The Eidolon slayer, glass warrior, walking maelstrom of death - Gara!
Passive: When casting an ability, Gara’s glass body has 15% chance to Blind enemies within 12 meters for 10 seconds, exposing them to Melee Finisher attacks. Blind chance increases by 20% until the blind triggers.
Shattered Lash - Lash out with stream of shattered glass, or hold for an arcing strike.
Splinter Storm - Gara’s armor splinters into a maelstrom of shattered glass that slices enemies and impairs their weapons. Allies who contact the cloud are fortified against damage.
Spectrorage - Trap enemies in a carousel of mirrors, forcing them to attack visions of their true selves. Destroyed mirrors damage their attackers, as does the collapse of the carousel.
Mass Vitrify - Create an expanding ring of molten glass that slowly crystallizes enemies who enter. When the expansion is complete, the ring hardens to block weapons fire. The ring draws extra strength from the health and shields of crystallized enemies. Use Shattered Lash to smash the ring and send razor-sharp glass flying outward.
Acquisition: Main blueprint is awarded upon completion of the Saya’s Vigil quest. Component blueprints are acquired from Plains of Eidolon Bounties.
The chicken bones bae herself. Or the not stonks frame. What? She’s the glass frame? Sure I guess!
I want to get into Gara but she just doesn’t seem to have helminth slots, so she’s kind of confusing for Circuit. Mass Vitrify is kind of cool but scales poorly, so you’re locked into Spectrorage, and possibly also Siphon/Eruption too. I do appreciate how much CC she brings to the table, and honestly Spectrorage is kind of cracked.
Theoretically, Mending Splinters gives her extraordinary DR, since the health regen opens her up to exploit the RageThinking loop for a whole lot of DR. You know, on top of 90% from Splinter Storm. If you like that kind of build.
I think Gara has a lot of room for experimentation due to how powerful and interesting her augments are. But this is also a curse because she only has so many augment slots, and wants to go in so many directions at once. I still have not cracked the code!
I loved Gara when she first came out but found it a bit too annoying maintaining Splinter Storm stacks. I should revisit her, anyone got a good build to recommend?
This one might be too paranoid about running out of energy and losing the stacks, and I dunno if Shattered Storm augment is mandatory nowadays? In that case, maybe a health tank instead, sth boring and reliable like this?
Also, what about building shattered lash? Is it worth going for Doughty or do people only use the arcing damage slash which isn’t affected by it? Worth building up the combo counter for weeping wounds / blood rush?
So the good news is that really none of the old build’s problems matter anymore. You wanna maintain splinter storm on yourself for the damage reduction, but you’re gonna find that enemies don’t really attack you much, so if it drops off it’s not a big deal. The old method of building up damage on it and making sure it never drops off just doesn’t perform as well as the new build. Personally, I built her to go in a Shieldtanking direction with Arcane Aegis, it’s just generally lower mod investment while still fixing your survivability.
The Shattered Lash build is Melee Influence, and the bad? news is that Gara is now a Melee Influence frame. You max out your range, spam the Shattered Lash slash attack (I recommend inverting tap/hold for her), everything on your screen dies, and so do some enemies you can’t see. You don’t really ever need to press her 4 or her 3 at all, so you get a free Helminth slot that’s up to personal preference.
Well that’s kinda lame then 😐. I might as well play some other frame with interesting abilities and use a regular weapon with melee influence then. Nova for example seems to outshine her in every way
I mean, you saw the line where I said everything dies? The build is still very good, and I would go as far as to say that all of the Exalted Melee Influence builds will outperform regular weapon Influence builds. Nova is really good, and you definitely get more utility out of being able to speed up enemies, but Antimatter Drop takes a bit of messin around to achieve a lower clearspeed than a Gara tapping 1 once.
I dunno if Gara is the one you have to go for, Khora and Excalibur and Baruuk are probably all much better for doing an Exalted Influence build, but you should have at least one in your arsenal. They’re very strong for stuff like EDA and ETA.
Oh yeah I know it’s powerful, I just think challenge is barely a thing in WF anyway so if I play something, it also has to be fun and synergetic a bit. I made the build and will try playing her a bit, always good to have it for archimedea as you said.
