[Chromatic Blade bug?]

I have to agree, the point I'm making becomes kinda moot given only 2 of your procs require re-applying - yes, they are sustainable, I was wrong here. However, I can't get behind your reasoning. Let's see - you have a little under 76% chance of applying 4 procs over you previously mentioned 6 seconds of time (which is a lot), provided you're forcing Impact at least once, which you should - as in you have a pretty big chance not to apply it at all. To do so, you're cutting your damage to about 60% of what you could've had. Okay, you had that argument about x4 combo vs x3 combo (which is weird because both builds will stall at x5 eventually - given the levels we're talking about - but whatever) - even then we are talking about dealing only 80% of Chromatic damage. And most importantly:

4 hours ago, Xzorn said:

You don't need to land every proc for Standard EB to beat Chromatic. You only need 3.

Chromatic has access to 4 status procs. 3 if you don't run Blast. Up to 6 if you don't run Naramon. It also lands them in the very first few hits.

So, as a matter of fact, Corrosive + Blast Chromatic Exalted Blade outperforms the build you've presented in every single way on every single level of content. Without throwing in another elemental your build doesn't have even theoretical conditions when it can outperform the augment.

4 hours ago, Xzorn said:

It might be beyond reason for you

"lemme lowkey insult you"

Nah, darling, I went higher than that.

4 hours ago, Xzorn said:

Considering you CAN perform better without Chromatic Augment and

That's the problem - you can't. And for 4CP/Infested for players for whom going that far is "beyond reason" Gas Chromatic Blade will always outperform regular EBlade.

And if we are speaking about overextended missions which are so "beyond reason", running a 4CP squad already implies some sort of synergy. And unless all of you are running melee Naramon for some reason - your group is likely to have another means of survival resulting in you being able to pick Madurai which makes all of your calculations largely irrelevant. For solo non-Grineer runs, there's a moment that all factions have some units with a bit of armor on them. If you went over level 500 and you don't have Corrosive - you'll be forced to avoid these enemies due to being effectively unable to kill them - so we are back to the point of your build being completely inferior to a Corrosive + Blast build for every single purpose. Corrosive + Blast is also the best damage combo against Infested.

4CP Naramon with Viral + Fire or Elec have more ground to stand on given it's a 5 status total against 3, however that would be -1 permanent proc from the calculations, yet another mod to be replaced with a dual-stat and +1 proc to affect your chances of both getting and sustaining the Condition Overload bonus. Meanwhile, augment will have much more reliable Viral proc, considerably higher base damage for the purpose of final scaling, consistent 100% uptime of damage bonus on enemies pretty much right away and overall better innate damage multipliers against beefiest enemies (as Viral is 75% against cloned flesh and you can make over 75% of your damage Viral). I ain't calculating this, but just from a glance, I doubt that regular EBlade will be able to outperform Chromatic on the average. And don't know if any of these can be better than an optimized Gas EBlade build.

All of that also assumes that despite being in a 4CP Naramon (as in "no need for defense frames") squad, your teammates do literally nothing. Because for some reason, there's no Equinox to put a slash proc on literally everything and no Saryn to viral stuff allowing you to run a superior Corrosive + Blast build. There's also no Banshee to make this argument pointless.

I grow tired of this, so here's the deal - you can convince me there's literally a single incredibly niche way of regular EBlade outperforming augment in a non-optimized squad doing ridiculously long endless if you do the math for a) Regular Viral + Fire/Elec EBlade outperforming Chromatic Viral + Elec while counting all of the factors in. 30% Power Strength disadvantage for Chromatic seems to be reasonable if you give both build Blind Rage, Energy Conversion, Transient and Power Drift, not really if you don't use any of these; b) The same EBlade can outperform 100% Gas proc chance Chromatic Blade - might as well figure out the most optimized build for it.

Otherwise, we can stand each to his own opinion, but I'll still think the idea behind a dedicated build for doing endless with zero synergies in a squad is stupid.

[Chromatic Blade bug?]

54 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

When you melee, which is the play style given Drifting Contact, you hit once with the weapon and once with the wave. Bringing the status probability to 45.24% at 11.6% elemental and 13% physical respectively. So with roughly 45% probability of a status effect occurring in melee per swing you will have a 56% probability of getting at least 3 status procs over 6 swings (2 seconds) or 90% probability over 10 swings (3.2 seconds). Now go all the way to 6 seconds worth of attacking which is the lowest duration of any status effect and you have 18 total swings with a 90% probability of 6 or more status procs which is plenty since you only need one status effect over Chromatic to beat it, given duplicate procs.

