The Heat sword doesn't get a lot of love in this game; it never makes any "best of" lists and most people seem to consider it MR fodder. It is my contention however that the Heat sword is very underrated, probably the best of the single swords, and that properly built it can rival any other weapon in the game. This isn't going to be easy to do; getting the right mods together is going to be a project that will take months. But the end result will be the best or nearly the best weapon in your arsenal. Before I begin the nitty gritty I want to give a shout out to aweblade4's youtube video on the heatsword. He's one of the only youtubers to give any attention at all to this highly underrated weapon.
His build is very interesting and worth trying if you want to go to the trouble, but there are some important things I think he misses. AFter I lay out my own build, I'll discuss the differences. I think my build is better, but if anyone wants to argue otherwise they're more than welcome.
My build: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuN03DML44HUh8xqn7ipFesFI8mi7Q
My build is based on synergy between 1) Viral-Slash procs, 2) the Condition Overload melee mod and how it interacts with 3) the Swooping Falcon stance, 4) the heat sword's high innate status stanc , and 5) the peculiar properties of the weapon's slam attack . Last of all, there is the heat sword's high riven disposition.
1) The build depends on Viral-Slash procs for damage. Viral procs halve health for 6 seconds, which provides a window in which stacked Bleed effects can kill an enemy quickly. (For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume everyone knows how Bleed procs work. If not I refer you to the wiki.)
2) Condition Overload synergizes with 1) because its damage multipier applies to slash procs. This means that the more status types a weapon can proc, the bigger its slash procs.
Let's say you're facing a really tough enemy, say a lvl 135 Nox; if you proc 5 types, something which is very easy with this build, Condition Overload will amplify Bleed by 10.49 times. This will take out practically any enemy in the game in a few seconds. 3), 4) and 5) meanwhile all concern the Heat Sword's ability to proc more often and more types than almost any other weapon, using 2) Condition Overload to scale damage past the point where any enemy can keep up. The sword stance Swooping Falcon (the Heat sword has the madurai polarity of the stance) has guaranteed procs in all of its combos; mainly slash and impact, but also blast. Guaranteed slash works well with 1). Nor do the stance's 200% damage multipliers hurt much either.
The synergy of 4) should be self explanatory with 2). The Heat Sword's base 20% status chance is higher than any other single sword, the only one even coming close being the Krohkur which has 19%.
I have saved 5) for last because it takes some explaining. It's an odd quirk of the weapon. The Heat sword, contrary to what the name suggests, does not have innate elemental damage in its attacks. Its normal attacks proc IPS with 80% of this slash. Where it does inflict elemental Heat damage is in its AoE Slam attack. Upon performing a slam, the sword emits a ring of fire that triggers ignite procs on those within the radius. The range is very large compared to most weapon slams, and ignite provides some good CC as a fringe benefit. You can use the slam to stun fast moving targets such as the Grineer Manic, allowing you to catch them ande finish them off with a combo. The really important thing for this build though is that the slam's Heat Damage is not modifiable by elemental damage mods. Putting an electrical damage mod on the weapon will not change slam to Radiation; putting toxin on it won't change it to Gas. It procs Heat and only Heat, and very reliably too. And this, in turn, means that you have an extra status type in addition to whatever you put on the weapon with mods. Let's say you put Cold and Toxin on the weapon, creating Viral so that the weapon procs IPS + Viral. With the Slam attack you can Proc IPS + Viral + Heat.
So when we consider the big picture, a Viral equipped Heat Sword will proc Viral through elemental mods, Heat through its slam attack, Impact and Blast through Swooping Falcon's combos, and, many, many slash procs through both its innate disposition to slash (80% of base damage) but also through the stance combos. With Weeping Wounds and Drifitng Contact (+40% status chance) and with two elemental dual stat mods (+60% status chance each), the Heat sword reaches 75.4% status chance when the combo counter hits 2 and 98.8% when it hits 3. We can proc 5 status types consistently, sometimes 6 if we get a lucky puncture and use those to scale multiple stacked Bleed procs for big damage. Throw in Healing Return into the last slot and we've added another way to take advantage of all this procing; we get some healing too.
