Dante is *PRETTY* good
A lot of Warframes are very hit or miss on release, and many of them are a tad underpowered. Yareli was a mess on release, but newer Warframes are better and better at being at the very least usable. Dante on the other hand is completely usable out of the box.
He’s good. Real good. Sure, Dante doesn’t have armour strip, but he has spammy slash damage, which is great. Dante also has healing, Overguard generation, damage boosts and is just all-round a good Warframe. Light Verse gives you Overguard, Dark Verse does slash damage to whatever is in front of you, and depending on what order you cast Light Verse and Dark Verse, Final Verse has different effects. Two Light Verses gives you a fuckton of Overguard, two Dark Verses basically doubles damage against enemies and nukes them, a Light Verse followed by a Dark Verse gives allies a copy of Dante’s Noctua (his exalted book) that shoots as allies fire, and Dark Verse followed by Light Verse spawns a bunch of ghostly owls that attack enemies and distracts them, while making enemies take more status damage.
What’s even nicer is that you can spam abilities pretty well. While Dante doesn’t really generate energy, there are a lot more ways to get around this. I do recommend getting some efficiency in there though. I haven’t run out of energy so far while playing as Dante, but I have Arcane Energize, which keeps me topped up.
His farm isn’t even that bad. I managed to farm all of Dante’s components in 2 hours, plus another hour to get the Voca and Argon Crystal I needed. Sure, Dante’s components are all C rotations, but he drops from Disruption, which means you can get C rotation rewards pretty damn quickly. Unfortunately, Dante isn’t accessible to new players, since you need to play all of the major quests, including Whispers in the Walls, to get him, but once you’re there, it’s an easy farm. AND, on top of that, Loid also has a currency shop, using resources obtained via the Disruption mission, so you can buy the parts if you get really unlucky.
The nicest thing about Dante though is having an actual dump stat. You can ditch all survivability mods and you can get away with not maxing out other stats either. Sure, Dante does benefit a bit from range, duration and efficiency, but you can dump all of those, run a max strength build with no Redirection or Vitality, and be absolutely fine. Honestly, Overguard is stupidly good, and Dante can produce vast amounts of it relatively easily. But at the same time, players can boost the Overguard Dante gives them by killing enemies.
Dante only really has one downside, and it’s that his exalted weapon, Noctua, sucks. It’s similar to the Grimoire, the book-based weapon, but it can use all the unique Grimoire mods. That sounds good in theory, but farming those mods is a pain in the ass, they’re trapped behind C rotations on Mirror Defense, which, while technically quicker than normal Defense (which is ruined by awful AI), can’t really be sped up because it’s a timed mission. Even then though, the damage is pretty mediocre. I can put up with that though because the rest of Dante is genuinely great.
In fact, he’s so good that I’m gonna forma the bastard, but even then, because I’m not wasting 24 capacity for Vitality and Redirection, even with a mediocre build, I am still useful. Once you get to level 10 with Dante and unlock his 4th, you are fine. In fact, I accidentally took my level 20 Dante into a level 70 Entrati survival mission and, once I worked out how to use abilities on my Nintendo Switch, I was fine. Absolutely fine.
So yeah. Good frame. Definitely worth all the Langthorns and Voca I had saved to build Qorvex.