There's also a huge pile of important information that's currently inaccessible. Permanent read-only would probably be better in general, because half the time when I search for an obscure question the only useful results are reddit posts from 2017 which I can't view anymore.

He's both sevagoth-level unobtainable and bad, meaning that by the time you get him you're guaranteed to have better options.

I love Caliban in concept and I really hope he gets some love soon.

Kullervo fits too well with the aesthetic of the rest of Duviri (especially the conservation animals) to be AI-generated. His base helmet is also an allusion to Thrax.

With that being said, I think the reason he seems AI generated is that he's colored differently than other warframes. In order to match the duviri aesthetic, he has more blending of colors and less color separation, which is fairly common in AI stuff.

I like the design personally, but I kinda get where you're coming from.

Three main reasons:

1. It's a cheaper mod. Easier to access, easier to max rank.

2. Applying three or more status effects is a lot easier than it sounds. A typical melee has impact, puncture, slash, and some kind of modded element. This means CO will beat other options after a few swings. Some enemies will die before CO reaches its full effect, but you didn't need the extra damage on them anyway. CO is far more effective than Primed Pressure Point against the biggest and strongest enemies, which are where you need the most help.

3. With a status primer like the Epitaph or Kuva Nukor, CO can produce a far higher damage multiplier than Primed Pressure Point. You can easily get 5+ statuses if you build right, which is a huge damage increase.

I consider Caliban a bad warframe. He isn't bad in isolation, he's just worse than almost everyone else. He's probably in the bottom ten in my opinion.

Going through his abilities:

1. His passive does not stack with Adaptation. It's an ability which encourages EHP tanking, but it gets invalidated by the best EHP tanking mod. It applying to allies is really cool - especially because it's affinity range - but it needs to stack to be worth using IMO.

2. His 1, Razor Gyre, is unambiguously awful. Even Caliban fans call this one a helminth slot. The chance for a slash proc is cool, but the way its damage scales makes it generally unviable as a tool for killing enemies at higher levels. It can work at lower levels, but at those levels other warframes can clear trash better. (And it locks you out of his 3 and 4, which are probably his best abilities. That's the same problem Hildryn's 4 has, and nobody uses that.)

3. Sentient Wrath lifting and applying damage vulnerability is cool, but any damage un-lifts enemies. It suffers from the problems of other CC abilities - if I want to do a full body animation to cast an ability, I might as well just kill the enemies. Also, for some incomprehensible reason, it has a target maximum. Meaning even if you wanted to build for range and duration, you also need strength if you want to capture a large group of enemies. The damage vulnerability is nice, but it's a little redundant to being able to full-strip armor/shields, since that's enough to kill everything in all content you'd bring Caliban to. If an enemy has no shields or armor, it usually just dies. And if you really need full strip and a damage vulnerability, you've probably reached a level where your passive and Lethal Progeny stop functioning at all, meaning you're going to be too busy dying to get use out of Sentient Wrath.

4. Lethal Progeny is a great idea with mixed execution. I love the idea of summoning conculysts to recharge shields and draw enemy fire, but the lack of scaling and prioritization of attacking over shield regen kind of kills it. IMO conculysts should somehow try to match enemy level, and at least one conculyst should always be assigned to permanent shield-recharging duty. Overall it's still a fun ability, but its use as a form of enemy distraction is held back by the fact that it has a duration. If Wukong can have an infinite clone, I think Caliban can keep his sentient pals until they're killed.

5. Fusion Strike is pretty good. The AOE full permanent armor strip is awesome, but the ability is a little long to cast, it's in a cone, and this is Caliban's main thing. Other warframes can armor strip better (like Hildryn, who can strip entire tiles in the blink of an eye with minimal interruption to your movement/gunplay.) It's a powerful ability, but it's not enough to carry his kit. It doesn't help that Tharros Strike is a helminth ability, which is also a cone-based armor strip that requires 200% power strength.

Overall he's just not great. He focuses on doing a lot of things badly instead of doing one thing very well. In a world where there are frames that can do lots of things very well, I just don't consider him worth using. There's never once been a single time where I've felt the need to use Caliban for something.

That being said, there's nothing wrong with using Caliban if you just think he's fun. Much like Atlas, he can perform well enough that you're not throwing by using him or anything. I just think he deserves massive buffs, because there's a great frame hiding in there that needs some work before it can really spread its wings.

Same reason you can't autosocket ayatans until MR10, I presume.

