Warframe / Tropes N to S

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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• Nail 'Em: The Bolto series, which include a rifle and pistol, fire stakes that pin enemies to walls. The Twin Gremlins are rivet guns made to bolt ships together, used by the Grineer... and the Tenno, who find that they work just as well as weapons to nail schmucks to the floor with. Later guns include the Stahlta, a Corpus nailgun that can fuse bolts together via radioactivity to pack a bigger punch.
• Nerf: This is a given considering the nature of the game. As more and more content gets added, the community gets increasingly more, or less, creative at optimizing their gameplay, to which the devs have a less than stellar reputation of trying to handle in order to promote healthier gameplay. Notable examples in recent memory include:
  • Update 31.5 brought forth an indirect nerf in the form of the Overguard mechanic in order to combat AoE and crowd control effects most of the strongest Warframes abuse to shut down entire maps worth of enemies, though ironically, all the Overguard mechanic succeeded in doing was making sure the meta remained prominent as the highest echelon of equipment/Warframes still completely trivialize the gameplay even with the addition of Overguard while everything else now suffers even more because of the changes.
  • The Veilbreaker Update brought a slew of changes targeted specifically at AoE weapons (reserve ammo capacity and pickup reductions, removal of headshot capability) due to their ease of use and over trivialization of mechanical skill and gameplay in order to kill the so-called "zoom and boom" meta.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight:
  • Initially subverted, since several of the Warframes used by the Tenno are heavily armored with strong shields and eventually enormous hitpoints, so that closing the gap and bisecting foes with an Absurdly Sharp Blade can often be a far more viable tactic than a standoff shooting match. But then it's back into full effect later on, where enemies can easily tear you apart if you're overconfident.
  • There are also two throwing knife weapons named Kunai and Despair. They're more effective than enemy machine guns, laser beams, or rocket launchers. A later update adds the Castanas, throwing knives that can be remotely activated to electrocute enemies.
  • Update 13 allows players to solely use melee as a means of combat. Parrying allows Tenno to deflect incoming bullets long enough to close larger distances, and combos allow the skilled to stun enemies up close. The implementation of a damage multiplier that could potentially triple your melee damage should you get enough hits in a short enough time. If that wasn't enough, Channeling into your melee weapon allows you to convert energy into even more melee power that, in most cases, literally vaporizes enemies.
• New Game Plus: Once you finish the Star Chart completely, you can start the Steel Path: you start the Star Chart from scratch, with enemies having a 100-level boost (50-level in the case of Archwing) and having 250% HP, Shields and Armor. Your reward? An armor set for the Operator, two Ephemera and a bunch of emotes and decorations. Mods and resources have double the chance to drop in Steel Path. It is, however, zig-zagged; you can freely switch between normal mode and the Steel Path.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Justified or not, the Tenno and Lotus have committed more than one blunder in their war for the Origin System:
  • During The Second Dream quest, Tenno interact with one of Hunhow's fragments to let Lotus link into his mind and figure out his plan to find the Tenno Reservoir. Which allows him to link into her mind and get the location of the Reservoir from her. Which was his plan all along.
  • During the Defection missions, Sargas Ruk manages to find the Kavor defectors and send his Manics after them by following the Tenno who came to the Kavor's aid — which he gladly taunts the Kavor about in one of his transmissions.
  • During the Vox Solaris quest, Tenno try to help a down on his luck Solaris Thursby in their own typical way (read — raid some Corpus caches for loot for him to sell, most likely killing one or two Corpus goons while at it). When Nef Anyo catches wind that Tenno are active in Orb Vallis, he sends his repo squad after Thursby, who end up quite literally tearing him into pieces. Subverted in that Biz orchestrated Thursby getting the idea to steal from the Corpus and thus being repo'd by Nef Anyo in order to inspire Eudico to take up arms once more.
• Night and Day Duo: The Warframe Equinox can freely switch between its Day Mode and its Night Mode, changing its active skills and physical appearance. You also need to build each individual Mode before you can build it, requiring double the resources and time than other Warframes.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Cyborg Space Ninja Zombies psychically linked to Child Soldiers contaminated by an eldritch realm. Hydroid Prime and Sevagoth both embody this trope.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Yes. Yes there is. Though it's a lot less than most games will give you. When making long-range shots with the Cernos, Paris or Paris Prime bows, you'll have to adjust for arrow drop that can turn a headshot into a gut-shot. Dread is notable for flying much straighter than Paris, at the cost of not being armor-piercing. Kunai and its variants (Despair, Hikou) also have a drop, though it's less noticeable than the arrows, with the exception of the Despair. The Torid also has this issue. Played straight with the Daikyu longbow, which has a longer draw time and can't be held indefinitely as a result.
• No Hero Discount:
  • Tenno must buy their own weapon blueprints, provide the materials and pay for them to be built at their Orbiter's foundry. Side materials explain that Ordis is skimming money off the top to pay for necessary maintenance and supplies.
  • Justified with the stores for the factions, syndicates, and colonies you can ally yourself with. The currency for these stores is called "standing", and is earned by doing tasks for a certain group and/or giving them certain items. While to the player, standing practically functions just like money that they use to buy items, from an In-Universe perspective they're giving you the item for free out of gratitude for what you've done.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Grineer ships have what appear to be exposed energy cores and engine function and walkways lacking railings all over the place. That's not even the worst of it, either - on Grineer asteroid bases, you will often find Grineer corpses in domitory rooms amongst collapsed structures and equipment, as if nobody even bothered to so much as clean up the mess, which is itself a health hazard. If that's not a big sign that the Grineer have a We Have Reserves attitude to health and safety, then nothing else is.
  • Corpus facilities in Jupiter make it possible to fall off into Jupiter's atmosphere, walk into big beams of energy, fall off of long bridges into chasms, etc. It's better than the Grineer, but that's not saying much.
  • The Reactor Sabotage missions can be solved in three ways: the first one, taking out the coolant then restarting the reactor, is justified in that you have to hack it to get it running, but the other two are inexcusable: the fuel and coolant cells have the same shape, so you can take one put it where the other should go, which has catastrophic results when you power the system back on.
  • Orokin facilities came off rather tame in comparison to other factions'. But the location of secret rooms will make you wonder what put them there.
• No Points for Neutrality: In the Gradivus Dilemma event, Invasion missions, and the Tubemen of Regor event, you have to pick a side to support more. If you try to support both sides equally, the points will cancel each other out and you'll get no reward at all.
• No-Sell:
  • Most egregiously, capture targets, who are supposed to be little more than rank-and-file troops with information the Lotus desires, are immune to Warframe abilities to a degree that no boss in the game even approaches. It makes it harder to stall them out or slow them down, but they're still no less vulnerable to being shot in the face.
  • The Stalker is immune to most Warframe abilities, except for certain direct damage-dealing abilities. The Rhino Stomp, for example, will hurt him but won't stun him and throw him airborne like regular mooks.
  • Many enemies have attacks that can knock down your Warframe, but Rhino can ignore them when his Iron Skin is equipped, as well as Atlas as long as he is on the ground. Certain mods can also apply this trait to any Warframe. Primed Sure Footed in particular will give a 100% chance to ignore knockdown effects, and it's an Exilus mod, which makes it an incredibly useful mod to put in that slot if nothing else makes a lot of sense for one's build.
  • Doing certain actions — for example, rolling, or using Warframe abilities — will make you immune to knockdowns during the animation. You'll still take damage from the attack, but you won't have to worry about spending an extra few vulnerable seconds picking yourself back up.
• Not the Intended Use: Limbo, Equinox, and Xaku can be modded to grant their fourth abilities enormous range. While the main use of this would be to affect as many enemies at once, the fact that these abilities can also burst material containers gives these Warframes a unique role as "can openers". These "can openers" can quickly destroy large numbers of crates to suck up their materials via Vacuum and Fetch-equipped companions. This is also useful for hunting down other useful materials that appear on Loot Radar, such as Syndicate Medallions, which won't be sucked up by Vacuum.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: The New Loka group wants to return humanity to its "untainted" form, believing that this is the only way to stop the war and restore peace to the system. As noted above, humanity as we understand it is long gone, and the time before the Orokin Empire is all but completely forgotten. Beyond them, Grineer footsoldiers are, to a man, augmented with cybernetics that keep their bodies functioning and Corpus crewmen are equipped with all sorts of technologies like shield generators, hover-skates and anti-Tenno auras.
• Nothing Is Scarier: During the "Octavia's Anthem" quest, when Ordis gets himself taken over by Hunhow trying to save Suda at the end of the third mission, the remainder is completely silent, without Ordis or the fake Lotus telling you to head for extraction. Afterwards, Ordis won't speak in the orbiter and Suda is similarly silent when you interact with her until you free the two Cephalons.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore:
  • The "Natah" and the "Second Dream" quests contain very important lore reveals, that irrevocably change everything you thought of some critical plot characters.
  • The Apostasy Prologue is even bigger: the Lotus abandons you. From then on, her role is played by a not-terribly-convincing holographic recreation provided by Ordis in an attempt to put you at ease.
  • The New War so heavily changes things that you receive a warning before even starting the quest that you won't be able to leave the questline until it is complete. By the time the quest has concluded, Ballas, Teshin, and maybe Alad V and Erra are all Killed Off for Real, the main Sentient fleet has been defeated, there are now two versions of the Operator existing in the Origin System, the Lotus has returned, but may have chosen to exist as Margulis or Natah, and the Man in the Wall is now taking a more active role in events within the system. The remnants of Ballas' empire, the Narmer, are now roving around in the system, trying to regroup. Oh, and Cetus, Fortuna, the Plains of Eidolon, and the Orb Valis have received some remodeling.
