The All-Rounders Volt Build, by an Everyday Volt Main

Volt makes up 50% of my total playtime in Warframe. I know him mostly inside out, from his weird two pairs of eyes to his little butt-cape. I regularly take Volt into lots of things and somehow manage to stay alive even when everyone else around me is dying. I honestly think it’s time to go through my build and how I manage to take him everywhere, from Kuva Fortress Assault to Sortie Defense, and not be totally useless. In hindsight, this might be because I am simply so used to playing Volt that I know his strengths and weaknesses. In fact, this might not be a very good guide and I’ve just been blinded by my own competence. But it’s worth sharing anyway.

I have a lot of other Volt builds (and two Volts and a Volt Prime to put the builds on) but it’s worth pointing out that anyone can do these. Obviously Volt Prime is better due to the double energy capacity and actual armour, but this is plenty doable with normal Volt too. None of my Warframes have Forma in them, simply because I fucking hate leveling up Warframes, but if you do want some forma, then I would recommend adding a V polarity, because you pretty much always want things like Intensify and Continuity. A – polarity might also be handy for Primed Flow, which can bring your energy up to around 800. You WILL need a potato and an Exilus adapter for these builds though.

So here’s the build.

Yes, this build uses two augments at once. Capacitance and Shocking Speed. If you’ve read my articles in the past, this shouldn’t come to much of a surprise. Both mods are straight upgrades to the default mods, and Capacitance gives you some extra survivability.

Also, yes, I use two survival mods. Vigor and Redirection. Sometimes I’ll switch Vigor for Vitality or Quick Thinking, depending on my mood (and generally when I’m going into Toxin- or Slash-heavy missions like Infested Survival). But that Redirection is important because Volt doesn’t have a lot of health, nor does he have a lot of armour. But he DOES have huge shields and most of the time, as long as you use Discharge regularly, you have 2400ish shields. The problem is, you have to be proactive on this and always keep an eye on your shields – as soon as you hit about 500-600 shields left, you should be using Discharge. The Precept mod Guardian is also a must for you and your Sentinel no matter what, as it basically refills your shields.

The trick with the survival mods is to swap them around as needed, but most of the time you’re fine with Redirection and a mod of your choice – Vigor or Vitality for normal Volt and Quick Thinking for Volt Prime.

You’ll also notice that the power strength isn’t actually that high. In fact, you’ve got a bit of everything and no negative stats. Why? Because I take this build everywhere. Sure, I could increase the duration way more than it already is, but it would be a detriment to my range, which means Discharge doesn’t last very long. I could increase my power strength at great cost to my efficiency and/or duration, but that affects all of my abilities apart from Shock negatively. And less than 100% power strength is all round bad for Volt.

I achieve two things here: survival and getting out of trouble. Discharge with Capacitance both gives me extra shields (which will stop me from dying to most enemies on the star chart) and Speed gives me a speed boost to run, reload and get out of the way, stunning enemies as I run past them.

With this build, it’s always good to have a Condition Overload weapon. Shocking Speed works insanely well with a Condition Overload weapon, since it’s basically an extra 60% damage applied automatically, even more so when the range of Shocking Speed’s electric aura is about the same as your melee range (excluding whips and polearms, but they have like 5m range anyway!). This is on top of the elemental damage that you’ll already have on your weapon. As far as I can tell, the electricity damage and guaranteed proc do not combine with elements already in play, meaning that if you’re using, say, corrosive, you still get the extra damage on top of that from separate electricity damage.

The whole point of this build is that I’m ready for anything. Well, almost. If I want to speed through a mission, I have enough Speed to do so, and Shocking Speed gets enemies out of the way for me. If I am in a sticky mess, then Discharge gives me 5-6 seconds to get out of there. At the same time, I’m not negatively impacting Electric Shield, which people forget is like Frost’s Snow Globe but smaller and invulnerable until its timer runs out. And in this case lasts at least 30 seconds.

Sure, I can’t go and nuke a room full of enemies, sure I’m not running so fast that I break the boundaries of space and time. But I can do a little bit of all of that, all at the same time.

Because this is a rounded build, not a specific build.