Warframe / Tropes E to H

This page covers tropes in Warframe.

Tropes A to D | Tropes E To H | Tropes I to M | Tropes N to S | Tropes T to Z

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• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • From 2012-2014, the story was generally in the vein of Star Wars, being a fairly standard 'empowered, honorable space warriors struggle against vast evil empire' Space Opera, and closer in tone to darkSector (Dark Sector, after all, was meant to be Warframe). New codex entries, along with the Second Dream and the War Within, began putting much more emphasis on the Orokin, their mysticism, and their evilness by making them directly responsible for the creation of the Grineer Empire's bloodthirsty fascism and Corpus greed, as well as emphasizing non-Warframe abilities used by the player character.
  • Prior to the Second Dream, lore generally implied or supported the idea of Warframes being Powered Armor the Tenno wore, as well as the Tenno being much like a samurai/knight caste for the Orokin. The Second Dream and The War Within both stated that the Warframes aren't worn — they're built around organic constructs, and that the Tenno are really superpowered teenagers granted psychic (and more) energies by the Void and shaped into becoming super-soldiers for the Orokin via the Warframes, while dropping some of the more Samurai/Knight implications with the indoctrination and training of the Tenno. The game changed Warframe "helmet" to "neuroptics" to reflect it.
  • Following on this, part of the reason Alad V was reviled was that he was explicitly killing Tenno, according to the Gradivus Dilemma, Zanuka, and his assassination introduction. Post-Second Dream, it is made explicit the Operators/Tenno are separate from their Warframe. Lotus' assassination lines for Alad V still exist in regards to killing him for the murder of Tenno, however.
  • In closed and very early open beta, the Lotus would announce that the Lotus would be pleased with the Tenno's performance, presumably as a holdover from early darkSector designs which featured The Lotus Rebellion as an organization. Later updates changed lines like "the Lotus will be pleased" to "I am pleased". She also used to speak much less formally, even using mild profanity(!) occasionally. A few holdovers remain, notably her use of "nobody" instead of the more formal "no-one".
  • Warframes used to have a progression tree before a mod system. Additionally, previously Warframe abilities used to be mods that had to be earned, leveled and equipped like any other, before they (and the extra slots they took up) were removed and you gained and upgraded abilities simply by leveling up your frame.
  • Every grid was a Corpus ship for a long time, with English Canned Orders over Loudspeaker from Rebecca herself, announcing ship status and alarms.
  • The first Tenno weapons that weren't used by anyone else, like the Braton and Lato, had Corpus features (boxy designs and gray metal). It was later explained as the Corpus, who'll work for anyone who has cash, making inferior copies of the actual Orokin weapons for the Tenno.
  • Grineer goons spoke clear English, and Corpus grunts had a MUCH more gutteral, animalistic screech for speech. Some enemy units had other differences as well. For instance, the Grineer Butcher was known as the Grineer Sawman, and they used a perpetually-spinning Glaive rather than a cleaver. This was also before DE had hashed out The Aesthetics of Technology each faction would later follow. This resulted in oddities such as the Corpus having a weapon^note the Snipetron that fired bullets, or Grineer units using shields.
  • Several older Warframes used to have different abilities, with some being removed or heavily modified due to gameplay updates or balance reasons. For instance, Excalibur once had the ability to perform a Super Jump on par with the Bullet Jump any Tenno is capable of in modern Warframe, and Rhino once had the Ground Pound ability Grineer Heavies love to use.
• Earth That Was: Earth was abandoned at some point in the distant past, and has since been reclaimed by nature. What parts of it are not polluted, Infested or otherwise toxified are shown to be haunted steppe plains littered with Sentient wreckage or overgrown jungles of Orokin-engineered 'super weeds' meant to keep the land out of the hands of any who might claim it. There are off-hand mentions in the lore of Orokin "cities" existing on Earth in the deep past, and at least one Tower still remains from that age, but most of the planet is wild and unwelcoming. Which makes the Grineer's claim on it shaky at best. Vay Hek tried to reclaim Earth through the use of the Cicero toxin, in order to stop Earth's jungle from growing endlessly. His attempt, however, was thwarted by the Tenno.
• Eccentric A.I.:
  • Ordis, your ship's AI, wavers between hyperactive ass-kisser and a violent, gutteral voice encouraging you to kill as many enemies as you can. This is on purpose. Ordis used to be a mass murderer before being converted into an AI.
  • Similarly, Loid and Otak are AI that have been shoved into the same drone body, due to Otak's personality partially being deleted. Loid is a gentlemanly Stiff Upper Lip butler for the Entrati family. Otak is a Manchild constantly using Buffy Speak. Both are constantly flipping between one and the other, and you can tell if Otak is talking because he crudely drew a smiley face on his side.
  • Cy, the AI for Railjack operations, is less like Mission Control and more like Drill Sergeant Nasty, fighting a war that was lost countless ages ago and barking commands and insults. This is a coping mechanism, for he lost all of his crew.
• Ecocidal Antagonist: The Grineer and Corpus factions in particular.
  • The warmongering Grineer are known to strip-mine entire celestial bodies in order to fuel their expansion across the Origin System. On Earth, they use toxin injectors to poison entire forests in order to clear land. Ceres and Sedna, meanwhile, have been entirely converted into factories which spew toxic sludge.
  • The Corpus are a faction defined by their limitless greed, which extends to unrestrained exploitation of natural resources. Nef Anyo, one high-ranking Corpus plutocrat with little regard for human rights, has jeopardized all of Venus on multiple occasions in his haste to maximize profit.
    • During the "Vox Solaris" quest, Nef orders the activation of an Orokin coolant tower that will terraform more of Venus' surface, but orders it to be activated before it's ready, which risks causing a catastrophic heat cascade that would destroy the Fortuna colony.
    • A recurring event has Nef pump dangerous amount of coolant into the ground in order to harvest Thermia (basically Venusian magma), causing fiery Thermia fractures to erupt all over the Orb Vallis.
• Elaborate Equals Effective: The highly-decorative Prime weapons are nonetheless a step above their vanilla counterparts.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The Void, a realm located outside of our space, and where the laws of physics seem to be different: for example, argon, a noble gas at room temperature in our world, becomes a highly radioactive crystal with a 24-hour half-life in the Void. It's also not navigable like normal space is, as its nodes on the star chart are grouped in multiple separate branches that are accessed through passages on different planets. Exposure to the Void can also damage a person's mental health, which is what happened to most of the residents of the Zariman Ten-Zero during a Void jump gone wrong; in that same incident, the children who survived this weren't completely unaffected, as they grew up to develop superpowers.
  • The Zariman Ten-Zero when visited in the New War is stuck between reality and the Void and the origin point of at least two diverging timelines, one of which resulted in the Drifter. By the time it debuts in Angels of the Zariman, it's still stuck halfway between the Void and reality, causing some utterly bizarre things to happen aboard it and creating new types of enemies for the player to fight.
  • Speaking of the Void, it also has a noted taste for Reality Bleed, as seen in Duviri and the Undercroft having elements of the Zariman Ten-Zero littered throughout as well as Albrecht Entrati’s labs overtaken by The Man In The Wall and his Murmur forces, shifting areas into a desert-like landscape filled with stone and fragments and eyes belonging to him being almost everywhere, even popping out of the very ground.
• Elemental Fusion:
  • Having two of the four basic elements (Heat, Cold, Electric, Toxin) on a weapon will make those elements combine, resulting in a new secondary element with its own Status Effect. For example, Heat and Electric makes Radiation, while Cold and Toxin gives Viral damage.
  • The Alchemy game mode revolves around causing Elemental Fusions. Enemies drop elemental Amphors, and you must fill the Crucible with the Amphors that combine to form the requested element.
• Elemental Powers: In the classic fire, ice, and electrical flavours, plus Toxin as a fourth element, as well as six other elements that are created by combining two of the main elements. All of them have a special effect;
  • Heat does high damage to the cloned flesh of the Grineer and most of the Infested, especially the smaller ones, with a chance to cause enemies to burst into flames, take damage-over-time while they panic about being on fire, and temporarily reduces their armor. It barely does anything to advanced shields.
  • Cold has a chance to significantly slow enemies down (both movement-wise and in terms of attack speed) and does additional damage to basic shields, a bit on alloy armour, and extremely tough Infested tissue, but is ineffective against standard Infested flesh. Additionally, enemies killed by Cold damage may shatter into pieces.