• Notice This: Corpus storage containers shine, Grineer storage containers have two glowing lights and modules give off blue sparks. Similar to Borderlands, a beam of light shines upward from items you can pick up. Breakable objects also have a characteristic shimmer effect, and Rare Containers have a glowing, almost staticky effect and an angelic hum.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Alad V says this almost outright when you help the Corpus during the Gradivus Dilemma:
    Alad V: You and I aren't so different, Tenno. We both know these dogs need to be put down. I sense we are at the beginning of a beautiful new partnership.
  • Similarly, Ruk states that the Grineer are the Tenno's best ally in the conflict; a reason he may give for doing so:
    Sargas Ruk: Tenno, of course you side with us! Of course the Grineer are your best option! We share your joy in Corpus death!
• No Waterproofing in the Future: Ordinarily averted, but in the Spy mission on Uranus there's an area where you must progress by shooting the glass coverings on the pipes and flooding the place. Upon touching the water the Sensor Regulators patrolling the area will instantly explode.
• Oddly Common Rarity: The Ignis Wraith is a peculiar example. It's an event exclusive and stronger version of the Ignis, with only a certain number of people and clans getting blueprints for it. The "Common" part is that the clans got the blueprints for research, so the people in those clans can make duplicates and they end up giving away the blueprint copies free of charge.
• One-Man Army: A lone Tenno will leave dozens upon dozens of enemies strewn in his or her wake during an average mission. A four-man cell will have hundreds of dead people bisected as they continue to rip apart the rest of the ship.
• One-Word Title: Warframes are the protagonists, making this a Protagonist Title, and a Portmantitle.
• Offscreen Teleportation:
  • Most humanoid bosses teleport, but they do it much more often if the camera is facing away from them (usually if you're running away), and usually from behind or to the sides.
  • The game usually spawns mooks only in places you aren't currently in, but it gets to this level when there's no other way they could have reached the room they appear in.
  • Some cases can subvert this trope however, due to the game's rather picky AI, such as teleporting right in front of you or even the next room where you are standing despite of not having the specific ability for it.
  • This also works in favour for players as well, as any Companion, Spectre or Prisoner will teleport to you if you leave the cell.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: As of 15.6, the Void's background music now features this to further establish the legacy of the Orokin.
• One-Hit Polykill: Punch-Through mods allow your bullets to pass through terrain to strike foes in cover, and also allow your shots to strike multiple enemies... so if they're lined up just right, it's entirely possible to score multiple headshot kills with a single projectile. Bows and sniper rifles have a lot of innate Punch Through even without mods, as do throwing knives-class weapons (though it's unknown if this is simply a bug they never batched). Larger melee weapons like staves, hammers, and heavy blades also have the ability to strike multiple targets at once.
• One Stat to Rule Them All:
  • Before Update 11 brought Damage 2.0's revamps, Armor Piercing was the damage type you had to boost if you wanted to be relevant against higher-level enemies.
  • Damage 2.0 saw Corrosive damage became the most popular damage type for its ability to shred through armor and render enemies vulnerable.
  • Following update 27.2 and the arrival of Damage 3.0, Viral and Slash became the new top damage types. Viral damage causing additional damage to health. Slash damage is favoured more for it's status effect, Bleed, which bypasses armor entirely, making it effective against highly-armored Grineer and Corrupted units.
• Only in It for the Money:
  • The Corpus will always work to protect their bottom line, to the point of working with the Tenno against the Grineer one week then working with the Grineer against the Tenno the next week despite hating both factions vehemently. The Tenno themselves invoked this during the Gradivus Dilemma, where factional warfare was often decided by who paid out better in the end.
  • Sargas Ruk taunts the Tenno who come to kill him as 'just another Corpus drone' fighting for nothing more than money.
  • Invasion outcomes are almost universally decided by which faction is offering the best in battle pay. If a faction is offering rarer resources, it's a sure thing that most players are going to support them. Orokin Catalysts are particularly desirable — if one faction is offering Orokin Catalysts as Battle Pay, they're virtually guaranteed to win.
  • The unfavorable opinion of The Perrin Sequence is that the only reason they're pushing for peace is to make a bigger profit. Their leader, though, really does want peace for its own sake, and believes that doing the right thing is its own reward.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Lotus will normally react with at most mild annoyance when the Tenno face a particularly tough enemy. When the Grustrag Three show up, though, she will get noticeably scared and outright abort the mission. This isn't an overreaction - the three will destroy you if you aren't well prepared.
  • A meta example, but when the player start The New War, the game itself will very bluntly ask you if you really want to go through with the quest, both because it is very emotionally heavy and, unlike all other prior quests (including the Wham Episodes that made up the previous cinematic quests), must be completed in its entirety before the player can move on to other missions. While other quests do warn you when you've reached a Point of No Return, they've never included a content warning before.
• Organic Technology:
  • The Tower of the Unum in Cetus has a fleshy interior. The Ostrons harvest this "Temple-Meat" at regular intervals to consume and sell.
  • There are a few weapons which are the result of a fusion between Infestation and technology, such as the Hema, Pox, and Pupacyst. All of the Warframes also qualify.
• Our Zombies Are Different:
  • Eidolons are basically undead Sentient that stalk the titular Plains Of Eidolon at night. The smaller, 'drone' Eidolons can have their physical form destroyed, but unless their 'spiritual' form is destroyed with Void damage they'll regenerate. The bigger Eidolons are straight up Immune to Bullets thanks to their impenetrable energy shield that can only be harmed by Void damage, which can't be dealt with any regular weapon. The only ones that are capable of hunting them are Operators after The War Within.
  • The Infestation also counts: They're a Hive Mind of creatures, mostly Grineer and Corpus crewmen, that got devoured and spat back out as horrible monstruosities whose only goal is to devour everything. Though some of them (Namely, most bosses) are capable of communication they're Always Chaotic Evil.
  • The Grineer offer their own version with the Ghouls. Technically they are alive, being only a different type of Grineer clones — but with how they act like feral mad beasts (their mental capacities are reduced even compared to regular Grineer), how they resemble walking corpses with their grotesque faces and emaciated (or on the contrary, bloated) bodies with putrid skin, how they burst out of the ground when ambushing you, and lastly with their monicker they can't help but resemble ravenous undead.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: The final two sequences for the Heart of Deimos quest give two different flavors of this:
  • The penultimate section has is a Stealth Based Injured Player Character Stage where, after having their warframe damaged by errant void energy, the Tenno must endure a No-Gear Level where they have to exit the Vault they had previously entered, now filled with active Necramechs.
  • The final segment, meanwhile, gives the player access to the Necramech "Snake", which they must maneuver back to the Heart of Deimos so that the heart can be healed. In direct contrast to the previous sequence, the player has the enormous power of a Necramech at their disposal, allowing them to mow down practically everything they encounter with ease. Said sequence ends in a boss battle against a rogue Necramech which is what killed the heart in the first place.
• The Paralyzer:
  • Corpus Prod Crewmen and Grineer Powerfists both use electrified clubs/shock prods to attack you. The Prod Crewmen don't do a whole lot of damage, but the hits have a high chance to make you stagger, leaving you open to other attacks or followup strikes. Powerfists are just Glass Cannons with the swing speed of a Mighty Glacier — huge warmup time, but they hit hard. The Tenno can also use these in the form of the Prova baton — devastating against Corpus, but usually less so against other factions.
  • The Lecta is a Tenno-designed reverse-engineered Prova, converted into a Stun Whip.
• Parrying Bullets: Every Tenno is capable of this — when switched to a melee weapon (any kind of weapon) they can use it to deflect incoming fire.
• Percent-Based Values: Mods apply a percentage increase (or decrease) in the stat they modify. For instance, the Serration mod provides a 200% increase to a rifle's damage at max rank. These effects can stack additively or multiplicatively depending on the type of mod. The effects of mods that affect a Warframe's Ability Strength, Ability Duration, Ability Deficiency, and Ability Range are displayed as percentage values in the Arsenal.
• Perfect Reload Command: The Sirocco Amp can be reloaded early by pressing the reload button halfway through the process. It also overcharges the next shot. Failing the command will simply play out the reload process normally.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling:
  • Prior to the Specters of the Rail update, the Interception mission located at Draco, Ceres was a popular area for power leveling due to the large swarms of high-level enemies you'd find there. With a good enough group, it was possible to fully level what would have been a mid-level Frame/weapon. With the update's overhaul to the Star Chart, Ceres is now a mid-level planet, and Draco has been converted to a Survival mission, killing the node's popularity for good. The new most popular power leveling nodes are Hydron (Defense) and Berehynia (Interception) on Sedna, and Akkad (Defense) on Eris.
  • Salacia (Mobile Defense) on Neptune plays this trope straight for Archwing equipment.
  • Sanctuary Onslaught was seemingly designed to be this. Tasking players with fighting increasingly difficult hoards of enemies, gaining affinity and focus at the same time, while earning Void Relics after clearing each area. With an affinity boost active it is possible to fully level rank 1 weapons to max in a single mission. There are also no penalties for failure either, with players keeping all their rewards if they fail to clear an area, and being free to leave by refusing to go on to the next.
  • While their presence is completely random, sometimes Sorties may generate with Eximus Stronghold as a modifier, which replaces nearly all the spawns with Eximus enemies who often grant several thousand points of affinity per kill, potentially even more with boosters and stealth kills. Once you complete a sortie you're allowed to replay the missions its comprised of endlessly until the next sortie cycles through, though Eximus enemies are tough, especially in large numbers, Eximus Stronghold missions are invaluable for putting several Forma into your 'Frames and weapons in incredibly short amounts of time. As the cherry on top, the high volume of high level Eximus enemies means you'll be seeing a LOT of Riven Slivers.
  • In terms of leveling Operator abilities and gaining large amounts of focus very fast, the Zariman Ten-Zero is one of the best places to do so. Why? Both the exclusive Thrax units and the Void Angels award rather large amounts of focus points for killing them (2500 per Thrax, 15,000 per Angel). These foes also have a chance to drop otherwise expensive and powerful Operator arcanes upon death.
