I immediately got interested in Jade’s passive shield tanking abilities. 2 piece Boreal, Aerodynamic, Glory on High and the new innate 50% DR on shields multiply out to: (1-0.5)*(1-0.5)*(1-0.24)*(1-0.4) = 0.114 damage taken. Boreal’s Hatred bumps her to 908 shields, and Arcane Aegis bestows 78 SPS, or ~8k effective shields (~18k with overshields) and 684 effective shields per second. Throwing on Arcane Barrier would be ~1080 ESPS on top of that, but I’m running Molt Augmented so my Glory altfires hit harder.

At a cursory glance, Aegis seems to enable Spirit of Resilience to be ticking as long as Aegis is active, meaning Jade has emergency survivability reserves to dip into as needed. Very very comfy to play.

Before Incarnons came out and power crept everything, I was all in on crafted weapons. Kitgun primary and secondary, and Zaw melee. My favourites are 1h Balla, which I still use in preference to incarnon melees, and both variants of Gaze. Paladin, Basilisk and Butterknife. Secondary Gaze is still one of my all-time weapons.

It’s easy to feel attached to crafted weapons given the grind for Star Amarast and the fact that you can name your own weapon after assembling it.

Revenant is an interesting beast. Right now we’re in the middle of an invisible war between Reb’s baby, Revenant, and Pablo’s baby, Nezha. At one point, Revenant was a high water mark for survivability, but other frames are starting to catch up and steal his thunder.

Revenant provides a lot of security and failsafes, to be sure, as well as being part of an older paradigm where you have room to fit Helminths for some fun combos. For instance, dusting my old Revenant off I found a set that mashed up Savage Silence and Blinding Reave. I’m not sure if the old Blinding Reave + Xata finisher combo works, but there’s another potential option. You can give him some pretty good crowd control by rounding out his kit with Resonator, and I personally also really like Thrall Pact + Tharros Strike to turn him into a gun platform so I can play with my collection.

He also has one of the coolest deluxe skins in the game.

Between the two, I much prefer the Cycron, just because the battery makes it great to use as a Secondary Encumber primer. Out of all the beam pistols though, Gaze remains my favourite, but the Cycron is a close second and is something I encourage all my clanmates to get. If you give it a Magnetic progenitor, it has full coverage as a primer and general crowd clearer and bubble popper.

Once you have Secondary Encumber, the gap with Nukor as a primer essentially closes. The battery has some obvious advantages if you’re using it as a primer

For shooting at things, the Cycron has much tighter variance. On paper the damage is a bit lower, but in reality most things will die the instant you point a fully built Cycron at them or any enemies near them. If you’re Sevagoth or Harrow, or some other frame with absolute crits, however, the Nukor is an easy winner.