  • Electric damage stuns enemies, with a chance to chain damage to additional targets. It deals more damage to mechanical targets, and less damage to alloy armour.
  • Toxin damage is more harmful to humanoids with a chance to deal damage-over-time straight to the target's health, but is less effective versus robots and Infested.
  • Blast damage combines Heat and Cold damage and has a chance to reduce enemies' accuracy (as a bonus, enemies killed with Blast damage are launched far away). Grineer machines are highly susceptible, but their rank and file are resistant.
  • Corrosive damage combines Electric and Toxin damage to possibly remove 26% of an enemy's armour temporarily. Obviously ferrite-armoured enemies are vulnerable to this, as well as fossilized Infested flesh just not proto-shields.
  • Gas damage combines Heat and Toxin damage that can envelope an enemy in a deadly cloud that does Gas damage to it and anyone else nearby. While it doesn't fare well to flesh, it is highly effective in large groups, especially against light Infested units.
  • Magnetic damage combines Cold and Electric damage to do very high damage to shields, with a chance to make them take twice as more damage. Tenno also lose most of their energy and end up with an Interface Screw. Grineer troops in Alloy armour are resistant to it though.
  • Radiation damage combines Heat and Electric damage that can confuse enemies and cause them to attack one another (for Eximus units though, their effects are just turned off). When a Tenno is affected they lose some accuracy and can now suffer from Forced Friendly Fire that can rub off on allies. Heavy Alloy-armoured Grineer troops, Corpus robotics and tough Infested flesh are all susceptible, but almost all of the rest of the Infested are highly resistant to it.
  • Viral damage combines Cold and Toxin and can increase damage dealt on enemy health by 100% (just not on bosses obviously). While nothing likes losing most of its health, the damage hits humanoids the worst while the basic Infested and the Grineer's machines can take it.
  • There is also an Element No. 5: Void damage, dealt almost exclusively by the Operator's attacks, particularly their Void Beams and Amps. It's equally effective against all targets, and has disruptive effects on Sentient defenses^note such as damaging the Teralyst's shield, destroying Vomvalysts in their energy form or resetting elemental adaptations developed by Battalysts, Conculysts, and the Stalker and the Overguard of Eximus units. Void damage has a chance to create a field around an enemy that redirects all nearby projectiles towards them.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Even physical damage is divided into three types, impact, puncture, and slash, each effective against different enemy types (shielded, armored, and fleshy respectively). Then there are four base elemental damage types, heat, electric, cold, and toxin. Combining two of these will create one of six secondary elemental damage types, blast, corrosive, gas, magnetic, radiation, and viral. Each enemy in the game has several different resistances and weaknesses to various damage types, and different elemental attacks have a chance to proc different special effects, such as knocking enemies down, setting them on fire, reducing their armor, confusing them into attacking their allies, or creating clouds of poison gas.
• Elite Army: The Tenno, whose emphasis is on small numbers of highly elite soldiers, waging a war by acting as special forces to make precision strikes.
• Elite Mooks: The Grineer and Corpus both have rosters of Elite Mooks, who appear as variants of their usual units on certain tilesets. All of the major enemy factions (except the Sentients) also have Eximus Units. These are larger, unique enemy units who appear leading squads of hostiles. Each Eximus Unit has different properties, such as deploying a copy of Frost's snow-globe, or passively poisoning nearby Tenno.
  • The Grineer, being the strongest military power in the setting, have quite a few sets of Elite Mooks to go around.
    • The Kuva Corps have had Kuva infused into their DNA during cloning, the Kuva Troops are much more intelligent and deadly than their regular brothers. They also tend to be much better equipped - as an example, the basic Heavy Gunner is equipped with a Gorgon, a functional-but-basic light machine gun; their Kuva variant wields the Drakgoon Flak Cannon, a MUCH more deadly weapon.
    • The Nightwatch Corps surpass even the Kuva Corps. Their ranks consist solely of improved versions of other Grineer units — tougher, packing new weapons with stronger damage and different behavior, and often displaying special abilities that regular versions of the unit do not have. They also have some units unique to them, namely Bailiffs, extremely heavily armoured melee fighters with Charge Attack, and Reavers, who are Bailiffs with a jetpack and Helion's missile attack. In addition, they have a red and black color scheme to distinguish them. Unlike most Grineer divisions, the lore portrays them as No Nonsense Nemeses, a reputation they are more than capable of backing up.
    • The units found on Earth, the Tusk Corps, are the Grineer answer to the Corpus's Terra Units. Although they don't have the training or equipment of the Kuva Corps, they're a substantial step up from basic Grineer troops, and they have air support and heavy armor to boot.
  • The regular Corpus units are surpassed in both quality, intelligence and equipment by Juno Corpus units, and also by Terra Corpus units. The former are found stationed on the revamped Corpus Ship tileset, while the latter are encountered on the Orb Vallis outside of Fortuna. Both of them are a substantial step up from the Corpus units who are encountered on planetside Corpus missions, employing much deadlier robotic proxies and much more dangerous weaponry. The Terra Corpus even have air support from Condor Dropships, which are nearly indestructible and come equipped with highly lethal turrets.
  • The Infested have Ancients (Ancient Healer, Ancient Disruptor, Toxic Ancient,) which are bigger and tougher Infested foes. The Healer grants nearby enemies damage reduction, the Disruptor can eradicate your shields and energy, and the Toxic Ancient's gas cloud inflicts Toxin damage, which can ignore Tenno shielding and armor. Deimos is also home to a stronger strain of Infested similar to the Grineer Tusk and Corpus Terra units, the Grey Strain, which have floating “dropships”, more durable and stronger unique units, and the capability to spawn literally out of the ground.
  • Of Dominus Thrax’s skeletal false Dax forces that patrol Duviri, he also employs stronger, more obviously Void-corrupted units themed after Old-War era Grineer, the Thrax Legate and Thrax Centurion. Both possess Overguard like Eximus units and are the only native Duviri unit to have armor, and can inflict Magnetic procs with certain attacks. They also seem to be breaching into the Origin System, as they also appear on the Yuvarium and Circulus nodes on Lua as well as the Zariman Ten-Zero.
• The Empire: The Grineer really want to reach this point, but between the Tenno and the Corpus, they're having a rough time of it. They still have a firm grip on a good chunk of the solar system, but they face much stiffer resistance than a Rag Tag Bunch Of Misfits. The Orokin were a much more straight-laced example, as seen under Abusive Precursors.
• Endless Daytime: It never gets dark in the Orb Vallis region on Venus - Venus's already very long day cycle is extended by an orbital mirror array that collects and redirects light into the region, ensuring that night never sets there.
• Enemy Civil War:
  • The Grineer are clearly bickering amongst themselves, fighting for leadership and control of various holdings and resources. Powerful warlords like Vay Hek and Sargas Ruk pursue their own interests in the guise of helping the Empire. Klingon Promotion and You Kill It, You Bought It seem frequent, with the rank and file not even contesting hostile takeovers in some cases.
  • Several builds ago, the Grineer would raid Corpus ships, or vice versa. It was a rare occurrence, but still a possibility. The infested can join the fun, as well. This feature seems to have been disabled, and/or eventually upgraded into the full-on Invasions system. It's now active as the Crossfire mission type, which can appear on certain planets. Mechanically, it's an Invasion Extermination... except you don't pick a side. Grineer and Corpus alike will be firing at you as much as each other, and you're expected to do the same.
  • The Hunt for Alad V has Corpus board member Frohd Bek offering to give Alad's location up to the Tenno if they help him deal with the Infested, out of fear that Alad would take the chairmanship if his Zanuka Project succeeds.
• Enemy Mine:
  • One weekend event, Operation Sling-Stone, has shown the Corpus (grudgingly) reward the Tenno for taking out a fleet of Grineer ships meant for a special operation against the Corpus. The prize were some ammo conversion mods.
  • The very next weekend saw Operation Arid Fear, where the Corpus were now hiding the locations of Grineer settlements from the Tenno because the Grineer were paying them a small fortune.
  • The fact that the basic rifle for the Tenno was Corpus in design (Before DE completely remade the weapon) is handwaved by the Corpus willing to work with anyone for the right amount of cash.
