Since Warframe is a Free-to-Play game with lots of grinding, players are naturally incentivized to do said grinding as efficiently as possible. This naturally leads to experimentation, min-maxing, and will inevitably result in absolutely broken builds, frequent developer patches be damned. That said, while with enough dedication, and some luck, any weapon and frame can be turned into a powerhouse, some are still obviously superior to the point where they seem to throw game balance out the window. Here are just a few of them:
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General game mechanics
- Shield-gating is the go-to meta for late-game survivability. Shield-gating refers to the brief period of Mercy Invincibility you get when your shields run out; the higher your shields, the better. If you manage to refill your shields during that time, such as by using the Augur mod Set Bonus and/or the Brief Respite aura to convert spent energy into shields, you can them immediately trigger another shield-gate, extending the duration of your invulnerability. The Rolling Guard mod can also be thrown in to add even more invulnerability in case of emergencies. If executed properly, you can endure any attack that even the strongest enemies can throw at you, with only the Toxin status effect posing any threat to you due to its damage bypassing shields.
- Focus schools offer ways to break the game if you take the time to farm up the focus points required to level them up:
- The Zenurik focus tree is specialized in energy recovery, which often makes it the first school people unlock. In particular, the Wellspring ability gives a massive 150 energy over 30 seconds, allowing most frames to abuse their abilities to their heart's content.
- Following the Angels of the Zariman update, Unairu has become viewed as the most broken focus school thanks to its two abilities, Caustic Strike and Magnetic Flare. When fully ranked up, these two abilities instantly remove all of an enemy's armor and shields, respectively. Caustic Strike in particular is viewed as rendering all other forms of armor reduction obsolete.
- Madurai's Void Strike ability costs all of your energy to use, but it then briefly boosts your damage by up to 10% for each 1% of energy drained. If your energy meter was full when you used it (and remember, Operator energy quickly regenerates on its own), that's a 1000% damage increase. That's right, you do 11 times more damage per shot for a few seconds with this ability. Nearly every enemy in the game, even big ones like Eidolons, will melt in less than a second under that kind of damage. The only downside is that it has a rather lengthy cooldown, but that's not a big deal during the Eidolon fights where you use Operator mode the most, since the phases are separated by an Energy Spike during which the Eidolon is invulnerable so you'll be waiting out that time regardless. You can even solo Tridolons while using the Mote Amp with Void Strike.
- Arcane Energize gives you a chance to recover 150 extra energy whenever you pick up an energy orb, which is also shared with nearby allies. This not only single-handedly supercharges your energy economy, it's also the only external source of energy that works even while a channeled ability is active. Due to this, it remains the most sought-after and universally used Arcane, even after it was nerfed to have a fifteen seconds long cooldown between activations.
- The Duviri Paradox has Decrees, which can not only be built up a ton over the course of a standard run, but also there are some which are pretty busted by themselves or even as a category:
- Fleet-Footed boosts your movement speed by 10% for every decree. Even on a "Lone Story" run, you can get 60% more movement speed, but in the full experience the number of decrees you can get are so numerous that the only reason you'd need a horse is to either fly or drop a significant height that'd kill you on foot, because you'll easily be faster.
- Easily-activated or constantly active status effects can add up very fast, especially when doubled and spreading amongst nearby enemies as well. And you can potentially increase your base damage just by inflicting status effects.
- Want to play as Saryn in Duviri? Well, now you can, with the Close Contagion decree, which has a 50% chance of spreading status effects to nearby enemies when a status effect is inflicted. It works with any status effect. Heat? Viral? Slash? It's getting spread around.
- Majestic Strike is simple but effective: melee attacks hit twice. While useful in the overworld, it can be devastating in the Undercroft on a frame with an Exalted melee weapon, like Wukong, Excalibur, Valkyr or Sevagoth's Shadow.
- King's Collateral is easily the strongest of the Spiteful Decrees. It increases the damage you take by 50%, which quickly becomes irrelevant as your health and healing abilities increase. In return, it doubles the rate you earn Rare Decrees. Keep in mind, Rare Decrees are Purposely Overpowered (Close Contagion and Majestic Strike are both Rare), and can easily make the actual loadout you use in Duviri irrelevant.
Warframes
While all frames are viable, and with the right build all of them can break the game's difficulty curve over their knee, some of them make it easier than others.
- Nova is widely considered to be wildly overpowered - she has abilities that can, with the right mods and equipment, do everything. Her first ability provides her with percentage-based damage resistance, her second can clear groups and one-shot bosses, the third allows whole groups to bypass agility/parkour challenges, while her fourth cause all mobs to take double damage from every attack then explode when they die, resulting in a chain-reaction that can kill entire waves at once in defense missions. With proper auras and energy management, a Nova player can often spam these abilities for as long as they need to.
- It's not even Nova as such, just her fourth ability: Molecular Prime. It does THREE things, any ONE of which would be an ultimate-caliber ability: first, it slows all enemy movement and attack speed by half, effectively neutering any threat the enemy might pose. Second, it causes all affected enemies to take double damage from all sources. Third, it causes any enemy killed to explode in a powerful blast strong enough to kill almost any other nearby enemies (thanks to the aforementioned damage doubling). On top of this, by modding her for negative ability strength, she actually makes mobs faster, making her extremely useful for speeding up grinding on defense and survival missions. You could strip every other ability out of Nova and nerf her stats to the ground, and she would still be overpowered solely because of Molecular Prime.
- While she might look complicated and gimmicky at first glance, Octavia's kit is absolutely insane in the right hands. To elaborate, her first ability, Mallet, is a deploy-able that can pull aggro to it and then sends the damage dealt to it back at the enemy at a multiplied rate on every percussion beat, which can lock down hallways and large rooms fast at high levels. Furthermore, since its damage is dependent on incoming damage, it infinitely scales with the level of the enemies. Her second ability, Resonator, deploys a roller ball that charms enemies and deals light damage, but has the added bonus of being able to pick up the Mallet, which allows it to collect more damage even faster. Her third ability is Metronome, which grants numerous different buffs based on doing various actions in time to the beat, the best of which is invisibility, which can be refreshed so long as 'Metronome' is still active. Her ultimate is Amp, which increases damage in an area and also doubles the range and damage of any Mallet that is in the area. Combine all of these, and you get a permanently invisible frame that buffs allies and deals infinitely scaling AoE damage to all enemies in range.
- Speaking of infinitely scaling, let's talk about Saryn. Her first ability puts Spores on an enemy, which creates visible growths and inflicts a small amount of Corrosive damage over time. These growts can be popped, infecting nearby enemies with Spores, who can infect more when they die, theoretically infinitely. The damage of Spores ramp up over time, and the more enemies are infected, the faster the damage grows. Since Corrosive damage also strips armor, Saryn can kill entire hordes through just this ability alone, but its true worth is shown in Steel Path and other hard content, as the tankier enemies are able to survive longer, allowing her to scale her Spore damage output near-infinitely.
- Gara's second ability, Splinter Storm, makes her into an incredibly tough tornado of death by using and abusing the synergy between three of her skills. Her first skill is a slashing attack damaging enemies in front of her, affected by the mods on her melee weapon. The second ability is Splinter Storm, a cloud of orbiting glass shards that can provide 90% damage reduction, can also be cast on allies and defense targets, plus it deals scratch damage to enemies getting too close. Her fourth ability creates a circular wall of glass. However, by shattering the wall created by the fourth ability using the first ability, it results in an explosion that not only damages the enemies based on the first ability's damage output, but half of that is permanently added to Splinter Storm's damage-over-time effect. Furthermore, casting the fourth ability refreshes the timer on the skill, meaning so long as one can keep up the energy economy, it allows Gara to infinitely stack damage on Splinter Storm, eventually allowing her to kill Steel Path level enemies just by walking near them, all the while remaining very tanky and providing team support.
