One of the stars of the most recent story update for Warframe, the mysterious Stalker, has a famously cool set of weapons (Dread, Despair and Hate). Right now you can get the entire set as part of the ‘What Stalker?’ weapon pack for 800 platinum.
The Stalker’s famous bow, Dread, is probably the most well-known of his loadout and looks extremely awesome on any Warframe. Here’s how to craft a Warframe build around it.
Obtaining Dread
If you would rather save your platinum, Dread is likely to be an early drop as soon as the Stalker gets on your trail. When you have completed a relevant Assassination mission, you will receive a mysterious message from the Stalker promising to hunt you down.
Every mission after this has a chance to spawn the Stalker, indicated by the lights flickering and a doom-filled message from the Stalker himself. He can be a difficult enemy early on, but once you have taken him out, he has a roughly 30% chance to drop the blueprint for Dread.
Why use Dread?
Quite apart from the sheer coolness of a bow that can decaptitate people, Dread has several advantages that you can build to enhance:
- High critical chance
- A charged shot that boosts your damage
- One of the stronger status effects in the game (slash)
- Entirely silent
- High Riven disposition
Building Dread
You’ll want the following mods in hand and fully maxed, plus an Orokin Reactor and three Forma (for Madurai slot polarities) to get the most out of it.
- Serration
- Split Chamber
- Point Strike
- Vital Sense
- Vigilante Armaments
- Speed Trigger
- Primed Shred
- Hunter Munitions
Serration, Split Chamber and Vigilante Armaments crank up the base damage with a classic damage/multishot combo, but the crux of this Dread build is the combination of critical chance and slash status effect. With Point Strike, you can increase the critical chance on Dread to 125%, making every single shot a critical hit (yellow crit) and a 25% chance of the second level of critical damage (orange crit). While the critical damage on Dread is below average (2x), you can enhance this to 5.6x with a fully-ranked Vital Sense.
Dread really shines with fully-charged shots, so Speed Trigger is useful to speed up that charge to get the most out of this bow, and you can add Primed Shred to boost punch-through as well as charge speed. You can also use Hunter Munitions to double down on the slash damage, as every critical (so every hit, with this build) has a chance to apply the slash status effect.
Boom, headshot
Dread has a decent stat line even for body shots, but if you are an accurate sniper, you might want to consider the Longbow Sharpshot or Primary Deadhead arcanes on the Dread itself, as both give you a hefty bonus after a headshot.
If you are like me and find yourself cursing the Grineer’s tiny heads, you might get on better with Primary Merciless, which only requires you to successfully kill your target to gain a bonus to damage that stacks with itself up to 12 times. Considering this build’s emphasis on ongoing bleed damage, you could end up with extremely high damage buffs throughout your mission.
