Ash: Wrathful Storm
Ash: Wrathful Storm
TL;DR
This build focuses on Blade Storm and Teleport. Blade Storm deals true damage through finisher attacks, making it excellent against tough targets, but its energy cost quickly adds up against groups.
Wrathful Advance pushes Ash’s damage into the millions, while the Prisma Obex Incarnon gives Teleport a much faster way to clear groups.
Blade Storm deals with the big, tough targets, while Teleport handles everything else. Ash has incredible damage output, but his slow attack speed and energy economy can be weaknesses. He’s a powerful, but somewhat expensive, glass cannon.
Playstyle
Ash’s playstyle comes down to Smoke Screen, Teleport and Blade Storm, with the latter two being his main sources of damage. I wanted to build around both abilities while giving Smoke Screen everything it needs to keep Ash alive.
Survival relies on invisibility and damage output. What can’t see you can’t kill you, but random damage that isn’t aimed directly at you can still be a problem. Ash is very much a glass cannon. He can deal ridiculous amounts of damage, but he still has weaknesses that need to be managed.
Blade Storm deals true damage through finisher attacks, making it excellent against tough targets. However, it’s slow, and the energy cost quickly adds up when marking multiple enemies. While it can deal with groups, I find it much more effective against smaller groups of tough targets.
This is where Teleport comes in.
Using the Prisma Obex Incarnon allows Teleport to become a much faster way to clear groups. The Obex attacks faster than Blade Storm’s clones, giving Ash a way to deal with crowds while his clones focus on something else.
This changes the way the frame plays. Blade Storm becomes the tool for dealing with tough targets, while Teleport handles everything else.
Without the Prisma Obex, Teleport is much less useful, just an escape not a damage tool. You end up relying more heavily on Blade Storm, and its slow clones and energy cost become much more noticeable when dealing with larger groups.
Wrathful Advance is what brings the build together. Replacing Shuriken with Wrathful Advance gives Ash a huge boost to his damage, pushing it into the millions. This allows him to instantly kill enemies well into the thousands of levels and gives the build the potential to scale into level cap.
Do you need to use this setup? No. Ash already had plenty going for him before Wrathful Advance. However, it gives him a much faster way to attack and reminds me of the old Marked for Death builds Ash used to run.
Those older builds used Silence from Banshee to produce some silly damage numbers. Now we have another Helminth option that can produce even bigger numbers, without needing an additional augment slot.
Even before Wrathful Advance, Ash was already a strong frame. This setup simply makes him a bit better, changing the focus from a build that relies almost entirely on Blade Storm to one that uses both Blade Storm and Teleport.
Not much can survive the damage Ash can output. If something does survive, the next hit will usually finish it off.
Weaknesses
There are still some weaknesses, though. If an enemy can’t be targeted, Ash can’t kill it with these abilities. Anything that nullifies abilities can also prevent his damage from being applied.
His damage output is also much slower compared to some other frames because of the animations and attack-speed limit on his clones. This is one reason why Ash is often seen as primarily a solo frame. In a squad, it can sometimes feel like you’re doing nothing while your teammates kill enemies marked by your clones.
His energy economy is another weakness. Blade Storm can become very expensive to use, especially against crowds. This is another reason why using Teleport for AoE damage makes sense, while Blade Storm is better reserved for smaller groups of tough targets.
Archon Shards
Do you need any of these Shards? No, they’re just nice to have. You can use quality-of-life Shards instead if you prefer, or invest in more damage. Do you need more damage? Not really, but funny, silly numbers are fun.
I added a Blue Shard to push Ash Prime just over 500 maximum energy. That lets me use two Violet Shards for additional critical damage on melee attacks while my energy is above 500.
This only works with Ash Prime, though. Any modifiers that reduce your energy can prevent the setup from working, including certain EDA conditions.
I’d love for Ash to have more energy so this setup could still work with those negative modifiers.
Do you need to do this? No, it’s just a bit more damage on something that’s already pretty stupid. You essentially have two flex slots here, which you can use for Red Shards to increase Duration or Power Strength, or replace them with something else entirely.
You could just use a bunch of quality-of-life Shards instead. It’s entirely up to you.
Build for Ash
I wanted to balance several things here. Power Strength pushes the damage as high as possible, but we also need Duration, Efficiency, Range and Energy. Duration is important for Smoke Screen, while Efficiency and energy help keep Blade Storm usable.
Aura: Steel Charge. We’re focusing on melee attacks, so this makes sense for the build.
Exilus: Primed Sure Footed. This is just a nice quality-of-life mod. You can skip it if you want to reduce the Forma investment.
Umbral Intensify and Transient Fortitude provide Power Strength, with two Arcanes helping to boost it even further. Primed Continuity counters the negative Duration from Transient Fortitude.
Narrow Minded gives us more Duration at the cost of Range, while Fleeting Expertise helps with Efficiency but reduces Duration. Primed Flow pairs well with Fleeting Expertise, giving us a larger energy pool to work with.