We're still not done because we haven't even touched the Riven yet. I consider this part of the build optional, but recommended. As I've noted previously, the Heat Sword gets little love and for this reason its' riven disposition is off the scales. This riven, which is by no means a God roll, is +Heat, +Electricity and +Damage. It occupies the spot that would normally go to Pressure Point or Primed Pressure Point since the Damage bonus does the work of Pressure point. Without the riven this build is already quite powerful, good enough for Sortie lvl 3, but with the riven because of the synergy of its Radiation damge with Condition Overload, it becomes ridiculous. If anyone wants to try this build and use a riven, I recommend rolling for elemental damage, damage, status chance, and attack speed. Reroll if crit or crit chance turns up since those aren't important elements in this build.
Now, briefly, let's touch on this build's differences with aweblade4's. That build relies on Crimson Dervish's infamous finisher combo. Since Condition Overload applies to finisher damage as well, this means you can get some enormous damage. While very effective, I think it has some deficiencies. First of all, Crimson Dervish is very slow, and this is a real problem on status build, because the more you hit the more you proc. Swooping Falcon is both faster and more mobile. Beyond that I personally find the finisher kind of inconsistent. This might have to do with the tiny hitbox of the strike that opens for the finisher, but whatever the reason, I can't do it 100% of the time.
Synergies, Closing Comments
Because this is a Condition Overload Status Build, Warframe abilities that add additional status effect types will further increase damage its damage output. I personally prefer Saryn's Toxic Lash with the Contagion Cloud Augment as well as Volt's Speed with Shocking speed augment. Volt goes particularly well with the Heat Sword because Speed increases Attack Speed. Excalibur's passive, providing speed and damage boosts to single swords, is also a good fit. Sentinels, Diriga's Electro Pulse and Taxon's Ice Beam are ways to add still more procs.
I run Naramon because Power Spike goes so well with this build. Any weapon that uses Weeping Wounds and Drifting Contact while running Naramon is going to be able to get to 3.5-4.0X Combo Counter before long, very useful for Endurance runs. I've taken this Heat Sword build one hour and thirty minutes deep into a Kuva Survival Mission and it was still getting kills.
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The Heat sword doesn't get a lot of love in this game; it never makes any "best of" lists and most people seem to consider it MR fodder. It is my contention however that the Heat sword is very underrated, probably the best of the single swords, and that properly built it can rival any other weapon in the game. This isn't going to be easy to do; getting the right mods together is going to be a project that will take months. But the end result will be the best or nearly the best weapon in your arsenal. Before I begin the nitty gritty I want to give a shout out to aweblade4's youtube video on the heatsword. He's one of the only youtubers to give any attention at all to this highly underrated weapon.
His build is very interesting and worth trying if you want to go to the trouble, but there are some important things I think he misses. AFter I lay out my own build, I'll discuss the differences. I think my build is better, but if anyone wants to argue otherwise they're more than welcome.
My build:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuN03DML44HUh8xqn7ipFesFI8mi7Q
My build is based on synergy between 1) Viral-Slash procs, 2) the Condition Overload melee mod and how it interacts with 3) the Swooping Falcon stance, 4) the heat sword's high innate status stanc , and 5) the peculiar properties of the weapon's slam attack . Last of all, there is the heat sword's high riven disposition.
1) The build depends on Viral-Slash procs for damage. Viral procs halve health for 6 seconds, which provides a window in which stacked Bleed effects can kill an enemy quickly. (For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume everyone knows how Bleed procs work. If not I refer you to the wiki.)
2) Condition Overload synergizes with 1) because its damage multipier applies to slash procs. This means that the more status types a weapon can proc, the bigger its slash procs.
Let's say you're facing a really tough enemy, say a lvl 135 Nox; if you proc 5 types, something which is very easy with this build, Condition Overload will amplify Bleed by 10.49 times. This will take out practically any enemy in the game in a few seconds. 3), 4) and 5) meanwhile all concern the Heat Sword's ability to proc more often and more types than almost any other weapon, using 2) Condition Overload to scale damage past the point where any enemy can keep up. The sword stance Swooping Falcon (the Heat sword has the madurai polarity of the stance) has guaranteed procs in all of its combos; mainly slash and impact, but also blast. Guaranteed slash works well with 1). Nor do the stance's 200% damage multipliers hurt much either.
http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Swooping_Falcon
The synergy of 4) should be self explanatory with 2). The Heat Sword's base 20% status chance is higher than any other single sword, the only one even coming close being the Krohkur which has 19%.
