Crequao

For umbra it is pretty much mandatory and other frames I don’t think it is worth wasting a mod slot to get rid of their passive even if you find it a bit irritating. I know nezha passive is annoying for me but I’m not going waste a mod slot to get rid of it when I need to better balance out my abilities and survivability stats.

I agree with it should stay a augment/mod but I want their own slot because my builds are being hinder/not reaching their best potential. Honestly DE can get rid of the little increase in ability strength on them in exchange for an a passive/augment slot and I be happy as it will not just be a free 15% increase in strength at the same time not taking up space on my build for more important or ability strength mod.

My exilus slot is always occupied by primed sure footed because I do endurance runs and use AoE a lot, so to me them making it exilus mod does not help/affect anything. It still waste a mod slot for something that is more valuable then something I personally feel should/shouldn't be a thing in the first place.

These augments are one of the dumbest mods to have to waste a slot for, especially frost who's actual passive can just be changed to biting frost. I never really agree on the augment slot train but passive augments on the other hand, I think it is warranted for passives as they are not part of the main kit and active gameplay so me wasting a slot just to simply deactivate a passive is ridiculous. I feel like the additional ability strength is for DE to make it an excuse for it to be worth it, even though everyone do not care for that part and just want a passive they don't like (Umbra) to just be disabled without hindering their build freedom.

I wouldn’t say you are entirely correct about Arcanes need to be universal because we had arcane trickery before universal source of finisher was available, also energize have no purpose on Lavos and hildryn, as well as barrier and aegis not being useful on kullervo, inaros, and Nidus. Yeah I beefed them up as well, as I got to level cap with exalted blade but energy becomes a huge problem with eximus not being affected by cc so you constantly have to waste energy to keep shield gating up especially with the higher constant spawn rate of them the longer you stay. In certain mission it is better to leave them inactive until a priority target but most regular weapons can deal with it as easily or better but don’t have to go through the constant casting animation. It might be the type of content I play that is why I have some bad views on them but disregarding that, exalted weapons are objectively worse than some regular weapons.

One of the biggest problems for most of them is that they can’t get guaranteed crits which leads to inconsistency in their damage. Status is not that big of problem for them as raw damage setups have shown value like regulators and valkyr’s talons. Also a good portion of them is not even valuable or good without their augments. I heard we getting new Arcanes so I hope we get more unique or ability focused ones. For example, an arcane that make Exalted weapons duration based with a cooldown, similar to the Enraged augment but maybe a 50% multiplicative increase in damage and not duration/cooldown not affected by mods because most times they are worse than regular weapons but they drain energy to a point it feel like it better off not building for it. IK my suggestion is pretty much a bandaid fix but I don’t think DE will actually go out their way to individually look and buff these weapons/abilities