To help deal with the negative Range, we’re using Augur Reach and Archon Stretch. A companion can also help with energy economy by triggering Archon Stretch through electric damage. It can then pick up energy orbs to help keep us going.
Primed Flow is important here because we want a large energy pool, especially when using the Archon Shard setup mentioned earlier, which pushes Ash Prime above 500 energy.
The mods I’m using are:
- Primed Continuity
- Transient Fortitude
- Umbral Intensify
- Primed Flow
- Narrow Minded
- Fleeting Expertise
- Augur Reach
- Archon Stretch
I don’t really have a flex slot here. Everything is here for a reason, and the build is pretty tight.
Arcanes
I went with Molt Augmented and Crepuscular for Ash himself. Both fit the frame well, providing extra Power Strength and additional critical damage.
For the Shadow Clones, I use Melee Exposure and Melee Retaliation. These fit the melee-focused nature of the build and help improve their damage. I’ll explain those in more detail below.
Blade Storm: Shadow Clones
The build focuses on toxin damage because Melee Exposure converts it into corrosive damage. This gives the clones a useful damage type. Melee Retaliation ends up building around gas for additional AoE damage.
There isn’t much difference between the two in terms of damage. One single target and one is not. Gas does have the advantage of leaving behind a cloud, which can help clean up anything that walks into it.
The clones use a dagger and deal finisher damage, but they can also perform critical strikes and benefit from melee effects such as Steel Charge. That means we’re essentially building them like a critical melee weapon, with finisher damage added on top.
They do have an internal attack-speed limit, though. Primed Fury helps reach that limit, but investing beyond it won’t make the clones attack any faster.
Wrathful Advance can push their damage even further. With it, we can start seeing red critical hits, although orange critical hits will be more common. If you add two extra Red Archon Shards for Power Strength, you can reach guaranteed red critical hits.
The build therefore looks something like this:
- Primed Pressure Point
- Primed Fury (overcaps the attack speed)
- Finishing Touch
- Organ Shatter
- Primed Fever Strike
- Covert Lethality
- More mods depending on the setup
The main thing to remember is that Blade Storm’s clones already have a limit on how quickly they can attack. Primed Fury is still useful for reaching that limit, but anything beyond it is wasted because the clones cannot attack any faster.
Helminth
I find replacing Shuriken to be more useful for this build. Its augment is nice, but when you’re already able to kill enemies well into the thousands, there isn’t much reason to keep it.
Instead, we’re replacing it with Wrathful Advance, which is where the name Wrathful Storm comes from.
In the past, you could use something like Silence with the Savage Silence augment to produce some silly damage numbers. However, Wrathful Advance doesn’t require an additional mod slot for an augment, can produce much higher damage, and works with the general build we’re already using.
That’s why it fits so well here. We’re already building around melee damage, critical hits, Blade Storm and Teleport. Wrathful Advance simply pushes those numbers even further.
Do you need to use Wrathful Advance? No. Ash is already a strong frame without it. But if you want to push his damage into ridiculous territory, it’s a very good option.
Companion
I use a Hound here because it helps patch up one of Ash’s biggest weaknesses: dealing with crowds. It can also apply status effects and deal some damage of its own.
Spreading status effects and dealing electric damage allows it to trigger Archon Stretch in the main Ash build. This helps with energy economy, while the Hound can also pick up energy orbs to keep things going.
Combined with its utility, it feels like a good fit for the build. There are other options available, but this is the one I settled on.
Weapons
I’m not really using weapons all that much unless I need to solve a particular problem or require a specific tool. There are quite a few options available for dealing with things like nullifier bubbles.
The primary weapon can be anything, but I find myself using a utility secondary more often to deal with specific problems.
Teleport and Prisma Obex Incarnon
For melee, I would use the Prisma Obex from Baro, along with its Incarnon upgrade. I don’t have it myself, but it is a straight upgrade for the playstyle we’re going for, allowing us to abuse Teleport to clear rooms.
The Obex attacks faster than the clones, which means you can use Teleport to deal with one group while Blade Storm deals with something else.
This gives Ash a similar effect to the old Marked for Death builds, which required a lot of setup and were generally more effort than they were worth. The Obex achieves something similar with less setup and far less effort, while arguably being even stronger.
Using the Obex allows you to clear rooms with Teleport with ease. If you have access to it, I’d recommend giving it a try.
The main point is that you have choices. You can use whatever weapons you feel are necessary for the rest of the build, depending on what you’re doing.
Closing Thoughts
Ash has always had the power to straight-up delete enemies, but he comes with a few downsides. His animations can be slow, his clones have an attack-speed limit, and Blade Storm can become expensive when dealing with groups.
Wrathful Advance and the Prisma Obex give him a much better way to deal with crowds. Blade Storm can handle the tougher targets, while Teleport lets him clear everything else much faster.
He still has weaknesses, and playing him in a squad can sometimes feel like you’re doing nothing while your teammates kill your marked enemies. This is one reason why Ash works so well as a solo frame.
Even so, he has gone from being a one-punch ninja who slowly deletes everything to a much more capable room-clearing ninja.
Not perfect, but he can still delete almost anything you put in front of him.