excalibur

Locked In A Closet with A Bunch of Suits

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Proto Excalibur and Proto Volt

It’s been three years since The Sacrifice came out in Warframe. While, for me, that seems somewhat recent, I’m pretty sure that most people feel like it was aaages ago. Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess. But there is something that troubles me about The Sacrifice. And it’s… a bit weird. A quick heads up! This article contains massive spoilers for one of Warframe’s bigger quests. I’d recommend finishing The Sacrifice before reading this article! Okay, to be fair, it WAS three years ago. Normally, most spoilers become unspoiled about a year afterwards. But because this quest is… [Continue Reading]

More Adventures with Phovos the Excalibur

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Phovos the Excalibur in his blue and orange colour scheme.

It’s that time of year again. Actually, it’s not. Normally, in March, Phovos the Excalibur would come back to life. The baby Warframe account would do the anniversary missions, claim its free slots then leave. But lately I realized that I was missing a bunch of Warframe achievements. And the only way to get them? I had to hop on my ancient account and play there.

I’m not going to lie, it’s… a struggle.

I take so much for granted.

Mostly modding and Endo. I have so little of it! No matter how much I obtain, I am very quickly spending it on leveling up the basic mods. The 2000 endo from level 2 of Nightwave was insanely handy in helping me rank up a Serration… which I had to obtain first.

Another thing I miss is readily available energy. Once you have your Operator, even the middle point of Zenurik is a HUGE helping hand. Before that, most new players have basically no energy regeneration. I’ve been using a damaged Equilibrium for now, but it’s not enough. Most missions I do are without energy for the most part.

I have some good gear, but it doesn’t always cut it.

Luckily, Phovos the Excalibur is actually quite well equipped. He has a Vectis, the Dex Dakra and a Galatine to help guide the way. The Dex weapons in particular are excellent. Sure, their damage output isn’t amazing, but they have one upside compared to normal weapons. Thy come with Catalysts pre-installed, meaning I get double mod capacity.

And at MR4, that means a huge amount. Starting with 8 capacity in a weapon over 8 means I can at least fit in a mid-ranked Hornet Strike or Serration. At MR5, I’ll be able to fit Pressure Point into these weapons. But currently I can’t fit anything of use into new gear, which makes it very hard to, well, do many things. While one can normally get away with using unranked gear after MR9-10, below that, it’s vital to carry something leveled up so I can actually do damage.

Everything hurts.

With no energy and no way of really healing, everything really hits much harder. For example, I finished the Vox Solaris quest to unlock the last node on Venus. But despite the enemies in that mission being between 7-10, they hit like trucks. AND they’re hard to kill. While shield-gating kept me alive enough to finish the quest, that same shield-gating meant that the Corpus took  double the time to kill compared to normal enemies.

That being said, Orb Vallis enemies are all-round tougher than most.

All in the name of achievements.

And I’ve got a lot to do. I need to do 10 Nightmare missions, I have to kill Tyl Regor and Kela De Thayme. And I even need to make my way to Eris to do 5 Hive missions. Tyl Regor doesn’t seem that bad. After all, I just reached Jupiter and could be going a lot faster if I’d tried. But Sedna requires me to do pretty much all of the star chart and most quests. And then farming in the arena mode to get points to even fight her once. I am SO glad that I don’t need the achievements for killing Ambulas, Mutalist Alad V or the Jordas Golem.

That being said, I have made some progress. I finished the Void Fissure and Invasion achievements I needed, and I have filled out two planets to get Nightmare missions on them.

Still, it’s a slow process. And it’s been a huge reminder of just how… awkward the early game is. I’d genuinely forgotten a lot of these struggles, so it’s been a bit of an eye-opener for me.

Still though, it makes returning to my MR30 account so much sweeter.

