If you pick a base character then the prime gets removed as well, the better version cant exist without the base version, however if you remove a prime version then the base character can still exist. My personal pick would be Valkyr due to how [IMO] useless she seems
She’s squishy, her damage is bad, and her abilities are finicky. She’s not good at anything. She’s not terrible at anything, I’ll give her that, but in order for that to be acceptable she needs to be good at at least one thing and she isn’t.
She can’t do stealth so her first ability is just a gimick.
Her second ability would be amazing on something like a chromatic blade Excalibur build, but sadly it isn’t her helminth ability. On voruna it’s once again a gimick as the status effects themselves don’t do much and so function merely to make her other abilities not suck.
Her third ability is just worse Dispensary.
Her fourth ability is the only one that’s somewhat good, but even in that case it’s worse than most other warframes abilities as it requires using her second ability first (on multiple enemies), and requires that it be able to deal enough damage on every attack to kill its target which means you need to be careful about the order you use it against enemies. If everything lines up perfectly it can do almost as much damage as most well moded guns. Assuming you can get it off before you’re killed anyway.
She’s just an all around underwhelming frame that accels at nothing. People keep ragging on Chroma for thematic reasons, which fair enough, but at least he’s super tanky and provides some very nice group buffs (he was better before the rework when you could use vex armor to quickly buff weapon damage to ridiculous levels). Chroma could certainly be better, but I’d still rather bring him than Voruna any day. At least I’d live long enough to get some kills.
Her 2 and 4 only momentarily exit you from her 1’s stealth, and it’s such a short period that enemies often can’t even detect you.
She absolutely can do stealth, she just has to focus on quick-kill builds with either her pouncing abilities (2 & 4) or melee heavy attacks. The latter requires she spam her 1 after every attack, but it works and you can easily have builds that destroy entire groups.
Her 2 does very decent damage when it procs the right statuses, and more than that it works as a primer for her. The RNGness of it does make it inconsistent, but it’s still an okay ability and functions well when you use it as a primer.
Her 3rd can feed her quicker than dispensary ever could. It’s problematic in that it doesn’t work with her 4, but it’s still an okay ability.
Her 4 doesn’t really need the stacking damage. It’s nice to have, but you can just as easily prime and then nuke an Eximus with it. You shouldn’t have to use her 2 multiple times for a group, her 2 spreads by itself when the enemy dies. So, you kill the primed enemy and then everyone is primed and everyone starts dying.
I would say Voruna is superior to Chroma, at least in my experience on the Steel Path. Voruna can eat into enemies with her 2 and 4, and you should never underestimate invisibility, even half-hearted invisibility like Voruna’s. She’s not crazy powerful and could use a few tweaks to make her kit function together better overall, but she’s by no means as abysmal as you say.
Hmm, I’ll try rebuilding her as a stealth focused build then and see if she’s better that way, but I’m not super optimistic. How do you deal with energy? Her 3rd only gives energy on headshot kills, but her two viable paths for securing kills are melee and her 4th ability. Do you need to just use a gun (bow?) to get headshot kills when her energy starts to run low and spam her 1st ability until you get your energy reserve back up so you can go back to using her 2nd and 4th? She still sounds way too finicky just to arrive at a state where she’s able to keep up with what other frames can do effortlessly.
If you go the heavy melee route, you can slot in Equilibrium and Synth Fiber on your pet to always pick up health so you can always get that energy, and then you’ll never have energy issues.
Using the pounces for kills actually doesn’t trigger her 3 at all (which is problematic and I wish it was otherwise) so you have to do the normal energy economy stuff like Arcane Energize, yellow archon shards, Streamline, Zenurik, etc… The pounce build basically completely ignores her 3 and subsumes over it. You could even use Citrine’s subsume which would let her get energy on kills again, but I prefer Roar because I have Arcane Energize.
Basically, don’t worry about headshots and either ignore the ability or use Equilibrium to make the ability into something Voruna wants.