Baruuk: Astral Wind

TL;DR

Baruuk is an exalted melee frame, built around Restraint, which grants you benefits. All about resource management, everything you do increases or decreases Restraint. Indirect changes have changed how he plays. Overguard is immune to crowd control, which makes Lull spamming impossible, so the build now has to change. If you’re in a mission with tons of Overguard, building your passive becomes impossible. Good news is he has other options and tools. Still strong and rather powerful, with Helminth you have plenty of options. Bad news, you’re a caster frame with limited health and easy to kill. You have certain abilities that make it harder when you’re not attacking. Good offense is a good defense. You can put out millions of damage very quickly here.

Weaknesses for Baruuk are enemies immune to ability damage and anything untargetable. Also, anything that nullifies his abilities. Another weakness is tick damage or melee damage. Another weakness is low enemy density, not your friend. Can’t build your passive pretty are screwed.

Archon Shards

Purple and Red shards are two good choices, focusing on critical strike damage. I’ve thrown in Amber for energy on spawn. Do you need the first two shards? Not really, they just give you bigger numbers. The energy one is just QoL and nice to have, the only one I say is really good to have. My advice here is to pick whatever you feel is needed, go with some QoL shards and two critical damage purple shards.

Frame build

Once again, we’re building a frame and his weapon. The only threshold we need to hit is 360 on Elude which means 200% range. The trouble is we hit 220% with the build i’m about to show you. That creates a bubble that protects us from incoming projectiles. A balanced build with a ton of range really.

Steel Charge is boosting our damage on Desert Wind. With the augment Reactive Storm means we don’t have to adjust the build as the game automatically changes our own damage output to suit the content. That augment is just too good not to use it.  Mixed with overall status boost it really worth using. So I will now explain the build.

Overextended and Augur Reach hit the range we need. The rest of the build is Primed Flow, primed Continuity, Transient Fortitude, Streamline, Umbral Intensify. Primed Flow mixed with purple shards makes sense. Primed Sure Footed means we can’t be knocked down and do nothing but be killed. You can use Precision Intensify but I find the Umbral version to be more useful. Boosts the number of disarms you get.

Desert Wind

Single target weapon that has some AoE, but not much. Wave attack not that big all things considered. We have a pretty standard Melee Influence build going on here.

Primed Pressure Point, Blood Rush, Galvanized Steel, Primed Fury, Galvanized Elementalist, Weeping Wounds, Quickening (For the combo), and Shocking Touch. With Reactive Storm we have an AoE melee weapon, thanks to Influence.

Arcanes

Molt Augmented to increase power strength and offset the reduced strength from Overextended. Melee Fury for melee damage. A couple of options but I have settled on this.

Helminth
Astral shell patches up the biggest flaw: when attacking, you’re vulnerable to damage and can die. Replace lull with whatever you fancy, considering how much weaker lull is and we’re building range for elude. This is why I went with shell just the perfect choice. You can use things like pillage.

Other Things

I use Wyrm to remove status effects, considering that’s a major way to die. Primary weapons don’t really matter here, bring whatever you want. Miter with its augment is good at dealing with nullifier bubbles. Secondary weapons, you want something to deal with things you can’t punch to death. Melee weapons, whatever you pick is going to be weaker than Desert Wind, so pick something with movement speed instead.

Closing Thoughts

You may have noticed this one’s shorter than the others, that’s because there’s less going on here, and it’s pretty straightforward. Baruuk is a rather strong frame that thrives in Steel Path, damage output close to Ash’s, but much faster. One of the harder to get frames but certainly worth the rep grind to get him. Good news is no randomness to deal with here, just need to buy his blueprints. You have to invest a decent amount but it is worth it.