Ranking Exalted Weapons – Warframe’s Best and Worst Exalted Weaponry

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Excalibur Umbra, standing proud

Exalted weapons are awesome. The ability to suddenly summon a weapon of death out of thin air is just so cool. Even if you’re already armed with an explosive bow, the badassery of summoning another bow is too cool to pass up. But there are lots of exalted weapons, and they’re all definitely not equal. In today’s article, I’m going to rank all twelve exalted weapons. Note: this is mostly based on personal opinion. You can get HUGE damage numbers on all of these. In fact, properly modded, these are all insane. But I like to consider usability and coolness… [Continue Reading]

The Problem With Exalted Weapons

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Tearing stuff apart as Valkyr

An Exalted Weapon in Warframe is an ability where you summon a magical weapon and wreck havoc with it. There are different types of Exalted Weapon and, generally, they drain energy as you use them, in exchange for sheer power. But while exalted weapons are both cool and powerful, they are not always consistent. And, sometimes, there are better options out there. Exalted Weapons are Harder to Mod The first big issue with exalted weapons is that they are finicky to mod. They’re not consistent and can’t use all mods. Originally, you actually couldn’t mod exalted weapons. Instead, they borrowed… [Continue Reading]

5 Old Facts about the 3 Starter Frames

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Excalibur looking cool

The three starter Warframes are old. Excalibur, Mag and Volt are among the original 8 Warframes that were in the game on release and they’re the three options you choose from, should you create a new account and start from the beginning. But each of these Warframes has a long and colourful history, most of which is forgotten these days. So here are six ancient facts about our three favourite starter Warframes. Their blueprint locations have been all over the place While Mag has pretty much always been the drop from the Sergeant, Volt and Excalibur have been a bit… [Continue Reading]

Happy Birthday Excalibur Umbra

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Excalibur Umbra and the Moon

Today, 15th June, is the day that the Sacrifice was released and Excalibur Umbra became accessible to pretty much everyone who had been keeping up with quests. Today is the day that we could all get Excalibur Umbra and calm his pain. But the more I think about it, the more I realise just how messed up that whole mess was. The Sacrifice Quest, that is. The Sacrifice involved finding bits of Excalibur Umbra, scanning them and throwing the parts into your foundry to basically resurrect the poor blighter. What’s weird though is that the Operator and Ordis think they’re… [Continue Reading]

Angry Excalibur

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Shiny Angry Excalibur.

By far, the Sacrifice is an amazing quest to get a new Warframe. Unlike quests like Octavia’s Anthem or the Glast Gambit, the Sacrifice hows you everything that went into making a Warframe and Warframes in general. And like older frames of the past, it rewards you with a fully built Warframe at the end. Exceeeeeept it’s never that simple. Normally newly built Warframes don’t force you out of their bodies, try to kill you and run away. Normally Warframes don’t seem to have any true sapience at all. But Excalibur Umbra? He’s still alive. And he’s very, very angry.… [Continue Reading]

The Sacrifice – Um… That was… Uh…

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A tree and a sword.

So I played the Sacrifice. It wasn’t very long. I think I finished it in about 45 minutes? Not long at all. At the end of it I was all rather… uh… I don’t know. I wasn’t sure how to feel. I think deflated but not surprised is the best description. I expected more. I really did. Before we start, don’t worry, this is mostly spoiler free. I won’t go into details about what happened or anything like that. Normally me and fellow clan members can’t agree on much. But we all seemed to agree on the same thing –… [Continue Reading]

The Return of Phovos the Excalibur

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"Woah, pretty sunset. But Lotus says there's a big scary monster that comes out at night?"

I used to be known across the internet as Phovos the Raptor, or Phovos for short. Everything I did, every account I made pre-SPUF, I was called Phovos. And so were a lot of things during my SPUF years, since Phovos is often available where Medic obviously isn’t. That bright yellow Volt you see around here all the time? He’s… not called Phovos. He’s called Retvik, because the name Phovos was taken when I created my current Warframe account. It turned out though, the name Phovos had been taken by me. I sort of rediscovered this when I bought the… [Continue Reading]

A Bonus Unlikely Story – The Scared Excalibur

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A Worried Excalibur

“An Equinox, an Ivara and a newbie Excalibur head to a bar!” the black and red Ash grinned as he dropped down from an unprotected vent. “Well, the other two bullet jump in, the Excalibur just walks…” “Don’t make fun of the newbie,” the equally edgy black and red Ivara tutted. “Not his fault he’s literally just escaped from Vor’s influence.” “Well, he’s only going to hold us back!” Ash’s mood dropped. “This is a spy mission after all! A Spy mission on a Grineer ship of all things. Isn’t the place for a newbie Excalibur!” Again, Ivara tutted. “We’re… [Continue Reading]