shogun

I bet it was a bug caused by it being given its own steel path region.

From a lore perspective the sisters of parvos kill lots of tenno, so I assume the Tenet Arca Plasmor is canonically a really strong weapon. I don't think we ever got any lore about the base form / ambassador.

What don't you like about her? Raksh is a pretty good ability, and she works well with equilibrium. She's not meta but I think there's a lot of frames worse than her.

I might change the passive up a bit, because this kit has a lot of methods of freezing enemies but not a lot to actually do with frozen enemies, outside of CCing them.

I think the passive could be something like 'inflicting an Impact proc on a frozen enemy shatters them, dealing cold damage equal to X% of their HP (scales with strength) in an area around them (scales with range)' It would encourage using impact-heavy weapons, which would be a fun niche.

It'd probably have to start as a small percentage and small range. Something like 50% of HP and 10% on acolytes/demolysts/etc, within an 8 meter range. The goal is more to make clearing groups of frozen enemies easy than to make damaging a single frozen enemy a viable method of crowd control.

I loved the archon weapons. Good stats, good choices of archetypes, and the special combos were awesome. It would be cool if we got more like them.

The ninkondi prime is okay but we really need one with a gimmick. Ideally something that can take advantage of the massive number of hits per second the stance can get

I've sort of given up on that altogether. I tend to run very high attack speed and bind melee to my scroll wheel, so my frame just flails at groups of enemies until they're all dead.

From the perspective of feeling like an actual melee weapon instead of a flamethrower that forces you to walk forward, I think DE would have to tear down the entire stance system and start over if they wanted that to work. I don't think we'll ever see them do that for the simple reason that in many cases, they refuse to acknowledge that this game is a horde shooter - we need combos ripped out of a Dynasty Warriors game, not something pretending to be single-target. But lots of new content is still being designed with the assumption that players will spend multiple seconds dealing with a single corrupted lancer, which is the root of a lot of balance issues.

But Stalker told me my actions have consequences

The new dual nikana stance is alright. Once they fix the weird bug that's causing the forced slash on heavy to be offset behind and to the right of your frame, it'll at least have good multipliers (although no guaranteed procs on light attack, sadly.) I feel like a truly good dual nikana would work fine alongside the stance, we're just blinded by how mid Sun & Moon is. And the heavy scythe stance has bad multipliers, but there's a lot of nice slash procs in there. I would call these stances alright. They're not great, but they're not so bad as to doom their whole weapon class.

Assault saws / two-handed nikanas are just bad though. If the Tenet Livia was any other weapon archetype I would never unequip it, but Wise Razor sucks so much that it ruins it. If they ever make another assault saw, they're going to have to pump its base damage way up to account for the terrible multipliers on Butcher's Revelry.

Overall it's been pretty hit or miss, but there have been some hits IMO. I'm done getting excited for new archetypes before I can try them, but I think saying there hasn't been a good stance in five years is a little excessive.

I consider Caliban a bad warframe. He isn't bad in isolation, he's just worse than almost everyone else. He's probably in the bottom ten in my opinion.

Going through his abilities:

1. His passive does not stack with Adaptation. It's an ability which encourages EHP tanking, but it gets invalidated by the best EHP tanking mod. It applying to allies is really cool - especially because it's affinity range - but it needs to stack to be worth using IMO.

2. His 1, Razor Gyre, is unambiguously awful. Even Caliban fans call this one a helminth slot. The chance for a slash proc is cool, but the way its damage scales makes it generally unviable as a tool for killing enemies at higher levels. It can work at lower levels, but at those levels other warframes can clear trash better. (And it locks you out of his 3 and 4, which are probably his best abilities. That's the same problem Hildryn's 4 has, and nobody uses that.)

3. Sentient Wrath lifting and applying damage vulnerability is cool, but any damage un-lifts enemies. It suffers from the problems of other CC abilities - if I want to do a full body animation to cast an ability, I might as well just kill the enemies. Also, for some incomprehensible reason, it has a target maximum. Meaning even if you wanted to build for range and duration, you also need strength if you want to capture a large group of enemies. The damage vulnerability is nice, but it's a little redundant to being able to full-strip armor/shields, since that's enough to kill everything in all content you'd bring Caliban to. If an enemy has no shields or armor, it usually just dies. And if you really need full strip and a damage vulnerability, you've probably reached a level where your passive and Lethal Progeny stop functioning at all, meaning you're going to be too busy dying to get use out of Sentient Wrath.

4. Lethal Progeny is a great idea with mixed execution. I love the idea of summoning conculysts to recharge shields and draw enemy fire, but the lack of scaling and prioritization of attacking over shield regen kind of kills it. IMO conculysts should somehow try to match enemy level, and at least one conculyst should always be assigned to permanent shield-recharging duty. Overall it's still a fun ability, but its use as a form of enemy distraction is held back by the fact that it has a duration. If Wukong can have an infinite clone, I think Caliban can keep his sentient pals until they're killed.

5. Fusion Strike is pretty good. The AOE full permanent armor strip is awesome, but the ability is a little long to cast, it's in a cone, and this is Caliban's main thing. Other warframes can armor strip better (like Hildryn, who can strip entire tiles in the blink of an eye with minimal interruption to your movement/gunplay.) It's a powerful ability, but it's not enough to carry his kit. It doesn't help that Tharros Strike is a helminth ability, which is also a cone-based armor strip that requires 200% power strength.

Overall he's just not great. He focuses on doing a lot of things badly instead of doing one thing very well. In a world where there are frames that can do lots of things very well, I just don't consider him worth using. There's never once been a single time where I've felt the need to use Caliban for something.

That being said, there's nothing wrong with using Caliban if you just think he's fun. Much like Atlas, he can perform well enough that you're not throwing by using him or anything. I just think he deserves massive buffs, because there's a great frame hiding in there that needs some work before it can really spread its wings.

He's both sevagoth-level unobtainable and bad, meaning that by the time you get him you're guaranteed to have better options.

I love Caliban in concept and I really hope he gets some love soon.

The phrasing of 'must now ask' implies that this is a new standard and not a one off thing. RIP Alecaframe I suppose