Creating builds | Profit-Taker Guide (2024)

This section should educate readers on general common sense known to Profit-Taker builders, such as the logic behind builds and things in the fight to build around.

By uumm

Frame builds ​

Warframe builds for Profit-Taker are pretty open to buildcrafting, there are 4 Mods (5, if you’re missing Primed Sure Footed, 3 if you’re using Unairu’s Poise) that you will see on all but the most specialized Profit-Taker builds

If you don’t have it, substitute Sure Footed & Power Drift in place of Primed Sure Footed

• Eclipse is used as it's the best available damage buff,
• Blind Rage and Umbral Intensify bring power strength to appreciable levels,
• Umbral Vitality is used because shield gating isn’t reliable enough in Profit-Taker to be viable
• Primed Sure Footed is used because of the sheer number of knockbacks and staggers in the fight.

This build covers all the basics of a Profit-Taker build. However, this build is not only difficult to use, but it also has quite poor performance as it has very little survivability, no Arcanes, extremely poor energy economy, and none of the normal utility Mods.

To fix these problems and reach a more standard Profit-Taker build you can follow these logical steps, note that Volt builds are highly advanced and often will not match this:

• To fix some of the energy economy issues, Narrow Minded is slotted, this gives enough time for your energy to regen between casting abilities if you’re using Zenurik.
• To Improve survivability, Adaptation is used, and if that isn’t enough, Arcane Guardian or Arcane Tanker. Proc Arcane Tanker by calling Archgun while in the elevator to give Adaptation time to stack up.

There is a wide range of utility Mods that range from immensely helpful to questionably useful:

• Vigorous Swap is a standard as it is a reliable source of damage due to frequent weapon swaps
• Sprint boost will improve Archwing speed, and is immensely helpful when in a squad that does not have a Volt
• Aura doesn’t matter too much, and ideally, it doesn’t make many differences but there are occasions where aura does matter.
• Saryn uses her Venom Dose augment to provide her weapons with Corrosive damage
• The Eclipse augment, Total Eclipse, can be used to buff teammates and Specters such as On Call Crew. It does NOT apply to Necramechs.
• Frames with long casting animations may wish to use Natural Talent
• Sometimes you’ll need more power strength to oneshot Pylons with Zenith, so transient fortitude may be used
• Sometimes you want even more power strength!!! For this, either Umbral Fiber or Augur Secrets, or both.

• Peculiar bloom because big flowers

Putting it all together, a more standard build might look like this:

There are a few other things that are important to know, too:

• The actual damage increase of Eclipse is related to the local light level and has nothing to do with light sources artificially created by the Player. The damage buff from Eclipse is consistently near or at max on the Orb Vallis.
• Buffs that act as a single stat element like Shock Trooper will poison your available elements by combining your modded single stat elements.

Shield, Pylon, Armor Build Factors ​

How shields, Pylons, and Armor Phases influence builds. Every weapon is equipped for a reason, and some like Zenith have interesting build requirements.

To understand weapon builds, you need to look at the fight as a whole, each phase has separate requirements for weapon builds. For reliably good Shield Phases, you need easy access to all elements, for good Pylon phases, you need some way to either ignore the barrier around the Pylon or a plan for how to quickly reach Pylons, for good Archgun phases, you need an Archgun that can break limbs quickly & consistently.

Shields ​

Profit-Taker's shields are the reason behind 80% of the meta loadout. To cover as many elements as possible, and thus make shields as fast as possible, the meta loadout is Volt Kuva Ogris, Magnetic Tenet Diplos, an Exodia Contagion Zaw, and an On Call Crew with Torid. Kuva Ogris is a bit of a black horse here as it is horrible for shield damage, it's here because it's the best option for taking care of Pylons.

Weapon Elementals ​

When building your weapons for Profit-Taker, no Toxin damage is an almost unavoidable problem, to see the reason why consider the current meta weapon elements for solo Profit-Taker:

Secondary: Viral(Cold+Toxin) and Heat, innate Mag, optional Radiation

Melee (Contagion): Gas(Toxin+Heat) and Cold, innate IPS, Blast, Corrosive, Radiation

Operator/Volt Shield: Electric

With this combination, you're only missing Toxin, and there is no way to fit it in the builds without creating the need to switch to your primary.

If you try putting it in place of any of the other modded single-stat elements, it will just combine with the dual-stat elements.

To solve this you must do one of the following:

• Sacrifice Pylon performance and use a Zenith with toxin on it
• Use an On Call Crew to cover toxin
• Use Saryn
• Get a friend(s) to use an alternate elemental config that covers Toxin

Going more in depth on how to cover this last missing element:

Saryn can do Toxin via her third ability, Toxic Lash, so while she doesn’t get electricity, she’s still only missing one element and isn’t forced to use operator to cover all elements.