But Stalker told me my actions have consequences

Not OP but I also used Grendel extensively pre-rework. I think his rework was a massive improvement overall, but he's a different frame now, and not one that stands out to me as much. Being able to suck up an entire room pre-rework just felt great. The new version is an excellent frame that I use a lot, but I feel like the original fantasy isn't all there.

(The rework was totally necessary though. Before it, he only functioned with helminth abilities, which should never be true of any frame.)

I've sort of given up on that altogether. I tend to run very high attack speed and bind melee to my scroll wheel, so my frame just flails at groups of enemies until they're all dead.

From the perspective of feeling like an actual melee weapon instead of a flamethrower that forces you to walk forward, I think DE would have to tear down the entire stance system and start over if they wanted that to work. I don't think we'll ever see them do that for the simple reason that in many cases, they refuse to acknowledge that this game is a horde shooter - we need combos ripped out of a Dynasty Warriors game, not something pretending to be single-target. But lots of new content is still being designed with the assumption that players will spend multiple seconds dealing with a single corrupted lancer, which is the root of a lot of balance issues.

What I mean is, if you want to spend your progenitor element and mod slot to get two statuses, you can do better than Impact + Hemorrhage. It's a small chance stacked on top of a small chance (since even with a 60% progenitor your elements will be diluted on a primer.) Going for something like Magnetic + a Heat 60/60 is just more efficient for priming, because you get status chance and the heat isn't contingent on getting a magnetic proc.

(It doesn't help that many of the best melee weapons already proc slash.)

The Ghoulsaw looks so cool. I don't care if it's practically unusable, just look at it.

The new dual nikana stance is alright. Once they fix the weird bug that's causing the forced slash on heavy to be offset behind and to the right of your frame, it'll at least have good multipliers (although no guaranteed procs on light attack, sadly.) I feel like a truly good dual nikana would work fine alongside the stance, we're just blinded by how mid Sun & Moon is. And the heavy scythe stance has bad multipliers, but there's a lot of nice slash procs in there. I would call these stances alright. They're not great, but they're not so bad as to doom their whole weapon class.

Assault saws / two-handed nikanas are just bad though. If the Tenet Livia was any other weapon archetype I would never unequip it, but Wise Razor sucks so much that it ruins it. If they ever make another assault saw, they're going to have to pump its base damage way up to account for the terrible multipliers on Butcher's Revelry.

Overall it's been pretty hit or miss, but there have been some hits IMO. I'm done getting excited for new archetypes before I can try them, but I think saying there hasn't been a good stance in five years is a little excessive.

You don't need Slash for priming though. As a Condition Overload primer, it only matters that you have a status, not what that status is. So Magnetic + Cold + Radiation is actually better than Slash + Impact, if you intend to use the Nukor to prime.

The only exceptions are Viral, which you always want a lot of, and sometimes Heat (if you're doing a heat inherit build.)

If you want to use the nukor as a main damage weapon and not a primor, hemorrhage/slash is okay, but the chance of getting a slash proc is so low that you're better off with a generic build.

That's true. Although on the bright side, numbers are easy to tune later. (As long as they remember to change them...)

I'm hoping it ends up being an additive CC buff like Arcane Avenger, which would help make more obscure melees viable on him.

I bet it was a bug caused by it being given its own steel path region.

The ninkondi prime is okay but we really need one with a gimmick. Ideally something that can take advantage of the massive number of hits per second the stance can get

Both his 1 and 3 scale based on weapons, so as long as they don't have any obvious problems (like a short range/duration on the 3) they should be good. 2 is survivability, which is nice, and his 4 will probably end up as a helminth slot (a la Sol Gate, Danse Macabre, and the other poorly scaling 'ultimate abilities' that frames get.)

The passive will probably end up being strong, given that Voruna's version caps out heavy attack efficiency, so this will probably do the same.

Overall I don't think he'll set the world on fire, but he seems to have a pretty solid game plan. And maybe his 4 will surprise us by scaling very well.

Can you tell us their exact words? Screenshots of the support tickets might help, just make sure to black out identifying stuff

As far as recent frames go, Gyre got an augment, Voruna got a few changes, including buffs to her 4 and usability fixes to her 1, and Caliban got a few bug fixes and QoL on his 4, but nothing major.

I'm hoping that Kullervo being tied to the new player experience via Duviri means he'll get a similar amount of love and care as Excalibur, Mag, Volt, and Rhino, the other first few frames that people can access. I doubt he'll get that much attention, but it'd be nice.