Kullervo is the 53rd unique warframe added to the game, and is tied for my favorite frame in the game. I sincerely enjoy playing him and think anyone who enjoys melee in Warframe would too, and with this guide I hope maybe I can teach new players how to get him, what he is and isn't good at, and how I have built him over time and what has worked well for me. I will cover builds that will assume you are at “endgame” but also have some builds that can be made earlier, since Kullervo is relatively easy to acquire even when you’ve only just started Warframe.

Why am I qualified to tell you about Kullervo, you might wonder to yourself? I’m not exceptionally qualified, but I feel confident I play Kullervo at a high enough level that if you are struggling or unsure about him then I can definitely lend a hand. Hopefully even if you already know what you are doing you still learn something, as that is also one of my goals.

Don’t be scared by the length of this guide, Kullervo doesn’t take a degree in engineering to play but basic knowledge of the game and it’s systems will go a long way so I aim to provide that in case you are new. If you know what you are doing I encourage you to skip past the sections on how to acquire Kullervo and the overview on his abilities.

Kullervo can be acquired upon completion of The Duviri Paradox quest, which is unlocked after completing the Uranus Junction. By playing The Duviri Experience node during the ‘Anger’ ‘Sorrow’ or ‘Fear’ emotional Spirals (noted at the top of the screen when selecting Duviri), you can optionally challenge a boss in the Kullervo’s Hold section of the map (which is only accessible by flying your kaithe there) to earn a material currency called ‘Kullervo’s Bane’. Kullervo’s Bane is only awarded upon completion of your Duviri Experience run and defeating the Orowyrm at the end of the run.


An Example of the Anger Spiral's look.


Here be Kullervo's Hold, if you're having trouble finding it.

I recommend only doing the fight after getting at least a few Decrees (the special buffs you get upon clearing objectives) under your belt, as the boss can soak up a fair amount of damage and hit decently hard. He has three phases, so remember to keep yourself healed and able to deal with him. It’s not an extraordinarily hard fight but it can surprise you the first time or two so it may not hurt to run it with friends or people also looking to farm Kullervo.

Once you have sufficient Kullervo’s Bane (you need 42 total to buy his blueprint and all three components. Additionally, getting his signature shotgun, the Rauta, is highly recommended by me and will take 30 more banes for the blueprint and components), trade them in for the blueprints/components with the merchant named Acrithis that wanders Duviri and also shows up in the plaza after defeating the Orowyrm. With all of that done, you’ll also need the following materials to construct Kullervo’s parts:

10 Pathos Clamps
360 Ariette Scale
200 Ueymag
125 Nacreous Pebble
100 Kovnik
100 Eevani
100 Aggristone
100 Saggen Pearl
75 Rune Marrow
50 Tasoma Extract
50 Lamentus

All of the above will take some time but is easily acquired from Duviri. In the interest of space i won’t go into specifically where each one is found, and instead recommend looking at Warframe’s fantastic wiki or other resources on details of where to get them all. Once you have it all, the components take 12 hours each to build and Kullervo himself takes 72 hours. I recommend pacing yourself, as even someone who enjoys playing Duviri will get burned out if you spend excessive time farming plants/fishing/getting kullervo banes. Pace yourself.

Alternatively you can just buy Kullervo and/or Rauta outright from the in-game Market for Platinum. Doing so also makes them come with an Orokin Reactor or Catalyst and a Warframe or Weapon slot. I dont knock you for doing this if you have the platinum, because Duviri Experience can be a slog to do over and over and you’ll need its resources for many other things as well, notably later on weapon incarnons.

Kullervo starts with relatively high health and armor plus a good amount of starting energy. However, he does not have nor can gain Shields by any means. This means he is difficult to survive with ‘as-is’, because shields and the brief invulnerability they give when broken (which is referred to as a ‘shield gate’, more on that and how it relates to Kullervo later) is non-existent on Kullervo. Thankfully Kullervo has a tool to circumvent this in his second ability, which i will introduce to you first.