  • After completing The Duviri Paradox you unlock the repeatable Duviri content, in which you'll not only encounter the aforementioned Thrax units for the purposes of Operator abilities, you'll also encounter large amounts of Dominus Thrax's false Dax, who are worth XP on par with Eximus enemies, and you'll be seeing a lot of them. If one of your choices available in Duviri is a weapon or Warframe who you're still leveling, taking them into Duviri will likely end with them leveling to max over the course of your run.
  • Omnia Fissures, introduced in Dante Unbound, let you crack open any relic type and are located on (among other places) the straight examples of Yuvarium (Conjunction Survival, which drops Voruna's parts and several Arcanes) and Tuvul Commons (Void Cascade, the primary way to farm Thrax.) What's notable about them besides combining their native rewards with Prime parts, however, is that scaling freezes during Void Fissures, meaning that on Steel Path, you can farm those and Acolyte drops in relative peace without mounting pressure. An hour on base Yuvarium will get close to the level cap, but an hour on Omnia Yuvarium is by comparison a stiff breeze once you have a spot locked down.
• Perpetual Beta: The game has been in "open beta" for over two years now with no end in sight. A huge number of major storyline events (and their corresponding exclusive rewards) are now inaccessible for anyone who missed them waiting for the game to "launch" before they start playing.
• Personal Space Invader: Leeches launched by Leech Ospreys will drain your health until you knock them off by swinging your melee weapon. Latchers launched by Grineer Seekers can only be taken off by rolling.
• Photo Mode: Captura is this, although only in special maps accessed through the customization screen in the player's arsenal. The player can spawn in enemies and alter lighting and light sources, as well as slow down time to capture acrobatic stunts and even plot a path of an Orbital Shot. It is essentially a developer tool for creating cinematics that was made user-friendly enough for the players.
• Pink Mist: Blasting Grineer melee troopers in the head can pulverize said head and thus leave little but a stump of a neck behind. Also (as mentioned above), headshots that don't kill one of the common Infested have a chance to blow out a nice big chunk of their upper torso along with taking off their head!
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: An Infested Juggernaut is much smaller than one would expect from its name and roars that it can emit.
• Playing Both Sides: The Tenno in the Gradivus Dilemma event. The Tenno that fought with the Grineer did so to rescue their comrades. The ones that fought with the Corpus did so to weaken the Grineer, and when the event was over the Lotus tells you that a retrieval team was already heading to rescue the captured Tenno anyway.
• Play Every Day: Warframe provides rewards for every cumulative day logged in, called a 'Daily Tribute'; for the first 1,000 days, rewards include a set of unique weapons (the Zenith rifle, Azima pistol, Zenistar heavy blade and Sigma and Octantis sword and shield) at 100, 300, 500 and 700 days and primed mods at 200, 400, 600, and 900. Other rewards include non-prime weapon and warframe blueprints, resource, affinity and credit boosters, Endo, rare resources, and Riven mods.
• Playing with Fire:
  • The Ember Warframe, who can use various fire powers to incinerate lightly-armoured foes. Her powers are devastating when used against the Infested due to their fire vulnerability.
  • Some of the Elite Mooks can have a skill that allows them to create a big wall of fire that deals damage and knockback.
• Point of No Return: Upon starting the New War, the player is given a warning asking if they really want to start this quest, because it will last several hours and cannot be exited from once started.
• Poisonous Person: Saryn, who, as her name suggests, revolves around area-denial by way of using extremely corrosive poison.
• Portmantitle: War + Frame. The name of the machine that are basically the protagonists.
• Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: An enemy crewship on Empyrean missions can be destroyed from the inside by damaging its reactor, which will cause both a fire inside the ship and eruption of explosions on its outer hull for about half a minute before one large explosion consumes the ship.
• Power Creep:
  • Weapons are infamous for this, particularly before Damage 2.0. For example, compare the older Vulkar sniper rifle to the newer Vectis — the Vectis is significantly more powerful, ammo efficient, and crit-seeking. Damage 2.0 brought some sense back the balance, with the introduction of more stats to modify other than "it does more damage/ammo/rate of fire" that lead to Damage 1.0's power creep. However, Prime versions of older weapons take this to the next level:
  • The earliest Primes were very marginally superior to their non-Prime variants, whereas the newest Primes make their vanilla versions look like Joke Items in comparison. Frost Prime, one of the first, has a minor boost in armor, while the newer Volt Prime has a massive boost in the base stats of his original, especially the ever-important Energy. Burston and Sicarus Prime have a miniscule performance boost over their originals; Soma and Vectis Prime have double the clip of their originals for starters, along with large increases to nearly every valuable stat.
• Power Fist: Comes in two flavors:
  • Proper Fist Weapons will turn your Tenno into a Boxing Battler, punching enemies into oblivion.
  • Sparring Weapons are a set of brass knuckles and reinforced toes strapped onto your Tenno's fists and boots respectively, and incorporates kicks in the mix, turning your Tenno into a Barefisted Monk.
• Powered Armor: Grineer mix this with their ubiquitous cybernetics. Warframes also appear to greatly increase the users strength, allows the Tenno to literally punch an enemy in half and swing two meter long swords.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The titular warframes, as revealed by the Second Dream quest, are powered (and controlled), by an Operator, a human child who survived the Zariman Ten Zero incident.
• Power Nullifier:
  • The Stalker has an ability that lets him remove any Warframe buffs, such as Rhino's Iron Skin, stunning the player in the process. One of the upgraded Hyena models has the same ability.
  • Corpus Nullfiers have devices that project a large, spherical shield that prevents a Warframe from using abilities. They also absorb bullets, strangely enough.
  • Corpus Comba and Scrambus units have special helmets that neutralize certain categories of Warframe powers (e.g. stealth powers, damage powers). Unlike Nullifiers, there's no big bubble to go with it, which is a bit of a mixed blessing: they're harder to spot, but much easier to kill once you do.
• Precursors: The Orokin, apparently. They once had a whole civilization before the Great Offscreen War in the background of the story, but now they're gone, and only relics remain, plus the towers that the Tenno use as base. If the codex for the Stalker indicates anything, the reason they're gone is because the Tenno killed them all.
• The Power of Glass: Gara, the Glass Warrior, is a manipulator of glass who sunders her foes with adamantine shards, reflects enemy attacks through enchanted mirrors, and reshapes the landscape with molten crystal.
• Power Up Letdown: After completing "The Second Dream", you are rewarded with Broken War, a shortsword made from a fragment of the Shadow Stalker's BFS. It's possible to upgrade it back into its full-sized state, but most players will advise against this. While War does more damage, this damage is mostly of the Impact element, while Broken War deals primarily Slash damage: Slash is considered one of the most powerful elements due to its associated Status Effect dealing Damage Over Time that ignores armor. Shortswords also have much faster attack animations, making them much easier and more practical to wield. One last blow against the full War is that Broken War comes pre-upgraded with an Orokin Catalyst, a rare item that doubles its mod capacity. If you craft it back into War, it'll lose that Catalyst since it's technically a whole new weapon now. The Broken War vs. War comparison is generally seen as turning one of the best shortswords in the game into a rather mediocre greatsword: if you want to use that kind of weapon, there are more viable options available that don't require you to sacrifice another great weapon.
• Primal Stance: A few Warframes' Agile Stance animations have this look to them.
• Properly Paranoid: On Kuva Fortress you may occasionally find land mines placed inside ventilations shafts. Sounds ridiculous at first, but considering that a crawl space is a perfect way for someone like a cyber space ninja to sneak around, it makes perfect sense — noone but the Tenno can trigger those mines.
• Protagonist Title: The players are Warframes.
• Protection Mission: Defense missions, which see you defending a cryopod (or Orokin Reactor, or other various objectives) containing a Warframe against waves of enemies. Fortunately, the pod/reactor regenerate their shields and health fairly quickly if you can keep the enemies off it, making the missions reasonably easy.
• Psychic Powers: The Nyx Warframe uses these to make enemies fight for you, launch a volley of telekinetically-guided force-bolts, and cause all nearby enemies to attack each other at random. The Phorid also has similar bolts.
• Pumpkin Person: There's a seasonal "Dullahan Mask" cosmetic that replaces the head of a Warframe equipped with it with a Jack O' Lantern.
• The Purge: The Red Veil seeks this outcome for the entire solar system. If the Stalker is to believed, the Tenno rose up against the Orokin and exterminated all of them after the end of the war.
• Punched Across the Room: Actually justified with the Obex, which are essentially gravity-displacement knuckles that hit like a truck.
• Pun: During Kuva Fortress raids, one of the Grineer Queens will broadcast an announcement regarding the reports of a lack of positivity on the harvesting floor. Her solution is to reverse the batteries of the Grineer workers.[^note As in, make a negative charge a positive one.
• Punny Name:
  • Saryn, which is a homophone for "Sarin", a potent nerve toxin. See also; Snipetron Sniper Rifle.
  • The Supra, Latin for 'Above' as well as sounding like 'Super', has the highest raw DPS in the game.
  • The Penta grenade launcher features a five-round magazine.
• Puzzle Boss:
  • The Jackal has a super-shield on its torso that effectively nullifies all incoming damage, and thus its health can only be depleted if you reduce one of its legs to zero health; this causes it to fall over and disables the super-shield, rendering its torso vulnerable for a few seconds.
  • The Razorback is similar to the Jackal, with an added layer of complexity: its legs are shielded too, and the only way to knock one of them out is to hack one of the nearby Bursas to attack it for you.
• Quantity vs. Quality: A handful of Tenno, specially trained and superiority in weapons, versus hordes of degenerating clones and brainwashed mooks.