That's mathematical fallacy. Excalibur up-close doesn't have doubled status proc chance - he has double strikes. Using doubled status chance in your calculations makes them inherently incorrect. The "about 30 up-close EBlade hits" I've mentioned means it takes 60 combined swings and waves to reach 88% chance of landing every single proc on the enemy on average still assuming all of them have infinite duration while status proc chance is 32% and not 26%.

54 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

I don't find it unrealistic at all. I build to fight lvl 400+ enemies. I'm an endurance runner, that's how I play. If you don't play that way, it's fine but Standard EB has the capacity to double the damage output of Chromatic.

Let's pretend I've never been there and don't know how long it takes for Excal to take down a level 400+ unarmored unit.

Spoiler

Oh, wait.

There was a reason I said "700+", and even then it'll be limited to lucky power spikes as opposed to sustained average DPS.

There are also factors if we are assuming you're playing in a 4CP squad, all of which don't work in favor of regular EBlade.

54 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

I'm fairly sure Gas counts as one status effect (Toxic) though I haven't tested it much.

I was referencing Impact.

[Bringing life to "bad" status procs]

The problem with Magnetic proc lies in the fact that not only the proc itself is effectively worthless - the damage type is also bad. Corpus being already paper-thin as they are, do not really require a "shield-focused" damage paired with a shield removing proc. Were they to have like 10 times the amount of shields they currently have - even then it would push Magnetic from being "total garbage" into being just "bad". The fact Magnetic proc is naturally paired with Gas doesn't help either, as Gas procs will kill shielded enemies faster than magnetic procs will get rid of their shields - why would a player even bother offsetting their Gas procs with Magnetic ones then? Not to mention, that both proc and the damage serve one single purpose of removing shields and become effectively worthless after the shield is removed. Corrosive might be doing effectively the same thing, however removing shields at a slightly faster pace can't really compete with even partially stripped armor that can multiply all damage done to an enemy by several times.

I would rather see Magnetic proc doing some real work like indeed jamming weapons of affected targets. Unlike "-n% enemy damage" rendering enemy's range capability completely useless for a prolonged duration might be actually helpful. The damage itself also should stop being so horrendously useless.

Addressing IPS procs with their x4 weight, I see no real reason why should only Slash be an actually strong proc, while all the other remain utter garbage.
Let's take Puncture proc. It does nothing unless applied to the frame - then it hardly does anything anyway. Even if it to be ramped up to something like -95% - it'll only become remotely useful if we get some sort of Amprex-like weapon but for puncture and even then it will be "meh" at best.

Puncture should be a damage dealing proc, and there's no real reason for it not to be. Let puncture pierce all sorts of enemy defense - armor and shields - when it procs. Make only some % of the damage do that if 100% is too much. Free punch through on proc can also be implemented - just remove Puncture from various grenade launchers and such.

And if Impact isn't a damage proc on its own, it can be made useful by giving it the privilege of rolling independently from other procs, thus not affecting their chances.
For example, let's take an imaginary 50/10/40 IPS weapon with 90 Fire damage and 20% status chance. Currently, it would proc Fire in 3.67% of hits, Slash in 6.53%, Puncture in 1.63%, and Impact in 8.17%. Were Impact to made independent, thus not affecting other proc weights while maintaining its own, the procs would go as: Fire - 6.2%, Slash - 11%, Puncture - 2.8% with every single hit having an independent 8.17% chance of proccing Impact either solo or on top of another proc. This way, the amount of Impact damage a weapon deals will reflect its capability of stun-locking targets without making high-Impact weapons terrible for status builds.

[Chromatic Blade bug?]

16 hours ago, Xzorn said:

Don't use Chromatic for unarmored enemies like CPx4 or Infested if you have Condition Overload since this mod will massively increase your damage output with each additional status effect applied and the standard EB is capable of 4 different status effects apposed to 2. That's up to +655% Total Damage compared to +256%

This is a false argument.

With augment, EBlade pretty much guarantees up to 4 status procs after a single combo while still providing mod space for Condition Overload, Drifting Contact, Primed Fury and Berserker (PPP is a given). With regular EBlade, you can get up to 6 procs all which will have minuscule (5.5~7%, a tiny bit more if you find space for Drifting) chances of occurring per hit, while the usage of 4 dual-stats becomes practically mandatory effectively removing one of the previously mentioned mods, all of which provide a huge DPS increase - added on top of the fact 4 dual-stats are already a DPS decrease compared to 3x90%. Meanwhile, mod space that'll be freed up by removing Chromatic Blade will add up to something like ~18% base damage increase.

