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The first build of the Warframe closed beta, released in 2012, contained only 8 Warframes in total. Ash numbers among these ‘legacy frames,’ the poster boys of Digital Extreme’s flagship MMO looter-shooter. Many members of this original squad have risen and fallen in relevancy in the various patch metas that dot the last ten years of Warframe. Ash and Rhino, however, have managed to remain dominant in their particular domains in every patch consistently.
Ash is arguably the most faithful embodiment of Warframe's ‘Ninjas Play Free’ slogan. Smoke Screen, his second ability, is the lowest cast-time invisibility trigger in the game. Shuriken, the first ability, softens targets up, while the remaining abilities are meant to deliver the killing blow. In 2023, Ash's status as the most reliable DPS powerhouse has been reinstated, thanks to recent discoveries.
Warframe Ash build 2023: mods setup and general strategy
The traditional approach towards min-maxing Ash tends to sacrifice ability duration. Only Smoke Screen suffers from low duration, remedied by slotting in Arcane Trickery. Arcane Trickery has a 15% chance of 30-second invisibility upon finisher kills, which Ash gets to trigger by the dozens thanks to Blade Storm.
However, for reasons discussed below, Ash does not necessarily need ability strength mods for high DPS. This opens up a lot of build flexibility, enabling you to treat ability strength as a dump stat. The current build will therefore combine ability range and ability duration as needed.
You can stray from this build as you see fit, barring one caveat: Savage Silence. To optimize this build, you must replace any of Ash's first three abilities with Banshee's Silence via the Helminth system.
Besides Silence's boons as a pocket crowd control tool that nullifies enemy abilities, it also adds 300% flat bonus finisher damage thanks to the Savage Silence augment mod. The playstyle with this is extremely straightforward: maintain invisibility with Smoke Screen and Arcane Trickery, and kill everything with Blade Storm, even on Steel Path. When the going gets tough, you can pop Silence for a damage boost on Blade Storm and some much-needed crowd control.
Ash stat stick build in Warframe Update 33.x
Recent community findings regarding Blade Storm
Ash's Blade Storm is a pseudo-exalted ability, partially affected by the mods on your melee weapon. A 'stat stick' is a dedicated melee mod setup to boost a specific pseudo-exalted ability.
The type of mods that are taken into account varies from one pseudo-exalted ability to another. Ash's Blade Storm, for example, does not have critical chance, critical damage multiplier, or even status chance.
Blade Storm deals damage in two phases: Ash's shadow clones latch on to the affected enemies to deal damage, and the forced Slash damage-over-time ticks it induces. Conventionally, two modifiers have been known to affect this damage:
- Current combo count boosts damage as it would on your melee weapon
- Melee attack speed affects the speed at which the clones appear and play their animation
A recent patch seems to have changed a few specifics of this pseudo-exalted interaction. A hidden third component of Blade Storm is that the shadow clones deal a flat amount of finisher damage that goes through armor. Further testing has revealed that this is affected by:
- Base melee damage mods, including Spoiled Strike and Condition Overload
- The base damage of the equipped melee weapon
- Finisher damage increments
These changes have only recently come to light because the shadow clone damage has no pop-up, akin to how Specter damage numbers are never displayed. Capitalizing on this, you can set up your stat stick so that most enemies die even before the Slash ticks kick in.
Up-to-date Stat stick build for Ash's Blade Storm
A weapon with a high base damage is recommended since the base damage of the equipped melee affects how much damage the clones deal. Even though heavier weapon classes have much higher base damage, you should ideally stick to daggers to benefit from Covert Lethality (+100% Finisher Damage). Note that Condition Overload and Gladiator Vice should be swapped out for Spoiled Strike and Primed Fury if you do not use a status primer.
Therefore, the best stat stick to use is Innodem or Karyst Prime. For players who do not want to have either, the Rumblejack dagger obtained by doing the New War quest works just as well. Extra elemental damage mods also function, but instead of the stat stick, the damage calculation only counts the clones' hidden reference weapon with 125 base damage.