For the First solution, you simply use a Zenith as your primary, modding it for toxin. This comes at the cost of pylon times but is consistent and works without issue.

For the second solution, you must have an On Call Crew set up properly, which is explained in depth later in speedrun strats.

With a properly set up On Call Crew, you have a way to do missing elements without having to swap weapons.

The only source of unreliability from this setup is the On Call Crew, which often will simply not shoot Profit-Taker, or will just die.

Weapons ​

While we’ve mentioned the basics of shields in previous sections, there are some very good reasons the elemental combinations are the way they are. In some cases, it comes down to available Mods, but it mostly has to do with weapon innate elements and fire mode.

The things Profit-Taker runners look for in weapons when looking at shields are:

• High damage when modded for crit.
• Multiple innate single stat elements (like the Shedu) OR innate dual stat elements (like the Tenet Detron/Diplos)
• Functionality: if a weapon requires some specific setup to work as advertised, or doesn’t work properly at all, it's not going to be very practical. (like the Shedu, which doesn’t work)
• Decent fire rate and magazine are optional in theory, but quite important in practice

Generally, the only weapons in a Profit-Taker loadout not completely built for breaking shields as fast as possible are primary and whatever you’re using to break limbs. You need as many of the 13 elements as you can get. Simply put, if you only have 6 elements, the best run you’re looking at is in the area of 3-4 minutes due to how much time you will need to spend cycling shields. This assumes you have a good understanding of the fight and have well-set up Archguns already.

That being said, you still need well-built weapons that can do decent damage, as you can see in how slow Profit-Taker is modless.

Profit Taker with Modless Weapons | 11m 09s 800ms RTA | PS4 Warframe

This run uses weapons that have decently high base damage, the meta setup would likely do worse than this under the same circ*mstances.

Weapon Choice and builds: ​

To start with, even if a weapon has an innate element like the Cyanex, it is still extremely important for weapons to have the ability to do enough damage to Profit-Taker. The Cyanex isn’t meta because it quite simply doesn’t have the DPS as you can see.

Off meta mechless run ft. cyanex + dagger zaw

While on the other hand, even though it doesn’t have any innate elements, the Lato Vandal can be quite good due to its stats.

Warframe PS4 Profit Taker Lato Vandal Only | 3m 38s 700ms RTA

So as you can see, weapons ideally have both good innate crit and innate elements. Exodia Contagion is the absolute master of covering multiple elements, with Kuva and Tenet weapons being a close second. Dual stat elements that contain Toxin are the easiest to mod for.

Ideally, the single stat element you mod onto a weapon is the one covered by the Primed Elemental Mod. This means Cold for primary, Heat and Electric for secondary, and Toxin for melee. However, some weapons do enough damage for this to not matter.

As a bonus, Profit-Taker runners also look for certain things about a weapon that results in faster elements, weapons like this include:

• Tenet Detron has so much damage and so many projectiles that it can clear 4 elements with one shot given perfect rng.
• Exodia Contagion, a Zaw Arcane that adds a grenade-like attack with 3 separate damage instances. Each one of said instances do the modded elements, meaning it is not uncommon to throw Contagion and clear 2-3 elements. For more information, check the Zaw guide

A generic weapon build will look something like this:

The specifics change between primary/secondary/melee, and certain stats are prioritized due to various factors such as available Mods and weapon type.

Once every element a weapon covers can be consistently cleared in one shot, it is best to start modding for utility such as fire rate and magazine size.

Rivens MUST be an improvement over at least one of the Mods above or open up a Mod slot, otherwise, they are not worth slotting onto the build

Note that with a well-coordinated squad, even the most absurd setups can do impressively good runs provided enough damage and most of the elements, like in this sub-2-minute Bonewidow run:

Bonewidow profit taker 1 47

Trying to figure out elemental combinations can get quite confusing, this image from the wiki can help keep track of everything.

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Zaw Part setups: ​

Contagion deals a lot of damage, meaning Zaws can focus on Quality of Life and reliability. When choosing parts for your Zaw, you want to go for a Scythe, Staff, or Polearm Zaw with max attack speed and critical chance. As was said here, Scythes, Staves, and Polearms don’t suffer from air lock, making them the weapon of choice. Attack speed will make the Zaw more forgiving and easier to use while critical chance guarantees a reliable damage output. If you’re looking for a Zaw Riven, see the graph below for strikes with good Riven disposition. If you’re looking for what mod config to use, see the previous section.

Seekalla is the best grip for most strikes because it is the highest attack speed two-handed grip. It is primarily used for Polearms and Staves. Peye is the highest attack speed one-handed grip and is primarily used for Daggers and Scythes.

