Modding Warframes & Weapons
Warframes
Congrats you have your first warframe and have started playing the game! Now you are probably wondering how do you start modding it? Can you just put anything on it? What are the pros putting on their warframes?
Well to start off by answering some of these questions
Yes, you will leave here with an understanding to get you started on how to mod your warframes in an effective way.
Technically you could just put anything on the warframe and it will work but it may not be the best of choices.
What anyone uses that you consider a "pro" should not be your top priority for a number of reasons. You will not have these mods at the start of your game, and what they use is not necessarily the best choice for your playstyle of the game.
With any warframe, you wanna put a serious build on to you are going to need to put an orokin reactor on it and possibly some forma. If you do not know how to install an orokin reactor or forma you can read about that here in the capacity and forma section.
Now it is tricky to tell you exactly what to put on your frames because it will vary vastly based on how you want to build your frame, what frame it is, and what the abilities of the frame are. So instead of telling you what to put on, I will list some of the essential mods you will need throughout your time playing on modding warframes.
Vitality
Redirection
Flow/Primed Flow
Continuity/Primed Continuity
Streamline
Stretch
These are the mods you will be using your entire time playing and lucky for you you will get these mods early on in the game aside from the primed variants you can get later.
Next, we are going to want to take a look at your frame and ask yourself how do you want to build them?
What I do is look at the frames abilities, try them all out and decide from there how I want to build them.
Lets take a quick look at our poster boy here Excalibur.
His first ability is slash dash and looking at its stats it will use range and strength mods.
His second is Radial Blind this will use range and duration.
His third ability uses range and strength
His fourth ability uses range(for a free blind performed from sliding attack) duration, and strength
now its worth noting that his fourth ability is a constant energy drain so efficiency is useful here too.
So based on this we can see all of his abilities can benefit from range, and all but one from strength.
So a good logical step is to put both power strength and range on to this build. If you are looking to do a balanced build then feel free to put strength, range, duration, and efficiency all on your build.
If you want to build towards a specific ability that you enjoy using then take a look at what that ability needs.
Looking at his radial blind he needs range and duration so he can blind as many enemies as possible to keep himself and his allies safe and keep them blind for as long as possible. Something worth noting with his radial blind is that when the enemies are blinded they are then opened up to melee finishers. This is important because finishers go straight through ignoring armor meaning you don't need as much damage to kill them ie a 500 damage move an enemy may live but probably won't live the finisher.
Now regardless of if you take Excalibur, Volt, or Mag as your starting frame, you can apply this same logic to them and to all your future frames. Just remember to look at what the frame can do, analyze the frames abilities, and decide what ability you want to build the frame towards.
For new players I will leave here what your starting frames abilities will need.
Excalibur:
1st ability: Power Strength Range
2nd ability: Range and Duration
3rd ability: Range Strength
4th ability: Duration Strength Efficiency Range(range here is optional)
Volt:
1st ability: Power Strength Range
2nd ability: Power Strength Range Duration
3rd ability: Duration Efficiency(efficiency will help slow the drain if you carry your shield around)
4th ability: Power Strength Duration Range
Mag:
1st ability: Power Strength Range
2nd ability: Power Strength Duration Range
3rd ability: Power Strength Duration Range
4th ability: Power Strength Range
There is another type of mods that are exclusive to certain warframes these are called augments. you can get a warframe augment from syndicates by exchanging some of your standing with them for it. An augment is a mod that is specially made to enhance one of your warframes abilities and as such warframes have 3-4 of these augments available. Newer warframes may yet to have even a single augment released for a little while so do keep that in mind.
Now keeping all this stuff in mind
Analyze your frames abilities for what stats they need
Decide what abilities you wanna build towards
Are there augments available
Do you want to use any augment
I have come up with my ash build as you see below.
Well to start off by answering some of these questions
Yes, you will leave here with an understanding to get you started on how to mod your warframes in an effective way.
Technically you could just put anything on the warframe and it will work but it may not be the best of choices.
What anyone uses that you consider a "pro" should not be your top priority for a number of reasons. You will not have these mods at the start of your game, and what they use is not necessarily the best choice for your playstyle of the game.
With any warframe, you wanna put a serious build on to you are going to need to put an orokin reactor on it and possibly some forma. If you do not know how to install an orokin reactor or forma you can read about that here in the capacity and forma section.
Now it is tricky to tell you exactly what to put on your frames because it will vary vastly based on how you want to build your frame, what frame it is, and what the abilities of the frame are. So instead of telling you what to put on, I will list some of the essential mods you will need throughout your time playing on modding warframes.
Vitality
Redirection
Flow/Primed Flow
Continuity/Primed Continuity
Streamline
Stretch
These are the mods you will be using your entire time playing and lucky for you you will get these mods early on in the game aside from the primed variants you can get later.
