Exalted Blade nerf review from someone who spends 70% of play time on Excal.

[Epsik-kun]

I can't care less about waves.

I mean, hello there.
After play testing Excal on level ranges from 10 to 250, I have following concern about the nerf:
"What it tries to achieve?"

As far as I know, the main reason behind the nerf was people who were constantly ranting about the fact EBlade waves oneshot everything on Mercury. Well, the problem wasn't solved then - waves still can do that.

The thing is, the change to waves won't affect the playstyle of Excalibur.

You see, EBlading Excalibur has three phases that roughly depend on effectiveness of his build and level of the grineer enemies:

1) Fighting low-level enemies and oneshotting everything (aka Excal on Mercury, the greatest evil of this game);
2) Fighting mid-level enemies (very brief period of something like armor/damage buffed Sortie 3, or T4 missions with enemy level around ~100);
3) Fighting overleveled enemies (overstayed survivals with Narmon essentially).

The only way to fix the first problem, is to ban Excal from Mercury, sorry about that.

Spoiler

 

Seriously speaking, at phase one, Exalted Blade build can be outperformed not only by frames, but by weapons - something like Ignis.
The truth is - everything is OP on low levels. Even MK1-Paris is OP on low levels. Something is more effective, something is less, but everything will ultimately stomp. EBlade isn't bad for low levels, but it is far from being among the most effective ways of clearing low levels. Even RJ build is much, much more effective than EBlade for that purpose.

Second phase is what I would like to call "Excalibur's apogee". He is best suited for this exact interval, where he can still take a hit and still can kill stuff. He can be one of the most effective frames for this phase (in terms of killing stuff) and can outperform anyone, however that requires a lot of efforts from Excal - movement, CC, balance between killing stuff and sustaining energy and HP pools.

Third phase is what Naramon enables Excal and few other frames to do, because they don't get oneshotted anymore. He is pretty good for soloing this kind of stuff, however far from being the best, as there are Covert Lethality builds and Banshee.

 

Now the thing is, you can kinda understand, that EBlade Excalibur shouldn't be built for the first phase. Pretty much any build you can come up with, will have no problems in dealing with this kind of content, as well as won't be too much effective at that. To be quite honest with you, that's the reason you see so much plainly bad build with the motivation being "it works for me". Well, everything works, that's the point of low-level missions.

Spoiler

My personal Excal build is oriented for that sweet-spot which is the second phase. Maximum efficiency, Rage as the only source of energy and Vitality + Steel Fiber for survivability core.
With that build you can do any kind of content and even go to the third phase up to like 2 hours of T4S (enemy level ~350) untill you won't be able to kill enemies fast enough to sustain Life Support.

And after trying all that content from level 10 to level 100, I realized that I did not changed my play style at all. This is like 95% of this game's content. Well, given I rarely kill stuff with exclusively waves, as going up-close provides much higher damage, I wasn't that much affected by the wave damage change.
Yeah it is there, you can notice it, and I have to give props to DE for finding such a clever way of effectively nerfing EBlade range, without actually even touching it. However it almost does not affect your game play, as you always had to move and rarely had your enemy at 40m range. And even now, if enemy comes in like 30m from you, you'll deal considerable damage with your waves.

But think about it - I said I don't care about waves, right? And that I normally try to get up close to the enemy, because it is faster that way. Why would I? What do you think is the damage difference between going up close and hitting enemies with your waves? If you think the answer is "melee does two times the damage of waves" you are terribly wrong.