• Radar Is Useless: In certain missions, the Grineer can invoke this with their Regulators — should the player be detected, the Regulators can disrupt the player's radar until they either move out of its range or destroy the machine.
• Ragdoll Physics: Enemies launched skywards by Vauban's Bounce pads will ragdoll helplessly until they land, giving you time to shoot them out of the air — this is on top of enemies ragdolling on death, which can lead to situations described under Blown Across the Room above and Railing Kill below. The same goes for your Warframe when you hit an obstacle too hard when on a K-Drive.
• Railing Kill: Get yourself a Bo, find a big group of Grineer, and fight them in one of those rooms that takes place on a big catwalk. Go on, it'll be fun.
• Ramming Always Works: With your Railjack it does. Fully mastering the Pilot intrinsic lets you use your railjack as a ram, damaging enemy craft that you plow through. Archwing Slingshot also lets you do this with your Tenno and turn yourself into a living missile, allowing you to board enemy crewships by bursting through their hulls to the inside, and one-shot smaller craft by colliding into them.
• Random Drop: Everything, basically. Some are rare, some not so rare. Even the regular rare frame parts may take several runs due to the Random Number God not smiling up on you. Equinox is especially annoying — eight parts required as opposed to the usual four.
• Random Drop Booster: the Resource Drop Chance Booster and Mod Drop Chance Booster doubles the chances of resources and mods dropping respectively.
• Randomly Generated Levels: Every level is procedurally generated using 'pieces' that are put together, much like Diablo, Hellgate: London, or Torchlight.
• Randomly Generated Quests:
  • After completing The War Within, players can access sorties, daily quests consisting of 3 high level missions, each with randomly selected objectives and conditions that make them extra harder (lower energy pools for players, weapon restrictions, magnetic anomalies, radiation hazards and such). Completing all three missions rewards the player with one of the rewards listed in the sortie menu.
  • Bounty missions in landscape areas are made-up from 3 to 5 stages scattered around the map, all but the last one being selected randomly from a pool of mission types available for that area. Each completed stage rewards the squad with one reward chosen randomly from a list given in the bounty menu.
• Random Loot Exchanger:
  • Transmutation lets you take four unranked mods and, at the cost of a small amount of credits, turn them into one random other mod. If all four mods have the same polarity or rarity level, the resulting mod will have a higher chance of matching these traits, but there's always an element of randomness.
  • Riven Mods can be fused with a substance called Kuva to re-randomize their attributes, which can be repeated at increasing Kuva costs. With the use of a Riven Transmuter, four of these Riven Mods can be fused into a completely new one, just like regular mods.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: All of the Grineer bosses are vastly superior to the common marines in combat. Tyl Regor is a scientist, for instance, but can easily tear you apart in melee combat. Sargas Ruk? He's got some kind of flame gun strapped to one arm and some tough-as-nails armour that can only be broken through by destroying the heatsinks. Councilor Vay Hek? He's a giant freaky cyborg-mecha guy with a Big F'ing Shotgun strapped to one arm.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: The animation for attacking a knocked-down enemy with fist weapons like the Furax has your Warframe pounce on them and punch them as many times as possible, which usually results in them exploding.
• Rare Candy:
  • Syndicate medallions/Voidplumes/Voca are hard to find objects scattered throughout mission tilesets^note the former through Syndicate missions, the latter two in the Zariman and Albrecht’s labs, respectively in bunches of eight. They can be traded in for Standing, with the first one bypassing their daily standing caps. Universal medallions also exist and can be traded in at any syndicate, but are extremely rare.
  • Eidolon shards can be obtained through hunting the Eidolons found on the Plains at night, and while they are used to rank up with the Quills, their primary purpose is to be converted into extra Focus for Operator abilities that bypasses the daily focus cap. Sanctuary Onslaught also occasionally drops a synthetic variant that gives less Focus than the real thing.
  • Archon shards can be obtained from endgame level content (such as hunting down Archons post-The New War, looting Netracells or buying one from Bird-3). Each one directly boosts a stat like health, armor, secondary crit damage, and each frame is able to accept up to five of them. The Cavia also sell the ability to merge them into variants with specialized but more potent buffs, and merging three Shards into a rarer and stronger Tauforged variant.
• Rare Random Drop:
  • The Blaze mod and the Sunlight & Moonlight Jadeleaf stands out for many. Additionally, anything you seek will typically be much rarer than it should be. Prime components, corrupted mods, Warframe or weapon parts comes to mind.
  • The illusive nemeses (Stalker, Zanuka, and the Grustrag Three) all have special drops. They are also quite hard to encounter, and while you are guaranteed a drop, you might not get what you need.
  • The Kubrow Egg, which is required as part of the Howl of the Kubrow main quest. The average rate appears to require destroying 50-200 Kubrow Dens, although you could instead bribe your way past the quest by purchasing an egg for a modest 10 platinum.
  • Armored Agility, a Nightmare mod, was discovered to have less than a 1% drop rate shortly after its release.
  • Parts for any alternate landing crafts are notoriously hard to farm. Mantis parts can only be found in Rare and Reinforced Containers, Scimitar parts drop from the three hunter squads (Stalker, Zanuka, and the Grustrag 3), and Xiphos parts are an exceptionally-rare reward for finding all three resource caches in Reactor Sabotage missions.
  • Kavats make obtaining a Kubrow look like child's play. First, you'll need to craft an upgrade for your ship's incubator; the upgrade needs 10 DNA samples, which you have a 15% chance to obtain whenever you scan a feral Kavat. Feral Kavats live only on Orokin Derelicts and are somewhat fragile and normally stay cloaked, making it difficult to find them in the first place. Once you've done that, you'll need to gather up 10 more DNA samples for each Kavat you intend to breed. You can skip the grind through the Market, but the prices are ultimately steeper than for Kubrows: DNA samples will run you five Platinum apiece, while the incubator upgrade can be purchased for a whopping 175 Platinum.
  • Prime equipment is behind a triple rare random drop — You need a relic to drop, the relic has to have the part you want as a possibility, and then you have to get that possibility when you open the relic. Repeat once for each part, of which there are usually four.
• Reality Bleed: This is how Duviri was created; it started off as a purely fictional universe in an allegorical storybook about how to keep one's emotions in check and the consequences of failing to do so, but the Drifter's mind, interacting with the Void, caused it be made into a conceptual manifestation, along with several characters from the book.
• Really 700 Years Old: In the Warframe universe, 105 is the new 15.
• Recollection Sidequest: Throughout the game you can find "cephalon fragments" and scan them to create entries in your codex containing not just information about the game's world but also containing a secret recording in which your ship's cephalon talks about his past that he has removed from his own memory.
• Recurring Element: A minor example, but all of the Landscapes in the game have some form of canid carnivore in or near them - the Plains of Eidolon has kubrows (which are bred in Cetus by Master Teasonai), the Orb Vallis has Kubrodons and Stovers (which wander the wilds), and the Cambion Drift has Predasites (which also wander in the wilds, but are pack hunters).
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The visor of The Sergeant's helmet is vivid red, although it can be a little hard to see. All other Corpus Crewmen have blue visors.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The Grineer are a hammy, scrappy-looking, militaristic propaganda-fueled military state with an overall orange-and-green aesthetic style with lots of steel mills and hot vents, who frequently deploy flamethrower-armed shock troops and control both the humid jungles of Earth and the arid deserts of Mars. The Corpus are calculating, unfeeling, backstabbing bureaucrats with ships built out of cold sterile metal hallways with blue Tron Lines; they have at least one freeze ray in their arsenal and they fill Exploding Barrels with liquid nitrogen; their bases are built into the glaciers of Europa and the icy peaks of Pluto and Venus.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Unless you or one of your teammates has equipped the Rejuvenation Aura, health doesn't regenerate passively. It can, however, be recovered by picking up red Health Orbs, using a Health Restore (that has to be equipped prior to the mission), getting healed by an ally, or using a handful of special mod and weapon effects. Shields, however, regenerate by themselves.
• Reluctant Warrior: Kavor Grineer defectors, who deserted from Sargas Ruk's army after getting tired of commiting atrocities, so broken and disgusted of various horrors of war that they decided to swear off fighting completely and live lives of complete peace. They are still forced to take up arms after their ships were attacked by the Infestation.
• The Remnant: The Tenno, the only living legacy left of the Orokin's reign — or so it seems. The Stalker's codex hints that he's part of another Orokin warrior caste — one that defended the Orokin, instead of attacking for them. The reason he wages war on the Tenno is because the Tenno murdered the Orokin.
• Remote Body: Although the Warframes are initially implied to be Powered Armor, the Second Dream reveals that the Tenno control them in safety from a far-off location. They're still incredibly valuable Precursor weapons, so losing a Warframe is considered nigh-unacceptable.
• Required Secondary Powers: Averted. Elemental-themed Warframes aren't immune to their own elements e.g. an Ember can take fire damage from environments or Grineer weapons, a Frost can have his shields reduced or be slowed by cold, a Volt can be harmed by shock prods or the electrified water in derelicts, and a Saryn can be affected by Infested toxins.
• Resource-Gathering Mission: Excavation missions, where Tenno are required to guard excavators against increasingly powerful waves of enemies to acquire cryotic for crafting and various prizes such as credits and Void Relics. Unfortunately, the excavators have a tendency to run out of power, forcing Tenno to seek out enemies carrying battery packs to recharge them with.
• Resource Reimbursement: The Bounce Back Decree (available in Duviri and in the Circuit) refunds 25% of the Energy spent on casting Abilities.
• Resurrective Immortality: Vulpaphylas have their own sub-species exclusive Devolution mods that allow them to revert to a larval form upon losing all of their health. After 30 seconds as a sentry-like floating mass of Infection, they'll turn back into their vulpine forms good as new. Zigzagged with the Tek Assault mod though, as a long-standing bug means Tek Assault's ability to ignore fatal blows activates the Devolution cooldown anyway while keeping the Vulpaphyla vulnerable, meaning they can die during this 30 second window if the Tek Assault fails to proc.