Recompense is Kullervo’s second ability and fairly unique in the scheme of Warframe. It will also be one of the most used abilities you have. It summons a large number of daggers that encircle around Kullervo when the ability is used that will seek out nearby enemies and stab them. Upon daggers successfully connecting with enemies, they will do a little bit of damage but also, more importantly, heal Kullervo as well as give him Overguard when his health is already full. This ability gives health and overguard based on your ability strength, and the maximum ‘cap’ of overguard is determined by ability strength also.

“But wait,” you might ask if you are new, “What’s Overguard?”

To put it simply, think of Overguard as a second health pool that, when decreased, does not regenerate like shields. Instead, you can gain more Overguard by using Recompense again, or by allied warframe abilities giving it to you. Overguard is by default the gray numbers next to your health bar. When you have Overguard, you are additionally immune to status effects and knockdowns, which is quite great! However, your armor value of your warframe does not reduce the damage your overguard takes, and while there is a period of invulnerability between going from having overguard to losing all of it (half of a second, to be exact), it is shorter and harder to manage than the shield gating equivalent.

I’ve mentioned shield gating a couple times now, what it means in regard to Kullervo is that you can do a similar, less effective thing with his Overguard - as soon as it’s gone, hit your Recompense ability to get it back and you should get overguard again before that half second of invulnerability expires. *This* is your main way of staying alive as Kullervo in high levels and Steel Path. Always be ready and able to cast your Recompense ability when taking damage at those levels.

As a final couple notes - the daggers will actually return and stab Kullervo if they do not hit an enemy within enough time, though they do pitiful self-damage and can’t actually kill you. The daggers also add to your Melee Combo count when they hit enemies - more on that in due time.

Kullervo’s first ability, Wrathful Advance, is likely going to be your next most used ability. It is a Tap/Hold ability (meaning it has different effects based on whether you just quickly tap the ability key or hold it down) that, by default, teleports you to a targeted enemy on a tap and performs a heavy attack with your equipped melee weapon; or on holding the ability will let you freely teleport to an ability marker that appears when holding the ability and does not require a target or perform a heavy attack. In addition, after teleporting Kullervo will increase his melee critical hit chance by an extremely high amount (by default, it increases your final critical chance by an incredible 200%, and the bonus is affected by ability strength!). This critical chance increases *all* of the melee hits you make during its (by default, it is affected by ability duration!)10 second buff duration, not just the targeted heavy attack. You also get the buff even if you teleport and don’t hit anything, which means usually it’s actually preferable to do the hold teleport into an empty area, then start swinging after the teleport so you can get more time swinging your melee stick of choice.

It’s not exaggeration to say this is the ability that makes Kullervo such a great ‘frame. It makes whatever melee weapon you happen to have into a disgustingly powerful red crit monster of a weapon. However, this also heavily incentivizes anyone playing Kullervo to be focused more on their melee weapon, though not at the expense of your guns. With most of Kullervo’s tools being tuned for melee, this means if you aren’t a melee enjoyer, Kullervo probably is not the frame for you.

It can be up to preference for this, but I actually enjoy inverting the Tap/Hold functionality of Wrathful Advance in the settings menu! This makes you teleport immediately with no delay by simply tapping the ability. It takes some practice learning to know where you’ll end up, but as a general rule of thumb, you’ll end up wherever your aiming reticle is currently looking at.

Kullervo’s third ability, Collective Curse, is your most complicated but also one that rewards skilled grouping of enemies and a good build. Kullervo sends out a wave of malice in a frontal cone towards where you’re aiming, enemies caught in this wave are chained together in a binding curse and will share the damage any of them take FROM Kullervo with each other. It’s default is 50% of damage gets shared, but with enough ability strength (200%) you can make every other enemy chained up take 100% of the damage you deal to other enemies. If you have a big group in front of you and you want them dead quick, use this then go nuts on the chained enemies, usually killing one will kill them all if you’re at that nice 200% ability strength threshold!

