Warframe Glaive Prime build guide: Best mods, synergies, and more

Warframe Glaive Prime is the favorite endgame melee weapon of choice for most experienced players. Glaives are their own sub-category of melee weapons in the title, which allows you to hold down the melee button to send the disc flying at distant enemies.

As a form of tribute to the signature glaive weapon held by Hayden Tenno, the protagonist in Warframe's precursor Dark Sector (2010), glaives can also be held alongside a sidearm, provided they are not akimbo.

Glaive Prime, in particular, is considered the best in its class when you are up against armored foes. The heavy throw bounces the projectile between targets before it is returned to you, but you can also trigger an explosion midway by pressing the heavy attack button.

This explosion deals a chunk of blast damage, but most importantly, it forces a Slash proc on all affected targets in Warframe.

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Warframe Glaive Prime drop location

You can purchase vaulted relics from other players or from Varzia (Image via Digital Extremes)

The regular glaive can currently only be purchased from Nightwave Cred Offerings for Nightwave Credits. Weapon blueprints in this stock appear on a rotational basis, so you may need to wait a few weeks for the opportunity.

Glaive Prime, on the other hand, can exclusively be farmed from Orokin Relics in Void Fissures.

Vaulted Orokin Relics become available on a monthly basis via the Primed Resurgence program.

That said, you can also obtain Glaive Prime and all of its components from other players via in-game trading.

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Warframe Glaive Prime mod build 2023

Glaive Prime build for easy-to-use heavy attack explosions (Image via Digital Extremes)

The favorable way to play with the Glaive Prime is to use its heavy throw for the forced slash ticks.

The lingering damage-over-time scales with the explosion's damage, which you can stack up with base, critical, and heavy attack damage.

The Volatile Quick Return mod is an absolute must-have to make this explosion more impactful. Since this is a heavy attack build, you stand to gain much from Corrupt Charge or a Riven mod with Initial Combo.

You can also fasten the wind-up for the heavy attack with Amalgam Organ Shatter and Killing Blow.

Furthermore, Gladiator Might adds a roughly 4% critical chance and a decent bit of critical damage.

Note that the showcased build is mostly optimized for ease of use. There are a few tweaks you can make according to your needs.

For more up-front damage, you can incorporate a Viral elemental combo with either Vicious Frost and Virulent Scourge or Primed Fever Strike and North Wind for extra Forma cost.

If you have other forms of attack speed buff, Primed Fury can be replaced with Power Throw. The buff it grants takes some practice to maintain but increases the burst DPS significantly.

Additionally, you can replace Killing Blow with a faction damage multiplier mod to benefit from double-dipping Slash ticks against armored enemies in Warframe.