  • The Gradivus Dilemma was this again, albeit adding in Sadistic Choice and We ARE Struggling Together. The Corpus and Grineer are warring again at the eponymous place and the Tenno are called to make a choice — side with the Corpus to prevent the Grineer from gaining ground, but letting them get their hands on some Tenno in cryosleep? Or side with the Grineer to save those slumbering Tenno, but letting the Grineer grow in strength? The Lotus has refused to prescribe which side a Tenno should choose, with the result that Tenno are competing with each other.
  • The Hunt For Alad V has Corpus board member Frohd Bek sending some MOA and Shield Ospreys to help the Tenno clear the Infested ships in Jupiter.
  • The Tenno are stated to be enforcing the 'balance' between the Grineer and Corpus now, and can side with either faction during invasions as they see fit. As before, Battle Pay is awarded for assisting them.
  • And it doesn't matter how much the various sides hate each other: once the Infested show up on the scene, everyone cuts the squabbling and works together.
  • Like the Gradivus Dilemma before it, the Tubemen of Regor event gives the Tenno a choice between two rival factions with conflicting goals. Alad V desires Tyl Regor's research into genetic repair, which he believes can cure him of the Infestation. Nef Anyo would prefer to keep Alad V out of the way, bribing the Tenno to destroy the research instead. Naturally, Tyl Regor's not very happy with either side or the Tenno.
  • The Second Dream quest has two different examples. Right off the bat, you learn that Stalker is working with the Sentients. Partway through, Alad V offers to help Lotus and the Tenno, reasoning that the Sentients were probably a bigger threat.
  • Operation Shadow Debt has the Tenno helping Alad V yet again, this time defending him from the Stalker's Acolytes.
  • The New War has the Drifter asking for help from Hunhow, resulting in the gameplay tag team of the Drifter and the Stalker.
  • The final part of the New War has the Operator/Drifter and Erra teaming up to save the Lotus and stop Ballas.
• Energy Weapon:
  • At range the Corpus use energy-bolt or energy-beam weapons almost exclusively, with the exception of plasma grenades and the Jackal's arsenal; machine guns, grenades, and missiles. The Supra Repeater is apparently a 'heavy laser gun' with green projectiles, whilst the Dera Rifle uses bolts of cyan plasma, to give just two examples.
  • Darvo, a Corpus you have to rescue from the Grineer during the opening missions, lampshades this.
    Darvo: Legions of robots, mindless automatons, freaking lasers!
  • The Flux Rifle and Spectra pistol fire continuous orange laser beams.
• Equipment-Hiding Fashion: Here's an option to render one's weapons invisible when they're holstered so they don't clip through accessories like capes and armor pieces.
• Escort Mission:
  • Rescue objectives sound like they could be hellish... fortunately, they're not. The Hostage you have to rescue is armed with a very basic pistol when they are first found, and always tries to take cover when he isn't running between multiple players trying to figure out who to follow, and has strong shields and lots of health, despite being essentially naked. However, the hostage can be armed — a player can hand the hostage their secondary weapon. Their level-capped, Orokin-Catalyst upgraded, fully-modded murderous secondary weapon, that can be anything from a magnum pistol to dual fully-automatic nail-guns, to a beam-spewing flux pistol, which the player would be fully capable of beating a level using exclusively from start to finish. Even more helpfully, you don't have to get the escortee to the extraction point to clear the mission- only get all Tenno there before the hostage goes down. Since Tenno can move like greased lightning, you can effectively free them from their cell and rush to the exit to get a mission success while they're still hundreds of meters behind you and surrounded by enemies.
  • Unfortunately, the "VIP" variant of the Defense mission type (always used in sorties and only by sorties) has a major difference compared to the regular rescue escorts — the operative you need to defend just walks around aimlessly rather than hunker down in the most defensible position.^note This might actually be intentional, as defending the operative becomes a very different from defending a regular static defense objective as a result. This basically becomes frustrating for Frosts who have to keep laying down snow globes when the VIP wanders off, even in a firefight. Thankfully, unlike regular defense missions, the operative can be revived as many times as needed as long as they don't bleed out first. And on occasion, if you're lucky, the VIP will wander into a linear dead-end corridor and not leave for a good while, creating a choke point that turns the enemy horde into a shooting gallery.
  • The Defection mission type is closer to the typical trope example, but is still rather forgiving. The escorties you have to protect are more on the fragile side and stick to the weapons they start with. But they don't wander off, staying near med stations until you tell them to move, after which that they obediently beeline for the evacuation point or the next medstation without being distratced by anything, they can still be revived even if the revival window for them is rather small, there are several dedicated consumable items that can help them, and most importantly, many healing and support warframe powers affect them, making the job of escorting them much easier.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • The Gustrag Three are psychopathic to the point of slaughtering fellow Marines, simply because their ship was taking too long to get to the action. When Sargas Ruk learns about this, he is disgusted that Vay Hek, who ordered their rehabilitation, would find use for traitors, and warns him that he'll regret it when they stab him in the back.
  • As much as the Corpus epitomize Corrupt Corporate Executive, even they found Alad V's actions reprehensible.
  • When Erra realizes what Ballas is planning to do at the end of The New War, he makes an immediate Heel–Face Turn and even sacrifices himself so that the Drifter/Tenno has a chance to stop Ballas and save his sister.
• Every Man Has His Price: Invoked by Alad V during the Gradivus Dilemma; he offers to double whatever Sargas Ruk is giving the Tenno to fight for him if you sided with the Grineer. Perhaps unfortunately, you can't actually take this offer.
• Evil Gloating: Alad V invokes this if you sided with him during the Gradivus Dilemma, telling you not to worry about your friends in Cryosleep, because he has grand plans for them. This, to the Tenno who are trying to stop him and his buddies from being steamrolled by the much stronger Grineer.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: The Once Awakened quest shows that originally, the Technocyte plague was originally not a problem... until a certain Grineer, Dr. Tengus, decided to see if it would make a good weapon. One inevitable containment breach later and the Infested threaten the entire Origin System. And then he has the temerity to blame the Tenno for the breach and tries to take credit for the (not entirely successful) containment of the initial outbreak.
• Evil Makes You Ugly: The Grineer are all clone troopers and their genetic stagnation really shows in their faces. Most of the Grineer bosses have been cybernetically modified and augmented to the point where very little of their original flesh is left and only their decaying faces remain as a key to the human origins they disgrace. Contrast Cressa Tal, who, despite being ex-Grineer, only has a scar on her lip to show for it.
• Evolving Weapon:
  • The Paracesis sword is the game's first example, being a weapon which performance can be improved with time through means other that putting mods on it. However it's quite a Guide Dang It! as none of this is explained in-game and it's up to players to figure it out through trial and error. Namely, putting Forma on it increases its maximum level by 2, which can be done up to 5 times for a max level of 40, which also means increased mod capacity. Additionaly, with each Forma up to 5th it inflicts additional damage on the Sentients, and at the 5th Forma it gains the ability to reset their resistances.
  • In the Crysalith, you can buy Incarnon weapons, which evolve and gain new abilities as you complete challenges with them. The first evolution unlocks the weapon's Incarnon form, and later evolutions unlock various special perks that can be equipped to the weapon.
• Exactly What I Aimed At: In "The Profit" trailer, Zanuka dodges Banshee's thrown Glaive... which goes on to hit the control apparatus Alad V is wearing.
• Excuse Plot: The game began with one; you are part of a clan of space ninjas, fighting to push fascist space assholes and their army of degenerate clones out of the known Solar System, and crush some corrupt corporate goons, and deal with a 'technocyte plague' that's overrunning countless ships, stations, and colonies. Later updates have gradually added more and more lore, backstory, and character depth. As a result, while the early parts of the game are still very light on plot, this changes entirely once you start the quest "The Second Dream", a huge Wham Episode that marks the point where Warframe becomes a plot-heavy game with deep, complex lore.
• Experience Booster: Affinity Boosters can double experience gained for a limited time. They can be purchased or earned from Daily Bonuses.
• Exploding Barrels: Bright red-and-orange barrels with little red lights — they are plentiful on most levels. The Orokin have them disguised as ceramic storage containers — look for the red slits and smoke coming out the top. Even more varieties have been added in, such as the Corpus cryo-barrels (handy for punching through those shields.)
• Eyeless Face: The Tenno do not have eyes, or at least not ones visible on the Warframes themselves (with a couple possible exceptions). This is lampshaded by Alad V, who tells Tenno fighting for him that they finally see eye-to-eye in the fight against the Grineer, and immediately corrects himself on that. He makes similar comments while helping the Tenno in the Second Dream quest.
