Building Khora in Mathframe

I felt burned out on GW2 in the wakes of WvW restructuring and Janthir, so I've been playing a lot of Warframe lately instead.

If you're not familiar with it, warframe is the game about moist robots in a far-future capitist hellscape, but also about Y2K where n-sync is trying to kill you.

I've played that on-and-off for a long time, mostly solo and playing with whomever the matchmaker gives me. Technically, I think I might have an account from around launch: they did a badge generator for Tennocon 2020¹ and it reported me as having started in something like 2013?

But: on and off. I've got some prime frames and weapons, a decent mod collection, star chart completion², and an ignis wraith that isn't very good anymore.

Normally, I just play one frame: nova. I've got a slow/neutral/fast build, so I can make the enemies go faster or slower when I infect them with stardust. I never set up anything else, even though I've got some good ones like octavia prime. It's kind of intimidating to try and do a build in Warframe, because there's so many interactions between things, and getting all the necessary equipment is a lot of work.

But this time around, I've been making an effort to branch out, and learn how the game works. I'd like to clear out the steel path starchart, and my nova builds aren't up to the task.

I got lucky doing a relic mission and ended up with the last part for khora prime dropping. I knew she's high in the tier list and has a loot-amplification ability. So, more-or-less randomly I decided I'd start building her.

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Khora

Learning how to make a steel path viable build from first principles is Not a thing I'm going to do, so I started with Thunderdome Khora | Steel Path Endurance Survival and Looting by ninjase.

This fans out into several other guides:

• Venari, khora's cat pet, has its own mods -- and it's own weapon with its own mods, so this guide does double-duty and covers both
• Stat stick melee weapon build for the main ability I'll be using
• And not related directly to khora, but ignis wraith needs an update too

The first step was learning how to operate khora. It's pretty easy: this build is focused on dealing huge crit damage in an area via her #1 ability, whipclaw. #4, Strangedome, can be placed in chokepoints to CC enemies and make it easier to whip them, and they'll drop bonus loot too.

On Crit

Whipclaw needs to consistently crit, so I had to learn about crits. I had a vague notion that red crits = good, but I wasn't sure about the red/orange/yellow damage numbers. This isn't complicated: when you have over 100% crit chance means your crits can crit. The numbers become increasingly red as you go up the crit tiers, for even higher crit damage bonuses. Red crits are guaranteed at 300% crit chance.

I guess red crits aren't necessarily good either: there's a multiplier to your damage, but it's still possible to have a weapon doing more damage without critting. That's happened with my ignis, I guess: it's better to focus on heat DoTs now than crit because of some change that I do not [yet] understand.

That's all pretty basic stuff, right? I'd just never bothered to learn it.

Khora's whipclaw is what people describe as a psuedo-exalted weapon. Some warframes get a free built-in melee weapon that you can mod; khora doesn't, but the ability uses the mods on my regular melee weapon. So: put tons of crit on there, spam 1, receive red crits?

But you can't mod +500% crit onto a weapon directly; that would be ridiculously powerful. I've got some good crit mods, but to push things up into consistent red crit territory, I next had to learn about melee combo. Gladiator Might means I can get +120% crit from maxing out combo points and sitting on them.

Source	Amount
Skana	90%
Combo	120%
Innate to whipclaw	25%
Total	235%

That's solidly in yellow territory, just from static bonuses.

Blood Rush multiplies the base crit -- 90% from the skana, I think? -- as shown in this complicated spreadsheet. I'm not sure exactly how this maths out, but I do know that even with partial combo, I can consistently whip for red crits.

Incarnons

Picking a weapon to use with whipclaw is a whole Thing too. I guess something with high base crit is important, since the whole point of the build is crit.

The guide originally suggested a kuva weapon from a lich, but I guess Duviri added a ton of evolutions for other weapons. Incarnons are available on a schedule from the steel path duviri circuit, and you can get two of them a week. Skana was on the list of acceptable weapons and its incarnon was available ... so that's where I started!

Getting the incarnon was easy. However: getting the duviri open world resources to put it on my skana was a huge pain. I've very rarely had to focus on getting resources because most stuff just kind of Happens as you play normally, but for this, I was doing solo runs into Duviri to pick up a couple nodes and resetting it.

But the incarnon gives the skana +%25 crit, on top of other bonuses. The crit is always on (I think), but the incarnon weapons can be "activated" during play by building up combo and making a heavy attack -- when active, you get stuff like +100% damage and move speed. That's a nice cherry on top.

One downside to activating the incarnon is you gotta make a heavy attack, which consumes combo points. That's bad, since I need to stack combo up for crit. I'm not sure how hard it'll be to stack up combo in steel path, where the enemy density is hopefully high, but in santuary onslight it's kind of painful to get it built up because everything's dying too fast.

Disipline's Merit fixes the problem, giving you a free heavy attack every couple hits.

Just in general, I'm having a lot of difficulty building up combo. Putting the incarnon on skana made it a lot better, since it extends how long you can be idle before combo starts degrading.

But! Skana isn't the best weapon for this build. Something that works with Manus Aggress is. At reset on Sunday, the incarnon for the heavy hammer Magister will be available -- and to prepare, I've forma'd up a Sancti Magister. Building combo on this thing, which is inherently slower than skana and currently sans-incarnon, absolutely sucks.

Venari has a mod that's supposed to give me combo when it hits, and whipclaw gets a little bit of combo. But these mostly seem helpful for sustaining combo, not for building it up initially.

Magus Aggress

The arcane Magus Aggress has a slightly broken interaction with whipclaw.

This lets you press two buttons to give yourself a +300% damage buff. It's meant to last for the next four melee attacks, so it's a big buff because it's only for a few attacks.

Whipclaw is melee, so it gets the +300% damage from this, but it doesn't consume the four stacks since it's an ability.

When I first read through everything, I had misunderstood and thought it gave you 300% for 20 seconds. It sounded super annoying to have to refresh it constantly, even if it was adding a thicc buff. When I re-read it and understood, I was skeptical: 4 attacks, sure, but what's the duration? Surely they wouldn't let me keep that for the entire mission?

I bought the arcane and headed into a mission to try it out ... and I was shocked to discover that no, this didn't need to be refreshed. Build up combo first with normal melee strikes, press the 2 buttons to turn the buff on, and sit back to enjoy huge damage numbers for the rest of the run.

This doesn't work with skana, so I'll be using that for a few more days before switching off to magister.

Next Steps

I've got a planka board with a big backlog of things I wanna get in Warframe. I think my next task is finding a clan -- I was in a small one around 2020, but everyone there stopped playing. Because once I've got my fancy khora build done, I'll need a good squad to farm endless missions and doubel the loot with!

Loosely, my other goals are to look at limbo or something I can use for spy missions in the steel path, fix up my ignis wraith, get helios prime and mod it properly, and then start clearing steel path.

If anyone wants to play some time, find me on steam!