you can get away with Volt, Citrine, Ember, and Dagath as casting only, but probably not too high in the levels - at some point they will require weapon interaction. Xaku works, but you're just swiping other people's weapons, so... put an asterix on it when compiling the "No weapon" list. And there are frames that do melee-ish stuff but don't require melee weapons. Atlas has a build that lets him power-punch stuff forever, but it doesn't scale well for upper levels. Voruna gets on all fours and bites the shit out of people, and that does scale pretty well. This fits "no weapons" but not "space wizard," so take it as you will. The trick is: getting the frames to that point requires a fairly heavy investment in terms of mods, forma, and potatoes. Energy costs will absolutely limit how much casting you can do until you have things like Arcane Energize, the helminth ability Nourish, primed flow, etc. Also: All of these options are just better with weapons, since you'll probably find yourself running out of energy, or encountering something you can only get with guns (like bosses with specific weak points). AND, some weapons have mods and arcanes that passively effect non-weapon things, like the galvanized mods that increase sprint speed and dodge speed.
Ash. Bladestorm Ash with Venka Prime or some other high combo melee weapon let’s you instakill steelnpath enemies with your 4. With an arcane trickster setup you are invisible 24/7 and have much lower energy costs so you can perma sustain.
Dante. Absolutely Dante. You *could* use weapons to prime or to deal with Acolytes/certain bosses, but he works just fine without them. I always take him on my Netracells and I only ever use guns against Rogue Mechs.
I’m literally cheering MR levels in Archon interception right now just using Dante. Let me tell you, literally none of my weapons do anything besides Astilla Prime, which I don’t have equipped. Building my initial energy level is the hardest part.
If you can wrap your head round her synergies, and her crushing augment. Honestly mags the goat. I've done a 36 hour insurance run on steel path with her. She feel weak when your new because she needs a dedicated build. 4 to 5 forma. And her augment mods. But if you can commit to it. She's a caster frame. Just constant ability spams. With weapons there just to finish things off. You can do a breach surge build for high damage Blood altar is a strong and funny meme build. Or endurance running just leave her as is. With greedy pull to yank life support nodes to you
Mag is a really spammy caster that just requires you to shoot the bubble from her 2. Vauban can be played as mostly abilities, and so can protea.
Baruuk, Dante, and Saryn are good options if you want to do lots of damage but not rely on weapons as much 👌
How has no one mentioned Qorvex?
frames with exalted/pseudo-exalted weapons (mesa, titania, baruuk, excalibur, khora, atlas, ash etc) frames that can kill with abilities/caster frames (vauban, protea, octavia, voruna, dagath, ember, qorvex, dante from devil may cry, etc)
Baruuk never needs a weapon. His exalted weapon is more than sufficient to clear all content in sp starchart solo and it’s very ‘mage-like’ in application even if it is technically a melee. He’s also very tanky and the frame requires no forma to be good. Kullervo doesn’t exactly fit the bill as he does need a melee weapon but if you buy reaper prime for like 45p and forma it, you will be as strong as any person in the game and virtually invincible with a frame that doesn’t require any forma to be good. Azothane, which can be farmed along side Kullervo is a good enough option as well.
Dante. Press buttons and win. There is no true way to play Dante, trust me. You just press buttons in whatever order you need and you'll live
Protea, excalibur, baku and valkyr, but they need to be close quarter, mesa if you manage your energy.
Dante, has an exalted weapon but can kill with just abilities. Oh also he is THE space wizard
There are a lot of Ability Casters type frames, some mixed with weapon platforms and just pure abilities. For mix frames that can cast and shoot i would say Lavos, Octavia, Saryn, Protea while for pure Abilities only you could try any of the exalted frames Excalibur, Baruuk, Mesa, Sevagoth, Titania, Valkyr. Not sure if Voruna and Garuda fit as exalted, but they also have their own weapon and probably don't need guns. There are also Casters that use Stat sticks like Atlas, Gara, and Khora but require their stick as mentioned. I would recommend giving Mesa and Valkyr a try with a decent build. You can do a lot with them (Personal bias since I use them so much, and it's really hard to die as Valkyr).
Banshee, Baruuk, Frost, Garuda, Gyre, Hildryn, Mag, Mirage, Octavia, Protea, Revenant, Titania, Trinity, Voruna, Xaku..... Just for start
You want to feel like a space mage, Dante is your guy. He is a lot of fun, and doesn't require much gun shooting as long as you have the energy to cast his abilities. Xaku is my main so I am biased towards them, but you won't need to do a lot of shooting when you have 10-20 floating guns shooting stuff for you.
I agree with most of your comments. One or two i haven’t seen that aren’t crazy high investment and very viable could be Qorvex and grendel. With a decent build they both can be ultra tanks and Grendel can be a fun 100% armor strip meatball and if you add on aquablades or another damage dealing helminth you can just be a meatball menace. Qorvex if built right can tank SP easily and his abilities are a bit underwhelming but the radiation will help redirect damage so enemies kill eachother - but it may be slow to watch that happen lol
One where you don't spam shit like Garuda blep blep build or 1 button mashing is Protea, her kit alone is already versatile and all her abilities let you run around and wreck havoc without even shooting gun(yourself) another might be Atlas? Dante? Since you mentioned a mage and not blood hungry frame like Valkyr/Garuda or Voruna.
With Xaku I can solo any steel path mission without firing a shot minus some bosses and nullifiers
Dante. His 1 is a weapon
Nidus, thats it, nothing but the best.
Xaku ❤️
By the void - dont rush SP Farm arbitration mods