Three Ways to Travel the Steel Path
The Steel Path is a conundrum. It was originally just an alternate area for players to test their high level builds, that gave a handful of rewards too. The idea is really simple: enemy levels are increased by 100, and everything has extra shields and armour. The rewards were never amazing, just the odd Steel Essence, as well as a higher chance of drops overall. Aside from those though, there was no real reason to play Steel Path, aside from the initial completion affinity.
But then people realized you could farm so much Kuva from the Steel Path. So the Steel Path got reworked a bit, Acolytes stole all the Steel Essence and we got alerts for the Steel Path too. But with Teshin bringing Umbral Forma every 8 or so weeks, not to mention the Steel Path appearing in Nightwave, more people are doing these difficult nodes.
However, the Steel Path can be surprisingly difficult. Luckily, there’s multiple ways you can tackle these missions.
The slow, steady, crowd-controlled style.
Sometimes it’s easy to over-complicate things. The Steel Path is no exception. However, most missions don’t have a time limit, and can be done at their own pace. So why not control the pace yourself, with vast amounts of crowd control? Slowva is great for this – with high power strength, most enemies are too slow to do much of anything, and you can pick them off with a weapon of your choice. A Sleep Equinox build will keep enemies knocked out and spread to other, nearby enemies. Hildryn is a great frame, since she is not only tanky, but she can also keep enemies at bay almost indefinitely, and there’s plenty of armour for her to strip.
You could take things even slower by just being permanently invisible with Loki, Ash or Ivara, taking enemies out one at a time. Ivara in particular is great since you can sleep any enemies who get too shoot-y. Meanwhile Limbo can dance as he pleases within his Rift. Not so great for enemies where killing is required, but utterly amazing for more defensive missions.
The mass nuke builds.
However, once you get a feel for things, it’s often fun to try out nuke builds. That being said, not all nukes work here. With the high armour and shields a lot of enemies have, standard nukes may need some form of armour strip first. Equinox with her slash procs takes a lot longer, and poor Volt’s Discharge stops working at all, and Volt as a whole ends up in crowd-control territory. However Saryn is as strong as ever, and Mesa still does astonishingly well too. You don’t even need much tweaking for those two.
Khora combines both the crowd control and the nuke with her Whipclaw and Strangledome combo. Not only are enemies trapped and knocked out of the fight, but Whipclaw does SO MUCH DAMAGE with its augment. Sure, it got nerfed and now requires line of sight, but it’s still amazing.
Just melee your way through everything.
Really though, the easiest path is to take a high-damage melee and a tanky frame and just go ham. There’s loads of tanky frames you can use. Inaros will happily shake off most hits, while Chroma and Rhino can boost their damage while also tanking hits. Revenant doesn’t care at all, and stuns any enemies who hit him, while also turning enemies against each other.
Wukong however takes the cake. Not only can you just whirlwind your way through enemies, but your Celestial Twin will murder things with your guns as well. That being said, Baruuk is also a great choice. Although he isn’t as tanky as Wukong, his augments allow him to do adapting damage, allowing Baruuk to take down enemies regardless of their armour and what elements you have equipped.
Out of all these options, I do kinda recommend starting off with going slow and steady. Exterminate and Sabotage missions are a great place to start, since there’s no real failure condition, aside from not dying. But all three options are viable in their own rights. And at the end of the day, you should play how you feel is best.