- Ivara isn't exactly a powerhouse, but her unique kit allows her to trivialize several game modes. In particular, her third ability makes her invisible and allows her to pickpocket enemies, allowing her to steal energy orbs and remain permanently stealthed. Combined with her ability to gather up enemies and put them to sleep with her arrows, allowing easy stealth kills for extra affinity and cheesing some otherwise difficult Riven challenges, this would already make her an outstanding Frame. However, the thing that makes her unquestionably a game breaker is her Prowl augment, Infiltrator, as it completely trivializes spy missions by making her undetectable by all the various defensive lasers and scanners in the data vaults, allowing her to just casually walk in through the heavily watched laser fences and crack the vaults without having to go through the usual process, essentially breaking the entire mission type.
- Mesa, the gunslinger frame, is pretty much a tanky murderous aim-bot on legs. Her Shatter Shield can provide an outstanding 95% damage reduction to projectiles, while her Peacemaker ability makes makes her stationary, but in exchange she brings out her dual pistols and can rapidly shoot any enemies in her targeting reticle, dealing some of the best burst damage in the game while requiring minimal aiming.
- Revenant is the tankiest Frame in the game, courtesy of the fact that his second skill, Mesmer Skin, makes him completely impervious to damage. Instead, each instance of damage shaves off one charge from the skill while stunning the attackers. On top of that, his first ability allows him to mind-control enemies and have them fight for him, serving as crowd-control by distracting other enemies, while his third skill turns him into a rapidly moving wall of energy that deals percentage damage, which is doubled on thralls. With the right build, he can one-shot level-cap enemies, all the while remaining completely invincible in the process.
- The Wukong rework brought many improvements to a frame that was previously known for being hard to kill but very little else. Of all of the changes, one particular ability improvement blew the Spy game mode wide open. Originally, Cloud Walker was a very slow way of avoiding damage and not much more. Movement speed was buffed to be faster than full-sprint Volt, casting time was made much faster, energy costs were lowered, it can be cancelled via attacking, and most importantly, it ignores cameras, traps, laser doors, and enemy vision. Spy with Wukong is now as simple as pointing in the direction of the vault, activating the ability, and basically teleporting straight to it.
- Wisp quickly proved herself to be one of the most ludicrously powerful Warframes in the game upon release, a status which she's kept for years afterwards, thanks to her extremely powerful supportive capabilities. It's telling that her fourth ability, a massive Wave-Motion Gun harnessing The Power of the Sun, is the weakest part of her kit by far. There are very few missions where you wouldn't be happy to have a Wisp in your squad.
- Wisp's Reservoir is quite possibly the best Status Buff in the entire game. This ability lets her choose between three different pods to summon, each granting a potent bonus to any ally that passes nearby. The Health Mote grants a large amount of extra health and regeneration, making Wisp a strong healer. The Haste Mote greatly boosts attack and movement speed, giving your whole squad a large boost to DPS and mobility, which is always welcome. The Shock Mote turns you into a walking Static Stun Gun, inflicting a guaranteed Electric effect on nearby enemies, a great crowd control effect. Even better, the Reservoirs have an infinite duration, meaning that you can easily set and forget them near the objective on a defense mission, letting your whole team refresh the buff duration whenever they want. This ability alone could make Wisp a top-tier Support Party Member.
- Breach Surge is another ludicrous damage-boosting and crowd control ability. Enemies in a large area are blinded, and when they're damaged, they have a chance to release a surge spark that targets another enemy, doing Radiation damage equal to the hit that summoned it and doubling all damage the target takes. Wisp killing an enemy herself guarantees a surge spark. Yes, this does double the damage dealt to an enemy every time it procs.
- Even her passive is extremely overpowered: every time Wisp jumps, she instantly turns invisible until she lands or fires a weapon. This lets her instantly escape death at no cost with the tap of a button. There's even a brief grace period of invisibility when she lands, making it easy to keep the effect indefinitely just by tapping the jump button. While any ranged weapon, even silenced ones, will break the invisibility, she turns invisible again when she stops firing, and she can still use melee attacks while staying invisible. This is one of the most powerful passives in the entire game, the cherry on top of her already ludicrous kit. The only real downside is that this passive is so good, it makes her Wil-O-Wisp ability (another survival tool which turns her invisible) feel redundant.
- Chroma's Vex Armor is considered to be the damage buff in the game. Vex Armor increases Chroma's Armor and damage depending on how much shield and health damage he takes. While the amount of damage he needs to take to reach the maximum is capped, the potential buff is not and is only capped by how much Power Strength Chroma is modded up with. A Chroma modded exclusively for Power Strength could buff everyone's damage by as much as 1500%, albeit at the expense of costing a boatload of energy and only lasting for about 10 seconds. In addition, this ability can buff other nearby players depending on your range, potentially allowing your entire party benefiting from it if they're coordinated enough. Parties that embark on Eidolon Hunts and Orb Heists often include a single Chroma for this reason so they can one shot the otherwise very tanky bosses.
- Zephyr after her rework has become this. Her tornadoes can now be cast to remain stationary, turning them into a great crowd control tool, while hitting said tornadoes distributes the damage amongst all the caught enemies, turning powerful single target weapons into AoE nukes. Her second skill can pull in enemies, not only acting as further crowd control, but also as a way to get them caught in the tornadoes, while her third skill not only makes her completely invincible to ranged damage, it does so by redirecting all incoming projectiles with a bubble around her. With enough range, this bubble can get big enough to encompass defense targets, allowing her to shield them from all ranged attacks. And as a cherry on top, she has a extra 150% base critical chance for all weapons when she’s in the air.
- Already a top-tier frame before the Echoes of the Zariman update, Garuda literally ascended to new heights with the addition of the Molt Reconstruction augment, that allows the user to heal 6 health points per point of energy spent on the initial cost of abilities. Garuda's Bloodletting ability lets her trade Health for Energy at at least a 1:1 ratio, so she can safely replace her much more limiting original healing ability Blood Altar with any spammable ability in the Helminth system and use it continuously, at max Ability Strength, while infinitely regenerating her health, energy, and (with any Augur mods) shields. Oh, and, if you lower her Aim Glide Gravity or bring a Moa with Tractor Beam, her Seeking Talons ability will reset the aim glide cooldown and further lower her gravity, effectively allowing her to fly forever. Have fun!
- Xaku is the Broken Frame... in more than one sense. First of all, Grasp of Lohk rips the guns out of your enemies' hands, letting Xaku wield the enemies' weapons against them, automatically targetting and shooting anyone in range. The damage of the stolen weapons depends on the enemies' levels, so its power will scale into harder missions as you turn the high-leveled enemies' stronger firepower against them. Their The Lost ability has three variants, but Gaze is the strongest: this immobilizes an enemy, creating a wide radius around them which strips the defenses of any enemy that enters, and Xaku can create two of those fields at once to cover even more ground. The icing on the cake is The Vast Untime, which freezes the duration of Xaku's abilities while it's active, meaning that you only have to keep track of one ability timer to keep Grasp of Lohk and Gaze near-permanently active. Using these abilities together results in a Warframe whose Powers Do the Fighting as any enemy that enters the range of Gaze will be instantly stripped of armor and shields before being shredded by Grasp of Lohk's automatically-firing guns.
