Warframe: Excalibur Umbra Build Guide (2024)

Excalibur Umbra Overview

Stats

• Health: 270 (370 at rank 30)
• Shields: 270 (370 at rank 30)
• Armor: 315
• Energy: 175 (225 at rank 30)

Continuing the trend of Excalibur being a perfectly balanced Warframe, Umbra’s stats are well rounded leaving him with no major downsides or advantages. Even still, Umbra’s stats make him very comfortable to play.

Passive

Because of Excalibur Umbra’s unique situation, Umbra exhibits a unique level of sentience on the battlefield allowing him to continue fighting when the Operator uses Transference to leave the Warframe. He also does 10% more damage and attacks 10% faster when wielding swords.

Abilities

Slash Dash (1st Ability)

Excalibur dashes forward slicing enemies with his Exalted Blade, automatically chaining to additional nearby enemies. Each strike inflicts a guaranteed Slash proc and Knockdown.

Not only is Slash Dash an excellent gap closer, but it can deal a decent amount of damage to a group of enemies with very little Energy cost. The invulnerability given to Excalibur during the ability also makes it great for dealing with large groups of enemies without fear of going down.

Radial Howl (2nd Ability)

Letting out a ferocious howl, Excalibur Umbra releases an intense flash of light that stuns any surrounding enemies. Sentient enemies also have their built-up resistances removed.

This is Umbra’s unique version of base Excalibur’s Radial Blind and functions in a similar fashion. The only major difference is its ability to get rid of Sentient resistances which is incredibly useful. Other than that, Radial Howl is the perfect ability for getting out of sticky situations because of its stun effect.

Radial Javelin

Excalibur summons javelins around him and launches them at surrounding enemies dealing high damage and possibly pinning them to nearby walls.

One of Excaliburs best abilities, this move helps him both clear rooms and provide crowd control at the same time. 

Exalted Blade

Excalibur summons an ethereal blade to his hand, using it as his melee weapon until he runs out of energy or dispels the ability.

This is the bread and butter of Excalibur’s kit and this build. This is the reason why Excalibur is called the sword-themed Warframe. Exalted Weapons are usually powerful and Exalted Blade is no different. This is especially true with the Chromatic Blade augment which allows us to change the elemental damage of the blade based on our energy color and increase status chance.

How to Get Excalibur Umbra

Luckily for new players, Excalibur Umbra is tied to a quest line meaning there are no lengthy grinds needed to unlock him. All you need to do is complete The Sacrifice story quest and you receive him.

Elemental Sword Excalibur Umbra 

This build will focus on Umbra’s Exalted Blade and its ability to deal elemental damage with a high status chance. This build will give our Excalibur high damage while also making him durable enough to survive Steel Path.

Mod Choice

The mod choice for this build is as follows:

• Umbral Intensify: Since Umbra comes with three free Umbra slots, we’re going to utilize them by using Umbral Intensify to increase our Ability Strength. This mod’s power will also be boosted because we’ll be adding Umbral Fiber as well, and all Umbral mods boost their power depending on the number of Umbral mods equipped.
• Umbral Fiber: We add Umbral Fiber to increase the power of all our Umbral mods, while also providing some much-needed survivability for Steel Path.
• Adaption: Same reason as Umbral Fiber, we add Adaption to make Umbra more tanky and increase his survivability on Steel Path.
• Archon Vitality: Our last survivability mod, this will increase our health as well as cause Heat damage caused by abilities to be applied twice. This will make more sense when we go over the build for Umbra’s Exalted Blade, but this is the reason we don’t take Umbral Vitality.
• Prime Continuity: Increased Duration will help mitigate the Energy loss from maintaining Exalted Blade.
• Transient Fortitude/Blind Rage: This mod slot is dedicated to increasing Umbra’s Ability Strength to increase the power of his Exalted Blade. I put both Blind Rage and Transient Fortitude because, while Blind Rage will give more Ability Strength by a large margin, the negatives from the mod might be too detrimental for players with weaker/unranked mods. Transient Fortitude provides a nice alternative in this case.
• Equilibrium: This mod will help us keep our energy up, especially if we put on Blind Rage and decrease our Efficiency. This paired with the Companion we’re going to set up and Energy shouldn’t be a problem.
• Chromatic Blade: One of the most important mods in this build, Chromatic Blade allows us to change our Exalted Blades element damage by changing our primary emission color, kind of like Chroma. It also increases our status chance by 300%. This is why we grab Archon Vitality since it causes our Exalted Blades fire damage to strike twice.
• Steel Charge: An easy choice for aura mods, Steel Charge increases our melee weapon damage which is what we’ll be doing a lot of in this build.

Arcanes

• Arcane Blessing: Since we’ll be picking up a lot of Health orbs, Arcane Blessing can help give us a little more survivability by increasing our overall health pool for each orb picked up.
• Molt Augment: Bonus Ability Strength for each kill is a no-brainer. Especially when Excalibur is so good at taking down enemies quickly.

Helminth Abilities

While all of Excalibur Umbra’s abilities are good, when choosing an ability to replace I would recommend Radial Javelin. Slash Dash’s invulnerability is too good to pass up, Radial Howl’s crowd-control capabilities are too good, and Exalted Blade is the basis for this entire build.

• Wrathful Advance (Kullervo): Hands down the best ability for any melee Warframe in the game right now, Wrathful Advance increases melee critical chance significantly ensuring you’ll be hitting easy red crits.
• War Cry (Valkyr): Valkyr’s War Cry ability is also great for Excalibur because of its bonus to melee attack speed. This will also give Umbra access to Eternal War which increases War Cry’s duration per kill.

Weapons & Gear

Umbra needs a couple things to make this build run smoothly. Mainly a certain setup for his Exalted Blade and a way to consistently get Health Orbs to drop.

Exalted Blade Mod Choice

• Sacrificial Steel: Just like Umbra himself, his blade comes with two free Umbra slots which we’ll be using for the Umbral weapon mods. Sacrificial Steel will increase our crit chance to help us hit harder.
• Sacrificial Pressure: We add this for the same reasons as Sacrificial Steel, only this mod directly increases our melee damage.
• Shocking Touch: Since we already have Heat damage on our Exalted Blade, we’re going to add Corrosive to help shred armor on enemies hit. To do this we need Electricity and Toxin slotted in.
• Fever Strike: Same reason as above, to help us add Corrosive to our blade.
• Condition Overload: A powerful mod that will increase our damage significantly. This will increase the percentage of damage per status effect on the enemy.
• Organ Shatter: This mod will increase our critical damage to help us hit harder.
• Gladiator Might: This mod will increase our critical damage even further.
• Gladiator Vice: This will increase our attack speed and pair well with Gladiator Might.

Companion 

For our companion, we want to ensure it has Synth Deconstruct to help produce more Health Orbs while playing. Choosing a Companion like Dirga that can spread elements easily is also a good choice to synergize with our Condition Overload mod.