Next, we are going to want to take a look at your frame and ask yourself how do you want to build them?
What I do is look at the frames abilities, try them all out and decide from there how I want to build them.
Lets take a quick look at our poster boy here Excalibur.
His first ability is slash dash and looking at its stats it will use range and strength mods.
His second is Radial Blind this will use range and duration.
His third ability uses range and strength
His fourth ability uses range(for a free blind performed from sliding attack) duration, and strength
now its worth noting that his fourth ability is a constant energy drain so efficiency is useful here too.
So based on this we can see all of his abilities can benefit from range, and all but one from strength.
So a good logical step is to put both power strength and range on to this build. If you are looking to do a balanced build then feel free to put strength, range, duration, and efficiency all on your build.
If you want to build towards a specific ability that you enjoy using then take a look at what that ability needs.
Looking at his radial blind he needs range and duration so he can blind as many enemies as possible to keep himself and his allies safe and keep them blind for as long as possible. Something worth noting with his radial blind is that when the enemies are blinded they are then opened up to melee finishers. This is important because finishers go straight through ignoring armor meaning you don't need as much damage to kill them ie a 500 damage move an enemy may live but probably won't live the finisher.
Now regardless of if you take Excalibur, Volt, or Mag as your starting frame, you can apply this same logic to them and to all your future frames. Just remember to look at what the frame can do, analyze the frames abilities, and decide what ability you want to build the frame towards.
For new players I will leave here what your starting frames abilities will need.
Excalibur:
1st ability: Power Strength Range
2nd ability: Range and Duration
3rd ability: Range Strength
4th ability: Duration Strength Efficiency Range(range here is optional)
Volt:
1st ability: Power Strength Range
2nd ability: Power Strength Range Duration
3rd ability: Duration Efficiency(efficiency will help slow the drain if you carry your shield around)
4th ability: Power Strength Duration Range
Mag:
1st ability: Power Strength Range
2nd ability: Power Strength Duration Range
3rd ability: Power Strength Duration Range
4th ability: Power Strength Range
There is another type of mods that are exclusive to certain warframes these are called augments. you can get a warframe augment from syndicates by exchanging some of your standing with them for it. An augment is a mod that is specially made to enhance one of your warframes abilities and as such warframes have 3-4 of these augments available. Newer warframes may yet to have even a single augment released for a little while so do keep that in mind.
Now keeping all this stuff in mind
Analyze your frames abilities for what stats they need
Decide what abilities you wanna build towards
Are there augments available
Do you want to use any augment
I have come up with my ash build as you see below.
Now if you know Ash you will see that I have built for the duration so I must have had his smoke screen ability in mind. However, I am using the augments Seeking Shuriken and Fatal Teleport. Neither of these has to do with the smokescreen ability, however, I do not feel I need that in particular and with sacrificing my range the augment for his smokescreen would be pointless as it factors in the range stat. Seeking Shuriken will auto target and fly towards enemies and with enough strength, the reason why you see I have added 45% power strength, is so it will strip armor completely for a few seconds. These few seconds is extended by my duration mods so this gives a nice opening to easily take down stubborn enemies and since Ash will throw two shurikens you can strip two enemies at once.
Now let's go over some key names of 2 of the mod slots here. Where Steel Charge is that is called the Auro slot. Only an Aura mod can be placed here and instead of using capacity it will give you extra capacity in addition to the mods effect. Now since it gives you capacity if the aura's polarity matches instead of using half capacity it doubles the capacity it gives you. So as you see Steel Charge matches and it's giving me a +18 to my mod capacity.
Auras are a type of mod that provides a passive beneficial effect to Warframe(s) during a mission. Unlike Mods, Auras will affect the entire cell rather than the Warframe it is equipped on exclusively. If several players in a cell carry copies of the same Aura, the Aura's effects will stack. This is why some people when going on high-level missions would want everyone to use an Aura called Corrosive Projection. Corrosive Projection strips 30% of armor off all enemies that spawn so have a squad of 4 would be 30+30+30+30 which is a total of 120% but of course, it caps at 100. What this means is all enemies that spawn will have 0 armor making it a much easier job for your squad.
Where we have Power Drift is called an Exilus slot. Initially, your warframe will have this locked and you will need to unlock it with an Exilus Adapter before being able to place a mod here. Exilus mods are a set of mods that are classified as mobile or utility mods. Unlike Aura mods you can put an Exilus type of mods anywhere however only an Exilus mod can be put in the Exilus slot.
You can get an Exilus Adapter in a few different ways.
Now let's go over some key names of 2 of the mod slots here. Where Steel Charge is that is called the Auro slot. Only an Aura mod can be placed here and instead of using capacity it will give you extra capacity in addition to the mods effect. Now since it gives you capacity if the aura's polarity matches instead of using half capacity it doubles the capacity it gives you. So as you see Steel Charge matches and it's giving me a +18 to my mod capacity.