• Faceless Goons: Many (but not all) of the Grineer soldiers wear faceplates. The plates don't seem to reduce how much damage the troopers take from headshots though. The glowing eyes just make them easier to headshot in the dark, in fact. Then there's the Corpus personnel, who all wear giant bulletproof box helmets. For their enemies, the Tenno must appear to be this.
• The Faceless: The Tenno's faces are hidden, as you only see their Warframes. "The Second Dream" reveals that they DO have faces, and look like normal teenagers (which you can customize), but this just raises the question of what lies under their Warframes' helmets. "The Sacrifice" then reveals that there IS a face under the Warframes, but it's not pretty: Warframes were once humans who were infected by a special strain of Infestation. Excalibur Umbra's Sunder helmet reveals part of what's underneath, a single eye surrounded by what looks like flesh or muscle.
• Fashionable Asymmetry:
  • Event badges and several Warframes have always had this effect. As of Update 13, players can mix-and-match armor on either shoulder or leg of their Warframe, as well as wings on their Sentinel.
  • Banshee has a large spike on one shoulder and nothing on the other.
  • Valkyr's default helmet plays this for drama: Alad V had been steadily dissecting and disassembling her.
  • All of Equinox's helmets feature this effect. Typically, her day form's versions will be a mirrored, color-flipped version of her night form's, while her composite form will merge the two together.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • Anyone who dies (and isn't a Tenno) in an Orokin lair is indoctrinated and warped into becoming eternal guardians. Also any poor soul unlucky enough to be assimilated by the Infested. Body Horror personified.
  • Glassing is the worst punishment one could receive in the Orokin Empire, requiring unanimous approval from the Council of Seven and involves the body becoming crystallized while the mind is left intact. There are two possible fates for you afterwards: Either you are put into an oubliette for all eternity or you are turned into a Cephalon. It doesn't help that Nihil, the Hanging Judge who invented this punishment, Loves the Sound of Screaming and created it accordingly.
  • Brain-shelving. It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin and the fate that awaits any Solaris worker who falls too deep into debt or manages to make Nef Anyo sufficiently angry. It also has the nasty side-effect of causing severe memory loss if you're brain-shelved for too long, which is what happened to Ticker's lover.
  • Narmer Veils are treated as this by anyone not wearing one. Eudico outright says she would rather be brain-shelved than have another one placed on her. Not because it causes immense suffering, but because you might never want to take it off again.
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: Nekros is a Warframe whose second ability, Terrify, forces enemies to disengage from combat and temporarily stripping their armor.
• Final Boss, New Dimension: The final portions of The New War take place around the Sun (which is the only major body in the system that cannot be accessed at any other point in the game), and culminates in the final confrontation with Ballas.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: Grineer Scorches (and the players, with some Clan research) use the Ignis, a handheld flamethrower which does moderate damage to unarmored targets, can hit multiple enemies at once, penetrates walls, and can be modded to shoot hot-pink radiation blasts that freeze the target, or electrified explosions, or corrosive fire, or...
• First-Person Snapshooter: Update 11 added a "Codex Scanner" that can be used on enemies for experience as well as information on their vital statistics such as health, armour, shields, any vulnerabilities or resistances to certain damage types, locations where that enemy can be found, and items dropped. Update 16 added the Sanctuary, which lets the Tenno earn reputation with Cephalon Simaris for doing this, to be redeemed later for special items. For lazy Tenno, the Helios Sentinel can do this for the player automatically, though there is a notable lag and acquire time between the scanning, as a trade-off. The Heliocor hammer can also do this for any enemy that it kills, as long as the wielder brings either kind of scanner to the mission.
• Fishing Minigame: Added with the Plains of Eidolon update. Uniquely, it isn't actually a minigame — instead, you just equip a fishing spear from your gear, take aim by the water, and wait for fish to spawn. There are four things you can do with your catches:
  • Cut them up into bait, which awards you components that can be used in crafting.
  • Offer them to the Ostrons, netting you standing with them in proportion to the size and rareness of the fish.
  • In the case of larger fish, you can make them into trophies that can be mounted on your orbiter's walls.
  • Finally, you can also put them in an aquarium in the personal quarters part of your orbiter.
  • There are appropriate equivalents in the Orb Vallis and the Cambion Drift as well, which have both unique fishing rods and special mechanics (Orb Vallis servofish have to be stunned with an EMP from the fishing spear, while Cambion Drift fish can fly to compensate for how the "water" of the area can only be penetrated with special spears).
• Flash Freezing Coolant: One option when sabotaging an enemy spaceship is to insert a coolant cell into the reactor core, which will cause ship-wide leaks of coolant that turns into freezingly-cold patches of ice.
• Flash Step:
  • Grineer Flame-Blades and other high-tier melee Grineer, as well as the bosses that resemble them, offset their melee only weaponry by the ability to teleport right next to you. Usually behind you.
  • The Stalker also likes to teleport right behind you.
  • Ash can do this with his Teleport.
  • Loki can flash-swap using his Teleport Swap power. Infamously portrayed in a Mashed video to allow the Tenno in question to defeat Alad V without dealing with Zanuka by letting himself be tackled by Zanuka and then teleport-swapping Alad V right before Zanuka delivers the death strike.
• Flunky Boss:
  • Not intentionally, perhaps, but bosses often have a decent sized group of mooks on hand to help out, and provide ammo/energy drops for the players. The only boss that doesn't really have mooks^note excluding pesky Mine Ospreys, which do not drop ammo or energy has regular energy/ammo drops into his arena from overhead rails.
  • Vay Hek invokes this, as one of his primary abilities is to buff nearby Grineer, which wouldn't work if there were no Grineer to buff.
  • The Fragmented Suzerain, Zelator, and Anchorite on Deimos in Albrecht’s labs incorporates hordes of Murmur fragments into their fights, as they only come out after you deal with a horde, eventually summoning more as you destroy their first health bar.
• Flying Cutlery Spaceship: The Grineer galleons have dozens of prongs protruding from their hulls, giving them an appearance of giant insects.
• Foe-Tossing Charge:
  • The first ability of the Rhino warframe, which knocks down any foes that aren't literally vaporized. Hydroid's Tidal Surge power likewise sends the user rushing forward, scattering foes in their wake.
  • On the other side of the barricades we have an Infested Juggernaut, who possesses a charge attack that scatters any Tenno who did not move away in time.
  • There's even a pet that can do this, along with hooking enemies with a retractable lash.
• Force-Field Door: Some doorways on Grineer tilesets are tied to a Sensor Bar which means the entrance is covered in a forcefield. You can pass through it, but it will strip away your shields, completely deplete your energy and screw with your HUD similarly to a Magnetic proc.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You:
  • During the Tethra's Doom event, Councilor Vay Hek interrupted the developers' livestream mid-sentence.
  • If the Grustrag Three or Zanuka Harvester defeat you, the game will try its absolute damndest to keep you from force-quitting the game until after they've properly set off their Non-Standard Game Over.
• Foreshadowing: The game drops many hints to the true nature of the warframes prior to The Reveals in The Second Dream and The Sacrifice.
  • Captain Vor notes how the Tenno don't control the energy of the Warframe, but are said energy. The Tenno are eventually revealed as Liminal Beings who exist as both physical and energy-based forms.
  • When a frame is captured by a Zanuka Hunter, the Tenno can still use other frames. The Tenno isn't actually inside the frame, so they can merely switch to a different one should the one they are using be captured.
  • Teshin's reasoning for teaching the Tenno seems rather vague. The Sacrifice implies he views the Tenno as being fellow Dax, since the Warframes were created from Dax soldiers.
  • During "The Silver Grove", Silvana notes how the Orokin brought their best experts in Infested Biology into the Warframe Project. They were used to create Helminth, who created the Warframes.
  • In "The Jordas Precept", Jordas notes that the Golem corrupting him senses that the Warframe is of "like flesh" and is confused as to why they are attacking it. This is because the Helminth, which made the Warframes, is itself created from the Infested.
  • Following "The Glast Gambit" and the completion of Nidus, should you go to the part of the orbiter overrun with Infested Parts, its inhabitant, Helminth, will address you as kin (if you are in Nidus). "The Sacrifice" reveals Helminth was used to create the original Warframes (i.e the Umbra Warframes) via infecting the Dax.