• Return to Shooter:
  • An ability available to the Mag Warframe and a certain boss, which causes bullets from the victim's firearms to strike them instead. It doesn't interfere with melee attacks or abilities, though.
  • The Reflection module effect is a minor variant of this.
• The Reveal:
  • The Second Dream drops one of these after another:
    • The Grineer sealabs on Uranus are looking for Sentient corpses.
    • The Moon, missing from Earth's orbit throughout living memory, is both an Orokin base AND concealed in the Void.
    • The Orokin were humans, as evidenced by the Sentient Hunhow addressing Alad V as one.
    • The Orokin base on the Moon is the hiding place of the true Tenno.
    • The Tenno are human children, whose exposure to the Void gave them powerful psychic abilities as well as the ability to remotely-control Warframes, but also made them dangerously-unstable as a result.
    • The Lotus is a former Sentient, having taken a human form.
    • Warframes appear to have their own degree of sentience, as the player's Warframe manages to reactivate and break War, banishing Hunhow, despite the player Tenno being in no position to control it.
    • A meta one, as the player Tenno removes their helmet and the player is prompted, with no foreshadowing, to customize their human appearance and choose the Focus that represents their manifestation of their Tenno powers, separate from their Warframe.
  • The War Within makes several more.
    • Teshin is a Dax soldier, a member of the Orokin Empire's warrior caste.
    • The Grineer Queens are actually two Orokin who survived the fall of the Empire and have been using a scepter to make Teshin their unwilling servant and spy.
    • The Orokin nobility would preserve their own life by transferring their consciousness into children and adolescence once their own became too old. Destroying the mind of the original occupant in the process.
  • Apostasy: Prologue shows that Ballas, the long dead Orokin who created the Warframes, is alive and well.
  • The Sacrifice drops a few bombs.
    • Warframes were created when the Orokin forcibly infected people with the Infestation, turning their own warriors and other innocents into living weapons to be used in their war against the Sentients.
    • The Tenno do not control the Warframes using their void powers, but by empathizing with the tortured soul trapped within, easing their pain, and allowing the two to work together.
• Re Vision: Regarding the Tenno and Warframes, it was generally assumed Tenno were in the Warframe, given nearly every character referring to the Warframes in person as 'Tenno', down to the Lotus, as well as the first beta trailer saying the Warframes were suits. This was later changed to the Tenno being mutated psychic children of the Orokin who remotely pilot the Warframe, which itself is a biomechanical construct.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: There's at least four revolver-style weapons in the game, each of which are powerful in their own right:
  • The Vasto revolver is easily one of the best sidearms in the early-game, being much faster than the Lex, and doing more damage than the default pistol. It's also very accurate. It comes in a primed version, combining the same high fire rate with even more raw stopping power, and an akimbo version with comparable critical chance and status. With proper modding, it can easily compete in Warframe's endgame.
  • The Magnus is no slouch either. With base damage comparable to the Vasto, it boasts a 25% chance to land random critical hits, as well as a 25% chance to proc status effects. Like the Vasto, it also has an akimbo version. However, adding enough mods will allow its (seemingly low) base damage to far outstrip the Vasto series.
  • The Pandero is easily one of the most beloved sidearms in the game, with massive physical damage, and high status, critical chance, and critical multiplier stats. It even has a fan-the-hammer alternate fire that lets loose every loaded bullet in one burst, earning it a reputation for massive burst damage.
  • The Astilla shotgun is also a fully-automatic revolver firing slugs that explode in a spray of glass shards, and capable of massive amounts of status damage. Within months of its release, it was already seen as one of the greatest primaries in the game.
• Reward for Removal: The Helminth can be upgraded to subsume any standard (that is, non-Prime) warframe, both freeing up an inventory slot and giving an option to override any other warframe's ability with one of the subsumed warframe's skills.
• Ridiculous Repossession: The people of Fortuna live under the constant fear that the Corpus will repossess their body parts, mechanized or otherwise, to repay the debts they owe on things like their body modifications, their living space, and their vocational training, not to mention most of them inherited debt from their parents. In the most extreme cases, some people are brain-shelved after having their entire bodies repossessed. The quest Vox Solaris starts when Eudico tells the player that they should talk to Thursby and buy stuff from him, as he's very close to having a repo order put out on him.
• Roaming Enemy: Most Field Bosses have varying spawning conditions, such as killing enough enemies at specific points or actions made in other missions. The spawn chance and countdown also vary. But even if they spawn, the player can usually opt to completely ignore them.
• Robot War: If you can believe it, it's happened at least three times.
  • There was a minor game event that played out in 2015, where Corpus security proxies rebelled.
  • There was the Old War, where the Sentients — terraforming robots of the Orokin — rebelled against the Orokin.
  • And finally, it's implied that there was a war against thinking machines of some sort in the distant past of the Orokin Empire. Little is known about that.
• Rock Beats Laser: Technology used by the Corpus is noticeably more advanced than the crude and repurposed Grineer tech. And yet there are multiple cases where more primitive Grineer solutions produce better result than Corpus high-tech. Examples include:
  • Corpus units use Deflector Shields as their primary defence while Grineer just carry bulky armour. Not only Grineer armour provides much better protection on higher levels, it's also much more difficult to degrade than the shields, plus the shields can be bypassed altogether by Toxic or Gas damage, making them completely irrelevant.
  • Corpus Shockwave Stomp is a slow-moving energy wave that crawls over the terrain and can be simply jumped over. Grineer use proximity explosive blasts that come out faster and actually spread in all three dimensions.
  • Corpus Laser barriers inflict small damage on you and knock you down (unless you roll through them, in which case they don't even do that). Grineer energy screens affect you with Magnetic proc, that completely drains your energy, cripples your shields and scrambles your screen and interface.
  • When it comes to deployable cover, Corpus units use vector shield generators that create force-field barriers. Grineer use rapidly-inflatable bulwarks seemingly made out of bulletproof material. Not only are bulwarks just as effective at stopping your bullets as force-fields, they do a better job as a cover since they protect larger area. Not to mention probably being much more cost-effective.
• Rocket Jump: The Grineer-created Tonkor grenade launcher is designed for this. Unlike its Corpus counterpart, the Penta, it does minimal splash damage to the user, allowing the explosions to propel the wielder to new heights.
• Rocket-Powered Weapon: The Grineer are big fans. The Jat Kittag heavy hammer has a pair of jet engines mounted behind the hammer head, allowing it to attack almost as fast as a regular weapon while simultaneously stunlocking the enemy. With the Crushing Ruin stance, the rockets can be engaged to launch the player forward while spinning the hammer to murderize anything in the way. Ground-slam attacks will send enemies flying across the room. Meanwhile, the Halikar is a rocket-powered, guided throwing mace which automatically returns to its user and can even disarm the enemy it hits.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Prior to its rework in Update 15, the optional player-versus-player "Conclave" combat was an extreme case of rocket tag. Players could utilize the same weapons and abilities they used in normally missions, leading to players mutually annihilating each other with hitscan weapons that did seven times more damage than players had health, on top of players being able to zip across the map at 70mph by "coptering" (getting a boost of speed from using a sliding melee attack, over and over). The post-rework Conclaves are still very fast paced (albeit dropping sheer speed for more agility) but severely limits what weapons and mods players can use to prevent everyone from being a One-Hit-Point Wonder. Over time, more Warframes and weapons were balanced for use in the Conclave, and by Spectres of the Rail almost all equipment is permitted in Conclave loadouts.
• Rule of Cool:
  • Update 6 added wall-running and ziplines. This has since evolved into a variety of stylish mobility options; agile Tenno can easily make it from start to finish without ever touching the ground, and many players will do so on instinct while gunning down enemies, making missions look like the world's deadliest game of "The Floor is Hot Lava" ever.
  • Gunblades incorporate slashes and gunshots with stylish flips and twirls.
  • For no discernable reason other than this trope, Tenno will flip the Marelok pistol when reloading or firing it while zoomed in.
  • The Euphona Prime, a Tenno lever-action shotgun (and a sidearm) with no non-Prime equivalent, is flip-cocked every single time it's fired.
  • Many of the stances for melee weapons can be best described as "how can we make [weapon X] look as cool as possible?"
  • Grineer weapons design philosophy centers around any number of outlandishly brutal combinations, such as rocket-powered maces and meteor hammers, and boomerangs, whips with meat grinders attached to the business end, swords and knives with electrically-superheated blades, man-portable saw-blade launchers, radiation-spewing pistols, and handheld flak cannons.
• Rule of Symbolism: When you first visit Fortuna your warframe does their typical drop-on-three-points-from-ceiling arrival - only this time their landing is noticeably heavier, and it takes a moment for them to rise up that they usually don't need. Ostensibly it's because the drop was higher than usual, but the symbolism is clear - the oppression is so heavy that even the Tenno with their strength can feel its weight.
• Running Gag:
  • Every time Mag is portrayed in a good light or even seen, people will joke that the devs needs to nerf her.
  • Any art featuring Rhino will be accompanied by complaints that his codpiece is too small.
  • Fans jokingly claiming that they deleted their account and the game and think about suing DE upon seeing minor problems such as a typo.
• Rushmore Refacement: There's a cliff face on Phobos◊ that Vay Hek has carved into his likeness.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • The Gradivus Dilemma was trying to create this for the players. Either support the Corpus, sacrificing a number of sleeping Tenno they managed to get their hands on, but prevent the Grineer from growing stronger. Or support the Grineer to free said Tenno but allow them to grow stronger creating an imbalance of power in the solar system. Players were less than happy when they didn't get a third option. To make the choice all the more problematic in hindsight. A trailer shows Corpus leader Alad V. cutting an Excalibur Warframe with Tenno inside in six parts to sell them individually, hinting on the fate that would have been possible for the sleeping Tenno.