Spoiler

Meleeing with Excal deals at least over x8 and up to over a hundred times of damage of what waves allow you to achieve. There are two main reasons: Spin Blind and status procs.
As EBlade effectively gains multishot up close, it also means for each hit you make, you have double attempts of getting a status proc on the enemy. Which means despite having only 10% status chance on paper, hitting with the sword itself roughly  makes EBlade into an equivalent of 20% status weapon, which is quite a good base status chance.
When you start to face armored enemies of at least level 60, building EBlade for corrosive status proc will outperform pure damage EBlade. For enemies of level 200+ pure damage EBlade deals effectively no damage, while status one can clear them.
Secondly, whenever you get a status proc with melee hit, you have a chance of that hit completely ignoring armor. That's something that I never saw waves do, and that's something that allowed me to get a 500k damage hit on a level 500+ Corrupted Heavy Gunner.
And the Spin Blind gives you a simple x4 damage multiplier. Spin Blind is the skill, that allowed Excal to perform on pair with Valkyr after she got her mod scaling on Hysteria. Yeah, you can argue, that you always have access to that damage multiplier, as you can always hit "2", true - but not really. Not only RB has 5 seconds cooldown, which may be the reason of you dying if you keep throwing it purely for damage purposes, it also costs quite a lot even with the maximum efficiency. Spin Blind, however, did not cost anything, allowed you to dish out insane amounts of damage were you choose to actually melee instead of just shooting waves and effectively neutralized the bunch of enemies you jumped into.

So basically my reasoning was "should I shoot waves for 20 seconds, or get into melee and be done in 2 seconds?"
That's a very legit reason to go melee, if you ask me.

Spin Blind was the ability that always made actually meleeing with EBlade not only a viable option - it made it into the best way of using EBlade. And guess what we got - Spin Blind now costs energy.

"You should really go melee with Excal, so let us nerf his main reason to go melee"
Spin Blind nerf essentially.

And the main problem I have with it is that it doesn't achieve much on the problem it supposed to counter. The problem was: "Excal does too much damage on Mercury".
Well, Excal still does too much damage on Mercury, even 30% of wave's damage is "too much for Mercury". You will never ever need Spin Blind on Mercury. I know that. Excal is my starter frame, I brough him from unranked on a new accound to the current 5 forma/4 builds monster. And I never used Spin Blind on the Star Chart.

Build for level ~100 content also wasn't affected by that much, as at this level you tend to go into melee anyway, but you don't need Spin Blind to kill stuff, aside from maybe throwing few into groups of armored eximuses. You can manage that. It is uncomfortable, but bearable.

And pure strength build was murdered brutally. Because that's the only build that's made for exclusively melee, and it can't melee anymore. You simply can't sustaint your EBlade when you need to do a Spin Blind almost for every enemy and it costs energy.

Funny thing is, now universal build performs better at late-game content than the actual late-game content oriented build.

Nerfing a frame without giving it anything in return is bad manners, seriously. Excal was nerfed in his ability of dealing with high level content, which he does by exclusively meleeing stuff to death, and the motivation for that nerf was "You should melee more". I don't get it.
Especially, given the energy management already became a bit harder, due to previous nerf he received in a sense of toggles no longer blocking energy drain from eximuses.

And while the nerf itself only makes my slightly confused and raises my eyebrow, there's something that makes me absurdly salty.
Shadow Debt mods weren't a "nerf". It was a buff of everything, save for Exalted weapons. Exalted weapons were "the best melee out there" for quite a long time. 
Are you aware that currently, it takes at least a hour of Void Survival for Exalted Weapons to start outperforming a properly built Blood Rush weapon on a frame that has zero melee abilities? Well, for some reason almost no one knows how to build them, but that isn't the point. Are you aware, that Exalted weapons are "on pair" at best compared to Blood Rush weapons on frames that do have some melee skills?

I am prefectly fine with Blood Rush weapons - they are fun, I use them myself, they made melee into an actually viable option.
But when I get easily outperformed by a Valkyr with a properly built Atterax in like 80% to 20% of damage done, I get literally covered with a centimeter thick layer of salt.
Why would you intentionally make Exalted weapons to be worse than regular weapons? It doesn't make any sense to me.

On a side note, I pity Valkyr. Excal got nerfs and no buffs, but his skill kit is good. Valkyr now is better off without using Hysteria at all.