Now, take into account the fact most of the status procs have limited duration time, so having a reliable full proc uptime on a regular EBlade with 34% status chance is realistically impossible. However, even if we assume the opposite - merely activating all of the procs will take about 30 up-close EBlade hits. Meanwhile, augmented EBlade will provide 2-3 procs on the very first hits while adding 4th one by the end of a combo while allowing for the uptime that's as close to 100% as possible.

Not to mention, all of this completely disregards the DPS provided by the procs themselves. Who knows, it's probably worth going Crit + pure Gas in a 4CP squad, given Condition Overload will still provide x2.56 damage increase.

So, the bottom line is - it's unrealistic for regular Exalted Blade to achieve anywhere close DPS to that of Chromatic Blade, and even if that was possible - it would only be applicable to enemies of level 700+

 

 

[Should tennogen profile icons be a thing?]

Yes, I quite want a pony icon.

[Atterax Build]

1 hour ago, (PS4)lhbuch said:

There was. Never tested again afterJanuary this year, but Maiming Strike was scaling with Blood Rush. The bug had been fixed at that point then it came back. Most probably fixed right now.

Maiming Strike always scaled with Blood Rush and it still scales now. It was never "fixed". The only change happened to Maiming Strike since it was implemented is the change of the activation requirements from "sliding" to "spin attack".

[Atterax Build]

1 hour ago, (PS4)lhbuch said:

there was a bug with maiming strike

There are no bugs with maiming strike. It's just a strong mod that can make any weapon with enough range late-game viable. Meanwhile, Atterax not only has incredible range - it also possess great crit stat.

Also, people weren't silent about that. I've made a thread showing Maiming Strike performance on the very next day after Shadow Debt was launched, but back then most of the people were sure there's nothing above 200% crit chance because they read wiki instead of trying things on their own.

But, yeah, Atterax can be decent enough with a regular Blood Rush + Primed Reach build.

[Chromatic Blade+Mire elemental question]

30 minutes ago, Sir_Alex_Traffo said:

Is it just a UI bug or the guy got the mechanics wrong?

It's not a UI bug because UI only shows you Mire's stats - it doesn't account for the element of your Chromatic Blade.

So, when you have a Blast combo on Mire (making Blast + Toxin) and Electric on Chromatic Blade, activating EBlade will result in a proper Corrosive + Blast combo.

15 minutes ago, -VV-william said:

 

Exalted Blade is not affected by the equipped melee weapon's stats

 

Wrong. There are a few weapons that affect EBlade, Mire being one of them.

[Long and boring rambling regarding Excalibur]

On 6/18/2017 at 6:26 AM, Xionyde134 said:

I personally haven't had problems with bringing him to Sortie level missions. I even brought him to the 3x Physical Enhancement sorties we got for 3 days straight after his augment came out and had little to no problems surviving because of Slash Dash paired with Life Strike.

I agree that Excalibur generally "can" take hit against level 100 enemies - even on x3. I even remember myself doing T4S solo and taking hits (a single hit, actually - the second will kill Excal) from over level 100 Bombards with x3 damage buff prior to Focus becoming a thing. What I'm addressing is the way Excalibur gets bursted down when a bunch of high-level enemies by a chance decides to shoot him all at once. I had experience of being killed from full health between consecutive Slash Dashes - which is a less than a second wide window. 
Excalibur is designed around outplaying his opponents and has a great toolkit for that. However, the current game state doesn't really allow this playstyle to be reliable due to the mix of both numbers and various obnoxious mechanics.
I've done plenty of amplified damage sorties that were a breeze, but so I've done plenty of ones the were disgustingly frustrating. Not hard or challenging - only frustrating. Enemy composition and spawn rates that can and eventually will completely screw you over - these differ from sortie to sortie. Sometimes you won't even need the enemies to have a damage boost to roll Excal over.
Of course, there's a rather simple counter play to that - not rushing in melee. Excalibur will have no problems surviving if he maintains his distance, however doing so kinda defeats the whole idea of the frame, as there are much better options for mid-range. Not to mention, DE likes to pretend they want Excalibur to go melee.

On 6/18/2017 at 6:26 AM, Xionyde134 said:

Also, there are a lot of "glass cannon" frames that only excel at end game, like for example Banshee. I think that Excal is beefy not so that he can take enemies past lvl 150, but so that newer players have an easier time with the game and hopefully play for longer.

Banshee is funny because unlike Excalibur she has no problems of getting her job done. Banshee is an example of a glass-cannon concept being done right - the excessive firepower she possesses feels counterbalanced with her fragility as opposed to the feeling of doing something she isn't supposed to do. Also, people love to complain about how Banshee sucks and dies all the time.
Meanwhile, the early game doesn't need a "beefy" frame, especially given the fact Mag is also an option for the early game. Even without any kind of sustain, going through the early game is fairly easy.