Finally, Kullervo’s fourth ability, Storm of Ukko, rains down knives in a large circle around Kullervo and deals decent slash damage to every enemy inside the circle, while also increasing your melee combo count every time an enemy gets hit by a dagger.

Despite being a rain, Storm of Ukko will usually hit enemies that are above a ceiling or on a level below you, to a degree. It’s actually somewhat surprising the amount of verticality this ability has in its radius, so try it out and see what you’ll hit when you have enemies below and above you to get a feel of what tilesets and features will allow the rain to go through and what will block it.

Storm of Ukko is great for clearing low level fodder enemies before you get to Steel Path, once enemies get beefier at those levels of play you’ll instead use it as a tool to build your Melee Combo count quickly. Now, what, you might wonder, is this Melee Combo count I keep referring to? Its the amount of melee hits you have dealt in a certain time window, and refreshes every time you make a new melee hit, but the count goes away if you fail to continue making melee hits or use a Heavy Attack with your melee weapon. There are multiple ways to increase the amount of time you get before your combo goes away or mitigate the amount that you lose, which i will go over in the builds, but the reason you want high combo count is threefold: You get a damage multiplier to heavy melee attacks at certain thresholds of combo (indicated by 2x, 3x, etc.), and this multiplier can also affect some mods’ power and let you activate Incarnon forms on melee weapons.

Here’s where things get based more on opinion and preference than pure fact. Any Warframe or Weapon in this game can be made good if you put the right stuff on it, but what makes things great for you will be slightly different than what others might prefer. That said, there’s definitely a number of things I recommend to do to make Kullervo great in all content no matter your skill level, and at the end i’ll share how I’ve built my Kullervo currently.

The basic things you’ll definitely want to hit are getting at least 200% ability strength to cap out the damage sharing from Collective Curse and to ensure Red critical hits when you use Wrathful Advance. At 200%, you’re also likely to just destroy anything below level 50 with your Storm of Ukko, too, and putting in more than 200% will make it even more effective. There is a point that you will reach where too much strength becomes overkill, though. While getting big red numbers is fun and a big part of playing Kullervo, you want to keep your other stats at a good point, too. Over investing in strength is good when starting, but when you have access to the wide variety of mods and other ways to power yourself up, you’ll find 200% ability strength is sufficient enough to do the job well.

When you’re starting out, be careful reducing your Ability Efficiency if you don’t have ways to counteract the amount of extra energy you spend. Using Blind Strength to boost ability strength early on is tempting but make sure you always keep enough energy to use Recompense in case of emergency. It’s very easy to spam abilities as Kullervo so he can get very energy hungry! Later on, when you get mods to help your energy economy, tanking efficiency to maximize stats is definitely easy to do.

Ability Range is useful for Kullervo and should not be dumped, but going above 130-145% is overkill. Just keep enough to make your Storm of Ukko worth using and your Wrathful Advance a viable mobility tool, and you’ll be more than alright. Staying at 100 is definitely okay.

Ability Duration is your second most important stat and what you should invest in after getting to 200% ability strength. Kullervo’s Wrathful Advance buff is 10 seconds by default which is kind of lousy and will make you need to recast it often unless you make your duration higher. Making your duration nice and high makes playing Kullervo a much more comfy experience.

Finally, it would be remiss of me to not mention that once you get access to Archon Shards, you will notice how much better your build will be. Red shards can fill in missing gaps in Ability Strength or give you more duration and, even more importantly, increase your melee weapon’s critical damage. When you also eventually get the ability to upgrade your Archon Shards, purple shards tuned for Melee Critical Damage are a direct upgrade from their red counterparts when you have over 500 maximum energy! The easiest way to get to that threshold is by equipping the mod Primed Flow, which by itself will get you over 500 very easily, but if you are still waiting to get that then using a combination of normal Flow and a Tauforged Blue Archon Shard will also get you there! Even Red melee crit damage shards make a big difference in getting those huge red damage numbers!

