The Best Xaku Builds In Warframe

Warframe’s fragmented character, Xaku, has received the gilded treatment with their Primed variant. This Warframe can manipulate the Void to control the battlefield and become a walking arsenal, turning enemy firearms and even their minds against one another. Create Void Fissures to possess your foes, fire beams of Void energy, or detonate your body to become a nimble machination of death.

Playing Xaku is surprisingly easy once you get a hang of their strange kit, but it’s the buildcraft where Xaku becomes a little tricky. Let us give you a hand. This guide will cover everything about Xaku, ranging from crafting requirements and ability breakdowns to useful build suggestions for min-maxing this character.

How To Craft Xaku

All of Xaku’s components can be uncovered from Cambion Drift bounties on Deimos. You can start open world bounties either from the Necralisk hub or in the open world at certain Mother checkpoints. Xaku’s parts drop from each bounty type that Mother has available. Harder bounties tend to have Xaku’s rarer parts in their drop table. Complete the bounty with mastery to maximize your chances of getting this Warframe’s components.

In addition, you’ll also need Scintillant to craft most of Xaku’s parts. This is a fairly rare material you can only get from the Cambion Drift. Consult our Scintillant guide for a detailed breakdown on where you can find this resource.

Drop table values were derived from Warframe PC Drops. Despite the website name, the drop tables are the same across all platforms.

Xaku Blueprint

Xaku Neuroptics

Xaku Chassis

Xaku Systems

How To Craft Xaku Prime

Xaku Prime’s components are tied to Void Relics you can find from most Warframe activities—Disruption, Defense, Survival, Capture missions, etc. You can also get Void Relics from relic packs sold by Syndicates. Once you find a Void Relic with a Xaku Prime component, crack it open by completing a fissure mission. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the part you want.

There are four components to Xaku Prime: their main blueprint, neuroptics, chassis, and systems. The good news is you don’t need Scintillant or many open world materials to craft this version of Xaku, so they’re arguably easier to obtain if you don’t mind farming for relics.

Xaku Prime Blueprint

Xaku Prime Neuroptics

Xaku Prime Chassis

Xaku Prime Systems

Xaku Abilities

Stats

Passive

25% damage reduction on AoE attacks; chance to avoid incoming weapon damage.

All incoming projectiles that impact Xaku have a 25% chance to not deal any damage. This is otherwise known as dodge in-game. Stacking other sources of evasion, such as through The Vast Untime, stacks additively. Your dodge chance cannot exceed 75%. AoE damage cannot be evaded, but all incoming AoE damage is mitigated by 25% by default. This stacks multiplicatively with other DR sources.

Xata’s Whisper

Wield Void damage for all attacks from equipped weapons when activated.

Xaku infuses their weapons with Void energy, causing all of your weapons to gain a portion of their damage as extra Void damage for a short duration. You can scale this buff with Ability Strength and extend the buff’s duration with Ability Duration.

Void damage has an intrinsic 50% damage bonus against Overguard and Zariman targets. Additionally, your weapons can now trigger Void status, creating a bullet attractor around the projectile’s impact point. Any projectiles that enter the dome will ricochet inside for a few seconds, similar to Mag’s Magnetize ability.

Grasp Of Lohk

Void Tendrils steal weapons from nearby enemies to use as your own floating, auto-targeting armanent. Damage output increases based on enemy level. The number of weapons grabbed also determines the damage mutliplier for The Lost: Deny’s Void beam.

Grasp of Lohk allows you to steal enemy weapons to create automated turrets that float around Xaku for their listed duration. Each turret will automatically target a nearby foe and shoot them roughly twice per second. You can’t modify the fire rate of these turrets, but you can adjust their base damage with Ability Strength.

Grasp of Lohk’s weapon cap is affected by Ability Range, not Strength.

Your damage with this ability is also dependent on the enemy’s level when you stole their weapon. Enemies at Level 100 will give you much stronger weapon than Level 20 foes, for example. If an enemy doesn’t have a ranged weapon in hand, Xaku will create a copy of their current weapon instead; all stolen weapons function the same.

This is Xaku’s bread-and-butter ability and should always be active. You’ll want to spec for Range and Strength to get the most out of your stolen weapons. Range takes priority here—try to hit 265% range to maximize the number of weapons you can have active at once.