  • At the beginning of the Operator segments of "The War Within", The Twin Queens refer to your Warframe as an infested puppet. The Sacrifice, as stated above, reveals the Warframes to be infested Dax soldiers.
  • During "The New War", in the first flashback to the Zariman 10-0 before the Void jump accident, the Operator takes part in a brief lecture and quiz concerning the dynamics and fluidity of alternate timelines. Turns out that the Drifter, whom the player controls following the flashback, is the Operator from a different timeline where they were never rescued from the Zariman.
• Fragile Speedster: The Loki 'frame has the lowest starting shields and health of all the warframes (75 each) but is also the fastest of the lot, faster even than Ash and Nova.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: No Frost puns intended, but if you watch the damage numbers flying off when using the Necramech 'Snake' during the final portion of the "Heart of Deimos" quest, you'll see that its weapon does heat damage - which is extremely effective at killing the infested. It seems Loyd and Father did think of everything.
• Friendly Fireproof:
  • Infested are immune to the toxic auras of Toxic Ancients... unless you have a Nyx handy to mind-control said Ancient.
  • The point of Radiation status is averting this; enemies inflicted with it will shoot one another. It works both ways, too. If you're affected, your shots can damage your allies, and there's NO mitigation. Watch your fire, or your allies will drop like flies.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • Previously, missions could easily wind up like this. A simple mission to destroy a ship's reactor to cripple it? Okay. But now you've done that, the Infested have come aboard — and to make matters worse, you now have to rescue someone from the ship's brig! Now you have to battle your way through the Grineer and Infested, who are fighting each other for control of the ship to reach the extraction point, whilst praying things don't manage to somehow get even worse. However, this is no longer the case, as missions tend to be strictly by-the-books affairs, and random invasions or changing objectives no longer occur.
  • From the Corpus's viewpoint, the Gradivus Dilemma could be seen this way. First, they have a dispute with the Grineer over trade routes, but then the discovery of a large cache of slumbering Tenno incites a full-out war between the two factions — and then the Tenno get involved...
  • Alad V's entire story is one steady From Bad to Worse, with the starting point being when he antagonized the Tenno.
• FTL Test Blunder: The Zariman 10-0 was an Orokin colony ship with the intention of using the power of the Void to, in essence, teleport to the nearby Tau star system. Unfortunately, a catastrophic error occurred, leading to the loss of the vessel within the Void, now known as the Void Jump Accident. All but a handful of people aboard the ship - all of them children - survived the accident, also granting the Tenno their Void powers. Only three people - the Operator, the Drifter, and Rell - are known to still be alive.
• Fungus Humongous: The Orb Vallis region on Venus is dotted with groves of house-sized mushrooms.
• Game Mod:
  • Referred to as TennoGen, but done a bit differently. People can submit possible cosmetic mods to the Steam Workshop, where other players can rate them. Mods that are rated the highest are implemented in-game. PC players get first dibs on them, but must be playing the game through Steam and they require money instead of platinum, but this is so the modders get paid for their work ^noteSteam get half the cut while Digital Extremes and the modder get the rest. Console players can get the TennoGen at a later date if the modder gives the okay, and they can be bought with platinum there instead.
  • On a much smaller note, any Partner gets an exclusive Glyph and can give them out how and when they feel.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • "The Second Dream" quest outright acknowledges Death Is Cheap in-story as far as the Tenno are concerned, and even uses it as a jumping-off point to answer certain important questions about the Tenno. The basic story is even entirely about the Stalker being frustrated that the Tenno he kills seem to keep coming back to life. Turns out the Warframes aren't actually inhabited by the Tenno, but remotely controlled (the actual bodies were in the moon, but moved to their orbiters when the moon was moved back into normal space in order to ensure their safety), and as long as the orbiters stay hidden in the Void and stay one step ahead of potential hunters, the Tenno are not remotely at risk of death.
  • The powerful Adaptive Ability of the Sentients is shown to have two weaknesses: the Void and sources of energy too powerful to adapt to. This crops up both in the story ( Sentients were rendered infertile by using the Solar Rails to invade during the Old War, and Erra bites it thanks to the Sun tearing apart Praghasa with a blast of pure solar energy wiping him out) and in gameplay, as Sentient resistances can be reset via Operator attacks or the gimmick can be bypassed thanks to sheer damage.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Despite the fact that you can have half the syndicates one the relays hate your guts, this doesn't affect your ability to do the quests associated with them (the Silver Grove for New Loka, Octavia's Anthem for Cephalon Suda, etc.). You can even hypothetically be attacked by the Syndicate you are currently working for while on a mission.
  • Both Natah and The War Within involve Teshin, the character that hosts the Conclave PVP minigames. Even if you have literally never met him, he still addresses the Tenno as though they have been his student since they woke up.
  • Alad V's storyline gets quite a bad case of this following the revamp of the star chart. Previously, the Patient Zero quest came before The Second Dream, which explains why he has a purple scar as a result of Infestation, and why he's willing to work with the Tenno— they technically saved his life. Now, Patient Zero is unlocked upon completing Eris junction, two planets after you would have finished Second Dream, leading to a Continuity Snarl.
  • In general, a lot of the big story quests (The War Within, The Sacrifice, etc) logistically can't happen to more than one person, but of course everybody can play through them.
  • During the New War, the Nataruk is said to be one of the only weapons able to kill an Archon outside of another Warframe. After the quest is done, however, the Nataruk is a poor choice for Archon Hunts, as the Archons' powerful Damage Reduction usually means that single shot weaponry like bows tend to lose their effectiveness very quickly, with shotguns like the Kuva Hek, Ferlarx, or Strun Prime usually being better thanks to their high multishot dealing massive damage even after damage attenuation kicks in.
  • Warframe is a game where Death Is a Slap on the Wrist. If you run out of health, you just get knocked down and can either have an ally pick you up, or use a life to instantly respawn. If you run out of lives, the mission ends and you go back to your Orbiter, losing the rewards you'd have obtained from the mission but otherwise unharmed. Despite this, some antagonists still act as if they can permanently kill you. This is especially noticeable in the case of the Stalker, who says that he's come to avenge the death of one of the bosses... then, if you fail to defeat him, proceeds to simply knock you down to the floor, then leave you be, as if he had actually killed you.
  • Excalibur Umbra is unique in that he’s able to fight alongside your Operator when they’re out on the field, with The Sacrifice climaxing in one such scene. Bring him into The New War, and he acts just as motionless as normal warframes during cutscenes.
  • Sentients tend to wither and die or suffer other adverse effects when confronted with the Void. If one manages to appear on a Void Fissure mission^note By either being released from a secret lab on Jupiter or being summoned on Lua, nothing will happen, even if they’re directly corrupted by the fissure into dropping reactant.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • When the Ignis was revamped in Update 17, it coincided with a glitch that broke Banshee's 'Resonance' Sonar augment. Instead of a killing hit only creating new weakspots after a few seconds of activity, each killing hit would cause a new weakspot to instantly form on every enemy within range, and since the Ignis has a massive area-of-effect, it would cause hundreds of weakspots to form per tick, inflicting millions of points of damage. After a few seconds of this, the game would turn into a slideshow until Sonar's duration ended or all enemies died. The Sonar bug was fixed within a week.
  • Peculiar Bloom, a Joke Item that when placed on a primary weapon causes flowers to grow from the victim (for cosmetic only effects) had to be nerfed to end one of those. An Amprex build could reach 22 critical hits per second for low damage, and even more with Mirage, creating so many entities that the game's frame rate dropped sharply, eventually crashing the game. This was fixed by only allowing the mod to create up to 5 flowers at once.
• Gatling Good:
  • The Grineer Gorgon LMG is a minigun in all but appearance — it uses a motor driven feed system, which forces it to have a wind-up time to get to full firing speed, but it hits like a train and has an impressive rate of fire. The Corpus equivalent, the Supra, also has a wind-up time, but it has multiple barrels — they do not rotate, however.
  • The Corpus Cestra sidearm is a pocket energy repeater with a rotating multi-emitter/barrel assembly — presumably to aid in heat dispersal and rate of fire, as with actual gatling weapons. Oddly enough, the barrels are part of the magazine.
