Spookiest frame, 666 HP, literally empty headed - Dagath!
Release date: 2023-10-18
Passive: Dagath feeds from the souls of the deceased, granting her a 35% chance to activate Abundant Abyss when picking up Health Orbs or Energy Orbs to increase their effective yield by 300%.
Wyrd Scythes - Wyrd Scythes surround Dagath and seek out nearby enemies. Those struck are slowed and suffer Viral Damage with a guaranteed Status Effect. The scythes also spread Doom and extend its duration.
DOOM Not Eternal (15sec edition) - Condemn nearby enemies to their DOOM. A portion of the damage Dagath deals is revisited upon them by a Wyrd Scythe. They also suffer Viral damage.
Grave Spirit - Supercharge Dagath’s weapons with extra Critical Damage. The effects are doubled on Doomed enemies. Escape fatal blows by briefly assuming a spectral form.
Rakhali’s Cavalry - Phantom Kaithes charge forth, inflicting Viral Damage upon all in their path. Their attack strips the defenses of Doomed enemies.
Acquisition: Main and component blueprints are acquired from Dagath’s Hollow within the Clan Dojo. Component blueprints require Vainthorns to craft, obtained from the Abyssal Zone on Ceres. Access requires Abyssal Beacons, purchased from Faction Syndicates.
Dagath is cool, her entire kit facilitates both weapon support and “uninstall enemies in a line”. Grave Spirit alone makes her extremely rare as a crit damage buffer, but combined with Doom powering up crits and cutting enemy health by up to half, she’s an absolute monster of a weapon platform. If that’s not enough, her 4 is an extremely potent nuke with an armour strip.
Her augment is interesting. Rather than being a Kinda Cool damage semi-passive, it flips it into a mixed defensive tool and offensive turbomurder utility. Dagath immediately becomes intangible, applies Doom with all damage instances, gains 200% of her Ability Strength as critical damage, and spawns health orbs like they’re delicious strawberry jellies. For a base 10s of duration, scaling with duration mods. In exchange, you are forced to reckon with a 25s cooldown after the duration, although it diminishes at 1s per kill, so it’s over in the blink of an eye.
The passive Doom during Grave Spirit’s spectral phase also means that Wyrd Scythes can be used to mass-spread Doom, opening up support playstyles for Dagath, although keep in mind that Doom is currently bugged and the scythes will steal kills from on-kill arcanes.
She also has some quite interesting setups between Scythes and Cavalry. The slow from Scythes will pin priority targets in place so you can properly space Rakhali. The horses have active hitboxes during the startup, so you can rapidly dump large amounts of damage in front of you, useful for killing things that need to be controlled and then killed.
Like Sevagoth, I think she’s burdened by very tantalising but also eye-wateringly high Strength softcaps.
Overall, I love Dagath. I think gun buffers are a fairly competitive frame archetype, but she can throw down with the best of them. Very few frames have the unbridled turbo murder capacity of Dagath, to the point that, like Frost, she can elevate the dusty old weapons in your arsenal into off-meta monstrosities. I rate this frame “I can nuke with Staticor again?!” out of 10.
Dagath had the misfortune of being a cone-shaped AoE nuke frame that released right after the strongest (also cone-shaped) AoE nuke frame in the game. In a world without Kullervo in it, Dagath would be a strong contended for the top spot in terms of nuking potential, at least until Dante’s release. Sadly for her, this isn’t the world we live in. As it stands, I don’t see a reason to use her over Kullervo or Dante other than for her spooky theme.
Tbh I just love running kullervo as a “oops quintuple red crits” melee platform
Her grave spirit augment is an interesting way to play though it suffers from its own success a bit, Free crit AND doom on all enemies is so powerful that when the ability runs out there’s nothing left in a 3 mile radius to kill in order to reduce the cooldown.
While it’s a strong combo, in practice it’s just a more clunky version of what a lot of other frames can already accomplish with subsumed Roar and their own abilities. An unmoddable 25sec of downtime that can only be reduced by killing 25 things without your strongest buff active is not very impressive.
Even without Grave Spirit running, the armour strip and viral from her horse blast essentially just demotes enemies off Steel Path, so the 25s cooldown is more like a 3s cooldown… if you’re soloing. Finding enough enemies on a squad is pain though.
Might want to also mention where Vainthorn is found, for those who need to actually build her.
I don’t understand anyone who runs Dagath without her signature Dorrclave. Free life steal and pure slash to go with all her viral.
You’re right, usually I only mention the blueprints themselves but she is a pretty unique case of having a whole mission dedicated just to farming her specific resource. I’ve edited it in.