- While only available in Duviri if you max out opportunity intrinsics, the Stalker is an incredibly reliable pick if your mains aren't available, and even if they are. His kit isn't super flashy and you can't customize him in any way, but his abilities are effective and you don't need to tinker with his mods at all. Two of his abilities are literally just Ash's Teleport (with the Lethal Teleport augment for free) and Smoke Screen, enabling instant finishers on most enemies (which kill non-Eximus enemies pretty much nine times out of ten) and constant invisibility, with the latter having the added bonus of automatically enabling the Stalker's passive, which gives him 300% critical chance when attacking enemies whom can't see him. Marked is literally just a better version of the Helminth's Marked For Death ability, allowing him to stun enemies and allow himself or his teammates to kill marked enemies to damage other foes nearby. And Punishment is basically Wukong's Defy, but with a horizontal wave of projectiles, and is quite effective if you build up enough damage from enemy attacks. All in all, you can't really go wrong with the Stalker if he's available.
- Special mention should be made for Stalker's passive ability, as his insane energy economy means he'll be invisible at all times, especially with decrees that further bolster it, 300% extra critical chance is a lot, and with weapons that already possess naturally high critical hit chance such as the Soma or the Lex, you can easily reach into red crit or even super red crit territory and put out millions of points of damage even through an armored enemy's damage resistance. And that's not even taking into consideration decrees that increase your damage or the abilities of other Warframes that also increase damage, meaning with support, the only thing stopping a squad with Stalker in it from potentially playing the Harder Than Hard Steel Path Circuit forever is the enemies eventually one shotting you or your defense objectives with so much as a light sneeze.
- While many derided him when he first came out, due to the underwhelming Overguard mechanics, a few buffs turned Kullervo into a powerhouse. He's naturally tanky, with high health and armor, but lacking shields. Instead, his second ability not only heals him instantly, but also provides him with Overguard, which not only acts as a shield, with its own damage-gate, but also protects him from all status effects, including knockdown. His first skill is a teleport that also initiates a heavy melee attack, and provides a flat critical chance boost to all melee attacks, allowing any weapon to do red crits for a few seconds. His third ability sends out a wave that links enemies, and so damage dealt to one of them is redistributed to all. All of these combined, he's a tanky frame with an one-button-press full heal, status immunity, and the ability to link an entire horde of enemies, teleport in with his first ability, and red-crit all of them with a single swing.
- Valkyr's "Hysteria" Ultimate ability is incredibly powerful if built correctly. It causes Valkyr to whip out a pair of energy claws similar to Excalibur's "Exalted Blade" Ultimate, and it can be modded in a similar fashion. However, what makes it incredibly powerful is that Valkyr is immune to all damage and status effects while Hysteria is active. With the correct mode equipped on Valkyr, Hysteria can be kept active virtually indefinitely, making Valkyr effectively immortal as long as she can keep getting kills.
Weapons
With nearly six hundred weapons in the game, a large number of them inevitable end up as fodder. The majority in the middle will be filled with usable, but not particularly exciting weapons. And then there are these.
- The deceptively simple Hek, a Grineer shotgun, has a few variants, but all of them are extremely powerful.
- The basic Hek can be obtained very early in the game, making it a Disc-One Nuke. Without any mods being applied to it, it has a base damage around five times that of many standard mooks, even those who would normally resist its damage type, like the Corpus, and has an absurdly tight pellet spread, giving it mid to long range capabilities. Apply mods to it and throw on a catalyst for good measure, and the thing can make normally difficult bosses like the Terra Frame or Corrupted Vor completely trivial. The only faction it has difficulties with are the Sentients, as they become mostly immune to it after a few volleys due to their natural abilities, but by the time you face them, you should have access to ways to remove their resistances.
- Its successor, the Steel Meridian-built Vaykor Hek, is even more powerful, due to its larger clip, high critical chance, and (thanks to Primed Ravage) extremely high critical damage. The one downside is that it loses the ability to use a unique mod for the Hek that increases the number of pellets per shot, but the benefits ultimately outweigh the negatives - its damage without the mod is about equal to the basic Hek with it, saving you a mod slot and meaning it can, among other things, kill the aforementioned Sentients in one magazine, damage resistances be damned.
- The Kuva Hek has all that as well as 20 more points of modding capacity at max level and the ability to burst-fire all of its chambers at the same time with alt-fire. Using it with any abilities that skip its lengthy reload animation or provide ammo efficiency lets it spam that burst fire for absurd sustained damage.
- The Sacrifice quest grants you Skiajati, a nikana that gives you 5 seconds of invisibility every time you perform a successful Back Stab. Equip an Enemy-Detecting Radar such as Enemy Sense and you can clear entire rooms crowded with enemies with little retribution. It's also already at max rank when aquired, meaning you don't need to undertake any missions to reach its full modding potential.
- The Redeemer Prime. It had its ups and down, starting out as a 100% status chance shotgun (which was a melee weapon with infinite ammo) that could exploit exponential scaling with pre-nerfed Condition Overload, then after Melee 3.0 it became a status/crit hybrid, and then once the shotgun status nerf hit the scene, the weapon became a heavy-attack crit nuke instead, and it was the go-to weapon for bursting down the tanky Condrix bosses in the Scarlet Spear event. No matter what happens to the meta, the Redeemer Prime just trucks along as one of the heaviest hitters anyway.
- With Operation Orphix Venom comes the newest addition to Warframe's weaponry, the Cedo shotgun, the signature weapon of Lavos, this can only be described as a monster of a weapon due to having effects reminiscent of Lavos himself; First off is while its primary fire deals a decent amount of damage even when unmodded, it also deals extra damage to enemies for each status effect they're afflicted similarly to Condition Overload which is complemented by its secondary fire, which fires off a ricocheting, homing glaive for no ammo that explodes on contact with surfaces and enemies, while being able to proc all four primary elemental status effects, a trait unique to it. Throw mods into the mix including bonuses to status, crit chance/multiplier and extra elemental effects means that even high-level heavy enemies such as Bombards, Juggernauts, and even most bosses are going to be ripped apart frighteningly fast by the Cedo's primary fire.
- Practically all Glaives are extremely powerful, thanks to the Volatile Quick Return mod allowing them to explode when thrown, and then still being able to detonated again with a heavy-attack on the way back to cause staggering AoE damage, but special mention has to be made of the Glaive Prime. The reason is simple: its heavy attack explosion has forced bleed procs, on top of its already heavy Slash focused damage profile. It will kill ninety percent of enemies in one shot, even on Steel Path, and the remaining ten percent is guaranteed to die a few seconds later anyway.
- The Kuva Variant weapons, obtained from Liches, range in quality from merely decent to outright meta-defining, further helped by the fact that there's a way to choose their bonus element.
- In general, Toxin is considered the best element to get on a Kuva weapon, due to the fact that it can be adapted into two of the best damage types in the game— Toxin and Electricity creates the armor-stripping Corrosive damage, while Toxin and Cold creates Viral damage, which increases the amount of damage that enemies take per proc.
- The Kuva Nukor, a variant of the Nukor Pistol. The base Nukor's gimmick is that it has an amazing base status chance, while having one of the lowest critical chances in the game at only 3%— but has a 4x critical damage multiplier. The Kuva Nukor has a still not-great 7% critical chance, but also has a 5x critical multiplier, which can go up to 10.5x before Rivens. What pushes this into truly broken territory is combining it with additive critical chance boosters (most commonly Arcane Avenger): additive buffs mean that the crit chance number is increased by a flat amount, which can be huge proportionally given the low base chance (e.g.: Arcane Avenger can give up to +45% crit chance, boosting the Kuva Nukor's from 7% to 52%). But wait, there's more— while the base Nukor can only damage one enemy at a time, the Kuva Nukor sends out two additional beams on contact with an enemy.
