How To Craft And Play Wukong In Warframe

Wukong is arguably one of the strongest characters in Warframe

. This trickster takes the best aspects of stealth Warframes and combines them with potent melee attacks. Played correctly, Wukong can destroy screens of enemies with their Iron Staff, travel great distances with Cloud Walker, and trivialize Steel Path content with their clone.

Even after numerous nerfs, it’s tough to rank Wukong as anything under S tier. Today, we’ll be going over everything you need to know about Wukong, ranging from in-depth ability breakdowns to endgame builds that make Wukong one of the strongest Warframes in the game for all content.

How To Get Wukong

Wukong is a Warframe you can acquire through clan dojo research. All of Wukong’s components can be found in the Tenno Lab aboard your clan’s dojo. If you aren’t part of a clan, you’ll need to join one and create a clan dojo key before you can access the building. New clans will need to create the Tenno Lab and research Wukong’s components first.

If you aren’t part of a clan, you can also get Wukong through Duviri Circuit, a roguelike game mode that you unlock upon completing

The Duviri Paradox
quest.

Wukong Blueprint

Wukong Neuroptics

Wukong Chassis

Wukong Systems

How To Get Wukong Prime

As with all Prime gear, Wukong Prime is obtained from Void Relics. You can find Void Relics as end-of-mission rewards, Relic Packs sold by syndicate factions, and through in-game trading with other players. If Wukong Prime is currently vaulted, you’ll only be able to obtain his Void Relics through player trading. Get your hands on a Void Relic, boot up a Fissure mission, collect ten reactant, then complete the mission to receive your reward. If Wukong is in the relic, there’s a chance his part will drop.

You can also trade Wukong Prime’s uncrafted component blueprints with other players.

Wukong Prime Blueprint

Wukong Prime Neuroptics

Wukong Prime Chassis

Wukong Prime Systems

Wukong Abilities

Stats

Passive

After taking fatal damage, Wukong automatically uses one of his mastered survival techniques. These techniques may only be invoked three times per mission.

Wukong’s passive is a cheat death effect that can proc up to three times per mission. Whenever Wukong loses all of their HP, you become immune for two seconds, restore 50% of your lost HP, and gain one of the following buffs at random:

• Cosmic Armor: Invulnerable for 30 seconds.
• Heavenly Cloak: Become invisible for 30 seconds.
• Monkey Luck: Enemies you kill drop extra items.
  • Behaves similarly to pilfering loot augments.
• Primal Force: Deal 300% of your current damage as bonus elemental damage for 60 seconds.
• Sly Alchemy: Health and Energy Orbs are four times as effective for 60 seconds.

This passive may only activate three times per mission. Once your passive has been triggered three times, Wukong will enter a downed state like normal.

Celestial Twin

Shedding part of himself, Wukong creates a twin to fight by his side. Attack at range and the twin will melee; pull a blade, and the twin will lay down covering fire. Use again to command the twin to attack a target with increased damage.

Wukong creates a copy of himself at his current location, cloning Wukong’s current stats and equipped weapons. The clone lasts indefinitely and functions identically to a specter, aggressively fighting targets near Wukong’s vicinity. If you need your clone to target a certain enemy, you can reactivate Celestial Twin on a target to mark them. Your clone will also copy any abilities you cast.

Your clone’s equipped weapon is the opposite of what you’re currently using. Wielding a melee weapon will equip your clone with your primary or secondary, and vice versa.

Celestial Twin shares Wukong’s ammo reserves and mods, so be aware if you’re using any weapons with low ammo reserves like the Kuva Bramma. Galvanized mod bonuses don’t seem to affect Celestial Twin, but every other mod is fair game. To scale its survivability and damage, you’ll want to scale Ability Strength.

Cloud Walker

Evaporate into a cloud of mist and float through the battlefield, dazing any enemies encountered while healing Wukong and his twin.

Cloud Walker is a fantastic movement ability that doubles as a stealth tool. Wukong flings himself into the air and turns into a cloud of smoke, drastically increasing Wukong’s movement speed. Enemies you travel through are dazed, and moving with this ability active restores your HP over time.

Outside of fast mobility, Cloud Walker is mostly used to skip laser grids in Spy missions. Making contact with lasers won’t detect Wukong, which trivializes virtually every Spy tileset.

Defy

Wukong and his twin become invulnerable and defy enemies to attack. All damage is captured, stored, and dealt back in a single furious strike of Wukong’s staff. Bonus armor is then granted relative to the damage captured.