  • Tubemen of Regor did a better job of it; Alad was genuinely sympathetic in his desire to purge himself of the infestation, but at the same time his prior actions made it tempting to side with Nef, if not to keep Alad out of the picture then to at least spite him. The fact that both sides offered worthwhile rewards meant Tenno might actually consider both sides this time around (and in fact did, as Alad won on PC and Xbox, but Nef won on PS4.)
• Scarf of Asskicking: The Syandanas, scarf-like customization options for your Warframes.
• Scolded for Not Buying: If the player does not buy anything from him and is not equipped with a Prime item, Baro Ki'Teer will often comment about how the player has something to work towards, implying the items are out of their reach, or recommend Darvo as an alternative, implying that he finds Darvo's merchandise is at a lower tier than his.
• Sculpted Physique: Warframes are combat biomechanical suits seamlessly blending organic and mechanical components to form humanoid shapes closely replicating human physique and anatomy. There is a very good reason for that.
• Second Hour Superpower: Prior to Update 11, you didn't get to equip your first ability until you gained a level, unless you had an Aura mod to give you some extra mod capacity. The game was a standard third-person shooter before then. Update 11 lowered the base cost for first abilities to zero points, allowing you to equip them for free, until Update 15 removed ability mods altogether, making abilities an innate part of your Warframe and guaranteeing that you start with your first ability unlocked.
• Sequel Number Snarl:
  • Update 11.5, which included jungle tilesets on Earth and the Oberon Warframe, was not preceded by an Update 11.4. Justified, as they spent over a month hyping its release and wanted to finish it before taking a holiday break.
  • A worse offender is Update 14.5, which followed Update 14.2.4 after approximately 2 weeks of hyping.
  • Update 19 is the worst example by far, and it will probably hold that title for quite some time. Initially envisioned as a more traditional major update, U19 grew so large in scope that the developers decided to split it into three parts, each of which would be comparable in size to a "typical" major update. The first two parts, Lunaro and Specters of the Rail, came out more or less on schedule, but the final part, The War Within, was still taking too long, so a fourth part, The Silver Grove, got split off to tide players over; throughout this process, the developers abandoned the traditional numbering scheme entirely. Eventually, even relatively minor updates started getting unique names, until finally The War Within was released and picked back up at 19.0. For those of you keeping score at home, the final tally is seven named updates, plus associated sub-updates and hotfixes, between 18.14.2 (the last hotfix of U18) and 19.0.
• Series Fauxnale: Digital Extremes has explicitly compared "The New War" to Avengers: Endgame, noting that it will close out all the plot points opened up so far, but that there will be others to investigate (namely The Duviri Paradox, and Angels of the Zariman thereafter).
• Set Bonus:
  • Set mods have an additional effect whose power is multiplied by the number of mods in that set you currently have equipped.
  • The Incarnon forms of the Stalker's weapons, Dread, Despair, and Hate, have evolutions that require you to equip all three of them in order to get their full effect.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook:
  • Nyx's Mind Control and Chaos powers allow her to turn enemies into temporary allies, or cause all enemies to attack each other at random. Mind Controlling the Heavy Gunner or Bombard at the back of a Grineer squad can be very effective — or you can use it to make Infested turn around and kill their own medics!
  • The combined elemental 'Radiation' does the same effect, but only on enemies closest to the target.
  • Infested Alad V can do this to the players. If he manages to snag the Dread-toting Rhino...
  • Playing into his Vampire theme, Revenant's Enthrall does this as well, mind-controlling any enemy (though Eximus Units will take a little more set-up) and setting them to attack and convert any former allies that they damage. Any personally-enthralled units that are killed leave behind an energy pillar, and if they are killed with Revenant's Danse Macabre, those pillars will grant overshields.
• Shield Bash: Grineer Shield Lancers can sprint towards enemies and bash them with the shield, knocking them off their feet. In fact, the shield lancers used to immediately make a beeline towards the first enemy spotted in order to bash them. Shield and Sword type weapons often incorporate shield bashes and shield throws in some cases.
• Shield-Bearing Mook:
  • Grineer Shield Lancers. Whilst the shield is largely immune to small arms fire, it won't stop bullets with Punch-Through properties. The Shield Lancers themselves are relatively squishy, but have a nasty automatic pistol and can smack you with their shield to knock you down. Repetitively. Shield Lancers are not popular with the player base due to their habit of turning Tenno into pinballs.
  • Tenno will get themselves into the shield action as well, having access to the Sword and Shield weapon type, which includes weapons like the Silva and Aegis, a sword and shield made of pure fire. They can also get the Ack and Brunt, Tyl Regor's Axe and Shield combo, as well as the Centaur, a shield-sword hybrid Archwing weapon.
• Shockwave Stomp:
  • Shockwave Moa and Grineer Heavies. Certain bosses can do it too. The Shockwave Moa's is unusual in that the wave travels along the walls/floor/ceiling, and can be jumped over. Players can jump and melee for their own version (which varies in effectiveness depending on the melee weapon used; a massive battleaxe will send enemies tumbling, while attempting the same with a dagger is... ineffective), and the Rhino warframe also has one as an ability.
  • Rhino's Rhino Stomp is a literal version of this. Any player can also pull it off with the Heavy Impact mod, if falling from a high-enough height.
  • It's part of a moveset with melee weapons, but it requires you to be airborne, and looking down and pressing the Heavy Attack button.
  • The Sparring weapon type's Heavy Attack on the ground is a simple Axe Kick that craters the ground
• Shooting At Your Own Projectiles
  • Tenno have to throw canisters of depleted thermia at the iced-over vents of the Exploiter Orb and shoot the canisters to melt away the ice protecting the Orb's delicate parts.
  • The Quanta and its variants' Alternate Fire launches a cube that can be detonated with any weapon afterwards.
  • The Simulor and Synoid Simulor fire small orbs of energy that can be combined together when fired at each other to become more powerful.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Downplayed. Shotguns do suffer damage falloff after a certain point, but generally it only takes effect at a respectably long range and the penalty caps out high enough that they can still deal serious damage from afar. Some play it straighter than others, though, particularly the Euphona Prime shotgun pistol, whose alternate fire has an optimal range of 6 meters and minimum damage of 1%.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Played very straight. The Tigris, Hek, Corinth and Drakgoon are known for being some of the best guns in the game. With careful builds, any of them can wipe out a room full of enemies in seconds.
• Shout-Out:
  • Internal and highly complicated. Early on, back in 2004, Digital Extremes had drawn up a design document for a very ambitious game which they called Dark Sector. Unfortunately, they simply couldn't manage to successfully pitch it to any publisher in its state at that point, and so it went through multiple revisions until it turned into the darkSector that was actually published in 2008. Warframe is DE going back to their original design document and finally designing the game they wanted to make all those years ago. This article explains it all in more detail.
  • The 5.4 closed beta update was called Hammer Time. Also, it adds a giant hammer. Later referenced a second time as of Update 17, where Tyl Regor may randomly shout "It's hammer time!" during his fight.
  • One of Lech Kril's lines is "And I will strike down upon [Player Name] with great vengeance and furious anger!"
  • The iconic Glaive weapon from Dark Sector (itself a Shout-Out to the movie Krull) was added to the game as a usable weapon. The description is also a shout out to the game by calling it "the weapon of the first Tenno". This is made all the more apparent when using the Glaive weapon type in that you normally wield the weapon in tandem with a non-akimbo secondary.
  • The Tekna 9mm, the default pistol, was previously used in escort missions as a place holder for the hostage's weapon. Now it, along with the Spectre and Vekesk are both available as skins for secondaries.
  • Towards the Unreal series, an inevitability due to its shared development lineage:
    • The Miter blade launcher both references Unreal and Unreal Tournament, being a gun that fires out slow-moving sawblades.
    • The Drakgoon shrapnel cannon and Stug goo-launching pistol are also extremely similar to their Unreal precursors (the Flak Cannon and GES Bio Rifle, respectively).
    • The Quanta takes after the Shock Rifle, firing slow-moving energy cubes that can be detonated with the primary fire mode.
    • And later we also got the Zarr, which is even closer to the original Flak Cannon.
  • The Miter blade launcher also closely resembles Tribes' iconic Spinfusor, which also fires discs, albeit energy ones that explode.
  • Grineer Scorpions can pull you into melee range with a grappling hook.
  • The Grineer Guardsmen are Magna Guards in all but name.
  • Update 10 introduces scarves to our merry band of space ninja, similar to the ones seen in Shinobi and Strider.
  • A new weapon from Update 10 at first looked like it with the name Dakka Prime. though this turned out to be a longsword and more a reference to the city of Dhaka. After players complained about the misleading name it was renamed Dakra Prime.
  • Ember's old profile had the description for World On Fire with Some just want to watch the world burn.
  • Update 12.1.0 included a Flappy Bird-style hidden minigame.
  • Hydroid is a pirate with tentacle-like appendages coming from his mouth and the ability to control massive eldritch tentacles.
  • The Devstream Overview article for Update 15 makes note of the Archwing's fan-perceived similarity to a Gundam.
  • One possible mission style for the Archwing is called the Trench Run, and it involves the Tenno zipping through canyon-like passageways and through ship vent shafts. Speaking of Star Wars, a secret order of samurai-influenced warriors fighting against a corrupt empire that fields cloned stormtroopers and a Solar-spanning corrupt corporation that relies on robots seems familiar. The Grineer Dargyn (the standard Grineer enemy in Archwing) also shares the shape and design of the Slave One, albeit scaled down and unable to turn into a tank.
  • In the Archwing reveal trailer, Ordis complains that he's a ship AI, not a weapon.
  • When the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was still going around, the Corpus Crewmen involved selected Destiny's Ghost to be the next victim.
