Funkenstein

I actually have been doing that recently, although without wrathful advance because I haven't bothered to farm kullervo yet, and the conclusion I've come to is that exalted blade sucks, just using a normal melee like nikana prime with the damage boost from furious javelin is better, and I've subsumed gloom over it. Sure, wrathful saves it, but you have to sacrifice one of his other 3 abilities that are all core to his gameplay. One of the biggest problems right now is lack of additional mod capacity from a stance to make room for the exilus slot, and the lack of being able to slot melee arcanes on the exalted weapon. Also, having to equip more then one augment mod to make a build work is a terrible design on any frame, but especially on ones that have such severe survivability issues like excalibur who require multiple mods to not get constantly downed in high level steel path.

So Tennokai is a pretty amazing system, but I immediately ran into the issue of picking a weapon to build for tennokai on. Sure, there are a lot of sticks that you can hit things with real hard with and get big numbers on the screen, but I was looking for something with more flavor. Out of all of the melee weapons that have additional mechanics, a lot of them just throw out projectiles on either light or heavy attacks which is an improvement on being a normal whacking stick but still fairly boring in my opinion, and frequently these are held back by subpar stats and/or confusing design decisions, examples being the tatsu prime, being one of the worst weapons in a bad weapon class in exchange for having some weird little projectiles that will maybe hit something if you're lucky, or the azothane which is salvageable due to its rather nice heavy attack build but then for a special attack they give it this dinky little AoE that deals 85 heat damage which cannot be scaled up in any way, sure it builds combo, but building combo is something you can also do by just swinging the weapon, which actually does damage. Syam is honestly the closest thing to an actually good weapon in this category, the projectiles are strong despite having worse crit and worse damage type spread then other nikanas. Incarnon melee weapons are if anything, even more disappointing with such an extreme degree of wasted potential. being generally limited to jacked up stats, initial combo, and more projectiles, which are great for making overpowered mindless mashing sticks but still not very interesting to use. The most significant thing any incarnon melee does is act as a stat stick for atlas and khora, aka the ceramic dagger or magistar. Beyond that we have the Hate which is a pretty nice heavy attack spam weapon that for some reason gets projectiles on its light attacks instead of its heavies, and then the praedos which is mostly used as a passive movement buff. I beg the question, why not just make cooler melee weapons that have multi-layered mechanics with high MR requirements so they can actually be good? Please note when when I say "incarnon" in the following section, I don't actually mean an incarnon adapter, as the primary purpose of an incarnon adapter is to give mostly passive stat buffs to weapons that really suck, and neither of the weapons I'm about to use as example require that. Instead I mean it in the context of having a charge-bar under the crosshair that can be activated to change the way the weapon functions, similar to how the grimoire has a charge mechanic but is not an incarnon. Let's take the Ekhein as a recent example. This is a weapon that was used to smash some kind of orokin time travel coffin, so that's a theme, let's work with it. The passive is pretty good to start with, but let's ramp things up a bit and let the attack speed part of Heavy Insight combo up 3x to provide a total of 60% attack speed bonus like you're absorbing time each time you do a heavy attack. Why not follow that up with an incarnon mechanic that, when activated, that slows time for enemies as they get closer to you? Say, 10% at 6 meters, and increasing up to 80% at 1 meter. Now, the coup de grâce, when you perform a heavy slam attack while at 12x combo while the time slowing effect is activated, have it completely stop time in that 6m radius for 5 seconds, lifting and freezing enemies in place and even stopping bullets in midair (spoiler, what I'm saying here is put a small fixed radius & duration version of limbo's 2+4 ability combo on this weapon, but without the rift nonsense preventing you from damaging enemies) There, now we have a version of Ekhein that is really, REALLY cool, and objectively not that much stronger then it was before. Besides having a lot of flavor, it has some niche uses for defending both yourself from being killed and other things like defense objectives although it obviously wouldn't wholesale replace defensive frames like limbo/frost/octavia because nobody is going to want to maintain a combo and use a heavy slam on the same spot every 6 seconds for 5+ minutes at a time. It's really not that hard to just pull out ideas like this by looking at a weapon and running with the first idea that comes to your head. Earlier I mentioned how Syam was almost good, let's fix that. Syam is a weapon of conceptual embodiment, born of the void which as I understand it is the nothing-space between multiverses, so lets give it an incarnon where it becomes a blade formed of voidspace, dealing pure slash with zero puncture or impact. While incarnon form is active, when the light attack key is held, your character stops moving and adopts a stance, and when the key is released, they perform an attack which creates a 2 meter bubble at the cursor's location which detonates, inflicting a fully scaled guaranteed slash proc on everything inside. Have this animation play at a reasonably fast but static speed, unaffected by attack speed mods, and if the key is held and released at a frame perfect 1/6th second interval, increase the speed and radius of the attack by let's say 1.5x speed and a 3m bubble instead of 2m. Also make it so that you can do this in midair while aim gliding, and successfully performing the perfect timing attack will extend the duration of your aim glide by 1 second each time. Now the secret sauce, let's say the incarnon form has a 90 second duration. If, during this window, you build and maintain a 12x combo for more then 60 seconds without taking damage to your health, you are able to perform a very special charged heavy attack during which your character becomes invulnerable and slowly sheathes the sword, and at the moment the katana clips into its syam, every enemy within affinity range suffers a single massive slash proc basically guaranteed to kill it within a few ticks. Cultured readers will be well aware that I've just spent the last paragraph describing yamato, judgement cut, and judgement cut end from devil may cry 5 and you're damn right DE pls put the vergil into the warframe just do it. In a game where the torid incarnon exists, this can exist too. Most bosses are already immune or resistant to slash so you wouldn't even have to worry about someone using this move to cheese the fragmented one or something, and the mesa-peacemaker style limitations on your movement for the light charged attacks requiring you to be either standing still or aim gliding as well as the time and specific circumstances required to activate the ultimate attack will easily prevent it from become some overpowered farm strategy, requiring 60 seconds of focused gameplay to do what equinox players can do whenever they want. Let's keep going okay let's fix tatsu prime, lets have each soul stored in the blade increase its crit chance, make the projectiles more aggressively seek targets, and you can do a charged heavy attack to summon the stored souls to fight for you for 15 seconds similar to nekros shadows of the dead although these are a 1:1 copy of the enemy not affected by power strength which keeps nekros mains with their 6x damage multiplier from feeling like this weapon is stealing their thunder. Now the obvious strategy most players would use here is to just not use the active abilities to keep their crit chance maxed out so let's say if you go too long without using either special attack, the souls break free from the blade and attack you, this incentivizes a more active ebb and flow gameplay to the weapon. Bam there it is weapon is fixed and good and has cool stuff, it's just that easy.

I think it would be a great idea to be able to reset your sun/moon alignment and then replay all of the story missions in order to make new canon decisions at least once. I feel like half of the choices I made were a result of ignorance or not really understanding the choice (why the hell does "control" mean "give the kuva to teshin"?) and for the other half, people change and this game has been out for a long time, I'm not the same person I was in 2016 when war within launched. Granted, this is a relatively minor thing, and as far as we know so far 100% of these alignment choices have been completely meaningless, but I still think it's a fun piece of additional flavor and customization for all the people who enjoy the story and universe of warframe. Also we're operating under Eternalism now and this means that the past is as accessible and malleable as the present and future :)