- The Kuva Bramma, a bow that fires explosive bolts that detonate into cluster bombs, which deal a lot of damage, combined with the second-fastest draw speed of all bows. Prior to the removal of Self-Damage in Update 27.2, this was considered one of the few self-damage weapons worth the risk just because of how powerful it was— even after several other weapons were gutted due to self-damage being replaced with a high amount of knockback and damage falloff from the center of the blast, it's still highly used and coveted.
- The Kuva Zarr is a substantial upgrade to its baseline variant, firing explosive cannonballs which also detonate into cluster bombs with massively improved damage, critical chance and status chance. With the right mod setup, one can blindly spray death into crowds of enemies; whatever isn't killed by the explosions themselves will be done in by whatever DoT effects the explosions themselves may have incurred.
- The Kuva Tonkor still doesn't elevate the Tonkor back to its pre-nerf glory days (see the legacy section), but it's still a rather potent weapon and it does have one big advantage compared to the Kuva Bramma and Kuva Zarr if you're good at hitting targets with it - it doesn't have the same ammunition problems those two do. The Kuva Bramma and Kuva Zarr have tiny max ammo pools (5 for the Bramma and a max of 10 in both the magazine and reserve for the Zarr respectively) and even with ammo pickup mods you can run out of ammo really quickly and have trouble getting more without a Squad Ammo Restore, with only one ammo per pickup without mods. The Kuva Tonkor has a max ammo pool of 30, and 3 ammo per pickup without mods. If you're good at aiming projectile weapons and have trouble with ammo while using the above two weapons, the Kuva Tonkor is a worthwhile alternative to consider.
- The Kuva Hek, a variant of the above-mentioned Hek that increases every stat and adds a new alt fire that just empties all four barrels of the gun into whatever poor sucker happens to be in front of you. Really, there's little to be said for this that wasn't already said about the Hek, though like the Vaykor Hek it does lack the ability to use the basic Hek's unique mod. Though, also like the Vaykor Hek it has improved critical chance and critical damage, making it an absolute critical hit monster with decent mods.
- The Kuva Ayanga is a contender for possibly the best Archgun in the game. Like the Mausolon listed below that was introduced later on, it's an explosive hitscan weapon that can damage multiple enemies simultaneously, has an excellent fire rate and fantastic damage (it basically makes Steel Path Archwing missions almost comically easy). While it has a much smaller magazine than the Mausolon, its quick recharge time renders this issue almost moot, and its firing spread is much more effective at hitting targets directly without having to rely on splash damage, which the Mausolon struggles with when used with an Archwing. The Kuva Grattler is a potentially competitive alternative as well.
- The Corpus answer to Liches, Sisters of Parvos, also come with their own brand of weaponry, Tenet variants. While as with the Lich weapons, some of them are merely serviceable, while others rightfully belong on this list.
- Some of the weapons (the Tenet Envoy, Tenet Diplos, Tenet Grigori and Tenet Livia) have access to the Granum Attache system, which in the former two automatically reloads the gun while it's holstered, whereas the latter two melees pause the combo counter. While not entirely game-breaking on its own, it certainly helps keep the weapons in prime shape for usage.
- The base Arca Plasmor, while fairly powerful on its own, suffers from being a Short-Range Shotgun. Not only does the Tenet Arca Plasmor do away with this flaw, but the shots also bounce off of walls, meaning it is entirely capable for it to wipe out entire rooms with a well placed shot. Oh, and thanks to the update introducing it reworking how Mercy finishers work and the gun's forced Impact status procs, it tends to pair great with killing heavy units regardless of damage.
- The Tenet Flux Rifle, unlike the normal Flux Rifle, functions on a more traditional ammunition system instead of the recharging magazine of the latter. That is the only disadvantage the gun has over its vanilla counterpartnote . A much better range, and fairly great crit and status chance are all well and good, but this gun retains the ability to equip the Flux Rifle exclusive mod granting heavily increased status chance. As such, this rife verges heavily on being a Master of All, excellent for combining with Condition Overload or Galvanized Aptitude for increased damage.
- As mentioned before, the Tenet Envoy has an auto-loader. That is just the very tip of how good this weapon is. It's a rocket launcher with a Painfully Slow Projectile (well, at least compared to other launchers), yet said projectile hits like a truck thanks to the gun's very high crit chance and multiplier. The Envoy also excels at hitting hard to hit targets in the air or behind cover. Why? The projectile's a guided missile capable of Roboteching almost on a dime. One of its only flaws is the predictably slow fire rate, as well as a puzzling tendency for the missile to get stuck in mid-air upon contact with a Nullifier bubble.
- The Tenet Spirex is essentially a secondary version of the Kuva Chakkur, albeit with slighter lower critical stats and better status chance. Oh, and while the Chakkur has a slow reload time and runs off of the fairly uncommon sniper ammo, the Spirex uses the more common pistol ammo and headshot kills speed up reloading. Not bad for formerly Unusable Enemy Equipment!
- The normal Plinx has a reputation for being a Little Useless Gun with not much to speak for aside from alright critical stats. The Tenet Plinx, on the other hand, is a Hand Cannon of the highest caliber, with improvements all around the board (especially with its already high critical chance) and a secondary fire that dumps the whole magazine into an explosive shot. And since the Tenet Plinx is still battery powered like it’s normal counterpart, you’ll never have to worry about ammo for it.
- During the New War, around the second act you end up playing as the Drifter, an aged up Operator from an Alternate Universe (long story), and to take on the Archons you are given the Nataruk, a Sentient bow, by none other than Hunhow himself, said to be the only weapon that can scratch them. Upon completing the quest, you are given said bow as well as the Drifter’s makeshift dagger, the Rumblejack. Both weapons are given Orokin Catalysts from the get-go, and adding modifications to the weapons ends up revealing them to be very powerful.
- The Nataruk is a ludicrously strong crit-focused bow that also comes with infinite ammunition, easily cracking into red crit territory upon properly timing a shot. What makes the bow even better is the abnormally large projectile shot with either a perfect or fully charged shot is fully capable of hitting multiple close together Mooks at once. Taking the Herd-Hitting Attack capabilities as well as the extremely strong Critical Hit potential of the weapon, and you have yourself a decently strong boss killer weapon.
- The Rumblejack initially doesn’t seem like much, being an Impact-based dagger with innate electric damage. However, it does major damage upon a Back Stab, even for a dagger weapon, thanks to a forced Electric status effect inflicted by the weapon before the actual finisher damage is incorporated. Combine the dagger’s innate Impact and electricity with, say, Shattering Impact and Toxic mods to create Corrosive damage or Cold mods for Magnetic damage and a frame that can force enemies into being open for finisher attacks such as Inaros, Gara, or Ash, and you have a dagger fully capable of one-shotting even Steel Path level Grineer.
- The Incarnon firearms introduced with Update 31.5 Angels of Zariman are this because of two words: Devouring Attrition, a perk available to said weapons that has a 50% chance of increasing the damage of a non-critical hit by 2000%, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, as even without such a massive damage boost the weapons themselves are no slouches:
- The humble Laetum is normally a hand cannon that throws down with the likes of the Lex Prime and the Marelok, but once it achieves enough headshots once it's Incarnon form is unlocked, it can transform into what can only be described as an explosive sub machine gun that can clear rooms with as much ease as weapons designed to explode large crowds of enemies but with far more control and ammunition.