Wukong begins to levitate and project an invulnerable aura around himself, absorbing all incoming damage to charge his Primal Fury staff and subsequent armor buff. Once Defy’s duration ends, Wukong will swipe his staff around himself to damage nearby targets. This will trigger an armor buff for the next 25 seconds, affected by Ability Strength and Duration.

Defy is best used as a panic button to make yourself invincible. The invulnerability buff can be juggled with Rolling Guard, shield gating, and other forms of invulnerability to make Wukong virtually unkillable in harder content.

Primal Fury

Summon the iron staff and unleash fury.

Wukong summons an exalted staff as his new melee weapon, featuring high critical stats, status chance, and great reach. This makes Primal Fury ideal for slide attack builds, although it’s also a decent option for slam attacks if you spec heavily into them through Primal Staff’s melee mods. Spec Wukong for Ability Strength to scale your base damage, and you’ll have an S-tier melee weapon for most content.

Wukong Augments

Wukong has access to three augment mods, all of which can be obtained from syndicate factions for 25,000 standing each. All three of his augments are available through the Arbiters of Hexis and New Loka. Of course, you can always trade for these augments from other players if you aren’t aligned with either syndicate.

Celestial Stomp

Celestial Twin augment: Hold to command the twin to perform a slam attack, suspending enemies in the air within 20m for 25 Energy.

Celestial Stomp forces your clone to perform a heavy slam attack at your reticle, suspending targets caught in the blast radius. Performing a heavy slam attack yourself performs the same function but doesn’t cost energy, making this a poor augment choice for most builds. The mod is affected by Ability Range, but most Wukong builds opt to dump range in place of more duration instead.

Enveloping Cloud

Cloud Walker augment: Allies within 4m of the cloud become invisible to enemies for 14s.

Enveloping Cloud allows Wukong to make his team invisible by moving through them with Cloud Walker. The invisibility range and duration are affected by Ability Range and Duration mods, respectively. Bear in mind that this simply makes your allies invisible; it does not allow them to pass through Spy mission lasers unfazed.

Primal Rage

Primal Fury augment: Killing an enemy increases critical chance by 15%. The increase decays by 1% per second.

Primal Rage increases your exalted weapon’s modded critical chance as you kill enemies, up to a +150% bonus. You cannot increase the critical chance cap with mods. However, scaling Ability Strength will increase how much critical chance you get per kill, thereby reducing the number of kills required to hit the 150% cap. This critical chance bonus is additive with other critical chance mods.

Wukong Builds

We’ll be looking at a powerful exalted build for Wukong today that does a little bit of everything, provided you’re comfortable spamming the slide attack button. Wukong is a character who is fairly easy to play and mod for, as most of his scaling comes from Strength and Duration mods. Consider using Naramon with Wukong to greatly extend the duration of your combo counter with Primal Fury. If you aren’t planning on using his ultimate, run Zenurik instead for passive energy regeneration.

Wukong prefers Melee Critical Damage (Crimson) and Ability Strength (Crimson) shards. Parkour Velocity (Amber) and Cast Speed (Amber) shards are also worth considering.

Slide Attack Build

This build is focused on spamming Iron Staff’s slide attack as much as possible, which will effectively wipe the screen of enemies once you ramp up your combo counter. We start by subsuming Defy with Kullervo’s Wrathful Advance, a short-range teleport that grants additive critical chance for a short duration. This will work alongside Primal Rage’s critical chance modifier to obliterate mobs with red crits.

If you don’t own Kullervo, generic damage subsumes are also a great choice, notably Mirage’s Eclipse and Rhino’s Roar.

Survivability and damage are paramount here. For the former, we run Umbral Intensify with Transient Fortitude to give ourselves a hefty Ability Strength modifier. We also run Steel Charge for more raw melee damage and Arcane Strike to scale our attack speed. For survivability, we use Umbral Vitality and Adaptation to scale our EHP. If you’re ever in a pinch, use Cloud Walker to reposition and heal.

You’ll be able to stay in Primal Fury most of the time thanks to our high Ability Duration and Efficiency—achieved through Narrow Minded, Primed Continuity, and Fleeting Expertise. If you need more duration, run Molt Efficiency as your second Arcane.

For Iron Staff, we’ve opted for a fairly generic Melee Influence build. This Arcane will spread status ailments to nearby targets when active; you just need to inflict Electricity onto a target first. We can do so by scaling our status chance with Weeping Wounds and Electric damage with Voltaic Strike and Shocking Touch. Scale the status damage with Galvanized Elementalist, and you have some monstrous Electricity procs that will kill Steel Path enemies with ease. Use the rest of your mod slots to scale critical stats and your Iron Staff’s range.