• Geo Effects:
  • Missions can sometimes start with the location having had cryogenic malfunctions or battle damage/munition storage accidents. The former halves your maximum shields for the duration of the mission, whilst the latter creates patches of burning material everywhere that inflict lots of damage if you're daft enough to stand in them. For temporary Geo Effects, some rooms can also be depressurized by shooting out the windows; this seals off the room and causes Continuous Decompression, which steadily depletes the shields and health of all players and enemies trapped in that room.
  • Prime Warframes also have some kind of interaction with parts of the Void Towers, such as causing certain objects to emit a once-off wave of energy to restore power to the Prime and his allies.
  • Orokin Tower missions feature numerous booby traps, including pressure-activated lasers and shockwave generators, proximity-sensitive collapsible covers, and fog traps that will slow down both Tenno and Corrupted foes alike. Orokin Derelict missions feature dilapidated versions of all of these, as well as stagnant water supplies with electrical currents running through them, which can quickly eat through a player's health and shields much like the fire patches in standard missions.
• Genius Loci:
  • Orokin Towers, hidden away in dimensional folds and only accessible by a one-use key. Each Tower is filled with traps and still defended by some form of Artificial Intelligence called a Neural Sentry. It seems that anyone who dies in a Tower is upgraded with Orokin tech and brainwashed to serve the Tower's Neural Sentry. The Towers have a white-gold color scheme, and are full of weird features like root-like growths sprouting from the walls, and waterfalls that flow upwards. They also contain many secrets and valuable treasures from the Orokin era, waiting to be rediscovered.
  • Cetus and the Plains of Eidolon exist in the shadow of the Unum, a massive Orokin tower that is mined for its meaty flesh and once possessed (or still does possess) a consciousness of its own.
  • And said Plains of Eidolon contain not only the "bones" of the sentient defeated by Gara and the Unum, but also its fractured consciousness, which twists pieces of debris into ambulatory entities known as eidolons, hunks of stone and tree which lumber to and fro in the Plains. It also imbues all the water on the Plains with its spectral, wispy energy.
• Ghost Ship:
  • Orokin derelicts are Orokin-era vessels in orbit of Deimos that have been consumed by the Infestation, leaving them twisted and full of unnatural growths. The vaults within are still in pristine condition, but are guarded by corrupted units.
  • The Tempestarii was a Railjack originally used for rescue missions, until it was lost on its last mission. It's the focus of the Call of the Tempestarii, and completing the quest rewards players with the Tempestarii skin for their Railjack.
  • The Zariman Ten-Zero was an Orokin colony vessel meant to colonize Tau. However, when it attempted to make a void-jump, it became stranded in the void. The adults went mad and were eventually wiped out by the children, who ended up becoming the Tenno due to The Operator making a a deal with the Man in the Wall. By the time of the game's present, the ship is now stuck (quite literally) halfway between the Void and reality, and has seen a few new souls move into it, infinitesimally downplaying this trope.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Grineer Butchers, Powerfists, and Scorpions do a LOT of damage up close, but die from one sword slash, pistol shot, or poke. Less damaging are the Corpus Prod Crewmen, who lack the damage, but have a chance to stunlock.
  • Corpus in general. The lack of body armor means they'll be taken out much more easily than Grineer goons, but arm themselves with somewhat better weaponry and field shielded Mecha Mooks that are tougher and more dangerous.
  • Fusion MOAs can do extreme damage in a matter of seconds, stripping someone's shields (regardless of mods) in moments — but aren't noticeably more durable than regular MOA. On the other hand, they can also deploy a fairly durable Drone armed with a rapid-fire plasma weapon.
• Glass Weapon: You have a few options for glass-based weaponry.
  • The Ether series of melee weapons (Ether Sword, Ether Daggers, Dual Ether, and Ether Reaper) have crystalline, glass-like blades, and are described as Absurdly Sharp Blades used to deliver painless Mercy Kills to allies who have fallen to the Infestation.
  • As you'd expect, the glass-themed Gara's signature weapons are made of glass: The Astilla is a shotgun that fires glass slugs, the Fusilai are glass throwing knives, and the Volnus is a glass hammer (don't ask why it doesn't shatter on impact).
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Helmeted Grineer Troopers have orange-reddish eyes, whilst some of the Infested have orange-red or blue eyes. Corpus bosses also have glowing lines where eyes would be on the helmets.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: The 'Dog Days' event begins with Kela de Thaym calling up the Tenno to announce a new round of Rathuum. The original plan was to have both sides be equipped with weapons that spray noxious acid... however, there's a gas leak in Kela's quarters and now she's high as a kite. So, she's declared it to be a water fight, and the new Rathuum matches consist of Tenno and Executioners fighting in a beach-themed arena wearing beach-themed apparel (the Tenno all have floaties around their waists) and shooting each other with squirt guns. Kela even personally sends prizes to the Tenno.
• Godzilla Threshold: The Orokin Empire waking up the Tenno to fight the Sentients. It was considered a desperate move. How desperate, you ask? They tried using the Technocyte plague first, a serious threat to the universe at large, due to how virulent and transmissible it is, because it was more prudent. Codex entries hint at the Tenno being warped and unstable from their time in the void — an Orokin agent was severely disfigured by a candidate that would later become an Ember in a giant fire that swept through the ship.
• Gold and White Are Divine: The Orokin aesthetic in a nutshell, which only serves to add to their mystique.
• Good is Not Nice:
  • The Red Veil, Well Intentioned Extremists that see corruption in everything and wish to purge it — at any cost.
  • Cressa Tal, the Steel Meridian leader, is openly dismissive of the Tenno even when you join up with the faction. She does appreciate your help, but as per the trope she's really bad at showing it. At first, anyway.
• Grand Theft Me: In case you needed another example of how the Orokin were Abusive Precursors, "The War Within" shows that they used to transfer their minds into the bodies of youths in order to artificially extend their lifespans. The potential victims would be paraded in front of the Orokin council, who would then overwrite the minds of the ones they selected with their own. Oh, and by the way, the Twin Queens have been doing this even after the Orokin Empire fell.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Harpak and Paracyst assault rifles's Secondary Fire fires a harpoon that can drag enemies towards the user. Valkyr has an integrated hook launcher, which she can use to swing about the environment or violently yank enemies towards her. Grineer Scorpions likewise have an integrated hook launcher for dragging enemies towards her, which can knock players off their feet.
• Gratuitous Japanese: Tenno is the word for "Heavenly Emperor". It could also be translated as "From Heaven", both of which apply well to your cadre of space ninjas. As it turns out, this is subverted, as the "Tenno" children were named after the decrepit ship they were found on, the Zariman 10-0.
• Gratuitous Latin: A single-word example; Corpus can be translated from Latin to mean 'corporation', amongst several other things. The symbols used in their writing (various ship signs, broadcasted messages, etc.) seems more like a mix of the standard Latin and Cyrillic scripts, though.
• Gravity Screw: Gravity works bizarrely in Warframe. In addition to your velocity increasing while falling, the magnitude of your acceleration increases. It's very noticeable on Warframes with climbing abilities like Valkyr or Zephyr; casting Tail Wind three times straight up will result in a dramatic drop in the abilities' effectiveness at climbing, while the fourth attempt will generally result in you slamming into the ground before it finishes casting.
• Gray-and-Gray Morality: The Syndicates:
  • The Steel Meridian vs. The Perrin Sequence: Either side with Grineer traitors who believe in protecting the weak and helpless, but believe in force, violence, and especially war and all its terrible costs, which they push onto the people they protect by demanding payment, or side with Corpus traitors who push for peace, pacifism, and progress, but still pursue the prized profit, and primarily push for peace to pocket more payout. Also, Cressa Tal is kind of a dick to recruits. The Kavor Defection event also showed that the Meridian is more than willing to forcibly press gang pacifists who just want a normal life into fighting for them.
  • The Arbiters of Hexis vs. The Red Veil: Side with those who wish the Tenno to become a proper civilization and not just a breed of warriors for a long-dead race, but may uphold, and possibly be responsible for, the genocide of said long-dead race, and push for putting themselves as the ruling class not unlike the Japanese Shogunate, or side with a resistance group rebelling against the Grineer, Corpus and Infested, but are insanely dogmatic and absolutist, to the point where they consider everyone who isn't following their dogma "corrupt" and a threat to be removed (even civilians), while blatantly torturing Grineer captives and weaponizing the infested in plain sight.