You get a decent amount of choices for your Warframe Arcane picks. Molt Augmented is definitely a reliable pick for almost every warframe that cares about ability strength, and Kullervo is of course no exception to that. You’ll get a very nice bonus to your melee damage with Arcane Fury, and Arcane Strike can be used to give you more melee attack speed, which is very useful as Kullervo does not give himself that natively. You could also play around with Arcane Truculence, as getting to the overguard threshold for it is extremely easy as Kullervo and will spread a huge viral status wave to everything around you just by pressing your Recompense, which in turn makes you deal much more damage to enemy health!

Speaking of Arcanes, if you have a free slot to put an Arcane on your Primary or Secondary weapon, you can use their respective Dexterity Arcanes that you get from killing Acolytes in Steel Path. At max rank, they give 7.5 more seconds to your combo timer!

With all that said, my current build at the time of writing this guide is below. As long as you have 200% strength, I feel like Kullervo is very flexible to build. Flex slots are plenty in this build: The Nira mods can be removed if you despise doing melee slams. I rarely use them myself but I keep the mods on, even if I’m not actively using a slam oriented weapon, as a crowd control tool. (The effectiveness of this, however, will be reduced slightly in upcoming updates, as the game design team has indicated they are reducing the radius of slams made from a small jump height.)



Constitution is mainly used for its Ability Duration increase, since Overguard will prevent you from taking knockdowns.

Rolling Guard might seem odd at first, especially if one plays Kullervo at low levels, but I personally love it for when I am doing more difficult content with him. When you lose your Overguard, utilizing a dodge roll before your Overguard gate ends gives you a LOT more time and freedom to reapply your overguard stacks without feeling pressured. I will admit you don’t need it at low levels, but it is something i stick on almost all of my Warframes anyway.

Energy Nexus is one of my favorite mods on any Warframe that does not have channeled abilities as it will almost single-handedly solve your energy economy when combined with (Primed)Flow. I’m a firm believer in not having to rely on Energy Orb drops if I can help it.

If you are copying this build you will want to do either one of two things: use a Tau Red archon shard for Ability strength to push you to 200%+ or replace Arcane Truculence for Molt Augmented to get you the rest of the way to 200 after a handful of kills.

The other Archon Shards i use are three purple Archon shards for Melee Critical Damage and another Tau Red for Ability Duration, which is solely for comfort and can be another Purple Melee Crit damage shard if you desire bigger damage numbers and are fine shaving some time off of your Wrathful Advance buff.

You can also switch Arcane Truculence with Arcane Strike in this build, which is a great option but one I do not have maxed at the time of writing this.

So, if you’re just starting out and stuff like Arcanes and Archon Shards are a bit over your head at the current moment, you can still do well with Kullervo using something like this:


YES, the Augur set effect does nothing for Kullervo, but it's additonal sources of range and duration that are easy enough to farm.

Remember, we like at least 200% strength without dumping our Range stat too low and as much duration as we can help ourselves to. You’ll have to be careful with your ability casts until you get access to Energy Nexus.

For your melee weapon, if you’ve built Kullervo well you can use anything from a Skana to an Incarnon Nami Solo to absolutely shred just about anything in the game. Pick whatever melee you love at the moment and Kullervo will give you the freedom to excel with it.

With that said, I have a list of personal favorites. The aforementioned Nami Solo, once you get its incarnon, is an extremely reliable and strong sword that’s only downside is it’s slightly slower than average attack speed.

The Okina Prime, recently minted and given an Incarnon, is good for status oriented builds and using Melee Influence with. Kullervo doesn’t natively buff Status damage but he makes Status oriented weapons an effective “hybrid” build by making them crit like a truck.

