Running Around with 40% Power Strength

Running around with low amounts of power strength is often sub-optimal for most Warframes. You need that power strength to, you know, make your abilities do stuff. The only real, well-known use of having less than 100% power strength is for the Speed Nova build, and even that is a somewhat niche use of her abilities, only really useful in Defense missions where people are experience farming. Having enemies race towards you means you can kill them quicker.

But lately, I’ve been using only 40% power strength on a different Warframe, without that power strength being detrimental to what I want to do.

I’ve been using 40% power strength on Khora. Why? So I can get more of that sweet, sweet range on her. As much range as I can.

The plan is simple. I want my Strangledome to be as big as possible. This also means that Ensnare is quite large, but more on that later. A Strangledome with huge amounts of range will grab enemies from a fricking mile away. Maxing out your range as much as you can will give you a 14m dome and a grab range of 28 meters, more than large enough to completely and utterly control a huge area, normally a defense target or an interception console. You get this perfect little safe zone around your objective that grabs enemies and holds them helplessly in the air.

Sure, that huge area can only hold 26 enemies, but there’s only ever about 30-50 enemies around you at any one time. Or at least it feels like that. Being able to control about half of all currently spawned enemies, or pretty much every enemy if you’re playing solo, is pretty damn powerful. You might say that the fact that Strangledome does no damage is a big downside but that doesn’t matter when you can cast TWO Strangledomes, ensnaring 52 enemies at once.

In fact, with the right map and the right position, you can actually maintain 3, maybe even 4 control points at once in an Interception mission.

Is there a downside to this? Well yeah, your Whipclaw and Venari will definitely do a lot less damage than normal. So will Strangledome itself. But I’ll be honest, that doesn’t really matter until you get to level 40 enemies. Below that, even with only 40% power strength, Strangledome will murder everything aside from Ancient Healers. But Ancient Healers give everything nearby 90% damage resistance and everyone hates them for it. At level 30-40, things take a little longer to die, but there’s still a trickle of enemies being killed then dropped then new enemies being snatched up. At level 50, you stop dealing meaningful damage. That’s fine. Strangedome is in pure crowd control territory.

You know what though? Even if YOU aren’t dealing damage, enemies will SHOOT at anyone stuck inside Strangledome. So enemies end up killing each other for you!

In fact, the only things you should be afraid of are Nullifiers, Bursas and the odd Parasitic Eximus. Even then though, Nullifier bubbles don’t completely destroy Strangledome, just the bits that it touches, unlike a Limbo’s Stasis, which pops the second a Nullifier comes too close. Parasitic Eximi are only scary because you need energy to cast Strangledome, like most other abilities.

But you know what’s even better? The Pilfering Strangledome mod. Sure, it’s only a 65% chance to get double loot from enemies caught in Strangledome but that’s 65% more loot than you’d get otherwise! It also means we’ve got more than Nekros, Atlas and Hydroid being loot bots.

This is a bit overboard though. You don’t need to min-max your stats. You just need a bunch of range.