The Lost

Cycle through a trio of lost Warframe powers.

• Accuse manifests a Void fissure ot corrupt enemies into allies.
• Gaze grasps targets in Void tendrils that capture damage and inflict it when the target is released.
• Deny annihilates with a beam of Void energy, wiping Sentinet resistances.

The Lost is technically three abilities in one. Xaku can swap between one of three versions of this ability to change its functionality:

• Accuse: Corrupt enemies into allies.
• Gaze: Infect a target with Void energy, freezing them in place. Nearby targets have their defenses (shields + armor) stripped.
• Deny: Xaku channels a Void beam that deals massive damage.

Accuse works exactly like a Void Fissure. All enemies near the summoned fissure will become infused with the Void and under their spell for a short duration, fighting alongside you as allies. You can’t modify the strength of your corrupted allies with mods, but you can increase the number of corrupted targets with Ability Strength.

Gaze is the main reason you’re using The Lost. Xaku envelops the target with Void tendrils, making them impervious to all incoming damage and unable to move. The enveolped target becomes a defense-stripping pylon that rends shields and armor from all nearby enemies. If you get up to 200% Ability Strength, Gaze will fully strip a target’s defenses, making this one of the best sources of defense strip in the game.

You can have two targets affected by Gaze at a time.

Deny is similar to Caliban’s ultimate ability, firing a beam of Void energy that deals high Void damage to targets. This beam doesn’t have an AoE component, but it does have infinite punchthrough against targets. Targets struck by the beam will levitate for a few seconds, provided they aren’t immune to CC effects like Eximus units or Acolytes.

The Vast Untime

Temporarily shed the outer pieces of Xaku in a destructive blast, then stalk the battlefield in a new, swifter skeletal form. Enemies damaged by the body shrapnel are rendered weaker to Void damage. Xaku’s other active abilities’ duration is frozen in time and resumes once The Vast Untime expires.

Xaku detonates their carapace in a violent explosion, shredding enemy Void resistance while revealing Xaku’s skeletal form. While active, you move faster, have 75% dodge chance, and all of Xaku’s other abilities have their durations paused. This allows you to maintain The Lost: Gaze and Grasp of Lohk for minutes at a time. Build for Ability Duration to make The Vast Untime last longer, thereby making all of your other abilities last much longer.

The explosion itself isn’t particularly useful on its own, but it deals damage through walls and doesn’t require line of sight. If you want to destroy crates in a massive radius to farm for medallions or other pickups, this is arguably the best ability in the game for that niche task. Throw on as much Ability Range as possible to tag every container on your minimap.

Beyond that, this is effectively an expensive pause button for the rest of Xaku’s kit. Keep The Vast Untime active as much as possible to minimize how often you need to refresh your other abilities, thereby saving you energy.

Xaku Augments

Two augment mods are currently available for Xaku, both of which can be obtained from Steel Meridian and Cephalon Suda for 25,000 Standing each. You’ll need to be Rank 3 with either Syndicate to unlock the ability to purchase these augments. Alternatively, you can simply trade for these mods from other players.

Vampiric Grasp

Grasp of Lohk Augment: When a stolen weapon deals damage to an enemy affected by The Lost: Gaze or The Vast Untime, Xaku restores 25 HP.

There’s not much to explain here. Enemies tagged by The Vast Untime’s explosion of the defense strip portion of The Lost: Gaze will now grant HP whenever your turrets hit them. The HP restoration is 25 by default, but you can scale this with Ability Strength. You’ll also want to scale Ability Range to maximize the number of weapons you can steal, thereby triggering this augment more often.

The Relentless Lost

The Lost Augment: The Lost gains 35% Ability Strength and 15% Ability Efficiency when cast. The effet stacks up to 3x. Casting the same ability back-to-back resets the effect.

The Relentless Lost is for players who don’t mind juggling abilities to gain extra buffs. So long as you don’t cast the same effect from The Lost back-to-back, this augment gives you 105% Ability Strength and 45% Efficiency. This promotes a much more active, energy-hungry playstyle where you’re constantly cycling Lost buffs. It’s generally inefficient compared to building strictly for The Lost: Gaze and Grasp of Lohk, but it does open a unique playstyle for Xaku.