  • Cephalon Suda vs. New Loka: Side with a unfeeling, possibly crazy A.I. who wishes to study and learn about everything in the universe (and "study" includes "maim, kill, and disassemble anything she considers worthless"), or side with a rabidly xenophobic group of Earth-worshipping fascist zealots who wish to revert to untainted humanity (this being a setting where everyone is at least in some way post-human and their idea of 'untainted humanity' seems to only include them), yet see no problem in employing Infested Ancients, and recolonize Earth, at the cost of technological progress and placing the Earth above everything else in the war.
  • The alignment system of the Sun and Moon that first appeared in The War Within. Unusually, neither side is obviously "good" or "evil". The Sun side practices restraint and distance from the powers of the Void, but at the same time invokes wrath, struggle, and Cruel Mercy. The Moon side, on the other hand, involves choices reflecting love, empathy, and peace, but also embracing the powers of the Void and actively hunting and slaughtering enemies. Neither set of choices is exactly one hundred percent right or wrong, and selecting the neutral choices often involves recognizing both wrath and restraint as well as the need to use the powers one is given and act when needed. A forum post by DE (officially a statement by Teshin) explicitly points this out — neither side is fully good or evil. Sun represents taking action immediately without reflection, moon is observant but can be indecisive, while balance involves a bit of both.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Warframe has two:
  • Executor Ballas is the creator of the Warframes, as well as the one who tricked the Council of Seven into allowing the creation of the Sentients, kicking off the Great Offscreen War below. He also betrayed the Orokin Empire after his fit of jealousy got his lover Margulis executed, sending Hunhow vital information on the Orokin and intentionally causing their downfall, meaning that the entire state of the Origin System can be traced back to him. He takes a more direct position as the Big Bad of The New War, manipulating the Sentients into taking over the system for him.
  • The Man in the Wall, an Eldritch Abomination from the Void that gave the Tenno their powers in the first place. His severed fingers also allowed the Orokin to colonize the rest of the Origin System. He has taken a more neutral presence so far, but every time he shows up it becomes more and more apparent just how dangerous his influence really is.
• Great Offscreen War:
  • The Old War, the great conflict between the Orokin and the Sentients that the Tenno fought in before being put into stasis, as well as the war that caused the former to unleash the Infested in one of their ploys to fight off the latter.
  • In addition, before the Syndicate update, Word of God stated that there were non-Tenno factions fighting against the Corpus and Grineer — it's been alluded to in flavor text, such as Alad V talking about supporting the Mars resistance, anti-Corpus rebels using Serro saws, or political dissidents and arms smugglers being hostage rescue targets. With the Syndicate update, it's revealed that Steel Meridian, a band of Grineer traitors, have been leading a guerrilla war against their former masters for some time.
• Ground Punch: Grineer Heavies can do this to damage and knockback nearby attackers, based on the Radial Blast power that Rhino used to have.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy:
  • Both smart and stupid to varying degrees. They won't leave patrol paths to check out noises, but other times they can be deaf and blind. Usually if you engage them and aren't quick about it, one of them will run to the nearest Command Console to raise the alarm — unless you can kill them before they get there.
  • The Wardens in Rescue missions practically reach Metal Gear Solid levels of insanity. As long as you're crouching, they won't see you even if you're out in the open ten feet in front of them.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Simply put, this game does a very poor job of explaining itself. And this is already after the tutorial has been improved; it used to be worse. Explaining what the game does will result in the page being twice as long as it is.
  • Good luck finding all of the Kuria, tiny scannable objects that are well hidden in specific spots on certain tiles.
  • Hesperon is an important component in several Fortuna blueprints, and is gained from mining. It is listed as common, but many people found it difficult to get. It took a while for anyone to realize that the problem is it's too common; if you do well at the mining mini-game, you get rarer drops. Skilled players therefore have to intentionally fail the mini-game to get hesperon.
  • One of the unique traits of the void damage type is that it resets Sentient enemies' adaptive damage resistance. You'd only know this if you either read a very obscure part of the lore or looked it up online. This was briefly alleviated during Operation Orphix Venom, where Father of the Entrati explicitly states this property of Void damage, since it's a needed ability to complete the Operation, but after the event ended, it once again went back to being unmentioned anywhere.
• Gun Fu: Any Warframe that wields the Redeemer (Shotgun Sword hybrid) or the Sarpa (Rifle Sword hybrid) can combine sword strikes along with a shotgun blast in a combo, particularly if you have the stances for the weaponset.
• Gun Kata: Mesa's Peacemaker ability performs the trope in a fashion closely resembling the Trope Namer.
• Guns Akimbo: You can do this with various kinds of semi-automatic and full-auto pistols. Many of the dual sidearms are named with an "ak" prefix. For example, if you have two Boltos, you can make an Akbolto.
• Hacking Minigame: Hacking is represented by a few different minigames depending on the mission, which must be completed within a time limit.
  • Hacking Grineer systems has a pointer going around a circular interface where certain slots are filled. Hitting the action button while the pointer is over a filled slot will activate that slot, and once all filled slots are activated, the hack is completed. However, hitting the button while it's over an activated slot will deactivate it. The speed of the pointer increases in higher-level missions, and some will mix things up by having the pointer switch directions each time you hit the button.
  • Corpus and Orokin consoles (both work identically) are more puzzle-based than reflex-based: there are up to seven hexagonal tiles, each containing a pattern of lines. You have to rotate each tile so that they're all connected.
  • During "The Sacrifice", there's an alternate Orokin hacking game, where you have to input symbols in the correct order. Hints to the correct order can be found hidden around the map. This one doesn't have a time limit, unlike the others.
  • Narmer consoles have an area that's split in half: moving your cursor in one half will make the hacking pointer mirror your movements in the other half. You have to click on all of the dots with the hacking pointer, with misclicks costing you time.
  • Chests in Duviri are hacked by lining up your cursor with dots on rotating rings, clicking when the dots pass under your cursor; some dots are "long" and require you to hold down and release the button with the right timing. You can speed up or slow down the rotation at will.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: A potential result whenever Slash damage is involved. Canonically, this is how Captain Vor died, although his Janus Key brought him back. The gap between his torso and legs becomes his only weakpoint in his Corrupted form.
• Hammy Villain, Serious Hero: The protagonists are the quiet, deadly serious Tenno who try to maintain some semblance of balance and order in the system by attacking the massive empires of the Grineer and Corpus. The most prominent leaders of both factions are constantly Chewing the Scenery, including Councilor Vay Hek, who is Suddenly Shouting in every other sentence, and Nef Anyo, a greedy Smug Snake who talks like a skeevy televangelist.
• Hand Cannon:
  • Among the pistols you can get: a gun made to fire shotgun rounds, about as big as your head. There's also a slightly more conventional handcannon, the Lex, that does very high damage, in exchange for holding only six rounds. The Kraken, a high-damage two-shot burst pistol, also qualifies. There are also a couple of hand-held rocket launchers.
  • The crowner has to be the Marelok pistol; it's literally nothing more than a Grineer lever-action rifle with the barrel chopped off. It's large, loud, powerful, and accurate, and can (with a particular mod) effectively be turned into a shotgun.
  • Taking it even further would be the Sepulcrum, an Entrati secondary gun that is pretty much a Storm Bolter in all but name. Like the Storm Bolter, it is a double-barreled, semi-automatic rocket launcher about the size of a submachine gun that fires two explosive rounds at a time, and that's only its normal fire mode...this being an Entrati gun, activating its Alt Fire after filling up its special bar with five kills in normal mode allows you to lock onto up to 5 targets to fire homing missiles at them.
• Heel–Face Turn: Steel Meridian and The Perrin Sequence syndicates are lead by Grineer deserters and Corpus merchants, respectively, that oppose the warmongering nature of the two empires. However, the two syndicates still hate each others' guts.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • The last mission in the Stolen Dreams quest sends you on a mission to an abandoned Orokin Derelict, which, like all of them is overrun with Infested in order to upload the Arcane Codices you've collected into a machine that can make sense of them. A short while before you reach the machine, you hear a creepy, cryptic message about... something.
  • In Infested missions, after some time a Juggernaut will make a terrifying roar from offscreen that temporarily buffs other Infested mooks. If enough enemies are killed within time the Juggernaut will emit an even more terrifying roar and appear in the mission.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: While boss banter for the older bosses is rendered in Speaking Simlish, the text-only translations will include insulting the player and his clan by name. They'll also mention the Warframe you're using. Averted when Stalker became Suddenly Voiced; the text will include your name and the name of the boss you killed most recently, but his voice acting does not.