On 6/18/2017 at 6:26 AM, Xionyde134 said:

The whole EB vs Vay Hek or Lephantis doesn't really mean anything when you consider that most damaging abilities don't work on these bosses either. That interaction, or lack thereof, and nullifiers were created so that players couldn't just steamroll through content without using the vast collection of guns in the game.

And why is Vay Hek universally considered to be a terrible boss, I wonder? Game design decisions aside, most of the damaging abilities in the game don't require the level of dedication to the build EBlade requires nor they have such a strong counter synergy with the regular weaponry. Generally, abilities used complementary to the guns as opposed to being the primary/only source of the damage. Exceptions to that principle are usually AoE nukes that can be specced for. However, these builds are niche and primarily used for either low-level farm or killing hordes of popcorn enemies - which is pretty much the opposite of the "focus priority targets" idea. Of course, there are a few abilities which fall precisely into the same category with Exalted Blade. However, them having the same problems as EBlade isn't something good as all of these abilities should have means of dealing with "hit me here" bosses - I'm only talking about Excaliburs because it's an Excal thread.
And the nullifiers' concept only reinforces this point, actually - Exalted Blade can deal with nullifiers just fine.

On 6/18/2017 at 10:39 AM, Djego27 said:

About your current post:

To be honest, I have trouble following you here. You seem to have a flawed idea regarding the direct and indirect changes Excal received, as what you're saying is not what really happened.
For example, let's take the duration/efficiency change - it was a major nerf to Excalibur who used to run with high negative duration builds. The balanced all-rounder build ended up being fine due to the realization Efficiency wasn't actually capped at 175%, but the Power Strength builds were rendered useless. Spin Blind change did the same with Narrow Minded Strength builds, however, they were re-enabled in solo by the Naramon change that made it force stealth multipliers onto everything.
The duration/efficiency change was an objective nerf mechanics-wise, actually. The reason being, while positive duration has diminishing returns for decreasing skill costs, negative duration increases costs exponentially. Only the frames who were running Duration builds already were buffed by that change.
The same goes for the wave/blind change. The damage fall of on waves forced no one into going melee - if it forced people to do anything, that would be stopping playing Excal. Meanwhile, slapping energy cost onto Spin Blind not only removed a good reason for going into close range, to begin with - it actively punishes players for using a basic mobility option.

Also, I believe we have vastly differing views on the game while your main arguments are directed not onto the Excalibur himself but on the game mechanics and, for some reason, player base.
Fixing mechanics is a long process, not to mention some of the said mechanics exist for a reason - giving reasonable tools to face the mechanics is much faster and can often be better than removing/changing the mechanics themselves as well as fail-proofing against future game changes. And I honestly don't see any reason to increase current Excal's sustained damage.

23 hours ago, Vanrythzx said:

 

i think his other abilites should synergy's with EB, giving them special effects while EB is active.
changing his other abilites won't do anything, i still wouldn't use them, EB is too strong, why whould you use any other ability of his if you just can onehit everything regardless of the enemy lvl? 

 

Well, RJ was used back then in Draco days. However, there are many ways of making useful abilities. Slash Dash is useless damage-wise in comparison to Exalted Blade, however, it's a great mobility tool and an amazing panic button. Radial Blind is a great CC and would've been widely used even if it didn't provide damage increase and finisher prompt. Were RJ (or any other skill, were RJ to be changed) to provide a decent lingering defensive effect for Excal, players would consider using it.

[Endgame isn't that hard to add in, just rebalance existing stuff.]

3 hours ago, Duster_casting said:

Making endgame content isn't hard

Yet, you had failed to provide an adequate suggestion.

[Long and boring rambling regarding Excalibur]

Let's start with a bit of an introduction to better show the context of this post. Feel free to skip it, though, as it isn't that important to the topic.

Spoiler

More than half a year ago I've made a thread regarding my view of Excalibur's position in the game and the complete irrelevance he has fallen into due to the set of changes he and the game received during the prior year or two. Even after that point, some of the changes to the game had continued to reinstitute the problem I had perceived.

However, after the release of the Chromatic Blade, I can finally say that DE have addressed the problem I've been talking about.

I consider the augment to be a beautiful solution to the situation, and I really hope that it will stay that way (as I hope the thing that's "treated as a bug at this time" will).