I have saved 5) for last because it takes some explaining. It's an odd quirk of the weapon. The Heat sword, contrary to what the name suggests, does not have innate elemental damage in its attacks. Its normal attacks proc IPS with 80% of this slash. Where it does inflict elemental Heat damage is in its AoE Slam attack. Upon performing a slam, the sword emits a ring of fire that triggers ignite procs on those within the radius. The range is very large compared to most weapon slams, and ignite provides some good CC as a fringe benefit. You can use the slam to stun fast moving targets such as the Grineer Manic, allowing you to catch them ande finish them off with a combo. The really important thing for this build though is that the slam's Heat Damage is not modifiable by elemental damage mods. Putting an electrical damage mod on the weapon will not change slam to Radiation; putting toxin on it won't change it to Gas. It procs Heat and only Heat, and very reliably too. And this, in turn, means that you have an extra status type in addition to whatever you put on the weapon with mods. Let's say you put Cold and Toxin on the weapon, creating Viral so that the weapon procs IPS + Viral. With the Slam attack you can Proc IPS + Viral + Heat.
So when we consider the big picture, a Viral equipped Heat Sword will proc Viral through elemental mods, Heat through its slam attack, Impact and Blast through Swooping Falcon's combos, and, many, many slash procs through both its innate disposition to slash (80% of base damage) but also through the stance combos. With Weeping Wounds and Drifitng Contact (+40% status chance) and with two elemental dual stat mods (+60% status chance each), the Heat sword reaches 75.4% status chance when the combo counter hits 2 and 98.8% when it hits 3. We can proc 5 status types consistently, sometimes 6 if we get a lucky puncture and use those to scale multiple stacked Bleed procs for big damage. Throw in Healing Return into the last slot and we've added another way to take advantage of all this procing; we get some healing too.
We're still not done because we haven't even touched the Riven yet. I consider this part of the build optional, but recommended. As I've noted previously, the Heat Sword gets little love and for this reason its' riven disposition is off the scales. This riven, which is by no means a God roll, is +Heat, +Electricity and +Damage. It occupies the spot that would normally go to Pressure Point or Primed Pressure Point since the Damage bonus does the work of Pressure point. Without the riven this build is already quite powerful, good enough for Sortie lvl 3, but with the riven because of the synergy of its Radiation damge with Condition Overload, it becomes ridiculous. If anyone wants to try this build and use a riven, I recommend rolling for elemental damage, damage, status chance, and attack speed. Reroll if crit or crit chance turns up since those aren't important elements in this build.
Here we have some footage in Level 3 Rathuum:
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AuN03DML44HUh8xs56r9Ar4-LFQycg
Now, briefly, let's touch on this build's differences with aweblade4's. That build relies on Crimson Dervish's infamous finisher combo. Since Condition Overload applies to finisher damage as well, this means you can get some enormous damage. While very effective, I think it has some deficiencies. First of all, Crimson Dervish is very slow, and this is a real problem on status build, because the more you hit the more you proc. Swooping Falcon is both faster and more mobile. Beyond that I personally find the finisher kind of inconsistent. This might have to do with the tiny hitbox of the strike that opens for the finisher, but whatever the reason, I can't do it 100% of the time.
Synergies, Closing Comments
Because this is a Condition Overload Status Build, Warframe abilities that add additional status effect types will further increase damage its damage output. I personally prefer Saryn's Toxic Lash with the Contagion Cloud Augment as well as Volt's Speed with Shocking speed augment. Volt goes particularly well with the Heat Sword because Speed increases Attack Speed. Excalibur's passive, providing speed and damage boosts to single swords, is also a good fit. Sentinels, Diriga's Electro Pulse and Taxon's Ice Beam are ways to add still more procs.
Here we have Saryn Prime with Toxic Lash killing a lvl 135 Bombard in the Simulacrum:
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AuN03DML44HUh8xs56r9Ar4-LFQycg
It takes 7 hits to kill starting from a combo counter of zero.
Here is some footage of me using Volt and Speed to super charge the Heat Sword on Stephano on Uranus:
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AuN03DML44HUh8xveCZJhd1f0kQ5EQ
I run Naramon because Power Spike goes so well with this build. Any weapon that uses Weeping Wounds and Drifting Contact while running Naramon is going to be able to get to 3.5-4.0X Combo Counter before long, very useful for Endurance runs. I've taken this Heat Sword build one hour and thirty minutes deep into a Kuva Survival Mission and it was still getting kills.
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