  • The Focus upgrades screen is extremely similar to the one from Shadow Warrior (2013) — the same font, each branch having a visual depiction in the style of uyiko-e of what the title for each power suggests, similar branches, and Asian-style music.
  • Some of the stance mods for melee weapons are this as well.
    • The Blind Justice Nikana Stance is a clear love-letter to the Zatoichi series, complete with holding the Nikana in a Reverse Grip.
    • The Vulpine Mask Rapier Stance references Zorro, whose name in Spanish literally means 'fox' and is known to favor the rapier.
    • The Galatine, Warframe's first BFS, is also the first weapon that starts off polarized for the Cleaving Whirlwind stance. This stance has a combo that, executed properly, causes the Tenno to spin around with the weapon held out dealing massive damage. Just like another well-known BFS-wielding scarf-wearing warrior. Demacia!!
  • Tyl Regor's boss fight has you go into a large chamber of his underwater base, where a giant golden statue of his likeness is gradually lit up by floodlights. As the fight goes on, Regor begins to shoot out the windows to let the ocean pour in; the resemblance this has to the Big Sister from BioShock 2 might be coincidental, but Digital Extremes did develop the multiplayer component of that game.
  • There exists a pair of bladed tonfa called Kronen.
  • Multiple Tennogen items (aka community-created cosmetic items) are clearly homages to other series. For example, the Mithra Heavy Sword skin very much brings to mind the Monado, and the Tengoken heavy blade skin resembles The Master Sword.
  • Titania's Profile trailer has Lotus referencing, of all things, Reading Rainbow with phrases such as "razorflies in the sky" and "you don't have to take my word for it".
  • Octavia's profile ends with the Lotus saying "If music be the food of death, play on, Tenno", a paraphrasing of the opening line of Twelfth Night.
  • The Steam achievement icon for the achievement "From out of the Sun" (shoot down 100 enemies in a Railjack) is a perfect recreation of the Rebel targeting computer display from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. From the same release, the achievement for entering the Dry Dock for the first time is called "Gonna Need a Bigger Boat" and the one for taking control of an enemy cruiser during a Railjack mission is called "I'm the Captain Now".
  • In one of The Glassmaker Nightwave event's crime scenes, one of the pieces of evidence is a radiometric datalog that gives marginal energy readout. The writer of the log notes "It's not great, not terrible".
  • When piloting the "Snake" Necramech during the Heart of Deimos quest, if you are killed, Father will shout, "Snake? SNNNNAAAAAAAKE!"
  • Occasionally, in Fortuna, Ticker will tell the player of Gara, and how she stood up to and slayed the Sentient war machine that became the Eidolons. Her analysis of this is as follows: "See, the value of stories isn't in telling you there are monsters, Stardust. It's in showing you they can be kicked square in the down-belows," a paraphrasing to Neil Gaiman's quote from Coraline, in turn paraphrased from G. K. Chesterton. ("Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.")
  • The Parazon is a Blade Below the Shoulder that is mounted under the Tenno's wrist, and is used to Mercy Kill low-health heavy enemies the way Ezio or Connor Kenway could...and given that it's also used for hacking, it's also a bit of an homage to Robocop
  • During Teshin's playable chapter of The New War, the manner in which Teshin pulls out the Typholyst's spiral-shaped, light blue core before crushing it in the palm of his hands strongly resembles the way Raiden harvests enemy electrolyte packs in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
  • Act 3 of The New War has you in your Railjack, needing to fire your Forward Artillery to get rid of a Murex that's blocking your path to jump to Praghasa. After pulling the trigger, Cephalon Cy says "Great shot, kid. That was one in a million."
• Sighted Guns Are Low-Tech: The vast majority of primary weapons have no sights. Inverted in-universe; the Tenno's sightless guns were actually designed to be low-tech enough that the "Sentients" couldn't control them.
• Silicon Snarker: Ordis, the Cephalon who runs the player's ship, often has more than a few biting comments towards certain people and situations.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Many of the best weapons and warframes in the Tenno arsenal fit the bill. This is also one of the Grineer's hats; they favor uncomplicated, brute-force weapons and equipment that are nonetheless both badass and effective.
  • Guns and other equipment -
    • The Corinth. Take a pump-action shotgun. Give it an underslung grenade launcher. Any questions?
    • The Tigris. The design for this gun is at least several thousand years old by the time of Warframe, but it can still absolutely eviscerate enemies ranging from ancient, semi-alien robots to elite cloned supersoldiers.
    • The Soma may be dolled up with the usual Tenno ornaments and made from futuristic materials, but it's still pretty much just a light machine gun that has virtually guaranteed crits (and excellent critical damage). You don't need to be more accurate; you just need more bullets in the air per second... in addition to Hunter Munitions so it has virtually guaranteed slash procs.
  • Warframes -
    • Mesa, The Gunslinger. She does not blow up the room, fill the air with poison, warp around through the void, or turn into sand. What she does do is shoot more and better than anybody else. Her ultimate simply involves whipping out a pair of Ace Custom revolvers and completely annihilating any enemy unlucky enough to be in her line of sight.
    • Rhino, the Mighty Glacier. A flat damage-buff that affects the entire team, a damage-resistance buff that scales with enemy level and makes him immune to Crowd Control, and an ultimate that can completely shut down an entire room of enemies for several crucial seconds.
    • Excalibur, the Master Swordsman. As one of the earliest-obtained frames in the game, and arguably Warframe's mascot, Excalibur nevertheless lives up to his namesake by being incredibly lethal with melee weapons of all shapes and sizes. Flashy? Not necessarily. Deadly? Absolutely.
    • Vauban, The Engineer Warframe. His gimmick boils down to "throw gadgets at the enemy," but said gadgets are capable of doing everything from defending objectives to immobilizing fleeing targets. When all you have are grenades, everything is a demo target.
• Sissy Villain: Defeating the uninfected Alad V will make him cry pathetically.
• Slobs Versus Snobs: Grineer vs Corpus conflict has overtones of this. The first ones are crude, militaristic and aggressive degenerating cloned brutes, whose afflictions very often include mental deficiencies, while the latter ones are a technologicaly advanced mercantilistic cult with a very arrogant attitude. They hate each other.
• Slide Attack: Generally more powerful than regular attacks, and are easy to pull off. Used to be a key part of "coptering", a physics glitch that players used to fling themselves around at bullet velocity, but with coptering patched out, they're back to just being good for killing stuff.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World:
  • The Corpus Outpost set, consisting of a set of Corpus Outposts and structures built into a big ol' snowy and mountainous landscape. Fortunately it's not slippy or slidey, but there's definitely a lot of snow and ice. There's also the 'ice' enviro-hazard, which halves your shield capacity for the duration of the mission. Yes, you can have the ice hazard on the Corpus Outpost set.
  • While also not as slippy or slidey, the Corpus Ice Planet set is as its name suggests: a planet full of ice. There's even a sign on the set that says Slippery When Wet in Corpus.
• Small, Secluded World: Orokin Void Towers, which appear to be part safehouse, part fortress, and part panic room; loaded with traps and defenses, and guarded by a sinister 'Neural Sentry' that seems to be capable of assuming control of weak-willed invaders, or 'reanimating' those who fall victim to its traps.
• Smoke Out:
  • An ability of the Ash warframe (also used by a couple of the bosses) makes the user disappear in a puff of smoke and renders them invisible for a few seconds. It also staggers all enemies in a small radius around the user, so it's very useful for making a quick getaway.
  • Stalker possesses a variation in his Dispel; it removes ALL buffs and toggled-effects from Warframes, as well as staggering them. Worst of all, it has absolutely no cooldown or costs. If players try to cheap out Stalker with buffs or channeled spells, Stalker will cheap them right back with a Cycle of Hurting.
• Smug Snake: Alad V., a Corpus goon who works directly for its board of directors. During the Gradivus event, siding with him will have him passively aggressively taunt the player over the soon-to-be loss of the Tenno that he managed to kidnap from cryosleep. Fighting against him will have him offer you twice whatever Sargas Ruk's paying you to beat the hell out of his forces.
• So Last Season: The PS4 trailer shows Volt shooting at a Zanuka with a Soma, but to little effect. This is reflected by Damage 2.0 (introduced in the same update as Zanuka) making the Soma not-so-top-tier.
• Sons of Slaves: The Grineer were created by the Orokin Empire as deformed slave workers to build up their decadent architecture. After the fall of the Orokin, they used the cloning technology built to create them to manufacture an army loyal to the Twin Queens and start an empire of their own. Unbeknownst to them, the Queens are Orokin in Grineer bodies.
• Sniper Pistol: The Lex handcannon is pinpoint accurate even over long range. Though it lacks a proper scope for optical zoom like the Snipetron or Seer, it can be a very effective sniping weapon. The Lato Vandal has a similar accuracy. You can also potentially turn any side-arm into this, provided you use a mod that increases the zoom distance. Finally, Mesa's Peacemakers could originally destroy any enemy she can see (with great efficiency at that) even if they're across the map; this was later nerfed to a maximum range of 50 meters.
• Space Is Cold: Corpus and Solaris singing traditions invoke this trope. "Sleeping in the Cold Below" is a euphemism for death, while it and "We All Lift Together" refer to the vastness of space as "the mist", with the Solaris calling it "the cold mist".
• Speaking Simlish: Whenever the commander of the enemy forces in a solar system taunts you, it's in this, despite in-game phrases being translated to English. You can even look at the deciphered languages from The Other Wiki, no, not that wiki. As older bosses get reworked, this is slowly being phased out for full voice acting where appropriate.
• Speed, Smarts and Strength: the three starting Warframes: Volt, Mag, and Excalibur have this dynamic. Volt is Speed, ramping up his speed dramatically to Bullet Time and strikes first thanks to his ability to produce massive bursts of Chain Lightning. Mag is Smarts, manipulating enemy positioning and stripping them of their armor before turning their own weapons against them. Excalibur is Strength, being the melee-oriented Master Swordsman who can produce a sword made of energy that can fire Sword Beams.
