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Weekly Warframe: Caliban
(lemmy.zip)
Unhinged Caliban enjoyer here with some thoughts about the funny space man.
In overview: despite his bad reputation, Caliban is a crowd controller-debuffer type character, which gives him incredible offensive potential and a corresponding wide and flexible arsenal of weapons to play with. His reign as the spicier Nyx was short, however, with Zariman adversely affecting his playstyle due to the Overpocalypse killing all CC not named Chaos or Irradiating Disarm (or Resonator at the time; RIP Octavia).
So, let's talk abilities.
The passive is kind of meh, but, I did stress test a hyper-offensive mod build that only ran Aegis and Brief Respite, and it comfortably went to the mid 200s in Conjunction Survival, which is honestly pretty impressive. After the shield rework, it jumped to providing up to 75% DR on his very rapidly regenerating shields. I'm going to keep tinkering with the build until he can Eclipse tank Mot and EDAs.
Razor Gyre is rightly considered his helminth slot. It's broken in a basic way. The damage is acceptable given the synergy with his Sentient Wrath, but that's about it. He can AoE knockdown with it, and use it to dash to an enemy. It also heals him if for some reason you're trying to health tank on Caliban... which I may have tried when Veilbreaker dropped... In Pablo's teaser, he showed it functioning as a forward dash, albeit with no visible knockdown. May have Gloom synergies in the future? We shall see.
Sentient Wrath, my beloved. A big spicy combined CC and DV, kind of like a souped up Sea Snares. The target cap has gotten worse now that Precision Intensify exists. Has glacial vertical tracking, in tilesets where that matters such as Lua and Entrati Labs. It also scales harder than Roar, and does not trigger the mutually exclusive damage Helminth lockout, so you can slap it on Rhino or Mirage if you please. Works really well with the new Blast and its weird buggy calculations. Combined with Fusion Strike, Caliban is a spicy boy.
Lethal Progeny is great. Regenerating up to 75 shields at base is a huge deal, and they provide some minor distractions. I wouldn't call this CC, but they do keep the heat off Caliban. Basically a budget Aegis provided you use the Augur set or Brief Respite to stay above 0 shields, and combine very well with Aegis itself. That all said, this is the first of Caliban's ridiculous energy drains. At base, devours 150 energy every ~28s. A 95% duration, 175% efficiency build makes this much more manageable. In the rework teaser, this is shown summoning all your li'l sentient buddies at once, so hopefully this fixes the time spent casting and the energy burden.
And finally, Fusion Strike. The cooler Gaze, almost a functional nuke, and a horrific energy tax, all in one! Arguably poor scaling for endurance content due to the debilitating animation lock, although it might be a bit better with the Primed Redirection shield gate nowadays; in my experience not an issue in teams either, having gone into the 1000s in Circuit. For everyday use though, it's fantastic. Up to three fullstrip fields can be placed, which in most tiles is enough to ensure all enemies approaching have 0 armour or shields. But let's talk about that energy burden... fields last 15s. That 95-175 build I mentioned earlier will be eating 1.35 energy a second to keep all fields up, and with Lethal Progeny it's around 2.8, just a bit over energy neutral with Energy Nexus. The rework teaser showed the Conculyst buddies contributing their own beams, so I feel like this is going to become a powerful linear-style nuke, like Qorvex's laser.
Overall, I can't wait for the deluxe skin, and I hope the future is bright for one of my favourite, secretly OP Warframes.