- The Phenmor is a simple but effective semi-automatic rifle that much like it's contemporaries can transform upon performing enough headshots into an arch-gun shaped weapon that functions essentially as a minigun, while comparatively boring is still no less effective due to just how much damage it can put out.
- The Felarx is an automatic shotgun, but is saddled with the fact that its a single shell loading shotgun much like the Strun and Corinth, and when transformed becomes a highly damaging pair of energy blast shooting pistols. Ironically enough, it takes more headshots than the prior two weapons to achieve its transformed state and is preferred in its untransformed state anyways due to the fact that each individual pellet rolls for the increased damage perk, not to mention the Felarx possesses infinite body punch-through, allowing pellets that roll high to keep going and potentially one-shot more enemies.
- The Felarx gained a newfound niche after the release of the Archon weeklies: it is one of the only two weapons (the other being the Kuva Hek) that can consistently one-shot the three bosses, avoiding an otherwise drawn-out fight by bypassing their damage-attenuation gimmick.
- The Duviri Paradox introduced Incarnon Genesis adapters for a variety of older weapons that grant them an Incarnon transformation that vastly improves their stats, elevating low-level MR fodder (and even some weapons that used to be incredibly good back in the day, such as the Soma and Dread) to endgame-ready powerhouses. Oh, and these can be applied to the non-standard variants of these weapons, including Prime, Vandal, Wraith, etc.
- One notable reason why many of the weapons noted below are especially broken is because of Riven disposition. Since most of these weapons were rarely used by the community, they had extremely high disposition at the release of the Incarnon Adapters, easily allowing them to double, triple, or even quadruple their damage output, depending on luck.
- The Ceramic Dagger is pretty much the definition of a mastery fodder weapon; daggers are already a Low-Tier Letdown of a weapon type, with their sole claim to fame being the fact that the have one of the only non-Riven mods that let them start with an initial combo. The Ceramic Dagger's Incarnon evolutions allow you to get +1 initial combo for every kill with a primary weapon, a buff that stacks up to 100 times, and the next level lets you start with an additional +20 initial combo. Combine these with the fact that their heavy attack now shoots exploding projectiles that force a heat proc and the fact that you only need a 6x combo (100 hits) to activate the Incarnon form, if you go long enough in an Endless mission, you'll pretty much have the Incarnon form active 100% of the time, which greatly benefits mods like Blood Rush, the Gladiator mod set, and Weeping Wounds.
- Throwing secondary weapons are often overlooked due to having low magazine capacities and less damage than traditional firearms. The Kunai's Incarnon, however, turns them into knives of death that multiply your multishot value and always seek the head for headshots.
- The Lex is an unremarkable semi-auto pistol. Its Incarnon form is a laser Hand Cannon to surpass the likes of the Arca Plasmor and Catchmoon, fully capable of wiping out crowds with every shot. Not only can it easily exceed 100% crit chance and status chance, the shots inflict guaranteed Impact procs. Doesn't sound particularly exciting... unless you have the Hemorrhage mod, which grants Impact procs a chance to also inflict a Slash proc (with the odds doubled on weapons with low fire rate such as this). With that, anything that doesn't die to its incredible raw damage can be safely expected to bleed out in short order.
- The humble Torid is a simple gas shooting grenade launcher that specializes in simply gassing crowds of enemies with status effects. With its Incarnon Genesis, it can gain an utterly massive amount of crit chance, allowing it to easily reach 100% crit chance with the Critical Delay mod, turning its gas emitting pustules into the deadly neurotoxin lobbing biomass it deserved to be. In addition, its transformation is no slouch either, only requiring 5 direct hits from its base form to charge, it turns into a medium ranged laser with massively increased stats that can chain off to 5 other enemies, giving it massive burst crowd control potential allowing you to point it down a hallway and watch things die.
- The Burston and its Primed variant are your run of the mill burst fire rifle and fall off extremely in endgame content. The Incarnon changes that, with the Burston Prime being able to reach a deadly 40% base critical chance before mods giving it massively increased damage potential and that's not even getting into its transformation, which turns it into a fully automatic explosive rifle with an absolutely massive "magazine" of 600 rounds and a blistering base fire rate of 20 rounds per second, putting the likes of the Soma (which also got its own Incarnon, but not to the ridiculous degree of the Burston) to absolute shame.
- The Latron Incarnon was the first break-out weapon on the type, and for a reason: it fires bouncing projectiles that explode on contact with enemies or walls, one Incarnon upgrade path allows them to fully strip armor, and with the weapon's unique Double Tap mod, it can supercharge its damage output even further.
- The Miter Incarnon is right up there with the best of them. Easier to charge than most other Incarnon weapons, due to only requiring two or three headshots at most, its Incarnon form fires slow-moving, homing glaives that explode on contact, not only dealing damage but applying forced Slash procs. Since the weapon is already heavily weighted for Slash damage, and it's both a crit weapon and capable ofusing Hunter Munitions, it can easily bleed even level-cap enemies to death in short order.
- The Dread Incarnon? See above about the Nataruk example, and increase the size of the projectile, give it innate heat, remove the timed shot gimmick, and give it bonuses to the Dread’s already high crit chance. The only minor flaw is that it loses all silence capabilities and has a weaker headshot multiplier.
- The Angstrum Incarnon turns a handheld rocket launcher with very low ammunition and poor damage into a powerhouse capable of turning into an heat-energy blasting submachine gun that can have an innate Condition Overload-like effect and ricochets to hit other enemies. And like the Torid, you don’t even need headshots to charge it, merely direct hits.
- The Dual Toxocyst, while usable in its base form, is slow to fire with high recoil when Frenzy isn't procced. Its Incarnon upgrade makes it easier to control, ups its status chance significantly, and gives it hefty base damage boosts (including a Condition Overload effect and a whopping 70% free Toxin damage on headshots, granting massive leverage to Corrosive and Viral builds) — and that's before transforming the gun, which turns it into a pair of Akstiletto-type automatic pistols that automatically chain their shots to other targets and is still able to benefit from Frenzy's firerate boost. As at least one player has attested, you could be dragging your feet with half a build loaded in and still pump out enough lead to clear out most of Steel Path.
Mods
Mods are the bread and butter of the game, and the main source of a build's power. Correspondingly, they are the and most readily available way to break the game's balance.
- Hunter Munitions, Internal Bleeding, and Hemorrhage, are three mods that achieve the same result, through by different means: Death of a Thousand Cuts on enemies by forcing Slash procs, either throur critical hits, or converting Impact procs. Since Slash procs are the most reliable way to deal with the toughest Steel Path enemies, these mods are practically mandatory on all weapons that can utilize them.
- Adaptation is a mod that can make squishy frames considerably tougher, and already tanky frames practically immortal on Star Chart levels. It gives stacking damage reduction based on the damage that you are taking, up to a staggering 90%. Its usefulness drops sharply with enemy levels, but it can still allow frames like Inaros, Nidus, and Kullervo to face-tank Steel Path enemies.
- Umbral Mods, in exchange of their high cost and inability to forma slots for them, provide much higher bonuses than their vanilla counterparts, allowing resourceful players to create even more broken builds in exchange of a lot of time and effort.
- With the release of Umbral forma, Umbral mods have become even more powerful if you can manage to set polarities for them on your warframe and weapons, allowing just about everything to have easy access to these mods for half the cost. The only thing keeping them in check is their extreme rarity.
- The so-called "Corrupted" Mods obtained from the Orokin Derelict vaults definitely qualify— they give a massive upside, but also a fairly sizable downside. With the right build, the downsides can become irrelevantnote or even a straight upgradenote .
