Even before his rework, Vauban was an incredibly fun frame to play for those of us who love to control the battlefield. His kit remains largely the same, just streamlined along with a few boosts to damage scaling, making Warframe’s tactician more viable than ever.
Vauban Build Guide
In this guide, I’ll show you how to build Vauban to devastate entire areas with a deluge of status effects and control abilities. He’s already quite good at area denial on his own, but there are some fun ways to make the enemies in your zone of control have an even worse day than usual. This build has been stress-tested in both Arbitrations and Steel Path, and clears both with relative ease. To follow this build to the letter, you’ll only need a single Forma.
What To Mod For
Strength will be your most important stat here, since it boosts Vauban’s buffs, debuffs, and general ability damage, followed by an even distribution of range and duration to give Vauban control over a larger area with minimal recasting required. Blind Rage gives you the greatest strength increase in a single mod slot, but the negative ability efficiency tradeoff means you’ll need to scrounge for energy at the start of every mission before you can get your ability rotation going properly. Slotting Arcane Energize helps produce a steady flow of energy once you do get the engine going, and Primed Flow ensures you’ll have a deeper well of energy reserves to draw from. If you find yourself wanting more ability strength, you could swap out the Exilus Mod for Power Drift instead, but the increased mobility and range from Cunning Drift makes it easier for Vauban to control the battlefield, and Molt Augmented already provides an additional 60% power strength at full stacks.
As with all somewhat squishy warframes, the easiest way to give Vauban more survivability is to take advantage of the Brief Respite aura + Augur set combo. Adaptation is nice for mitigating damage, sure, but the immediate shields-per-energy-spent from the aforementioned combo is invaluable when you’re wading through the thick of it. Realistically, you can use whatever combination of Augur Mods you like, it mostly just depends on whether you care more about strength, range, or duration. You could even use all three Warframe Augur Mods (besides Augur Accord) if you’d prefer to replace one of the less crucial mods in this build like Adaptation or Primed Continuity, but available mod slots are already spread pretty thin since this build uses two Augment Mods. There’s always an argument to be had about the cost-benefit analysis of Augment Mods, but Neutron Star and Tesla Bank help take Vauban from purely controlling the battlefield to absolutely demolishing it.
Beyond The Mods
For Archon Shards, two Crimson Shards for ability strength help make up for the two mod slots taken up by augments. To take advantage of the electricity status spread by Vauban’s Tesla Servos, which is further spread by Tesla Bank snapshotting enemy health upon contact and releasing it in a damaging electrical burst on death, we can fill the remaining Archon Shard slots with three Violet Shards. They provide an ability damage increase whenever enemies are affected by electricity status, which should be almost always. This helps boost the damage done by Nova’s Null Star ability, which I’ve subsumed over Vauban’s Photon Strike for this build. Sacrilege, I know, but Null Star rounds Vauban’s weaknesses out nicely, and replacing any of his other abilities would be too destructive to Vauban’s control tactics.
Null Star is a stellar subsume option solely for the damage reduction per Null Star particle orbiting you, but it can be an effective damage dealer as well. Granted, its blast damage doesn’t do much on its own, dealing only 30% damage per stack until 10 stacks or death, at which point a 300% damage blast is released in an AOE. The Neutron Star augment helps speed the process up, since it adds innate heat status and allows you to recast Null Star to send out damaging particles to seek enemies. Heat status has the added benefit of weakening armor alongside a steady damage over time, making it much easier to take out enemies and trigger the explosions from both Tesla Bank and Null Star for devastating effect.
The Gameplay Loop
As I mentioned earlier, your energy economy takes some time to kick off when starting missions, meaning you’ll only be able to cast a handful of abilities before you have to go scrounging for energy orbs. It can help to bring along a weapon you’re confident in to offset these low-energy states, but these deficits should become less common as you accumulate a stockpile of energy. Once energy is no longer an issue, you’ll want to keep your tether-flechette orbs active in a radius around whatever you’re defending, while always having your Tesla Servos out and wreaking havoc. Null Star is worth keeping up and recasting whenever you encounter a new group of enemies, both to refresh your orbiting particles for damage reduction and to reduce enemy defenses with the heat status from the previous set of particles. In contrast, Bastille is best saved for large groups of enemies or whenever you or the defense objective are under immediate threat. The ragdoll effect coupled with the armor strip from Bastille is incredibly helpful, especially since that armor is granted to Vauban and nearby allies, but the ability comes at a heavy energy cost.
Just starting Warframe, or back after a break? Check out our article on the Jade Shadows: Constellations update! Interested in more of my build-crafting? Give Excalibur a try! We encourage you to comment below with any questions regarding the Mods, Arcanes, or various tips in this guide. Keep checking GameObserver for more Warframe guides and news!