Shattered Storm looks interesting due to applying Damage Vuln to everything hit. I assume it suffers from LoS checks though.
Any thoughts as a Gara player?
I wonder if I need to keep Splinter Storm if I’m doing a Shattered Storm build, given it’s an augment for her 1 and triggers off her 4…
Honest thoughts is that Shattered Storm isn’t worth using. You already apply a damage vulnerability with Gara’s 4 to any enemies that get touched by the initial crystallizing phase of the ability. I think if you wanted to make her more of a support frame, it would be interesting, but whether you’re making use of Melee Influence or her traditional 1+4 combo with a raw damage build, you’re just going to be killing the vast majority of enemies instantly. Adding a damage vulnerability to dead enemies does not seem worth an augment slot.
After playing around with her a bit, I really don’t like how slow MV is (you’re talking to a Zephyr player, there is a certain way I need to play this game, and it starts but does not end at +90% parkour speed), so I think Storm at least lets you spread vuln further and faster than waiting for the cast to blanket enemies in nice warm glass.
How does she scale off cast speed in general? I notice the sweep variant of Lash is a full body cast, although I’m not sure if it’s subject to parkour cancels. I don’t think I’m going to click with this frame if I can’t remedy how much she needs to stop moving.
Gara’s already impressive nuking capabilities have been augmented even further with the Exalted melee changes! Her Shattered Lash is now a nuke itself, no longer needing to rely on her 1+4 combo to massacre crowds. All that on top of having a 90% DR with a stacking damage aura that she can share with her teammates! Very solid frame that, like Zephyr, is woefully underplayed for how powerful she is.
I just saw wellplayedninjas’s video of her sweep Lash ignoring LoS checks, lol. Play her before the nerfs come!
Always nice to find a bird fancier in the wild
What are people slotting in as her Helminth? I used to really like Hildryn’s Pillage, but Gara’s new build runs a lot less strength for range instead. Is the answer just going to be Roar/Nourish, or does anyone have a more spicy option they’d like to share?
Nourish/Roar are the boring but solid options, even with lowered power strength they still provide a considerable damage boost. A good alternative (and my preferred option) is Lycath’s Hunt from Voruna, with Equilibrium this completely solves any energy issues you could possibly have and enables the use of Arcane Blessing to give Gara a rather considerable tankyness increase. You can also add Health Conversion to give that large health pool you got an extra layer of defense to make Gara VERY hard to bring down, so long as you keep on killing to make the health orbs happen.
Lycath’s Hunt is a good call I hadn’t considered, so it still works on the Shattered Lash kills? I prefer shield-tanking on frames that have in-built DR since it’s generally easier to build and can last for all content, but I am using 2 tau equilibrium shards on her. It might let me drop some efficiency for some more strength.
Downside is I’d need another Voruna for the wall, I love my wolf-mommy too much to feed her.
Nothing too spicy here, just nourish, but if you need energy and can find the room spectrosiphon generates so many orbs. Her whole kit is solid
Siphon + Eruption also augments her CC kit, and now that she’s an Influence nuker the enemies getting yeeted away isn’t as much of a KPM drag any more.
All that, and a giant tower as a wife as well. Gara’s got it all.
3 of the new Exalted warframes use the same build. Nourish over their most worthless ability, as much range as fits in the build, blast/elec on the exalted weapon, with influence arcane, as many purple crit damage shards, offset by yellow shards for casting speed and parkour velocity. Maybe a bit boring, but damn if its not effective
I’m bummed the 4 to 1 combo with growing splinter storm is kinda gone. I really, really enjoyed it. I understand I can still do it but her 1 has been buffed so much it almost seems pointless.
I think she’s a very fun frame still with top tier fashion.
The thing is, while the end effect of getting to turn into a running ball of death was enjoyable, the actual gameplay loop of maintaining it had problems. There was no worse feeling than getting clipped by a nullifier bubble you didn’t see, or the dreaded long host migration that reset your damage. I kinda hope that DE recognizes that people want a frame that’s kinda like Path of Exile’s Righteous Fire and delivers on it someday, while also making it a lot less of a hassle than Gara’s.