I’ve recently began playing with the Hate Incarnon, which shoots projectiles that are buffed by your melee crit chance/damage and guarantee status procs. It’s a very fun weapon to build for Status or for Crit and use to “shoot” enemies with.

The power of Slam weapons like the Magistar Incarnon and Sampotes are very, very easy to build for high damage output and easy to use.

Any Glaive like the Xoris, Glaive (Prime) or the (Coda) Pathocyst will be turned into very effective AoE grenades with their thrown Heavy Attack detonations! The Glaive family was the first tools of destruction I used that made me fall in love with Kullervo.

But truly, any melee is good when it comes into Kullervo’s hands.

With all that, you still have a Primary and Secondary weapon slot to fill, yeah? Let me make some more pointed suggestions as to what can be run on those.

If you built Rauta and use it on Kullervo, you get a passive bonus to your melee combo timer. Combine that with a Primary Dexterity arcane and you get a very good stretch of time to play with your melee combo… the main downside of the Rauta, however, is it’s not really a weapon you use to kill things with due to it’s pitiful damage stats. It makes up for this by being a great combo timer extender and having the added bonus of increasing your melee combo count for every shot that hits an enemy (This feature even works on frames that aren’t Kullervo; you just dont get the extra combo timer duration)! This can rack up your melee combo extremely quick and lets you hit the ground running with your melee weapon very easy, or act as a ranged method of increasing your combo. I also use it to drop Nullifier aura bubbles on enemies. It’s versatile but don’t expect it to kill anything if you use it. I recommend building it for Multishot, Fire rate, Magazine size, and reload speed in that order to pump out a lot of quick shots that will rapidly build the melee combo up.

If you use the Rauta in your primary, it’s very important that you make sure your secondary weapon is pretty dang good at killing something quickly if you have to take out things at range. The Laetum is my go-to even at endgame, but anything with a decent rate of fire and high damage plus accuracy will be great. If you want an absurd amount of time in your melee combo timer, you can put on a Secondary Dexterity arcane, but I typically don’t in favor of using something that powers up the secondary weapon itself more.

A couple free tips to help you with playing Kullervo.

He has an augment mod for Storm of Ukko. I don’t really like it but if you do, it can be slotted in fairly easily.

Anything that says ‘Upon shields break’ will typically always be active on Kullervo, or any other Warframe with no shields. It’s rare, but you see it on some Incarnons like the Ack and Brunt’s, for example.

Don’t feel like you need to stack a ton of Overguard when playing on higher difficulty. It can be better to go to 5000ish and just reapply it when it depletes rather than managing it constantly to keep it at your cap. In high levels, 15000 overguard can be depleted almost as quickly as 5000.

Kullervo’s passive gives him faster Heavy Attacks and natural Heavy Attack efficiency, meaning he does not consume the entire melee combo count by heavy attacking. You can sort of game the timer this way by heavy attacking before the timer kills your combo. This refreshes the timer and reduces your combo by 30% instead. It’s a neat trick but rarely practical, though.

When you unlock focus schools, I recommend Zenurik because it’s useful on almost every warframe, but when you finish working on that, Naramon is a easy pick to help Kullervo with melee, too.

If you don't dig the look of a bunch of knives being stabbed into him, you can remove Kullervo's daggers in his appearance settings.

The greatsword from his boss fight is, unfortunately, a Market only item to be bought for Plat.

Did you know that in the lore, Kullervo committed Seven Crimes which were so unfathomably horrible that they were why he's locked up in such a terrible place like Duviri? They are, in no particular order:

1. Rushing items in the foundry with platinum.
2. Charging unfair prices for Rivens.
3. Talking about Nezha's sexuality/gender identity in Region chat.
4. Tax Evasion.
5. Referring to himself as "Kullerbro".
6. ???
7. Killing some Orokin, who cares

PS: If you read all of this guide, I love you <3

This guide was made during update 38.5, on the eve of the Yareli Prime update. If I update this guide again, I'll update this section to reflect that.