- Special note has to be given to the combination of the Vectis sniper rifle and the Depleted Reload and Charged Chamber mods. The Vectis has a magazine capacity of 1 (2 for the Vectis Prime), and Depleted Reload decreases magazine capacity, but increases reload speed, meaning that there is literally no penalty for equipping it onto the Vectis. Charged Chamber is a mod that increases the damage on the 1st shot fired from a sniper rifle's clip by 40%, and has an upgraded version called Primed Chamber (that's not a prime mod) that increases the first shot damage by 100%— and with the Vectis having only one shot and reloading in less than half a second with Depleted Reload... yeah.
- Riven Mods. There's an incredible amount of RNG and grinding involved with them, from only fitting on a single, randomly-chosen weapon, to grinding out the resource needed to randomise its effects - but they have multiple effects in one mod, with the right combination of effects for their weapon, they can easily take otherwise middling weapons to great, and good weapons to ridiculous levels, thanks to being able to do the job of multiple mods in one. The only thing that keeps them in relative check are semi-regular adjustments to weapons' Riven disposition, which affects how strong (or weak) a Riven's effects are for a given weapon.
- The Galvanized mods one can get from the Arbitration Vendor are DE's attempt to close the gap between melee and the primary and secondary weapons, and for the most part they've succeeded. Namely the Status mods for non-shotgun primaries and secondaries due to second effect, which grants a Condition Overload like effect to the weapon on kills for a few seconds, which stacks up to 3 times, giving primaries and secondaries that are tuned more to status a means of doing tons of damage, especially if they have innate elements on them on top of the physical damage types. Paired with the Multishot Galvanized mod for that weapon type, which grants more multishot on kill, and you'll have a weapon that can both spread status and kill effectively.
- As part of the companion rework in the "Abyss of Dagath" update, a number of Bond mods were added to the open-world hubs' conservation merchants. Some of them can turn your companions into autonomous killing machines, able to nuke whole rooms with little to no player intervention required.
- Manifold Bond has two powerful effects. First, it causes the companion's damaging Precept abilities to inflict the status effects of the companion's weapons. Second, it reduces the cooldown of their Precept abilities by 3 seconds when you or your companion kill an enemy affected by 3 or more status effects. This is a very easy condition to meet, especially with the added procs from your companion abilities, so their Precepts will continuously refresh their cooldowns and be recast, inflicting even more status. It can only be used on Robotic companions, but those are able to break the game in half with this mod. It's been found to have particularly strong synergy with Nautilus' Cordon (which does no damage, so it doesn't inflict status effects, but will continuously create Corralling Vacuums that group enemies to let you almost instantly refresh its cooldown if your own weapons do enough procs), Diriga's Arc Coil (which casts Chain Lightning, doing low damage but inflicting its weapon's statuses to multiple enemies due to Manifold Bond's other effect), and the Hounds' Synergized Prospectus (which shoots an electric explosive Pinball Projectile).
- Contagious Bond causes half of an enemy's status procs to be copied to nearby enemies if killed by the companion. With a big enough crowd of enemies and the above-mentioned Manifold Bond to continuously cast abilities and prime enemies with status effects, this can result in mass-spreading Damage Over Time effects like Gas and Electric, melting through enemies. An Obvious Rule Patch had to be added to cap it to only spread up to 100 stacks of a particular effect at a time, as it would have a tendency to literally break the game, since enemies could end up with thousands of stacks which would sometimes crash the game.
Augments
Augments are special mods that, instead of granting extra stats or gimmicks, directly modify one of the Warframe's abilities. Most of them can be considered little more than minor buffs, yet others completely redefine the Frame's gameplay and can lead to new ways the players can break the game.
- Ivara's Infiltrate utterly trivializes Spy missions. It increases her movement speed while in Prowl, and also allows her to walk through laser barriers without triggering the alarm, making it a breeze to stroll in and out of a data vault.
- Rhino's Ironclad Charge allows him to even further bolster his game-breaking Iron Skin, and to make setting up an Ironclad Charge boosted Iron Skin even easier, Iron Shrapnel allows Rhino to purposely detonate his Iron Skin in an explosive blast without putting himself into danger, making it incredibly simple to stay invincible as long as his damage mitigation can hold against enemy level scaling.
- Volt's Capacitance augment for his Discharge causes him and his allies to rapidly regenerate shields so long as enemies are actively being damaged by the ability. When combined with Archon Stretch to regenerate energy from electric damage abilities Volt can easily make himself and his allies effectively immortal to anything that isn't Toxin damage.
- Gara's Spectrosiphon gives all enemies who die within range of Spectrorage's mirrors a flat 50% chance of dropping energy orbs on death. This is very situational on Gara herself, but since Spectrorage can be subsumed, it's a common pick for Vauban: with his Vortex ability, he can suck an entire room's worth of enemies into the mirrors, turning them into a fountain of energy orbs.
- Revenant's Mesmer Shield augment allows him to grant his squad mates within affinity range 5 charges of their own personal Mesmer Skin stacks, which allows them to not only also tank 5 hits from enemies for free, it also retains the stunning effect and gives Revenant a flat 50% strength boost to his own Mesmer Skin on cast, allowing him to free up the mod slot needed for Mesmer Shield and possibly more.
- Grendel's Gourmand causes his first ability to use health instead of energy to devour enemies, when he's already a Mighty Glacier who can regenerate the lost health basically for free, and causes devoured enemies to grant him even more armor, up to a total bonus of 2000 extra armor compared to his normal 1250 extra armor.
- Styanax's Intrepid Stand gives him and all allies Overguard every time he hits an enemy with his fourth ability, which in turn gives everyone status immunity and an extra layer of damage gating. Overguard gives a very short amount of Mercy Invincibility when broken, but since this augment rapidly grants small amounts of it, you and your allies will already have more Overguard up when the gating ends, effectively making this augment grant your whole team 2.75 seconds of complete immortality (to which you can add another 1.3 seconds from shield-gating) which can instantly be recast when it ends.
- Voruna has Ulfrun's Endurance, which restores a charge of Ulfrun's Descent when an enemy dies near her while affected by a Slash effect. This mod lets you perpetually keep the ability active, so long as you're careful not to run out of charges. After 5 direct-hit kills, the ability's damage reaches its cap of a 10-times multiplier on top of increased critical stats, and the augment lets you fully take advantage of this by effectively making it permanent so long as you don't end the ability. Status effects, which can easily be inflicted by Voruna's Fangs of Raksh, further double this damage. Throw on Shroud of Dynar to boost this ability's critical hits even higher while making you invisible (and therefore practically invincible), and Voruna turns into a monster, dishing out massive slash nukes and wiping out hordes of enemies at a time. This even scales into high-level missions, with the only caveat being that armor strip eventually becomes needed against extremely tanky enemies.
The Helminth System
The Helminth system allows Tenno to replace an ability on any warframe with a different ability, some exclusive to Helminth, some from other Warframes. Whether it's use to replace useless abilites with more powerful ones, or to exploit never-before seen synergies, it is undeniably one of the biggest source of game breaking builds.
- Out of all of the subsumeable Warframe abilites, Rhino's Roar is the most popular since it boosts all damage. Despite the lowered power, infused Roar can allow many frames to do insanely high amounts of damage, and more importantly, double-dip on status proc damage.
- Mirage's Eclipse falls in the same category as Roar, and a similrly popular choice for weapon platform frames. It provides a much higher potential damage boost to weapons, and conditional damage reduction, but it doesn't boost ability damage or status procs.
