banshee prime herself is actually currently vaulted right now, however you can get the standard frame from researching her in the tenno lab in the clan dojo, making her a pretty easy frame to get hold of. the research isn't too expensive to do.

Once you've managed to get hold of the prime though, you get a frame that is extremely squishy from a stats perspective, 300 health at rank 30 is very average, and 65 armour means that an enemy giving you an angry look will result in your untimely demise.

So if its not her stats that are something special, lets dive into the abilities and see if we can find something in here!

Lets start off with her passive, she makes literally all her weapons silent. Not a lot too it and honestly, has fairly limited use since she has no invisibility to take advantage of that, so honestly, its kind of a bit of a useless passive really.

Sonic booms her first ability. She throws out a wave of sound in a 180 degree cone in front of her which will ragdoll enemies away and do 50 impact damage. Thats pretty much all that needs to be said about the ability itself. It does have line of sight detection, which means occasionally it does weird things, but in general, one of the best and cheapest crowd control abilities in the game.

And it comes with a pretty damn good augment for it soo in sonic fracture which with enough power strength will strip all the armour off of the units that are hit by sonic boom. Which turns great and cheap crowd control into a monster against armored factions like the grineer. Definitely a good one here.

Sonar is pretty much banshees signature skill. She will send out waves of sound, marking locations on enemies with visible spots on their body and amplifying damage that is applied to that area. Recasting sonar will put additional spots on the body if the duration of the first spot is still active, and these additional spots are able to stack on top of each other, further amplifying the damage to some really insane numbers. The ability base multiplier is 500%, so you can imagine just how crazy it gets when you get multiple on top of each other. All enemeis that are hit by sonar will also be marked on the minimap too, which is good for some free enemy radar. Quite simply one of the strongest damage abilities in the game, with the potential to be able to fairly easily hit the damage cap. Its a pretty damn good ability.

Especially if you combine it with its augment which is resonance. Any kill using a sonar spot on an enemy will trigger another sonar pulse that hits all enemies in range again, with the remaining ability duration. This means that you can trigger sonar spot after sonar spot and have enemies with a whole load of spots on them, making it even easier to keep spreading. Its a fantastic augment, and one you will never not want on a sonar build.

Third ability is silence where banshee projects an aura around her that will stagger enemies and deafen them to everything, alarms, gunfire and the death screams of their dying friends, although they will still aggro if they physically see you or take any damage. Enemies that are stunned become affected by stealth damage multipliers which means you can follow up with some super hard hitting melee attacks. One thing about silence though is that you can restun enemies, so if you move away from enemies out of your ability range and then go back into range, you can keep them basically permenantly stunned. Its also important to note that silence on its own, while it does open to those stealth multipliers, does not open to finishers.

Savage silence however does do exactly that. Opens them up to finishers and then does 300% more damage on those finishers. Not a lot to talk about here, however, this is going to provide the focus to one of our builds.

Then we have sound squake, banshee channels all her sound energy into the ground forming waves of energy that damage enemies. 200 blast damage at base, plus staggering all enemies around her. This is a channeled ability which drains energy over time and will make her unable to pick up energy orbs, or use pretty much all methods of energy regen. One thing to note about soundquake is that banshee is completely immobilised while doing this and not invulnerable, so if you don't have enough range, its entirely possible for enemies just to take you out while you are doing that, so proper positioning is something to pay attention to.

Her augment, resonating quake, removes a lot of that by doing a single high damage wave that deals 20 times damage at the centre of the wave, but gets weaker and weaker as the wave radiates out. One big thing here is that the damage muliplier cannot be modded for whatsoever, which does limit its potential a fair amount. Its a good mod against low level trash and used to be the meta for levelling your friends and focus farming on hydron, however the changes it recieved really hit it hard, and honestly, unless you are speed running low level defences, its not worth making a build specifically around any more.

Which does bring us nicely onto the builds, where we actually have 2. First one is the one you have been watching in the background which is our savage silence build which is using a whole load of synergies to make it work. Sadly, to hit that magical hour mark in arbitrations, or fighting level 120 enemies, banshee simply isn't survivable enough for that with a standard build, so we're having to tank 3 of her 4 abilities and focus on one, that savage silence.

Starting off with the aura, swift momentum again, fantastic aura that helps keep our melee combo counter up, which since we are meleeing the whole time here, is going to help a tonne. Then vigilante pursuit in the exilus for the enemy radar and the free crit buff to our primary weapons. Narrow minded, primed continuity and constitution for duration, and we're using narrow to tank our range, so that we don't have too many enemies affected by savage silence at once, to make our finishers much easier to control. Streamline for a little bit of efficiency, rolling guard so that if one of our defensive options fails, we can roll out, or even roll into a group to pick up a quick finisher for the cloak. 3 seconds of invincibility every 7 seconds is super nice to have, then we have vitality, which I know might seem like a strange choice.

But we are combining this with a bunch of synergie. Firstly, we are going to be using the skiajati nikana for the cloak on a finisher combined with the amalgum diakyu mod which gives free lifesteal to all nikana attacks. Then thats all going to work with our arcanes the double trickery on our frame for 2 10% chances at a 20 invis as well as the magus lockdown on our operator which also opens enemies up to finishers. So theres a whole tonne of synergies going on here to make this build as strong as it can be. If you want to see the skiajati build, its up on screen right now, nothing too crazy here, in fact its a fairly standard build, except that instead of a combo mod, we have finishing touch for that additional finisher damage. One thing to note about the skiajatis cloak though is that if you attack with it again, that it will break its 5 second cloak, so you need to be careful not to just spam it like crazy or you will screw yourself over fairly heavily.

Its kind of a shame with this build that we are having to tank the great CC from her 1 and the damage from her 2 because her survivability is so poor, but we did a whole bunch of testing, and this was the only way we could get her to live long enough at this level to do anything at all. Its a fairly selfish build, however, we'll talk a bit later about some suggestions for her that could make her a bit more usable without having to tank your range hard like this.

Second build is the sonar one....







So, what do I think of banshee and how do I think she fits into the game as she is. And honestly, she is a bit of a relic these days, its sad to say. The problem with banshee is that she was build for the way the game way 3 years ago, before the crazy constant creep in power that every frame keeps getting.

Back in the day, the damage buff from her 2 was useful and needed in the longer runs of things, however with frame rework after frame rework and each individual frame getting stronger and stronger, the need for her damage amplification has really fallen off. Her actual damage buff is still the strongest one in the game by far, but when you have chroma who can buff his damage by a crazy amount and is crazy tanky, or saryn who does thousands of damage per second over entire tiles, banshees just gotten left behind.

And the problem is that honestly, by the time that you realisticly need that damage buff from her 2, she isn't survivable enough to actually use it because she just has no survivability. The reason we had to tank her range for her slence is because her only real damage mitigation is the stun from her silence and if you mod that for too much range and duration, enemies inside the radius only ever get stunned the once, so once thats happened, they just turn around and shred her.