Life & Death Decoy Loki
Welcome to another build that doesn't need to exist by Tonto! I prefer to make builds for frames I don't see getting a lot of love and in ways I don't see them often... loved. That brought me to Loki and I decided I wanted to make a Damage Decoy build using Well of Life since that allows the enemies to take a lot of hits... the thing is, when I started making this I couldn't shake this feeling I'd heard of it before. Turns out I had, in this year old post by u/liplessmuffin. Appreciate the inception, lipless, even if it took a year to take root!
Let's start with what this build is about, Damage Decoy and Well of Life. We target an enemy with Decoy making all their allies shoot them and receive 5 random status effects and damage reflection for their trouble. Can't have that guy die too soon though, so we tag him with Well of Life to hang him in the air while he pulses energy to heal us. We've got invisible to make sure the only target for the enemies is our decoy and just in case we die, the Well of Life kills our Decoy instead. Neat! Let's take a look at Loki's mods:
Our game is spreading status effects, and so naturally we run the full Mecha Set. We need our Decoy and Well to cover a lot of area and last a long time, so we're gonna pump duration with Narrow Minded and Continuity, and Range with Overextended, Stretch, and Augur Reach. Since we tanked our Strength, we're gonna recover some of it with Power Drift and Intensify, and since our Decoy is ability based status effects and Well of Life is Ability based healing, we're going to use the Archon variety of each of these mods.
Since we're Loki we'll naturally always be invisible which means Arcane Crepuscular is good for 30% more Ability Strength and +3x Critical Damage. Since we're placing every status effect on enemies with Decoy, Arcane Impetus will give us a constant 78% Ability Strength and 39% Ability Efficiency. Archon Intensify will also feed us an extra 30% Ability Strength since we're always healing and if you saw the title card you might notice we have another 75% Ability Strength from 5 Tauforged Red Shards. If you've been keeping score, that means we have 298% Ability Strength in practice... wanna see those abilities again?
That's right, each enemy hits themselves for 1,042% reflected damage and gets 5 status effects per bullet they plug into our floating tube of Neosporin. Our little Loki is carrying 280 Health and this pulsing piñata heals for 298 per second. That being said, I recommend not getting shot at all... if Mecha Pulse isn't active you probably go down in one hit... which the Decoy will take for you, but then that's on cooldown for 2 minutes. Just stay invisible. I know, I know, I can hear you now: "But Tonto, what about Nullifier's, they cancel invisible!"
Well that's why we bring our reliable Miter!
Okay, I am aware that this is my absolute worst quality image, but thanks to the damned incarnon mode, there was a lot of info to get in here. I will also be upfront with you, I droped 425p on that riven just for this build. I don't expect you do, it'll work fine without it, I would probably sub in Vigilante Armaments.
This Miter has 3 functions in this order:
- Pop nullifier fields with Neutralizing Justice. At a resting 3.1 multishot, every trigger pull has a 99.909% chance to permanently burst their bubble.
- Pump our pets Status chance. Mecha Overdrive adds 98.4% status chance to our pet thanks to Miter... which is useful since our pet has a base status chance of 5%.
- Deal Damage. We only focus on damage with what is left after accomplishing the first two tasks... but lucky for us, we can still deal plenty thanks to Spectral Serration giving 330% damage while invisible and Primary Frostbite being stacked by our Decoy.
Now after all that, I'm sure you wanna know about this pet... I mean, did you see his fashion in the title card?! Well hold your kaithes, we gotta talk about the melee first:
I'll come right out and say it, these aren't very strong, I wanted them to be, but they just aren't... but they do their job well, which is to stack gas effects quickly granting us 40% movement speed... combined with Switch teleport giving us +148% Movement speed and we've got wheels! What's that? I skipped the secondary? Oh... I just don't carry one... go ahead and use grimoire for extra ability strength or anything really and throw on an amalgam mod to roll faster... it's not important.
Our Pet is though!
This is Kubroham Lincoln, and before you ask, yes, occasionally he gets shot. He's running a Heat and Slash build that hits hard when he doesn't crit and hits really hard when he does. He prefers the Assassin Posture to shred the overguard of enemies that can resist my Decoy. That's all claw talk though... the real gameplay loop is on Kubroham himself.
Ferocity may seem like an odd choice, since it only attacks targets that are finisher marked. Well it turns out a few of the status effects from Damage Decoy mark enemies for finishers. Then, when Kubroham kills the shit out of them, there's a 30% chance everyone in 6m will be knocked down and marked for ground finisher, creating a devastating loop of "fuck you, I'm a dog!"
Contagious Bond spreads half the status effects on killed enemies to enemies in 9m, Vicious Bond strips 15% armor on attack and if the enemy was recently damaged by an ability (like Damage Decoy) it spreads the armor strip in a 9m radius. Lastly, Tandem Bond lets us increase our Kubrow's strength by up to 360% when we heavy attack.
...
As usual if you made it this far you have my utmost appreciation, I know I put alot of words up there and it takes a real champion to read them all when you could just as easily look at the pictures and say "Not shieldgating, n00b!"
Once again, a special thanks to u/liplessmuffin, they may not be the origin of this idea but the first time I thought of it was undoubtedly because of them.
If you chose to try this build out, please return with your thoughts. If you chose not to try this build out, I'd love to know you thoughts, too. If you're just going to tell me all warframes should only be played as shield gating, torid incarnon, melee influence weapon platforms... save yourself the time.
Posted Dec 9, 2025, 8:39 AM UTC