Vargeet II Jai gives you max attack speed and critical chance. With Sacrificial Steel and Vargeet II Jai, all strikes reach 100% cc, making it the de facto choice.

Armor ​

The easiest and least complicated phase, the Armor Phase relies almost entirely on your choice in Archgun and build, so here are a few helpful tips and the pros and cons of the four best setups.

Archgun builds are fairly cut and paste, with pretty much all Archguns using the following build:

• The biggest difference between the two Archgun builds is generally whether or not Automatic Trigger (60% FR) is used. With some extremely rare exceptions, Containment Breach is the best replacement when you want more single-shot damage over fire rate.
• Dual Rounds might not be the best if you want maximum reliability. If you have a Riven that gives >100% cc with Critical Focus and Parallax Scope but does not have multishot, it might be best to replace Dual Rounds with said Riven.
• Sometimes it is best to replace Hollowed Bullets or Parallax Scope with a Riven and use Automatic Trigger. After all, if you consistently (100% of the time) one or two-shot legs without the Mods equipped then there is no reason for them to be equipped.
• The most important part of any build is to mod for Radiation for reasons you can see clearly in the graph below. The relative elemental damage multiplier from Radiation is greater than any other single damage buff that can apply to an Archgun. Cold is never worthwhile, as it doesn’t increase how much Radiation you have, and Radiation doesn’t increase how much Cold you get.

Rivens ideally give Archguns 100% cc and/or ms for consistency’s sake, especially in the case of the Velocitus, for which the meta build requires critical chance on the Riven.

Archgun Setups Pros/Cons: ​

Before getting into the specifics about Archgun setups, make sure that no matter what setup you use, keybind the gear item as it massively increases the reliability and versatility of both Heavy Weapon and mech summon.

Heavy Weapon:

Pros:

• Has access to frame damage buffs such as Eclipse. This means that once you have your Archgun called down, it will shred Profit-Taker legs
• Is fairly close to the ground, and you can crouch to get lower, letting you get a decent view of all legs from the front

Cons:

• Has a ~3s delay to call down Archgun. The animation starts once you put away your current weapon and takes place over a fixed amount of time. If you have a scanner out, the animation will start immediately
• Due to the Archgun cooldown, explained in build basics, many Archguns miss out on DPS to slot Ammo Chain.
• You are completely exposed when calling down Archgun, requiring you to either get lucky or plan your positioning around calling down Archgun.
• After the first Shield Phase, it is extremely common for Profit-Taker to do her laser attack while you’re calling Archgun. Press a/d + slide right before calling Archgun to slide out of the way of this attack, your momentum won’t stop immediately when you’re in the call animation, you need the Archgun deployer on a keybind to do this.

Mausolon (Heavy Weapon):

Pros:

• Reliable, high damage, can 1-3 shot limbs rivenless. Riven, Arcane Avenger, and Adarza Kavat can bump up this consistency.
• A large ammo pool means you can waste ammo without having to deal with an extremely long Archgun cooldown.
• One of the few hitscan Archguns
• Full auto and a large ammo pool means you can make one, sweeping motion through all four limbs without worrying too much about cooldown due to missed or wasted shots.

Video (click to play/pause):

Cons:

• Extremely bad Riven disposition means Rivens don’t cause a massive improvement in consistency. For most Rivens to be viable, you need to run Arcane Avenger to raise the cc enough to replace Parallax Scope with Riven.
• The explosion doesn’t consistently damage the rear limbs. While this allows you to damage a front limb while aiming at a rear limb, the explosion doesn’t do enough damage while solo to break limbs as quickly as the direct hit

Prisma Dual Decurion (Heavy Weapon):

Pros:

• Noticeably higher fire rate than Mausolon
• Has a unique summon animation that’s 150ms faster than the default
• Good Riven disposition means it can reliably oneshot legs with the proper Riven, meaning its possible to fire a single shot at each leg if you move the mouse fast enough

Cons:

• Low ammo pool and high fire rate mean missed/wasted shots are highly penalized by cooldown
• Projectile weapon like most Archguns
• Is affected by Archgun Hitbox Bug

Mech:

Pros:

• Instant summon
• Fairly tanky, don’t need to worry about dying.

Cons:

• High camera and weapon position sometimes make rear limbs hard to hit
• Few damage buffs, and an extremely restrictive meta setup. The forms of damage increase available are as follows: Volt shield, Damage Bless, Tactical Rank 9, and Riven Mods.

Velocitus (Necramech):

Pros:

• High fire rate makes the Velocitus extremely fast for solo Profit-Taker, being theoretically capable of reaching sub-3s sum of legs if skill permits.
• The Velocitus is extremely precise.
• The Velocitus has the Fastest projectile speed of any projectile weapon.