We recommend cycling between Gaze for defense strip and Deny for a quick fire-and-forget cast. If you cast the same portion of The Lost twice (not any ability), you’ll lose your stacks and need to rebuild them.

Xaku Builds

We’ll be looking at two builds for Xaku in this guide. The first build is a general loot farmer you can use without any Forma, ideal for farming tileset medallions or other collectibles. Once you put some Forma into Xaku, you can use our Grasp of Lohk build to trivialize the game with automated turrets, complete defense stripping, and easy access to shield gating.

Since Xaku casts some expensive abilities with semi-frequency, we recommend Zenurik as your Focus School. This gives you a means of passively regenerating your energy at all times. Xaku doesn’t have any channeled skills, so you can benefit from Wellspring virtually all the time.

Xaku leverages Crimson Archon Shards to great effect. Throw on as much Ability Strength and Duration as you can. You ideally want to hit 200% Ability Strength (164% with Corrosive Projection) to fully strip enemy armor. You might also want to consider giving them Parkour Velocity (Amber) to further boost their agility during The Vast Untime.

Vast Untime Looter Build (0 Forma, No Subsume)

You need at least some investment in Xaku to make Grasp of Lohk a good ability, but you can easily make Xaku an S-tier character for farming environmental pickups with no setup. We’ll be using The Vast Untime’s initial explosion to destroy containers on the map. You can then use Mag’s Pull ability with the Greedy Pull augment to pull all the materials toward you. You don’t need Pull for this build to work, but it makes it much better for speedrunning.

The only thing you need for this build to work is Ability Range. Overextended, Stretch, and Augur Reach give you a 66-meter explosion that bypasses terrain. Pull will grab anything from 33 meters. You’ll be spamming quite a few abilities, so we suggest also using Fleeting Expertise and Streamline to cap your Ability Efficiency. We use Primed Continuity to counter the negative duration from Fleeting Expertise.

The final mod slot and aura are down to you. We recommend Loot Detector for your aura and Primed Redirection for your survivability mod. If you aren’t worried about taking chip damage, you can use Rolling Guard instead. Use Vast Untime, get a clear view of the containers you destroyed, use Pull, and repeat. It’s incredibly easy to do and makes for a great material and collectible farmer.

Grasp Of Lohk Build (3 Forma, Condemn Subsume)

Xaku can comfortably handle the hardest content in Warframe with this build. We spec for Ability Strength and Range to make their Grasp of Lohk ability incredibly strong. You can now steal 15 guns that last for 18 seconds. That’s not a long time, but we can rely on The Vast Untime to pause the timer, allowing you to maintain it for closer to a minute. Throw down The Lost: Gaze to strip enemy armor, and you can kill level cap Steel Path targets with ease.

We start the build with Transient Fortitude and Umbral Intensify to greatly increase our Ability Strength. When you throw in 30% more Strength through Archon Shards and the Corrosive Projection aura, The Lost: Gaze can now fully strip enemy armor with a single cast.

Molt Augmented will let you fully strip enemy shields once you kill enough enemies in a mission.

We’ll need range to make Grasp of Lohk worth using. Overextended, Stretch, and Augur Reach drastically increase your Range stat at the cost of Strength, but we still have enough Strength to hit the armor strip cap on The Lost: Gaze. Use Augur Message and Primed Continuity to give yourself some much-needed Ability Duration. Finish the build with Rolling Guard for an added layer of survivability.

You have a few options for Subsumes and your Exilus mod. If you want more survivability, you can’t go wrong with Condemn or Pillage in place of Xaku’s first ability. You can also run Silence from Banshee if Eximus targets are giving you trouble. Of course, you can run Xaku without a subsume and clear content just fine.

For the Exilus slot, we highly recommend Primed Sure Footed if you own it. This makes you completely immune to incoming staggers, including your own AoE weapons. It’s downright mandatory if you don’t have Overguard and plan to push higher difficulties like Steel Path Circuit. If you don’t own this mod, use Handspring for a similar effect or Cunning Drift to give Grasp of Lohk an extra gun.