So, I have to put a disclaimer that I do consider Excalibur to be in a rather good spot currently and what I want to talk about are possible changes to reinforce his identity and to address some of the well-known problems he has, as opposed to a general "we need to fix him" statement. 
Another important moment, I will be talking about a high-level and highly optimized playstyle - balancing Excalibur around the Mercury had never produced anything good. He is nicely balanced to go through low levels as a starter frame with no access to optimized gear - expecting him not to steamroll through said content when properly geared is weird, to say the least.

What I want to talk about here is a number of balance, identity, and QoL issues of Excalibur. To put them into an understandable perspective, let me first share my vision of what Excalibur currently is - based on my own experience of playing Excalibur for quite a long time:

Spoiler

Excalibur is an all-around universal frame, possessing some niche tools for every mission in the game - similarly to the vast majority of other frames. What he currently truly excels at is dealing moderately focused damage to priority targets while still having relatively high AoE clearing potential - all of which is achieved via Exalted Blade.
Now, if you're going to argue that his AoE potential should not be addressed as merely "high", I'll allow myself to correct you by stating Exalted Blade is physically incapable of getting even remotely close to the AoE potential not only of skills - but even of regular melee weapons. To put it into simpler terms: Exalted Blade ain't going to outperform Maiming Atterax at AoE clearing - unless we're talking about some seriously overstayed missions, which is also a topic I want to address.

Judging from this position, I see Excalibur as either a damage-dealer/priority targets killer at the Sortie-level content or a frame with a great scaling into overextended missions. I am not saying that he can't or shouldn't do other content - like any other frame he's perfectly fine with deviating away from his "forte". However, I still believe that it is the "forte" what supposed to be in the center of the frame's identity.

And within this "identity" I see a couple of issues that are rather frustrating than game-breaking. Let's start with a well-known issue: Excalibur's durability

Spoiler

 

For a frame that only starts to shine on a high-level content, Excalibur is awfully frail. People sometimes address him as a "glass-canon" which is pretty hard to argue against in the context I'm talking about. However, I'm absolutely certain that Excalibur wasn't made with a "glass-canon" archetype in mind. Not only Excalibur is one of more durable frames - most of the frames that excel him in durability - especially against sustained damage - were either introduced relatively recently or had received new mechanics which enabled that.

And the important moment here, when frames do excel Excalibur in durability - they tend to do so by a landslide. Why is it important? Well, because while Excalibur never was a "tank" frame per say - he always had enough durability to trade blows with his enemies. During the powercreep of the last few years, he lost that aspect of his identity - that's why when a frame is decided to be able to "trade hits" it receives vastly superior endurance stats compared to Excalibur.
And I am not trying to bash on powercreep here - it's vital for a game like Warframe. Lack of progression makes the game stall. However, while powercreep should be opening new limits to push for, it shouldn't be killing aspects of the game.

So, offensively Excalibur is designed to be good for high-level content, however defensively he isn't capable of facing the said content.
Invulnerability of Slash Dash and CC potential of Radial Blind are great aspects used to reinforce the idea of Excalibur going toe-to-toe with his enemies, but the "used to" is the key part here. Slash Dash and Radial Blind will ultimately fail to save him from getting bursted down in a fraction of a second - and when it happens it is simply frustrating. These tools are designed to be used on reaction to what's happening on the screen - there's no room for a reaction when Excal is getting one-shotted. And it's not like the player is being punished for trying to jump over their head - it's the opposite, actually. They are just doing the only content where Excalibur is an objectively better choice than yet another frame with a stick.
And because of how the scaling in this game works, this isn't a problem Excalibur can realistically solve through modding. He is lacking the necessary tools that would allow the mods to scale properly. Going for the 5-mod survival combo might make surviving marginally easier, however, it won't significantly affect the level of content where his survivability will ultimately fall off. Not to mention, it will dramatically reduce his actual combat potential as Excalibur already has quite a few mods that can be considered "mandatory" essentially voiding the point of using the frame in the first place.

So, how the game addresses this issue? Revives and Naramon. While one-shots happen more often than they should - they are rare enough to be dealt with by just getting revived by other players or by some of player's 5/6 self-revives. I don't know about you, but for me dying is a frustrating experience. Especially when dying can't really be "git gud" around.
Regarding Naramon, I believe there are no people left in this game who don't agree on the fact invisibility is completely and utterly broken. Hence, a Focus school that gives universal access to invisibility is supposed to be broken too. Well, it's half-true. Making a broken mechanics universally available allows to cover some glaring holes of other broken universal mechanics. To put it in different words: "A frame can't survive in arbitrary content? Run Naramon, duh".
Now, I'm among the people who actually likes Naramon as far as Focus schools go (ahem, mostly garbage, ahem), but I don't think that over-reliance on Naramon for the sake of living up to his own identity is good for Excalibur. Naramon is great for effectively enabling viable melee builds for normally squishy frames thus allowing the builds to exits. But the Naramon being a required tool for Excalibur to fulfill his main role looks pretty weird to me. I have no problems with Naramon being required for Excalibur to do over 2 hours of solo Survival - it isn't the regular game content, it's something that Naramon enables the player to do - to combat the scaling system and see how far they can get. Some people, myself included, like it. However not using Naramon whenever applicable during, say, Sorties will give Excalibur so much unnecessary headache it isn't really worth it.