Cons:

• only has viable usage in combination with Volt's Shield and a decent riven
• As the Velocitus is a projectile weapon, there is a barely noticeable delay between firing a shot and said shot hitting the target
• The Charge is all or none, making it extremely impractical to charge the Velocitus.
• There are only 11 stat combinations of Riven Mods (fewer without a negative) that work for uncharged oneshots. Note that some Rivens oneshot without a CC Mod on, but they have only 74% cc. No Riven is necessary for charged shots
• To reach those extremely low leg times, you need a Riven that can run lower damage but a higher fire rate build. Bless helps with this, but without Bless, there are two viable stat combinations and grades will decide if a Riven will work or not.

Corvas (Necramech, non-Prime):

Pros:

• The Charge isn’t all or nothing, Corvas’s stats linearly scale from uncharged to charged stats as you charge it.
• When used with Volt shield, Corvas is the fastest Archgun for rivenless solo runs, as with Damage Bless it can oneshot Profit-Taker legs if you charge it to slightly over half. When used without Volt shield, a slower build is required making Corvas slightly slower than Heavy Weapon.
• Can oneshot legs on frames other than Volt with only a moderately good Riven, making it ideal for said frames.
• Unlike most Archguns, the Corvas is a hitscan weapon, meaning shots hit immediately after firing
• With additional damage from Volt’s Shields, it is possible, though extremely rare, to oneshot two legs at a time with a single shot due to bullet spread.

Cons:

• Low base fire rate means it can’t quite match Velocitus performance and needs a strong/expensive Riven if you want to slot Automatic Trigger.
• Still needs quite a specific Riven if you want to oneshot without charging.
• High multishot makes it possible to miss with a few pellets, meaning the legs aren’t oneshot.
• As it is a shotgun you need to be near Profit-Taker to do significant amounts of damage. Not a massive issue, but something to keep in mind.
• The Primed version is garbage and often deals 0 damage.
• Is affected by Archgun Hitbox Bug

Pylons ​

What do Pylons change about your setup? Why are they special?

Pylons are an essential part of the fight, but they have an impenetrable bubble around them that you have to work around. Generally, one of your weapons will be chosen not for shield performance, but for Pylon performance.

What To Use for Pylon Phase: ​

Ideally, you have a weapon that can break the Pylons from outside the shield bubbles, to do this your weapon must have either infinite punch through or be an Opticor-style beam cannon.

The five weapons that meet these criteria, in order of speed:

Kuva Ogris ​

Ogris has a mod called Nightwatch Napalm, which leaves a large area of effect where the rockets land that lasts six seconds. This AoE can damage pylons through the pylon bubble, making it possible to destroy a pylon after it has landed, and if a pylon lands in the AoE, it can be quickly destroyed. This makes the Ogris several seconds faster than the next best option, as it isn’t solely reliant on reaction time (and aim) after the pylons have landed, but rather predicting where the pylons will land and pre-firing them. The Kuva Ogris is best for this as the progenitor damage bonus is one of the only damage increases that apply to Nightwatch Napalm. This is a speedrun strat known in the community as “Pogris”, more information on it here. Pogris is unable to effectively damage shields, so it must also be paired with a good On Call Crew.

Video (click to play/pause):

Zenith ​

Infinite punch-through allows the Zenith to go through mountains to hit Pylons from any point, along with its good base crit stats giving it good shield damage. The only drawback is its status as a weapon from daily rewards means you likely either have it or must wait months before you can get it. If you've sold it, you can find it at simaris. Zenith is also borderline on oneshotting Pylons with each pellet with a majority of builds (having to rely on multishot is just asking to have one of the pellets miss.) Only Saryn (due to Venom Dose), Grendel (due to Nourish), Mirage (due to Nourish again), and Oberon (due to Smite Infusion) don’t have to worry about this, other frames have to sacrifice survivability for power strength to oneshot with Zenith.

Video (click to play/pause):

Opticor/Opticor Vandal ​

While the Opticor Vandal is best for this task due to its higher fire rate, both Opticors can shoot Pylons from outside the shields. However, they cannot shoot through mountains and have horrible performance against shields, leaving them in second place.

Video (click to play/pause):

Fluctus ​

This Archgun is a bit unusual in that it requires a specific setup to give meaningful results. To use the Fluctus to take care of Pylons, you must be using a Zephyr with their Turbulence augment. This gives the Fluctus enough range to hit Pylons from far away. This is less practical than any of the other options and it's only marginally better than using an Amp, but it is an option.

Your alternative to using one of these four weapons is hopping into Archwing and flying to the Pylons.