With over 50 Warframes and hundreds of weapons to choose from, it's to be expected that not all of them will be viable to use. Note that these examples are subject to getting a Balance Buff or rework at any time, so being a Low-Tier Letdown isn't necessarily a permanent thing.
Warframes
- Ash suffers from this at higher levels. Most of his damage from abilities is single-target; Shuriken can only seek out two enemies at a time, Smoke Bomb is a joke of a stealth ability that barely has any duration if you want to build for max power strength, Teleport staggers enemies and opens them to finishers (you need an augment to automatically execute them) leaving his fourth ability, Blade Storm, as the only way he has to deal with crowds of enemies. Blade Storm takes forever to set up, with you having to manually mark enemies by aiming at them, and the animation can take even longer to execute. While his Seeking Shuriken augment can strip armor, so can Styanax's Tharros Strike, Mag's Polarize, Caliban's Fusion Strike, and about a dozen other abilities that are area-of-effect and don't require a mod slot. What's more, a bug in 2023 made the damage from Bladestorm far weaker than it should be, and it has yet to be patched as of writing. Ash is generally agreed to be a decent frame in the early-mid game, but the problem is that outside of the Circuit in Duviri (where he's on a rotation alongside thirty-two other Warframes every week), he's locked behind late-game Railjack content that is difficult to get public groups for.
- Khora was panned by a lot of players for being released in a nearly broken state, with very weak abilities and a large number of bugs plaguing her kit. She received a hotfix buff almost immediately, just to make her usable. Which was followed by numerous other tweaks and improvements in the following patches. Thankfully, she is now considered a very good frame, with her Entangle and Strangledome abilities being highly valued for both their mass crowd-control capabilities and for Strangledome becoming a Loot-Making Attack with the right augment.
- Revenant received a mixed reaction for similar reasons. While certainly usable, he drew criticisms from players for how inefficient and largely underwhelming his abilities were. Thankfully, he was later buffed and reworked, and is now considered one of the strongest Warframes in the game.
- Vauban was largely considered the worst Warframe in the game. Originally meant to be a Weak, but Skilled Jack of All Trades, he has not aged well at all since his release. Between poor scaling, and the fact that almost all of his abilities were weaker or inferior versions of another Warframe's, he became a Master of None with no real purpose. His fans clamored for a rework for years; in October 2019, they got their wish, and he's finally become a very popular Warframe, excelling in both crowd-control and armor-stripping.
- Nyx is another Warframe derided for its weakness. She has little built-in survivability, her Mind Control ability is basically a glorified radiation proc that relies on the hope that the enemy AI won't be completely braindead and can do damage, her-armor-stripping Psychic Bolts that can only affect six enemies (which does not scale upwards with power strength), and her Absorb ability gives her invincibility but makes her completely immobile (unless you use an augment mod) and guzzles energy even at max efficiency. Her only viable ability, Chaos, literally is a Radiation proc, substituting the actual status effect with some special overlays, causing enemies to attack each other, but also leaving them open to attack players on your squad. Overall, this leaves you with a Squishy Wizard whose Useless Useful Spells have been left completely in the dust by countless overhauls, and who has very, very few options to make work at even mid-level play, much less anything approaching endgame.
- Inaros is generally seen as a one-trick pony: he's a Stone Wall thanks to his naturally massive health pool, but all of his abilities are extremely weak. Dessicate is a mediocre blind, Devour essentially tickles a single enemy to death over the course of several minutes, locking you out of actually using your more powerful guns during this time (though at least you're invulnerable while doing this), Sandstorm slows down your movement speed and knocks enemies all over the place, making them hard to target, and Scarab Swarm is an okay armor buff at best which can be recast to launch a very weak Corrosive attack. His passive is also pointless, letting Inaros drain life from enemies and allies at a very slow rate in order to revive himself when downed; this process is so slow that it'll likely take several minutes to self-revive in all but the lowest-level missions (this also makes you unable to use the Last Gasp focus skill which is a superior self-revive method). The biggest thing all these abilities have in common is pathetic damage: while many nuke-Frames can hold up through base Star Chart, and some even scaling into Steel Path, Inaros struggles before you've even reached Sedna. And though his tankiness is his main claim to fame, he's not even the best at that: many Warframes can get higher EHP than him through damage reduction abilities, and others can become straight-up invulnerable: Inaros' lack of shields means he can't use shield-gating like almost everyone else.
- Although her reveal was met with much fanfare, Yareli was quickly declared the worst Warframe to be released in years when she finally touched down in the Sisters of Parvos update. While she's themed as a CC-heavy combat support who rides around on her unique K-Drive, Merulina, the lack of proper gametesting became painfully apparent once players got their hands on her. All of her abilities deal pitiful damage to any remotely difficult enemy, have limited range, required a lot of energy to use, and often worked counterintuitively (i.e. Riptide gathered enemies up, only to blast them all over the place). Merulina is supposed to provide Yareli with uniquely fluid and constant movement, but in practice all it does is make Yareli hit her head on every doorframe and sacrifice the fine controls of Warframe parkour. The fact that her passive is considered the most powerful part of her kit speaks volumes about how undertuned she is, and she had almost all of her damage values doubled in less than 24 hours after her release. Even this wasn't enough to rescue her from the heap. The "Lua's Prey" update gave her some much-needed buffs and quality-of-life changes, such as adding a Damage-Increasing Debuff to Sea Snares, allowing the use of Operator mode without cancelling Merulina, and withholding the scattering explosion part of Riptide until the ability is recast.
