Magical Sword-Wielding Maniac Space Ninja Poster Children

In my earliest Warframe ramblings, I always mentioned that I was never a fan of Excalibur, the poster child of Warframe. He just seemed too loved by everyone else, and in my nonsensical ways, I tend to dislike things that are loved by everyone else. Plus, being a newbie, I found myself playing with a lot of Excaliburs, while my little Volt would just trail behind them. They were everywhere, with their weird, overly basic looks and their complete lack of eyes.

My discontent for Excalibur continued until I decided one day to go and fight Ambulas, the boss on Pluto. While Ambulas is a whole different article (due to a certain event), Excalibur is now finally worth talking about, because I have his parts and I built him and…

Well, I’ll admit, I was wrong.

Being the poster child, you’d expect someone a little fancier though. Excalibur, compared to most frames, even older ones, looks rather dull. I mean, Volt, Rhino, Frost, they’re all early frames and look very simple. But they have their quirks that make them stand out. Excalibur looks like a suit with a weird helmet and some weird crinkly cybernetic thing running down his back. The back thing in particular is odd because it’s always black, no matter what colour you make your Excalibur. Luckily, being the favourite, Excalibur has quite a few nice skins and cosmetics, and his simple looks mean you can stick pretty much anything on him and he’ll look alright.

Just like his looks, Excalibur’s abilities are kinda simple as well. A sliding slash dash attack (literally called Slash Dash), an attack that briefly blinds enemies (Radial Blind), another attack that stuns enemies briefly (Radial Javelin – even though it shoots out swords, not javelins!) and his signature ability, Exalted Blade.

Exalted Blade is a magical sword that Excalibur pulls out of thin air and uses to tear everyone a new one. Not only does this ethereal Skana (the default sword of the game) do damage based on the mods your real melee has equipped, but it also shoots out waves of energy that pierce through the heavens and cut through your enemies. By magical sword standards, that’s pretty cool.

What makes Exalted Blade so cool is that it works nicely with his other abilities. Slash Dash does extra damage, and slide attacks done while using Exalted Blade automatically send out flashes of Radial Blind. Basically you turn into an awesome sword-swinging light show. The crowd control isn’t great, the damage isn’t always amazing, but it’s awesome just to spam melee and watch things die.

There are only two things bad about Excalibur. The first is that no one apart from players who bought specific Founders packs will ever be able to obtain Excalibur Prime. DE said he’d never be re-released (alongside other Founders-exclusive items) and they’ve stuck to it. The Chinese counterpart has Excalibur Umbra, which is a dark grey variant, but that’s not available outside of China either.

The second bad thing is that, as fun as he is, Excalibur just isn’t as fun and useful as Volt. Even if a Volt does no damage, no matter the situation, he can still use Speed, Electric Shield and perhaps Discharge to be helpful, but Excalibur can just spam Radial Blind all day. But that’s just my opinion.