 

So, the bottom line is: Excalibur technically can go through the missions he's supposed to be good at, but this process itself is rather frustrating and repetitive.

Another issue regarding the whole idea of being a priority target killer is the fact many bosses don't actually fall into the list of priority targets to kill which is rather counter-intuitive. 

Spoiler

I believe, any Excalibur player who've tried to fight Vay Hek or Lephantis quickly realized that EBlading them down is nigh impossible. Both waves and blade attacks refuse to hit vulnerable spots most of the time, and by "most" I mean "over 95%".
And given how much dedication Exalted Blade build requires and how little synergy Excalibur has with the usage of regular weapons, I refuse to consider the necessity of swapping weapons to be a good design, especially given the horrendous implementation of said swapping in Warframe and all the penalties that come with it for Excal.

 

Yet again, it isn't actually a "problem". Ultimately, the player can trash the idea of being an anime swoosh-swoosh swordsman, just swap to a gun and shoot whatever shiny spot they're supposed to shoot - likely with the help of teammates. That's unless they'll try to solo Sortie Vay Hek - then they're in for some quality time.

The last thing I would like to talk about is Excalibur's skill set and more specifically - the place Radial Javelin holds in it. I believe, most if not all players - Excal mains or not - agree on the fact Radial Javelin doesn't fit Excalibur's skill set, has no synergy with other skills and is rather useless.

Spoiler

Were you to ask me a year ago - "should Radial Javelin be buffed/changed/removed?" - I would likely answer "no". A year ago, there still was a reason for Radial Javelin to exist - two, actually. One being old Draco, another being old Void Defense.
Now, it doesn't really matter whether or not you personally like either of these - the fact remains, RJ build was useful. Not so much anymore.

It's not like the mission archetypes themselves are gone - it's about the necessity of high performance and optimization. A highly-optimized RJ-centered squad could produce anywhere from 30% to 100% better results compared to its more easily sustainable alternatives. My personal best was a bit over 1500 kills during a single cap2 wave (getting a thousand considered to be really good already). Yes, RJ Excal was very hard for EV to sustain, but the results were worth it, so people knew how to do it. This in its turn enabled the opportunity of using a similar squad for Void Defence (including T4D) which was the fastest way of doing 20 waves by far. And the fact EVs usually were able to sustain RJ, one could've even taken RJ to a resource farming (because killing three times as fast is better than having double drops) and have outstanding results.
However current "loot caves" are pretty far from being as profitable as old Draco was and neither they are as well suited for RJ to be the main DPS. And even if we assume he still can be top-DPS (which is possible but is unlikely) provided a near-perfect performance from the whole squad - the difference isn't really worth the effort anymore. And given RJ is out of the meta - you can't really expect an arbitrary EV to be able to sustain him, so all the other usages for the build are also quite limited. And even taking him to the Void Defense is quite questionable, as there's no real point in running quick 20-40 waves of Void Defence anymore - even if for the fun of the mission type itself.

So, the usefulness of RJ is limited to low-level Exterminations and why would you even bother having a dedicated separate build for that? Augment too is too bad to be good.

This concludes the list of my concerns for Excalibur and my thoughts regarding them.

Continuing to the actual suggestions to address said concerns:

There are numerous ways of balancing Excalibur's survivability ranging from tweaking his attributes to changing his skills.
I personally always felt that protection provided by Exalted Blade falls short far too often for a supposedly melee-oriented frame - we even had patch notes stating "Excal should go melee, so we nerf his melee options" (I didn't get it back then, I don't get it now, but whatever).

Adding some extra protection to Exalted Blade is one of the ways to address the issue.

Currently, Exalted Blade provides 60% damage reduction in an arc in front of Excalibur - much less than 60% from explosives. As far as I'm aware, manual blocking protects you from knockdowns but doesn't provide any extra damage reduction.