- In the Duviri Paradox, the Rank 10 Opportunity intrinsic gives you the opportunity to finally play as the Stalker after years of teasing from DE. However, Stalker is barely a unique Warframe; his first three abilities are borrowed from other sources (He copies Ash's Teleport and Smoke Bomb for his first and third abilities, and his Marked for Death ability is a slightly modified Helminth power) with his ultimate and passive being the most unique parts of his kit. Since you don't have access to Stalker via your arsenal, you can't customize his appearance or kit in any way, so he's stuck with his default appearance and default mods, meaning no Min-Maxing from corrupted mods, no infusing with Helminth abilities, no opportunity to customize Arcanes, none of that. While he's powerful on paper (a 300% critical chance against enemies unable to see you is nothing to sneeze at) he suffers from the same problem as Ash in that most of his ability damage is single-target in a game about shooting hordes of enemies.
- Limbo got a major, if indirect, Nerf with the Angels of the Zariman update in 2022 that essentially made him one of these through no fault of his own. Previously, the combination of Cataclysm plus Stasis made him possibly the best Warframe for defense missions and general crowd control, as well as being immune to damage while in his Rift Plane, if a bit of a nuisance for squadmates who got hit with a Banish by accident. With the rework to Eximus units in Angels of the Zariman, not only can they ignore Stasis, they also entirely ignore the Rift and can damage Limbo while he's in it, without Limbo being able to do a damn thing in return. Limbo in 2024 is what Vauban was in 2019: a Frame whose only utility now is messing with teammates, having been outclassed in basically every other area, just because the game evolved and the developers failed to address how that evolution would interact with this Warframe's kit.
- Loki's kit stands out as The Artifact, originating during a time where Warframe was a very different kind of game than what it eventually became. Distraction, invisibility, and teleportation were potent tools back when the game was about sneaky ninjas covertly eliminating their foes, but over time, Power Creep hit most Warframes, allowing them to rapidly mow down hordes of enemies in a matter of seconds. Even for players who do want to be sneaky, Loki is disappointing, as there are many other options that have similar, yet superior invisibility and mobility options: Loki's Invisibility only gives him invisibility, as opposed to, say, Ash's Smoke Screen affecting allies, or Octavia's Metronome giving invisibility along with multiple other buffs. His Decoy is intended to Draw Aggro, but has very little durability, meaning it'll go down almost instantly against the types of enemies you'd actually want to distract. Switch Teleport is hard to use properly, with a lot of potential to hinder teammates by putting them in a worse spot, making it risky to use compared to simply spending a few more seconds bullet-jumping to your destination. Radial Disarm, while decent in a vacuum, can be disappointing, as he's not the only Warframe with a mass-disable ability. This has left many players clamoring for him to get a rework.
- Hydroid used to be seen as the worst Warframe in the entire game. His abilities did piddling damage, had very little utility, and had a nasty side-effect of knocking enemies all over the place, making them hard to shoot afterwards. Players spent years demanding that he be reworked, and he got that in the "Abyss of Dagath" update, finally giving him a reason to be picked by making him an armor-stripping machine with less obtrusive crowd control on his abilities.
Weapons
- After Melee 2.0, Scythes were universally inferior to just about any other melee weapon. Prior to the change, they were renowned for their charged attacks' ability to sweep the ground, dealing additional damage to enemies who had been knocked down. Melee 2.0 removed charged attacks and gave them flashy but unwieldy stances, and their stats tended to be lousy. This was made worse by the release of the Anku scythe, an outright upgrade to all other scythes and also one of the easiest to obtainnote ... and even then, it's strictly a mid-tier weapon, ineffective against high level foes. After nearly a year, the other scythes were buffed in Update 18.5.
- Machetes have been consistently overlooked by DE for years now. Unlike most melee weapon categories at the time, they only received a single Stance with the introduction of Melee 2.0, and the Stance in question is widely understood to be terrible. Furthermore, the category has very few weapons, and almost all of them have very low stats. The Vacuum Within (part of the lead-in to U19) finally added a machete with decent stats, the Gazal Machete, but it only reaches its full potential whenever the underwhelming Djinn Sentinel uses its inconsistent power Fatal Attraction. Eventually, DE made a new stance that was not terrible, and machetes are being grudgingly acknowledged as pretty good. Then Zaws came out and promptly made all conventional machetes obsolete.
- While many of the Incarnon weapons introduced with the Duviri Paradox are well regarded for breathing new life into older weapons, the same can't be said for all of them, most notably the Soma/Prime. In its heyday the Soma was well regarded for its high critical stats and high magazine capacity being able to mow down hordes of enemies with ease, until it was slowly power crept out. The Soma's Incarnon doesn't help much in that regard, only adding a measly 12/10 base damage, and either another 12 base damage or a .6 base increase to its critical multiplier. Its transformation on the other hand is atrocious, as it reduces your fire rate but grants an innate multi-shot of 8 shots, except both the Soma's critical and status chances get completely dumpstered while transformed. And despite the fact that you are potentially shooting several dozen bullets per salvo which should theoretically offset the reduction of critical and status chance, your reduced critical and status chance is so poor you're not likely to score either.
