The gore queen, infinite energy frame, slash procs galore - Garuda!
Release date: 2018-11-08
Passive: Garuda gains up to 100% additional damage bonus for her abilities and weapons for each kill or assisted kill.
Dread Mirror - Rip the life force from an enemy and use it as a shield that captures damage. Charge to channel the captured damage into an explosive projectile.
Blood Altar - Impale an enemy on an altar of talons and siphon health for Garuda and her allies.
Bloodletting - Garuda sacrifices her health to generate energy.
Seeking Talons - Charge to expand the targeting area, release to send Garuda’s talons careening toward each target in area. Surviving enemies are prone to bleeding.
Acquisition: Main blueprint is awarded upon completion of the Vox Solaris quest. Component blueprints are acquired from Orb Vallis Bounties.
Garuda is lovely in theory, with all the cool following features: infinite health, infinite energy, forced slash on any weapon, easy infinitely scaling damage, can fly using an ability loop, tonnes of iframes, one of the best (imo) melee weapons in the game.
I’d probably main her if not for how she actually is when you play her. Her pseudo-excalted claws take up far too much screen space, and can’t be used on melee sorties. Also you can’t change their skin, so tennogen is hampered if you’re into that. Given so much of her kit is % scaling, she only needs a little strength, and massive range. Yet you’re still often finding yourself out of range, with no other option than to just die, or ignore her kit entirely. And whilst her 4 mostly works with the default cone targeting, the augment mod making it hit in a circle makes the ability actually feel good to press. Even if the range of the ability now feels very small.
Still, she’s probably still my favourite frame for actually “trying”. All her synergies can be combo’d infinitely, but leave little downtime. Alt tabbing to search up a song, reply to a message, or do anything else is a death sentence. Comparatively I could just play Valkyr for mostly the same melee experience, and have the safety of her 4 to brain afk the entire map.
For once, I got nothing. This is one of my “level and shelf” frames, her kit and theme just never was interesting to me.
Don’t have much to say aside from “she’s excellent.”
I’m rarely one to say something in this game is “the best” but her Talons are the single strongest melee in the game.
On my account, Garuda also seems to have an odd, undocumented passive: She shows up as a circuit choice about 4 times as often as other frames. Which is great because the huge maps with great line of sight means her Seeking Talons can wipe huge chunks of the map with a leap in the air.
As a long time valkyr main she always felt kind of like a glass (pre shield gating) cannon sidegrade with a bit of ‘new frame thats just a better rework of an existing frame’ thrown in. A dream to play for melee enjoyers with solid claws, forced slash and a leap ability that’s just really nice and makes me super jealous that hysterias leap augment is so bad (insert rant).
She is starting to show her age just a little bit with melee arcanes not being equippable on her claws and blood altar generally being outclassed by gloom or companion healing options.