• Spell Book: As of the Whispers in the Walls update, we get the Tome weapon type, the first of which being Albrecht Entrati's personal book, the Grimoire. It is a weapon type that fits in the secondary slot and has its own set of mods, and is used to fling bolts of Void energy at targets.
• Spiritual Successor: Some people see Warframe's gameplay and sci-fi aesthetic as a better followup to Lost Planet 2 than its actual sequel.
• Splash Damage Abuse: Many weapons' radial attacks ignore walls, so buffing your Kuva Zarr's splash radius and shooting the ground can let you kill an entire room's worth of foes at once. The only downside is the self-stagger, but this can be nullified with Primed Sure Footed or certain abilities that grant status immunity.
• Sprint Meter:
  • Prior to Update 17, Stamina. Depletes when you sprint or block, replenishes at all other times. Jumping or fighting in melee costs Stamina, but doesn't stop it from regenerating. Some mods affected how fast it recharges and how much you can store. With Update 17, stamina is history, and players can sprint, jump, and leap off the environment as much as they want. The only things limited are clinging to walls and gliding, which are limited by regenerating duration.
  • This is no problem for Loki, whose innate ability is having ten times longer wall clinging and gliding, presumably Just Because, with even the update note bringing this feature having a humorous exclamation mark after it.
• Spy Catsuit:
  • Nearly all of the Warframes are form-fitting, making it easy to tell who's female, and who isn't.
  • Averted with Zephyr, which actually looks like she is wearing armor, and whose gender can be quite ambiguous to uninformed Tenno.
• Standard Human Spaceship: The Corpus play this trope quite straight. They have the standard forward-facing guns, rear-mounted engines, they are extremely boxy in appearance, and they exclusively come in shades of silver and blue. The Grineer toy with the trope; they maintain the "improbable olive drab pallette" and "visibly riveted together" parts of the trope, but their ships are very strangely shaped, being bulbous and alien-looking.
• Star Killing: At the climax of "The New War", Ballas attempts to use the Sentient Mothership Praghasa to consume the Origin System's Sun in order to fuel his journey to Tau.
• Starter Equipment:
  • New players are given a choice of three normal Warframes (Excalibur, Mag, or Volt), and one "MK1" weapon in each category (melee, secondary, primary). MK1 weapons deal less damage than their standard versions but are otherwise identical. As players progress through the introductory/tutorial quest, they are given "Flawed" mods, weaker variants of vital Warframe and weapon mods that are cheaper to upgrade and equip but have a lower upgrade cap.
  • There are a handful of basic weapons that can be purchased with just credits and no crafting involved, clearly meant to serve as this as well. They're a step above the starter gear mentioned above, but are quickly outclassed.
• Stat Overflow:
  • All Warframes except for Nidus and Inaros can have overshields in addition to their regular shields, which will turn the shield bar from cyan to purple. There are a variety of ways to gain overshields, including companion precept mods like Shield Charger or Molecular Conversion as well as Warframe abilities like Hildryn's Pillage or Protea's Grenade Fan. All Warframes have a hard cap of 1200 overshields except for Harrow, whose passive is to double this cap, and Nidus and Inaros, who can't have shields at all under any circumstances.
  • In a variant, the Health Conversion and Synth Fiber mods respectively grants armor to a Warframe or sentinel upon collecting health orbs.
  • Enemies that have been Taken for Granite by Atlas will drop rubble when they die. Picking up the rubble will heal Atlas or give him a stacking armor buff if he's at full health.
• Status Effect-Powered Ability:
  • Covert Lethality is a rare mod that increases finisher damage. Besides the obvious Stealth Finishers, finishers can also be triggered on blinded or stunned enemies.
  • Condition Overload is another rare mod that enhances the damage of the melee weapon it's equipped to by 60% at max rank per status effect inflicted on the target. Combined with melee weapons that can reach nearly 100% status chance with the right mods or a status-heavy firearm just before swinging, nearly any melee weapon can deal incredible damage against any enemy but the status immune.
  • Some Galvanized mods (Galvanized Aptitude, Savvy, and Shot) bring a Condition Overload-like effect to ranged weapons. You do need to kill an enemy with that weapon first, but afterwards, other enemies will take extra damage based on how many status effects they have.
• Status Quo Is God: Justified following the events of The New War — while the Narmer are still a threat, with Ballas dead they've become a Decapitated Army, and the Operator/Drifter note that the "old guard" (The Twin Queens, the Corpus Board, and their underlings) will be eager to reclaim what they lost. Narmer is still present, but their disorganization allowed the old villains to exploit the Evil Power Vacuum to make a comeback. This is why you can only face Narmer enemies in special Plains and Vallis bounties - they need time to rebuild.
• Stealth in Space: Enemy radio chatter mentions that the Tenno's Liset ships have 'void masks' that make them invisible to sensors, although 'void echoes' can still be detected. Sometimes. Certainly the view out the Liset's windshield indicates that the Tenno are in the habit of hanging around directly in the middle of Grineer and Corpus fleets without fear of being found. It probably helps that Lisets are absolutely puny.
• Stealth Pun: The mod that increases puncture damage for pistols is called "No Return". Puncture damage, as in, pointy. Point of No Return.
• Stealthy Colossus: Every warframe is a space cyber ninja. So every single one of them is capable of being very sneaky and quiet if they feel like it, even big and hulking ones like Rhino, Atlas, Hildryn or Grendel.
• Sticks to the Back:
  • Melee (exception of fist, claw and sparring weapons) and primary weapons stick to the back, whilst pistols and kunai holsters stick to your hips. Advanced technology is involved, so it's probably excusable.
  • A particularly notable variant is the Glaive, which, in a nod to darkSector, Sticks To The Forearm, collapsing and folding itself to be small enough to be barely noticeable.
  • With the new Holster Style customization, you can customize the position, both the location on the Warframe and their X, Y and Z axes, of your holstered melee weapons for maximal Fashion Frame. Alternatively, you can choose any weapon you like to disappear when holstered if you so prefer, making them materialize in and out of the Warframe's hands in the weapon's energy color.
• Stock Weapon Names: Gram and Reaper Prime.
• The Straight and Arrow Path: The game has a large assortment of bows, from the basic Paris to the rocket launching Lenz.
• Streamer-Friendly Mode: "Creator Mode", aimed towards content creators recording the game, hides the player's email address on the login screen and suppresses several common spoilers that show up in gameplay.
• Strictly Formula: The format of the Syndicates in each landscape are as follows:
  • The first Syndicate the player encounters in any given landscape will be focused on providing equipment relating to that particular landscape. They'll provide conservation lures, fishing kits, mining tools, and weapon assembly in exchange for services provided by the Tenno.
  • The second Syndicate, meanwhile, will only accesible upon completing The War Within, as their dedicated room can only be fully accessed by Operators. These syndicates provide Operator equipment, which is useful outside of the landscape and helps prepare the player for The New War.
• Stuff Blowing Up:
  • The Tenno decided things would be more fun if they had rocket launchers... so they reverse-engineered the Grineer ones. You can guess what happened next, right?
  • Taken further over time; now there are grenade launchers, handheld rocket launchers. poison-gas cannons, laser cannons, and even electric sticky-bombs!
  • The Nova Warframe specializes in this, having one ability that fires an explosive which can absorb and reflect damage, and an ultimate ability that turns enemies into bombs when they die, starting off a chain reaction of explosions.
  • On the enemy side of things, quite a few bosses have some sort of bombardment — both Raptor and Jackal unleash a flurry of homing missiles that explode a good chunk of the arena, and Kela carries an Ogris.
  • Following Update 34, Explosive Barrels now do even more damage which now scales accordingly based on enemy levels. This is followed with even bigger explosion effects to boot, making these more viable for Operators to use.
• Suddenly Speaking: The Kuva Guardians oversee the Grineer Larvelings chosen to become Kuva Liches post Update 24, and one of them coming on the voice channel is an indication that a Larveling is there; they have surprisingly smooth voices, sounding like old women rather than as gravelly as other Grineer.
• Super Drowning Skills: As super advanced as the Warframes are, they still are remarkably ineffective in any amount of water. Taking a warframe into water has the same effect as falling off a cliff.
• Super Prototype: The Prime equipment (Excalibur Prime, Latron Prime, etc.) has vibes of this, being the original designs from the Orokin era as opposed to the derivative equipment that modern Tenno craft with their own hands using lesser materials. The power level of the Prime equipment varies wildly between items — for example, the Reaper Prime and Sicarus Prime are generally considered to be Better Off Sold, while the Boltor Prime and Soma Prime are generally used as the benchmark for all potentially-viable automatic rifles.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: Averted — the Grineer, Corpus , and Corrupted take care to put a fair amount of security in their facilites, with extra measures in lace to defend Prison areas and Data Vaults. Not only do they keep several guards in these areas, but the minute they catch onto you, they will make efforts to ensure you are not successful (such as delete data during spy missions or killing the hostage during rescue missions). Should you trip the alarm in a Spy mission within the Data Vault, any future vaults will always have additional security to prevent further successful break ins. And should you trigger an alarm in every vault, the Lotus will order you to Leave No Survivors, explaining why they constantly return security to lower levels in future spy missions - nobody was around to tell them that the security measures failed.
• Sword Lines: All melee attacks tend to have a brief blur/distortion, but the effect can be made more pronounced by enabling permanent melee weapon trails or channeling energy into your weapon. The exact effect also varies from weapon to weapon; plain swords like the Skana have a clean and simple trail, the Fragor and Galatine have thicker and more jagged trails that give them a more powerful feel, whilst the Prova shock baton has four individual trails with an electricity-esque aesthetic.