[Trekiros]

Hey, another Excal main here. I posted this in the main thread, where I came to the very same conclusion : whoever was in charge of the Excalibur nerf doesn't understand how Excalibur is played, and the spin blind nerf was very much counterproductive.

 

[Epsik-kun]

So, on topic of how the change affects Excal's regular gameplay - it does not.

It does however severely limits his late-game potential, which was already hard to achieve, tedious and not really rewarding. Motivation "you should go melee" on this nerf makes no sense, really. It simply isn't true.

Edited June 4, 2016 by Epsik-kun

[Hypernaut1]

Maybe they WANTED to increase the energy consumption while using EB, thus the energy cost on spin blind...

[Enno69]

The devs wanted to discourage the "energy turret" play style by giving users an incentive to go up-close and personal with Excal and his blade. I do not really understand the intention behind the change to it's spin attack, however. If they were afraid pof potential chesse, removing the blind effect while keeping the slide slash "free of charge" would have been somewhat more logical, as the blind is simply a bonus on top of an attack that is an essential part of any melee combat.

" Valkyr now is better off without using Hysteria at all. " Not true. Hysteria now requires some awareness to perform optimally, it gives a downside to the invincibility, making the skill more engaging to use. Of all the recent reworks this is one of the best, imo.

[YasaiTsume]

Excal Late Game build. 

Stack that Body Count boys. 

[Dragazer]

2 hours ago, YasaiTsume said:

Excal Late Game build. 

Stack that Body Count boys. 

 

That's part of the issue, any melee weapon wielded by any frame, now pretty much outclasses Excalibur's EB despite supposedly being a dedicated melee frame

Why bother using EB anymore?

Edited June 4, 2016 by Dragazer

[Epsik-kun]

Just now, Dragazer said:

That's part of the issue, any melee weapon wielded by any frame, now pretty much outclasses Excalibur's EB despite supposedly being a dedicated melee frame

Only few frames can outclass EBlade with Blood Rush weapons, and most of them only will be able to do that on low levels.

In fact, that group of gunners can be taken down by EBlade Excal in like 10~20 seconds.

[YasaiTsume]

3 minutes ago, Dragazer said:

 

That's part of the issue, any melee weapon wielded by any frame, now pretty much outclasses Excalibur's EB despite supposedly being a dedicated melee frame

Why bother using EB anymore?

Why do people actually main Excalibur just for Exalted Blade? :^)

I never use Exalted Blade ever. 

 

[Dragazer]

4 minutes ago, Epsik-kun said:

Only few frames can outclass EBlade with Blood Rush weapons, and most of them only will be able to do that on low levels.

In fact, that group of gunners can be taken down by EBlade Excal in like 10~20 seconds.

War/Scindo Prime with Cleaving Whirlwind build with BR and BC will absolutely stomp EB now, moreso at higher levels with the 4x combo counter damage and constant red crits on any frame. There is no competition.   

Edited June 4, 2016 by Dragazer

[Epsik-kun]

Just now, Dragazer said:

War/Scindo Prime with Cleaving Whirlwind build with BR and BC will absolutely stomp EB now, moreso at higher levels with the 4x combo counter damage and constant red crits on any frame  

When I was talking about getting on the level of EBlade in hands of few selected frames, I wasn't talking about War or Scindo Prime. It's simply impossible for these weapons.

[Hypernaut1]

36 minutes ago, Dragazer said:

 

That's part of the issue, any melee weapon wielded by any frame, now pretty much outclasses Excalibur's EB despite supposedly being a dedicated melee frame

Why bother using EB anymore?

Excal doesnt need to build and maintain a combo counter to be effective with melee though. He can just pop EB at any time, switching between blade and gun at will. Also, Excal is STILL the best at going pure melee because his kit synergizes well with blood rush and body count. His slash dash and RJ helps to build combo counters quicker than any other frame.