• Herd-Hitting Attack:
  • Melee attacks with dual wielded or heavy two-handed weapons (including the Bo) can hit multiple enemies per strike.
  • Certain weapons, particularly Launchers, possess high punch through stats or area-of-effect damage to take care of crowds of mobs with ease. Some standout examples include the Arca Plasmor, which fires a massive energy bolt with infinite punch through so long as it doesn't hit a wall or its maximum range, the Ignis, a flamethrower that roasts everything in a cone in front of it, and the Amprex, which creates beams of Chain Lightning.
  • Numerous Warframes have abilities designed for this. Excalibur's Exalted Blade fires Sword Beams with infinite punch through and a maximum range. Zephyr's Tornado generates massive twisters that trap foes and expose them to additional damage. Rhino's Rhino Stomp and Nezha’s Divine Spears leave all enemies in a radius around them helpless and suspended in the air.
• Highly Visible Landmark:
  • The Orokin Tower of the Unum towers over the gate leading from Cetus to the Plains of Eidolon, and is visible from pretty much everywhere aboveground in the Plains.
  • The lift going down to Fortuna from the Orb Vallis has a smokestack - while the building itself isn't visible from afar, the black smoke it belches out certainly is.
• Highly-Visible Ninja:
  • The Tenno are futuristic ninjas, but there's nothing stopping you from painting your Warframe bright pink and carrying around a heavy machine gun, a pair of Hand Cannons, and a giant hammer.
  • It gets utterly ridiculous when you realize the Rocket Launcher is a silent weapon meaning it's very much possible to do entire stealth runs by exploding everything with your rocket launcher. Of course, if you don't leave any witnesses you might as well be invisible.
  • Some Warframes like Rhino or Nova are nigh-impossible to consider stealthy by any means.
• History Repeats: During the Ambulas Reborn event, Ergo Glast notes that the Corpus risk meeting the same fate as the Orokin if they let Animo get too smart.
• Hitscan: Standard implementation. Nearly everything that shoot bullets is Hitscan, most things that do not aren't. Though most of those Slow Lasers are not painfully slow (unless they're shot by Corpus goons). There are also some pretty much instant-travel beam weapons and other oddities out there.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • The Codex entry for Excalibur states that the Orokin were losing their war against the Sentients due to the latter turning their weapons and technology against them.
  • Amusingly, this can be done against The Stalker; he isn't immune to the insane headshot damage of his own bow any more than you are.
  • The Grineer Scorpion have been an annoyance to players since their introduction because of their hard to avoid harpoon that pulls players to their feet for several seconds. The Valkyr Warframe has a very similar ability with Rip Line allowing players to give them a taste of their own medicine.
  • The deployable cover the Grineer use, Blunts, are generally ineffective even at the worst of times, but when a Tenno is using explosive weapons with a large blast radius and explodes on contact, such as the Tonkor (which falls into Difficult, but Awesome due to the difficulty of hitting moving targets with an arced projectile), Blunts become an outright liability for the Grineer due to it being considered a valid target for explosives to go off on when hit. This changes them from ineffective cover to very large static targets that enables a Tenno to wipe out entire groups gathered around it.
  • If both of you are nearby, it's possible to electrify Grineer with their own arc traps.
  • This was a recurring theme for the Orokin, to the point where they were basically entirely responsible for their own downfall- they created the Sentients (who turned on them), the Grineer (who rebelled), the Infestation (which ran out of control) and the Tenno (who were subverted by Natah). The last of which wiped them out altogether.
  • Fibonnaci of the Cavia will sometimes say "L Ike a fish back in water! But with air" when you activate Life Support in a Survival node branching off the Sanctum Anatomica.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs:
  • Since cats are apparently extinct in the far future, the K-board stunt penalty for repeating a trick multiple times in the same trick chain is called "Copykavat".
  • Getting a buff from a conduit on a Disruption mission outside of Jupiter will sometimes have Little Duck say "Won't be looking that Kubrodon in the mouth"; Kubrodons are a conservation target on Venus's open world, and the idiom is a twist on "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth".
• Homing Projectile: The Grineer Buzlok assault rifle can fire bullets that home in on targets marked by a player.
• Human Cannonball: The Railjack Archwing Slingshot allows for this, shooting your Tenno out and to quickly cover some distance in space. With more skill in Gunnery you can even weaponize this, allowing you to turn yourself into a homing cannonball that tracks enemy craft and demolishes them with the force of the impact.
• Humiliation Conga:
  • This has not been a good month for Alad V. First, he kicked off a war between the Grineer and the Corpus by trying to steal Tenno cryopods, and was an abject failure at swaying the Tenno to his side. The board promptly withdraws funding for his war, leaving him in massive debt, and an angry CEO sending the Tenno and Corpus personally after him to collect what's due. The Tenno find him, smash the crap out of Zanuka and free the remaining Tenno, and personally give him a discount on their ammunition supplies.
  • It got even better. With the board still out to collect and the Tenno still out for his blood, Alad V started turning to Infested research in a desperate scramble for some sort of miracle to turn his situation around (along the way "volunteering" many of his own employees for experimentation.) When news of this leaked to the Corpus board, they dropped his debt and declared him an enemy of the Corpus, siccing the Tenno after him once more to end his experimentations; on top of that, his employees understandably started deserting him in droves, and he turned to self-experimentation. Predictably, it didn't go well, and by the time the Tenno reach him, he's a powerful but effectively-brainwashed Infested patsy. At this point, taking him down is more like a Mercy Kill than anything else.
  • Seems he finally learned his lesson, because his next appearance had him offering the Tenno some nice goodies for helping him swipe Tyl Regor's clone research to reverse his infestation; once he decided to start paying the Tenno to help him, his scheme went off without a hitch, even with Nef Anyo trying to counteroffer him to avoid him regaining power (except for PS4, where Nef was successful in blunting his recovery.)
  • And again in the Second Dream, where, after the events of the Natah quest, Alad made another surprisingly-clever call by offering to trade the Tenno information about the newly-awakened Sentient, and the Grineer excavations thereof for an undisclosed favor. He then takes it a step further and offers the Tenno advice on escaping the Moon base before its Void collapse, (though it's only so the Tenno don't die and thus invalidate his 'favor'.) Time will tell if Alad manages to use the 'favor' for something beneficial, or whether he still manages to antagonize the Tenno and suffer the consequences thereof. However...
  • The trauma continues, as eventually, in Operation: Shadow Debt, Alad calls in his favour with the Tenno. For reasons as of yet unknown, the Stalker out of all people is after him, along with powerful acolytes of his.
  • Unsurprisingly, things haven't gotten better for him. An old friend offers him a contract that will help recoup all his losses, and he signs with gusto... Only to realize immediately afterwards that the "old friend" was a Sentient Mimic, and to his horror he's now bound by the contract to create Amalgams, Sentient-human hybrids, for his enemies. Further, any attempts to weasel out of the contract, legal or otherwise, will be met with a giant flying Sentient destroying his city. In desperation he's put the entire place on lockdown in the hope of preventing information about this deal leaking out and making him "kill on sight" again. Somehow, he still manages to blame the Tenno for this.
• Humongous-Headed Hammer: Hammers are a class of melee weapons whose one consistent feature is a head that is larger than an adult person's head. Examples include the Tenno-produced Fragor, the Grineer-produced Jat Kittag and the Corpus-produced Arca Titron.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place:
  • It's not made clear what the Void actually is, but from what we know, it is the source of the Tenno's Reality Warper powers, a place where the Orokin sought refuge in the last days of the Old War, and it enables Faster Than Light travel via the Solar Rails. Not even the Orokin know for sure what it's all about, but it seems to alter human physiology after unprotected exposure (this is how the Tenno were created), it is the only weakness the Sentients had and it allows Argon gas to solidify into crystals that decay radioactively when removed from its environment. It also seems to be the closest thing people in the Origin System have to a deity; the Corpus religion seems to be based on the assumption that it is sentient. On the other hand, it's also the only permanent weakness of the Sentients, which meant the Orokin didn't have much choice but to use it during the Old War. During the War Within, all the adults on board the Zariman Ten Zero were driven insane by just being there.
  • And as of the Chain of Harrow quest, well... Rap. Tap. Tap. The man in the wall.