A possible suggestion here is to change EBlade defenses. For example - Exalted Blade could provide constant damage reduction from all sources and directions while having an active parry in the frontal arc. Let's say it'll be 50% total damage reduction and 75% parry - it'll add up to Excalibur having effectively doubled EHP during Exalted Blade while receiving only one-eighth of the damage directly from front - which puts the damage reduction slightly below the likes of what Trin, Nekros, or Nidus have while being far less reliable but paired with a powerful damage-dealing ability. Manual blocking in its turn could just provide the good old 100% damage reduction because honestly, it won't break anything. AoE partially bypasses block anyway.

Eventual (haha) Umbra release might be an opportunity to tweak with Excalibur's base attributes be it HP, Armor, or both.

Another option is to make use of Radial Javelin. The community had suggested countless possible changes to RJ - some offensive, some defensive, some CC oriented. I personally liked the idea of RJ using up and resetting the combo counter to get an insane one-time power increase (for example, x1.5 enables melee mods for RJ, x2 removes targets limit, x2.5 turns damage into finisher, x3 removes LoS restriction).
However, if we talk about survivability - RJ providing a source of damage resistance might be a good idea. For example, via making use of the actual mechanics in the game and giving Excal some amount of damage reduction for each target hit by RJ - let's say 5%. Though the duration should be like four times of what the augment has or it'll be rather useless (like the augment is).
Or, alternatively, the idea of changing RJ for a sword-barrier (a la Vergil from DMC series) is also quite popular.

If Excalibur receives means of actually surviving the content he's good against - it might be a good opportunity to tune down Excal-Naramon synergy a bit by preventing waves from activating Naramon. Doing it as it is now will be a huge unjustified nerf, but if Excalibur becomes capable of actually getting in on the enemies without dying - it is pretty reasonable.

And finally, regarding the EBlade being effectively useless against some bosses - it might be a good time to finally give Exalted Blade a god-forsaken Charge Attack. Especially if the rumors of Charge Attacks moving to the reload button are true.
To be more specific - Charge Attack for Excalibur could be a thrust that doesn't send waves but instead has a hitscan targeting which would allow Excalibur to attack "sweet spots" of bosses (and headshot regular stuff if the player likes it). I do understand that the thought of a not absolutely useless Charge Attack is quite frightening, but there's a first time for everything.
For the fun factor, it could also have a forced Puncture proc, while pause combo could have a slash one - so switching combos would be actually useful.

So, what I've intended to be just a bunch of quick suggestions somehow ended up being far too long with me going overboard explaining my thought process and reasoning behind these suggestions. It was too late to stop anyway so here you have it.

If there's a single soul who managed to make it through - I would love to hear any of your thoughts, whether you agree with me or not.
 

[Who's the Tankiest of them all?]

3 minutes ago, Alcatraz said:

Wukong can hurt it a little, Valkyr can't even touch it.

Aaand Banshee oneshots it. Banshee - best tank confirmed.

[Who's the Tankiest of them all?]

During the regular content - up to Sorties and Raids - Trin. She can fully sustain herself on 300/300 at any given point no matter what she faces while sustaining her team as a bonus.

[Critical chance stats]

5 hours ago, Dreddeth said:

I feel as though you've missed the point of my remarking upon how the ridiculous RNG involved in Rivens makes them unreliable. You can't actually count on any given Riven mod to be good, or even be applicable to the weapon you might want one for, no matter how many rerolls you make, so holding out for one is just plain naive. You got lucky this roll, but the very nature of Riven mods makes then too inconsistent to rely upon

OP is trying to understand the critical hit mechanics. Rivens are one of the things that can dramatically affect critical hits pushing them into the field OP didn't understand. There's no reason to omit something that dramatically affects a mechanics that's being discussed and the "unreliability" is not an argument here - it completely misses the point of the thread.

It's also a false argument, as for an arbitrary player, the probability of having a Riven that pushes critical chance of a weapon beyond 200% is higher than having an Argon Scope access to which is currently very limited.

[Valkyr Needs a change]

38 minutes ago, Stoner74 said:

Like... 98% of the weapons / frames in the game?

Can you name me a reason an ability weapon with a minuscule range that requires a separate dedicated build for it while effectively gimping your non-ability melee should not fall into the remaining 2%?

[Why is this not nerfed ? Yes synoid simolor]

2 hours ago, Magneu said:

Naramon cheese. You could do this with literally any frame that doesn't rely on abilities for damage.

You know, normally I would've called you ignorant and suggested you try it out for yourself, as very few frames/weapons could've actually done that. However, DE completely broke invisibility recently and at this particular moment what you're saying stands correct.