- Another fairly popular Helminth ability is Sevagoth’s Gloom, combining a decently strong enemy slowdown over a large radius around the user with a Life Drain affect for any damage done in the radius by the user and their allies, lasting as long as until energy reserves run out. While universally decent, it proves very powerful in the hands of certain frames, such as Mesa gaining health from enemies shot down via Peacemaker and Garuda gaining an infinite health to energy feedback loop via use of her Bloodletting ability.
- Gara's Spectrorage isn't a great ability by itself, but its Augment, Spectrosiphon, causes enemies that die in its range to drop extra energy orbs. On Gara herself, it's difficult to build around it without affecting her core ability loop, but on other frames that already build for maximum range to gather and/or Crowd Control enemies, such as Zephyr, it allows them to completely ignore their energy economy in exchange of a single mod slot.
- Similarly to the above, Mesa's Shooting Gallery is barely useful on her, since she's generally built for maximum duration and strength while sacrificing range, reducing the ability's effectiveness. However, on frames with positive range, and especially the Muzzle Flash augment, it is the single best subsumeanble Crowd Control ability.
- Khora's Ensnare and Nidus's Larva are both used for the same thing: gatherhing up enemies for easier dispatching. Their use-cases are slightly different, but so long as one can spare the range, they are useful abilites on most frames.
- Hyldrin's Pillage is one of the best universally useful abilites in the system, thanks to combining two extremely useful attributes: it can fully strip enemy armor, and while doing so, it also replenishes the Frame's shield, resetting the shield-gate in the process. Better yet, due to its mechanics, it works on both range and duration builds, making it applicable to the vast majority of the roster.
- Grendel's Nourish became one of the best subsumeable abilities in the game after his rework, not only providing extra viral damage to all weapons, but getting damaged causes an explosion that staggers enemies and puts ten stacks of Viral procs on them, amplifying any damaging procs they receive. This would already make this a powerful subsume, but on top of all this, it also multiplies the energy gained from all sources, and it is affected by power strenght. Note the "from all sources" part there. It means it not only works on energy orbs, but energy pads, Zenurik wellsprings, and even Styanax's third ability. Oh, and it's a group ability, meaning it's applied to any other Frames in range. This combination of offensive, defensive, and energy economy support makes it one of the default picks on many frames.
- Protea's Dispensary is Boring, but Practical at its finest. It simply hands out health, energy, and ammo to the team, but all it has to do to be useful pretty much anywhere and anytime.
- Wisp's Breach Surge is one of the most universally powerful abilites in the game. It not only primes the enemies to take more damages, and spawns energy projectiles that spread the damage they receive to other enemies, but it also blinds all enemies in range, which makes it invaluable in difficult defensive game modes, such as the Steel Path Circuit, where it's one of the few abilites that can stop the otherwise CC immune Eximus and Thrax enemies.
Others
- The Conservation mechanic can make getting standing with Solaris United stupidly easy, especially at higher ranks— completely botching the capture of a Kubrodon still rewards 1,000 standing. This is even easier on Cetus, where echo-lures aren't locked behind rank.
- In Kahl's Break Narmer missions, the simple act of recruiting Grineer or Corpus squadmates by either breaking veils or freeing them in the Murex makes combat so, so much easier for the most part, aside from certain bosses. Allies are tanky and easy to revive, can take fire and will easily overwhelm enemies with their own gunfire. This makes it much easier to deal with objectives and just leave standard enemies to your squadmates. So basically, recruiting everyone you come across makes Kahl's missions a lot easier.
- The Skaut landing craft has a very specific Air Support Charge effect, "Kahl Beacon", that can be ridiculously useful, especially when playing solo - it summons Kahl and two other allied units, all of whom are level-scaled to that specific mission. Kahl himself brings a Grattler and incendiary grenades as well, giving him quite a lot of firepower, and any Corpus Techs can summon Shield Ospreys. They'll stick around for only five minutes, but if you have even just the second Railjack Engineering Intrinsics level, that's not a problem because you can just immediately summon them again. Your teammates can even utilize their own Kahl Beacons to not only reset the timer, but also add another allied unit to Kahl's squad, meaning you can have a minimum of three NPC allies or up to six fighting alongside you and drawing fire away from you as well. Sure, Specters can potentially be more powerful, but they're harder to get and build, and most importantly, can't be used on Archon Hunts, unlike Air Support Charges, making the Kahl Beacon significantly more useful.
- Out of all the companions, the three most commonly used are the Smeeta Kavat, the Panzer Vulpaphyla, and the Carrier sentinel. The Smeeta has a chance to give a buffs that, amonth other things, can guarantee orange crits, or double picked up resources. The Vulpaphyla is the only literally unkillable companion in the game, and it not only turns into a sentinel on death and return into its beast form shortly after, but it can fire quills that inflict guaranteed Viral procs, making them a great primer. Last, but not least, the Carrier not only increases the maximum ammo capacity of the weapons the Frame carries, but it automatically converts ammo to the equipped weapon's type, which makes it practically mandatory if one wishes to use ammo-starved weapons like the Bramma, Acceltra, or Kuva Zarr.
- Necramechs absolutely trivialize all open-world content.
- The Voidrig is the more overpowered Necramech, despite being the easiest one to obtain, thanks to its Guard Mode ability. In Guard Mode, the Voidrig enters an Anchored Attack Stance, equipping its Exalted Weapon, the Arquebex, which fires RIDICULOUSLY powerful explosive projectiles. With just a few basic Arch-gun mods installed, you will be doing hundreds of thousands of damage per shot, letting you easily shoot down enemy dropships before the Mooks within have time to jump out.
- Making things more ridiculous, Necramechs come with the Mausolon Arch-gun equipped by default. This heavy automatic cannon fires extremely powerful Hitscan projectiles which explode to damage multiple foes at once, making it one of the strongest Arch-guns in the game despite its ease of acquisition, making it an excellent substitute for the Kuva Ayanga. You can even bring it on Archwing missions, too, though its main problem outside of its open world use is that it struggles with hitting targets directly, which can be an issue when using it with an Archwing.
Legacy
Nothing lasts forever, and in a constantly evolving live service game, yesterday's game breaker can turn into today's run-of-the-mill with a single update.
- Trinity used to practically be mandatory in any endless mission due to her ability to keep her allies (and the defense objective) healthy, giving out almost unlimited energy, and granting her whole squad a potent damage reduction buff. After many nerfs, a shifting metagame, and the introduction of more versatile Warframes and other options (such as the Zenurik Focus school giving free energy regeneration to any player), she's no longer the top support choice due to having fallen into Crippling Overspecialization, though she remains a popular pick for Eidolon hunts thanks to her ability to heal the lures.
- Loki used practically unkillable due to a single ability: Invisibility. A properly modded Loki with Zenurik focus could regenerate more energy while invisible than what it cost to cast it, meaning he could stay permanently stealthed, and while it didn't necessarily make him invincible, in the hands of a skilled player, it might as well do. Unfortunately for him, changes to the meta and tweaks to the invisibility mechanics made Loki slowly become obsolete, with other frames being able to do everything he can, without being saddled with two mostly useless abilities.
- While meta shifts and the introduction of other frames turned Nyx into one of the weaker frames in the game, Chaos was once a very good crowd-control solution, ensuring that the only threat to Nyx was when her energy is low.
- Saryn used to be the lazy nuke frame of the game, as she could clear entire maps by simply throwing her Spores onto her Molt and then bursting them, spreading them over to all the enemies in range, who then spread them further, resulting in stacking damage over time effects. Her rework made this particular tactic no longer availiable, though it wasn't a nerf, as she became arguably more powerful, but only if played more actively.
