Atlas: Nourish Landslide

TL;DR

Atlas is a health tank, built around Landslide, with everything feeding that. Landslide, his exalted melee, can put out some pretty high numbers, not Ash levels, but high enough. Like Ash he’s single target but can do AoE too, though if you can’t target something you’ve got to use a weapon instead. The rubble mechanic could be better, but that’s the trade-off you pay. Helminth has two options, Nourish and Kouemi, the latter being a bit of a curveball.

Weaknesses: untargetable enemies mean no Landslide damage outright, and while tanky, he isn’t invincible compared to some other frames. Energy economy can be a problem, which is why Nourish is used. Classic nullifier just stops you.

Archon Shards

You don’t really need shards, but they can give you some much needed QoL. I’ve gone a bit nuts here, went with Violet Shards for bonus critical damage, meeting the energy requirement. Most likely going to move two shards from Atlas toward somebody else. Amber Shard for casting speed, starting energy just sounds nice. Do whatever you need or want to here.

Frame Build

This is a full Umbral setup, quite an investment, this character can take you quite a few Forma and is a workhorse.

I’m building Power Strength and Survivability with a touch of Range.

Aura: Steel Charge is the go-to choice, this melee-focused aura synergizes perfectly with Atlas, increasing melee damage while providing extra capacity for other mods.

Range mods: Cunning Drift, Archon Stretch, Augur Stretch, and Overextended. The Archon mod here gives bonus energy if you can create electric damage, which is what my pet does. The rest is range for Landslide.

Umbral Set: all three (Umbral Vitality, Umbral Fiber, Umbral Intensify) are in for the extra survivability and strength. Unranked Umbral Fiber still gets the set bonus if you want to use less Forma.

Adaptation and Primed Flow, the last one for purple or violet shards. You can swap out Adaptation for Hunter Adrenaline if you want to push toward level cap.

Augments are nice but not really needed, can’t really fit them into this build.

Arcanes

Arcane Blessing and Arcane Bellicose pair together well. Persistence is another option, you could give up Bellicose for it.

Landslide

At base, Landslide has some AoE, which makes Exposure and Influence pretty good arcane choices. It’s a melee weapon at the end of the day, so these arcanes scale with that damage. Single target and more AoE are the two directions here, I use Influence for higher level content, something I don’t play that often. You want maximum damage output, which is why Primed Pressure Point and Condition Overload go together, using a companion that can provide that status to boost CO damage. If you know how to build melee weapons you can figure out how to build this. Only thing to note, attack speed does nothing here, but range does. Build gas for Exposure, build electricity damage for Influence.

Helminth

Nourish for energy economy and status procs, and omanmri for endgame content, that heal is good. Makes you basically immortal with that heal running.

Other Things

Using Hounds to apply status procs works for stuff under 1,000. Otherwise go with Diriga, using a weapon that applies electric damage, which can also group things together for you. Any good primary with a secondary or something can deal with what you can’t punch to death. Melee wise, you’re using your fists, so that slot barely matters.

Closing Thoughts

Atlas’s mechanics and design are simple to understand, nothing fancy going on here or hidden away. You punch things with your rock fists, doing a ton of damage, and you’re very hard to kill. When that doesn’t work, you shoot it instead. Not perfect, but it gets the job done. Sure, things could be better with rubble, but you can mod around that these days so it’s less important. Overall a shockingly good frame with a bad rep if you played him ages ago and never updated your build.