However, the point here: the game has a lot of mechanics and tools far exceeding Synoid Simulor - Mirage or not. Asking for this weapon to get nerfed only because you're bad enough to consider it overpowered over the other options simply due to being unaware of their existence is silly, to say the least.

Fix the game first, then nerf the only relevant primary weapon.

[Why is this not nerfed ? Yes synoid simolor]

12 minutes ago, xXxBeasTxXx said:

show me :)

Spoiler

 

 

Not signed in

 

[Why is this not nerfed ? Yes synoid simolor]

1 minute ago, xXxBeasTxXx said:

thats just it. you kinda proved my point. 

When i get the gun and forma it i will prove my point and stick it on a lvl 1 frame with only vitality mod and run trough lvl 80 and higher mobs.

 

I did 100 minutes of T4S with unranked Ash in melee. Your point?

[Why is this not nerfed ? Yes synoid simolor]

16 hours ago, xXxBeasTxXx said:

It needs a serious nerf in all aspect of the gun

It doesn't, as even on Mirage it can be easily outperformed by other tools if you aren't bad at the game.

[Oberon doesn't suck! You don't know how to use him!]

10 hours ago, Harper said:

He is a jack of all trades, master of none

He's garbage. Excalibur better than Oberon in every mission that isn't precisely Radiation Sortie Defense. Bless Trinity is better than Oberon in every single mission in the game.

And people who keep saying "Oberon is a jack and isn't godawful" are the main reason he is godawful. He is bad in a team, he's bad solo, he's never in the meta, he misses the balance of this game by a landslide, he feels bad to play due to having abysmally terrible stats for his skillset - especially early on.

Oberon has been in a desperate need of a rework for a few years already - much more than Rhino, Valkyr, Mag, Saryn, Ember and whoever else got one. And the main reason he wasn't reworked is you people who keep saying he isn't complete garbage. But he is. Not a jack of all trades, but just a garbage.

[EBlade Finisher Damage Build]

44 minutes ago, SortaRandom said:

recent hotfix changed it so that hitting enemies with a melee weapon doesn't wipe the stealth multiplier

Yeah, Shadow Step is kinda broken atm. All frames became almost as good as Banshee.

[EBlade Finisher Damage Build]

6 hours ago, SortaRandom said:

Could you elaborate on this a bit? This is my first time hearing that decreasing your elemental weight will decrease your chance of landing a physical proc.

The status weight of IPS damage is four times higher than that of elemental damage. Most of the time total status chance increase from a single dual-stat outweighs the addition of an extra elemental - unless we are talking about near 100% status chances. On Exalted Blade in particular (base status proc chance 10%) every single dual-stat nets in an effective increase of Slash status proc. Not to mention, Blast is godlike on Exalted Blade in prolonged Survivals.

16 hours ago, (PS4)lhbuch said:

Some prefer the Corrosive+Blast status build. Some prefer the Blind+Gas build.

Guess both sides swear by their opinions. 

I use them both.

 

Corrosive + Blast build also utilizes Blind. The problem of the pure Gas EBlade is the resource economy. Gas being garbage damage type on its own results in you resorting to the help of Blind much earlier that you would with Corrosive + Blast combo. Overextended scaling is also worse, compared to Corrosive + Blast build that uses Buzz Kill, unless you aren't going to face any armour on your enemies.

When the resource economy and endless scaling are not a problem - sorties, for example - Gas build is pretty strong. 

[EBlade Finisher Damage Build]

1 hour ago, Theiyre said:

I even just tested in in simulacrum

Then you're doing your testing wrong, unless DE had changed it in like 3 last hotfixes - I've done the same exact testing not so long ago. Neither Radiant Finish nor Savage Silence affect bleed damage. They only affect prompted finisher damage. Not to mention, if Radiant finish were to affect bleed damage, it would change not by a few thousands but by a few orders of magnitude.

1 hour ago, Theiyre said:

is it worth it to take a fury and 1 dual stat mod off for crit?

No. Losing Blast in your combo will make your resource economy dramatically worse and will decrease your Slash proc chance considerably. I would go for Fury even if you don't have a primed one yet. If you want to go crit so much, then remove both Blast dual-stats, so you'll have one less element, and replace it with crit mods. It's a worse option for a prolonged survival, but It's a better one among them. Be prepared to blind a lot, though.

[EBlade Finisher Damage Build]

4 minutes ago, (PS4)joshw1400 said:

If you're gonna use EB don't use IPS mods.

Incorrect.

[Slash Vs. Toxin Stealth DoT]

Any kind of enemy obstruction forces stealth multipliers onto enemies if the player is invisible. Even a knockdown from a blast proc.