- Limbo was once able to completely trivialize and circumvent the main mechanics of certain mission types. First off, Limbo is capable of entering into the Rift Plane just by dashing, where he is literally invincible, allowing him to go through entire maps unmolested at the cost of not being able to deal damage himself. He can, however, use his Cataclysm ability combined with Stasis to create a bubble where enemies are frozen in time and enemies outside of the bubble cannot deal damage to anyone inside of the bubble. Like this, a Limbo modded for maximum duration could once put a Cataclysm bubble on a defense target, mobile defense console, or excavator, and then just sit back and laze around in the Rift Plane occasionally recasting Stasis without having to face any difficulties. This strategy was greatly nerfed, however, with the Eximus rework in Patch 31.5, which introduced the Overguard mechanic. Units with Overguard ignore Limbo's Rift mechanic and Stasis, allowing them to attack him from within the safety of his bubble.
- While it's not special anymore, Broken War, the damaged version of Stalker's new sword from "The Second Dream", was once one of the greatest melee weapons in the game. Stats roughly on par with Dragon Nikana, plus it's a longsword compatible with the already-lethal Crimson Dervish stance. It instantly made most other melee weapons of its time obsolete. Most damningly, you get it for free just for finishing the quest...AND it comes with its own Catalyst and weapon slot!
- A properly-modded Tonkor was once able to annihilate anything in explosive range. The build started off with the basic Serration, Point Strike, Vital Sense, Split Chamber and Hammer Shot mods, followed with Bladed Rounds or Heavy Caliber. After that, the last two mod slots would vary depending on the enemy faction: Corrosive for Grineer, Toxic to bypass Corpus shields, and max Blast for Infested, mixed enemy types and everything else. This fell off when the Tonkor's friendly fire damage was increased, and even after that mechanic was replaced with self-stagger, the availability of more powerful alternatives meant that most players only use it for nostalgia anymore, though there is the Kuva Tonkor that's still fairly viable, especially if one's frame has 100% knockdown/stagger resistance, and it has significantly less problems with running out of ammunition compared to the Kuva Bramma or Kuva Zarr.
- The Tigris Prime can reach 100% status chance. Though this was later reworked, this used to mean that every pellet would be guaranteed to cause a status effect. Unlike the earlier 100% status shotguns (the Strun Wraith and the Boar Prime), the Tigris Prime has ridiculous base damage (meaning the disadvantage of status builds in terms of raw damage is largely negated), a damage distribution heavily biased toward Slash damage (which is a damage-over-time status effect that ignores shields and armor and can stack with itself, making it a player favorite). A properly built Tigris Prime will melt most mobs with its raw damage like the other top-tier shotguns, and unlike those damage-oriented shotguns, when its raw damage doesn't suffice (mostly against heavily-armored foes at Level 120+ or so), the Slash status effects you inflict on that enemy will still kill it within seconds without requiring another shot (and there's nothing stopping you from firing another shot anyway). After the status chance of shotguns got nerfed into the ground, the Tigris Prime lost almost all of its appeal, and while its huge base damage can still erase enemies on the star chart, it became incredibly underwhelming in late-game content to the point it is rarely ever seen anymore.
- Maiming Strike single-handedly created the "spin to win" meta. It used to make it so that when the player's frame is doing a spinning melee strike during a slide, their weapon gets extra 90 percentage points to base critical chance. This meant that a weapon with a 25% critical hit chance would have a guaranteed crit, and 15% chance for an upgraded crit. Update 26 and the melee rework made it so that the critical chance bonus no longer applies to the base critical chance. This means that, while it's still usable, Maiming Strike and crit-chance on slide Rivens are hardly game-breaking anymore.
- Covert Lethality previously allowed daggers to instantly kill enemies regardless of their health or armor on a melee finisher. This would normally only work on unaware enemies, but there are a number of Warframes with crowd control abilities that open enemies up to finisher attacks, allowing tank frames like Inaros to systematically murder their enemies one by one regardless of their level. Update 26 nerfed the mod so that it now only increases finisher damage, making the tactic no longer viable.
- The Sonicor, aka the Tenno Space Program. Modded for blast damage, it was capable of launching enemies into the air, and sometimes even straight into the ceiling. When it can't, it still is capable of always ragdolling whoever is unfortunately on the business end of it. Various updates to the game engine, blast damage and ragdolling would nerf this: the Sonicor can no longer launch enemies into the sky. While no longer a fan favourite, it still finds niche use in the hands of hostages for Rescue and sortie Defense missions.
- The crit/status melee meta, enabled by four mods: Blood Rush, Weeping Wounds, Condition Overload, and Berserker. With these combined, any suitable weapon turned into an enemy blender. Berserker massively boosted your attack speed after a few critical hits, which made your combo multiplier go up quickly, which granted greatly increased critical hits and status chance from Blood Rush and Weeping Wounds, which then, combined with the increased attack speed, allowed for even more status effects to be inflicted so that Condition Overload gave a massive damage buff. Eventually, this strategy was nerfed: Berserker (renamed to Berserker Fury) was changed to trigger on kills rather than critical hits, making your combo start off more slowly, Blood Rush and Weeping Wounds had their numbers lowered, and Condition Overload added to your weapon's base damage multiplier rather than multiplying it exponentially per status effect. Despite this, these four mods still remain not only viable but the melee meta, used by nearly every decent player, but they're no longer game-breakingly broken.
- For a long time, Wukong's Celestial Twin absolutely annihilated any semblance of difficulty the game might have, as it created a clone of him that dealt the same amount of damage, had increased health, no duration limit, unlimited ammo, and immunity to self-stagger. This allowed Wukong to literally AFK for most levels while his clone beat the entire mission on its own, especially if you gave it a powerful AoE weapon that's meant to be balanced by a small ammo pool and the risk of self-stagger. This was finally heavily nerfed in the Veilbreaker update, which lowered the Celestial Twin's damage unless you mark a target, made it use up your ammo when firing its gun, and removed its self-stagger immunity, so while Wukong is still a powerful frame, you can no longer sit back and relax while the game literally plays itself.
- Beam weapons had a brief spot in the limelight, after changes to their damage-application made them outstandingly powerful damage dealers and status applicators for a while. However, as the game evolved, the meta evolved around them, and they are no longer as oppressively powerful as they used to be. As of now, if a beam-weapon is amazing, it's most likely because of it's stats and gimmicks, and not strictly because it's a beam weapon.
- Hunter Adrenaline, and to a lesser degree, Rage used to be extremely useful mods, allowing incoming damage on health to be converted to energy, fueling the Frame's abilities. However, with the enemy levels and damage output being pushed higher and higher, for most Frames, taking damage to health is simply not an option, let alone something to be relied on for the sake of energy-economy, and in high-end content, shield-gating and other forms of damage-mitigation make them not wort sacrificing a mod slot for.
- Between the "Warframe Revised" update in March 2020 and "Abyss of Dagath" in October 2023, the Decaying Dragon Key, of all things, broke the game's meta. This item, which is meant to be used to open Dragon Vaults on Deimos for Corrupted mods, inflicts a debuff which halves a player's shield capacity. Shield gating, a strategy that exploits the Mercy Invincibility from breaking your shields, works better the lower your shield capacity is, so players would keep a Decaying Dragon Key equipped at all times to make it easier to fully recharge their shields and benefit from the full-length invulnerability period. An end was finally put to this in the "Abyss of Dagath" update, which changed shield gating's duration to not work on a binary "either your shields are full or not" system, incentivizing having more shields, though strategy is still possible if you use the Catalyzing Shields mod.