Auras are a type of mod that provides a passive beneficial effect to Warframe(s) during a mission. Unlike Mods, Auras will affect the entire cell rather than the Warframe it is equipped on exclusively. If several players in a cell carry copies of the same Aura, the Aura's effects will stack. This is why some people when going on high-level missions would want everyone to use an Aura called Corrosive Projection. Corrosive Projection strips 30% of armor off all enemies that spawn so have a squad of 4 would be 30+30+30+30 which is a total of 120% but of course, it caps at 100. What this means is all enemies that spawn will have 0 armor making it a much easier job for your squad.
Where we have Power Drift is called an Exilus slot. Initially, your warframe will have this locked and you will need to unlock it with an Exilus Adapter before being able to place a mod here. Exilus mods are a set of mods that are classified as mobile or utility mods. Unlike Aura mods you can put an Exilus type of mods anywhere however only an Exilus mod can be put in the Exilus slot.
You can get an Exilus Adapter in a few different ways.
- Can be purchased from the Market for 20Plat under Equipment → Components.
- A fully built Exilus Adapter is obtained automatically after completing one of the quests.
- A fully built Adapter is also rewarded after completing the final mission in one of the quests.
- A fully built Adapter is rewarded on the 150- and 450-Day Daily Login Milestones.
- A fully built Adapter was rewarded to players as a token of apology for server issues on 13th September 2015.
- The blueprint can be obtained from Sorties.
- The blueprint can be obtained from Cephalon Simaris after completion of the Natah Quest for 50,000. The blueprint is consumed upon crafting, and must be repurchased to craft another Adapter.
- The blueprint can be obtained from Teshin for 75,000 standing.
- The blueprint can be obtained from some Invasions.
Weapons
Once you have your weapon built you are going to want to but an orokin catalyst on it and probably some forma into it. If you do not know how to install an orokin catalyst or forma you can read about there here in the capacity and forma section.
Now weapons are different than warframes in the sense that there are specific builds that work and ones that won't depending on the weapons stats itself. These stats are the very key to you learning the basics of how to mod your weapons. Some stats to take a look at before you start throwing mods on all willy nilly are
Crit Chance
Crit Damage
Status Chance
These three stats will tell you everything you need to know about how to mod your weapons. Of course, there are always tricks and exceptions but today we are talking about the basics so we will speak for weapons in general.
Now we have our three stats to look at you must be asking what the essential mods are for each weapon? Well, I'll list them here for ya.
Primary: Serration, Split Chamber
Secondary: Hornet Strike, Barrel Diffusion, Lethal Torrent
Melee: Pressure Point
Now if you are a new player unless you dump out a chunk of plat to buy mods from other players(must be Mastery Rank 2 to be able to trade/buy/sell with another player) You may not see Split Chamber, Barrel Diffusion, or Lethal Torrent for a fair bit and that's OK. That just means you have to learn to make due until you can get a hold of these mods yourself.
Going back to the three stats we mentioned earlier to know how to mod our weapons I am going to give you some minimum numbers that I recommend that should be the "hey mod towards me" flag.
If Crit Chance is 15% or higher consider modding with crit chance mods.
If Crit Chance is 25% or higher you should probably almost always be modding for Crit Chance.
If Crit Damage is 1.5x then it is solely up to you as this is the lowest crit damage can be for a base.
If Crit Damage is 2.0x then you should definitely consider modding with some crit damage mods.
If Crit Damage is 2.5x or higher then you should probably almost always be modding towards crit damage.
If Status Chance is 15% or higher consider modding with status chance mods.
If Status Chance is 25% or higher you should probably almost always be modding for Status Chance.
After using this as a rough idea as to how you wanna build your weapons we then have elementals to consider. Elementals are mods that add elemental damage of course. These can be electric, heat, toxin, or cold and can be combined to create new elements like gas, blast, magnetic, viral, radiation, and corrosive. All these elementals all have extra effects once they proc in battle. These effects are
Electric: Stun
Heat: Burn
Toxin: Damage ignoring armor and shields
Cold: Slows enemies
Gas: Causes a cloud that deals damage to all that enter it and stacks the more it procs
Magnetic: Removes shields completely
Viral: Cuts total health in half
Radiation: Turns enemies on each other with a sort of confusion attacking whoever is closest to the affected enemy
Corrosive: Strips armor making them much easier to kill
Blast: AOE knockdown
The elemental or elemental combo you choose to use is ultimately up to you, however, keep in mind some enemies are weaker to some elements whereas others will be strong against it. So you must decide will you do an all around build for all enemy factions or will you build weapons for specific factions? Keep in mind you could do one weapon with one element and another with something else since you are allowed one primary, one secondary and one melee with you on any given mission. This means you have the option of say using a primary to strip armor with corrosive, secondary to remove shields with magnetic, and melee to cut health in half with viral.
