U38.5: Exalted Weapon Arcanes (Titania and Jade) (U38.5.2)

Amongst the many, many things brought in U38.5: Techrot Encore, Exalted Weapons were granted access to their respective Weapon Arcanes, as well as the "Acolyte" conditional/combo mods. While a full article discussing every Exalted is far beyond my expertise, I thought it worth at least doing a post for my two most-used Exalted Warframes - Titania and Jade.

Titania

Dex Pixia

Dex Pixia gains significant benefit from getting access to Arcanes. Its strong benefit from Galv Shot's +Damage, and being only usable in Razorwing, remove many of the Arcanes from contention. In my mind, there are three Arcanes worth consideration:

• Secondary Enervate - As discussed in my article on it, Sec Enervate is better on weapons with lower base Crit Chance - like Dex Pixia. Dex Pixia's extremely high Fire Rate with Razorwing Blitz allows it to cycle through peak and trough Crit Chance very quickly.
• Secondary Encumber - Dex Pixia excels at inflicting Status procs and is a great user of Galv Shot, so naturally can make great use of Sec Encumber for even more procs.
• Secondary Fortifier - Overguard contributes a great deal towards the toughness of elite enemies, so being able to rapidly remove is very useful. The Overguard steal effect is also greatly beneficial for your own survival.

Of the three, I favour Enervate for damage output, while Fortifier is a great option if survivability is desired.

Diwata

To be honest, Diwata is so forgettable that I almost forgot to include it when writing this post. Indeed, it still isn't very good, and it is not longer even used as a Razorfly statstick. Access to Blood Rush is nice, but with low range and overall mediocre stats, Blood Rush isn't enough. The vast majority of the time, you're better off sticking to Dex Pixia.

The best Arcane options for it, in my opinion, are Melee Exposure or Duplicate. Exposure gives a hefty amount of Corrosive damage, which is always nice. However, my setup for Diwata uses Shattering Impact, which notably is triggered twice with Duplicate, making for a neat (if rather niche) armour-strip option against enemies who are otherwise resistant to procs and Abilities.

Funnily enough, Diwata also cannot equip any Exilus mod despite now having the slot as it cannot truly Heavy Attack.

Increasing Dex Pixia's average Crit Chance from 28.7% (with Primed Pistol Gambit) to approximately 125% with Sec Enervate is a roughly 2.5× damage increase, as well as freeing up a mod slot. I've often used the spare slot for +Magnetic or +Punch Through. The single target damage increase is drastic, melting even the toughest of Steel Path and onwards enemies with ease.

While not common or reliable, the occasional red Crits are entertaining to behold as well - such is the nature of Secondary Enervate.

Jade

Glory

Glory has many similarities to Dex Pixia, with various traits about it and Jade making certain Arcanes less relevant. In particular, while Glory is not a good user of Galv Shot (due to its AoE), Jade's Deathbringer buff provides +Damage that reduces the value of the +Damage Arcanes like Casc Flare.

In my opinion, there are two clear Arcane options, for much the same reasons:

• Secondary Enervate - Again, the Glory's base Crit Chance is unimpressive (15%), so gains significant benefit from Sec Enervate. While its Fire Rate is nowhere near as high as Dex Pixia, and so does not cycle through Sec Enervate as quickly, the damage benefit is still more than enough to justify it.
• Secondary Fortifier - Again, exceptional against Overguarded units like Eximus, and provides nice survivability. Indeed, I used this as an option in EDA where one of the modifiers was that every enemy had Overguard - I was functionally invincible and that mission was a breeze.

Again, for most content I favour Enervate for the damage boost. Unlike Dex Pixia, I have found Glory to be slightly wanting for damage at times, so the greatly increased damage output (roughly 2×) completely remedies this. I run a lot of +Fire Rate on the Glory, which on top of the overall DPS increase helps to minimise time between peak and trough Crit Chance.

Notably, these Arcanes also affect Glory's Alt Fire, and again the same benefits are evident. Enervate alleviates its otherwise inconsistent Crits, and the semi-consistent second-tier and occasional third-tier Crits can deal comically high damage.

Conclusion

As expected, giving Exalted Weapons access to Arcanes has given many of them a significant power boost even if they were otherwise untouched. Indeed, where I felt both Titania and Jade were very much Steel Path and beyond worthy (having used both comfortably in EDA), access to Arcanes helps bring them to yet another level of power.

Personally, I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the power levels and level of content that Warframe is pushing. In my opinion, particularly with Elite Deep/Temporal Archimedea, we are far beyond the point where increasing enemy level stops providing meaningful difficulty increase. In addition, player power level continues spiking upwards, to the point where barely-modded top-level equipment can waltz through Steel Path with ease - content which used to be considered quite difficult for all but the best loadouts. All that is a rant for another post though.