About Warframe Reviews

This page will hopefully offer some clarification on how I structure my Warframe reviews. As so much of their utility relies on player skill, usage and preferences, they will be a lot more subjective than the weapon reviews.

Abilities

When discussing abilities, the following shorthand will be used. This shorthand indicates what stats are affected by Ability boosting mods.
(+Str) - affected by Ability Strength
(+Ran) - affected by Ability Range
(+Dur) - affected by Ability Duration
(+Eff) - affected by Ability Efficiency
Note that (+Eff) will only be indicated where it affects more than just energy cost/drain, as that is consistent throughout all Warframes for essentially every ability.

I will be discussing abilities with respect to their stats at Rank 30, because there is no reason to consider a Warframe below max Rank.

 

Augments

Augments are mods that alter an ability, either adding extra effects or changing its functionality entirely. I will cover each Augment for a Warframe that exists at the time of writing. Augments are continually being created and many Warframes do not currently have Augments for all four (or any) of their abilities. Additionally, Augments do on occasion get changed, as with everything else in this game. As such, there is a good chance that after some time, a number of my reviews will be missing some Augments, or have outdated information.

Builds

When discussing builds, I will suggest the stats and abilities that I feel are most worth building for, and thus give my recommendation on the sorts of builds that I feel are best. These are of course subjective and depend on your playstyle preference and available mods. I will attempt to avoid Primed mods where possible in low/no-Forma builds, due to their poor availability and high cost. If you have relatively few mods, it is often a good starting place to just increase all stats with the basic mods (Intensify, Continuity, Stretch, Streamline, Flow, Vitality, Redirection).

Personally, I don't like Quick Thinking. I'd much rather slot in a health mod and preserve energy for a potentially life-saving cast, or save the energy for when I get revived. I also typically equip multiple healing methods, which for me, are faster and more convenient than energy restoration. I will try to make mentions of which Frames I feel make the best use of Quick Thinking.

Shield Gating

Shield Gating is a mechanic originally introduced with Hildryn, then rolled out to all Warframe, Companions, Necramechs and Railjack. Upon taking damage that fully depletes Shields, any remaining damage is negated and the player is rendered invulnerable for a short time - 1.3 seconds if their Shields were depleted from full, and 0.33 seconds if the Shields were only partially replenished. Some equipment (e.g. the aforementioned Hildryn) can have Shield Gate invulnerability for 3 seconds.

With the use of mods or abilities that regenerate Shields, this can be utilised to grant almost any Frame pseudo-invulnerability, however it is typically very management-intensive due to the short timeframes involved. Due to this, I prefer not to rely on Shield Gating where possible, and only use it on Warframes who do not have any other method of good survivability.

Role

I will be discussing what sort of role(s) I feel each Warframe works best in. These can be generalised into five basic roles:

• DPS (damage-per-second) - dealing large amounts of damage to enemies, usually to large groups.
• CC (crowd control) - negatively affecting the behaviour of enemies, usually by slowing or stunning them.
• Debuff - making enemies less threatening and/or easier to kill.
• Support - supporting allies, whether it be with buffs or with health/shield/energy/ammo restoration.
• Tank - survive far more damage than most other Warframes. Traditionally, Tanks would also draw fire, but there aren't many reliable ways to draw aggro in Warframe.

Note that there is a fair bit of overlap between CC and Debuff, but I feel that there is enough difference to be worth having them separate.

In the Directory, rather than giving each Warframe a rating, I will be simply denoting whether they fulfill a particular role or not. Because of how different Warframe abilities are, it can be extremely difficult to objectively compare one ability to another, and often multiple of a Warframe's abilities can contribute to a given role. Many abilities can also cover multiple different roles.

Major Changelog

U31.6.1 - revamped, added Shield Gating.