Excalibur Mains, what do I need to know to become a better Excalibur player? To minmax or optimize Excalibur?

[-SilverWolfPrime-]

This is a call for help to anyone who has played a fair to extensive amount of Excalibur, Excalibur Prime, or Excalibur Umbra. I wish to ask for guidance from experts on the Warframe.

To make things simple, I am asking for help for the best way to build, improve, and play as Excalibur. Ever since I started playing Warframe, Excalibur has always been a big interest to me as a frame of choice. He was my starter Warframe, and him alongside Oberon were two frames that got me through a majority of the storyline and Star Chart. I've always wanted to keep Excalibur as one of my ace Warframes to keep around, alongside my two mains Nekros and Voruna (particularly Excalibur Umbra). However, every time I decide to play as him, I keep running into snags in the build process, and I don't yet think I've found my style to play as him. In addition, there are many things about using Excalibur that I have a lot of questions about, despite him being considered simple to play as.

As a result, I'd love to ask those who have had a bit of playtime with Excalibur for assistance and help in building Excalibur, optimizing my Excalibur Umbra to the best of my abilities. I always try to aim to make the most of ALL the abilities on a Warframe if I can, so I'd like to go for that.

I have SEVERAL questions to ask, so I shall start with the most pressing ones below:

1. How does one describe Excalibur's playstyle? Obviously he's a high powered melee DPS, but I keep having this inkling that he's either run as a tank or an offensive frame. Which one do people commonly go for with Excalibur?
2. Is Steel Charge an "obvious" choice for the Aura slot, or is that a myth? It SEEMS obvious to me given the synergy is has with his passive and bonuses he gets using melee weapons, but I've seen other builds opt for other Aura mods like Brief Respite. I've always run Steel Charge just because it always made sense to and Excalibur seems like the kind of Warframe who wants more mod capacity rather than less, but I'm not sure if the actual effects of Steel Charge on Excalibur make this a worthwhile investment.
3. How much commitment should I put to Excalibur's energy economy? Only Streamline? Can he run Blind Rage effectively? Should he run Fleeting Expertise? What about running stuff like Zenurik, Primed Flow or Arcane Energize/Arcane Steadfast?
4. How important his Range on him? I've always built Excalibur towards Exalted Blade, so my first instinct is "fine at 100%, no negative", but even people who build for Exalted Blade seem to running at least a Stretch in their builds.
5. How major of a difference is it to play as neutral Excalibur vs. Excalibur Umbra? Normally I would never consider this question and just go straight to the highest variant I could (Prime/Umbra), and in this case I still fully intend on using Excalibur Umbra, but I've been seeing the argument that there is merit in building neutral Excalibur based on whether or not you are willing to polarize one of Excalibur Umbra's Umbra polarities. For the sake of actually using and enjoying Excalibur, I AM WILLING TO POLARIZE AN UMBRA POLARITY ON EXCALIBUR UMBRA, but I want to hear whether or not this is worth it and what I would put in its place.
6. Is Chromatic Blade a "must have" augment for Excalibur? It seems to me like this is the case because you can pretty much guarantee two elements no matter what combo you use and those elements can be pretty damn flexible, but you don't really get much of a bonus from Condition Overload since you're restricted to ONLY elemental mods. At the same time though, NOT running it means you probably don't have the Status Chance to reliably proc Condition Overload as well, so you might as well run Chromatic Blade for the elemental effects you're able to proc from elemental mods. This also applies to Healing Return, which I run on Exalted Blade.
   1. As an extension of this, which Archon mod would be more reliable to run and build for? Radiation/Toxin with Continuity, or Viral(Corrosive)/Heat with Vitality? Should I be RUNNING an Archon mod?
7. The same thing above except this time it's for "Furious Javelin". I currently run this, and I feel like this is also a no brainer because you can get LUDICROUS amounts of bonus damage, but it also feels finnicky and it's not always consistent. Not to mention that I feel like Radial Javelin is Excalibur's weakest ability, so I end up questioning if it's just better to Helminth the ability for something else.
8. Speaking of.....Helminth abilities. I have no idea on this one. What would be some good ones to run, and is it necessary to? Obvious ones feel like simple choices like Gloom or Roar, and I've only ever used Dispensary because Umbra's passive can cast it and provide Health and Energy for Necramechs, but that's about it. In addition, Slash Dash or Radial Javelin? I like Slash Dash much much more, but Radial Javelin as a better augment.
9. What kind of weaponry should I utilize or keep in mind when playing Excalibur? I tend not to use my guns a whole lot and just wreck face with Exalted Blade, but I feel like I'm missing something not using my secondaries and primaries for something, and I'm not sure how big of a role Excalibur's (first) passive is to his gameplay.
10. Other miscellaneous stuff to consider. Archon Shard set up? Arcanes like Primary Charger or Blade Charger? Molt Augmented?

EDIT: Probably should have mentioned this when I first posted, just some background information. I'm currently Legend 3, completed entirety of Steel Path, have quite a decent chunk of a built up Arsenal.

Edited June 14, 2023 by -SilverWolfPrime-
More information on player stats just to provide some context.

[-SilverWolfPrime-]

1 hour ago, nslay said:

Yeah, if you really want to use an Exalted Melee, then Baruuk Prime is a really great frame for that! But Excalibur does have that Furious Javelin augment which gives a multiplicative bonus to all melee damage. So if you give Excalibur a "meta" melee and pair it with Furious Javelin, you'll have a great time!

That is a good point. If it honestly has to be that way for now, I wouldn't be opposed to subsuming Exalted Blade like before, at least for the sake of optimization. It's honestly getting cumbersome how much I have to spec towards it for it to be effective and I think that's a big sign to me.

I'm....still incredibly thrown off by how diminishing a passive Umbra's passive is. I think that's the worse part about the optimization because Umbra looks so badass :')

[nslay]

10 minutes ago, -SilverWolfPrime- said:

That is a good point. If it honestly has to be that way for now, I wouldn't be opposed to subsuming Exalted Blade like before, at least for the sake of optimization. It's honestly getting cumbersome how much I have to spec towards it for it to be effective and I think that's a big sign to me.

I'm....still incredibly thrown off by how diminishing a passive Umbra's passive is. I think that's the worse part about the optimization because Umbra looks so badass :')

Umbra gives you some different modding options due to the free Umbra polarities (well, some people consider that a disadvantage). So you can give Umbra some neat build and then make a normal Excalibur with another different build.

I like and play both of them... although I'm forced to always use Umbra in SP Circuit 🙁