So when it comes to modding your weapons keep in mind the crit chance, crit damage, and status chance to help give you an idea of how you may want to think about modding it in addition to your essential mods listed above for primaries, secondaries, and melee weapons.
You can create the elemental combos by equipping to elementals beside each other.
The combos are created by mixing the following elements.
Electric + Toxin = Corrosive
Cold + Toxin = Viral
Cold + Electric = Magnetic
Heat + Electric = Radiation
Heat + Toxin = Gas
Heat + Cold = Blast
It is worth noting that there are "dual stat elemental" mods that instead of giving you a +90% in an element like stormbringer or convulsion it will give you +60%elemental and +60% status chance effectively giving you damage and boosting that chance that some kind of status will proc on the weapon. The Higher status will have a higher chance of being proc'd when it does proc so having a weapon that does say 60 slash 10 impact 10 puncture and 70 corrosive will most likely have corrosive be what procs. However, slash is pretty high and almost as high as slash so it will have an almost equal chance to proc each hit.
So when adding mods to a weapon it will be
Essential mods for weapon type > elemental or dual stat elementals > crit or status mods
If you have any space left you can place anything you want in here such as Life Strike(melee) that will heal you based on a percentage of damage you do when channeling, fire rate mods, reload mods, ammo mutation(converts picked up ammo into ammo this specific weapon can use) or even your riven mods if you have one for the weapon you are modding.
Now applying all of this to a build would look something like this
Now weapons are different than warframes in the sense that there are specific builds that work and ones that won't depending on the weapons stats itself. These stats are the very key to you learning the basics of how to mod your weapons. Some stats to take a look at before you start throwing mods on all willy nilly are
Crit Chance
Crit Damage
Status Chance
These three stats will tell you everything you need to know about how to mod your weapons. Of course, there are always tricks and exceptions but today we are talking about the basics so we will speak for weapons in general.
Now we have our three stats to look at you must be asking what the essential mods are for each weapon? Well, I'll list them here for ya.
Primary: Serration, Split Chamber
Secondary: Hornet Strike, Barrel Diffusion, Lethal Torrent
Melee: Pressure Point
Now if you are a new player unless you dump out a chunk of plat to buy mods from other players(must be Mastery Rank 2 to be able to trade/buy/sell with another player) You may not see Split Chamber, Barrel Diffusion, or Lethal Torrent for a fair bit and that's OK. That just means you have to learn to make due until you can get a hold of these mods yourself.
Going back to the three stats we mentioned earlier to know how to mod our weapons I am going to give you some minimum numbers that I recommend that should be the "hey mod towards me" flag.
If Crit Chance is 15% or higher consider modding with crit chance mods.
If Crit Chance is 25% or higher you should probably almost always be modding for Crit Chance.
If Crit Damage is 1.5x then it is solely up to you as this is the lowest crit damage can be for a base.
If Crit Damage is 2.0x then you should definitely consider modding with some crit damage mods.
If Crit Damage is 2.5x or higher then you should probably almost always be modding towards crit damage.
If Status Chance is 15% or higher consider modding with status chance mods.
If Status Chance is 25% or higher you should probably almost always be modding for Status Chance.
After using this as a rough idea as to how you wanna build your weapons we then have elementals to consider. Elementals are mods that add elemental damage of course. These can be electric, heat, toxin, or cold and can be combined to create new elements like gas, blast, magnetic, viral, radiation, and corrosive. All these elementals all have extra effects once they proc in battle. These effects are
Electric: Stun
Heat: Burn
Toxin: Damage ignoring armor and shields
Cold: Slows enemies
Gas: Causes a cloud that deals damage to all that enter it and stacks the more it procs
Magnetic: Removes shields completely
Viral: Cuts total health in half
Radiation: Turns enemies on each other with a sort of confusion attacking whoever is closest to the affected enemy
Corrosive: Strips armor making them much easier to kill
Blast: AOE knockdown
The elemental or elemental combo you choose to use is ultimately up to you, however, keep in mind some enemies are weaker to some elements whereas others will be strong against it. So you must decide will you do an all around build for all enemy factions or will you build weapons for specific factions? Keep in mind you could do one weapon with one element and another with something else since you are allowed one primary, one secondary and one melee with you on any given mission. This means you have the option of say using a primary to strip armor with corrosive, secondary to remove shields with magnetic, and melee to cut health in half with viral.
So when it comes to modding your weapons keep in mind the crit chance, crit damage, and status chance to help give you an idea of how you may want to think about modding it in addition to your essential mods listed above for primaries, secondaries, and melee weapons.
You can create the elemental combos by equipping to elementals beside each other.
The combos are created by mixing the following elements.
Electric + Toxin = Corrosive
Cold + Toxin = Viral
Cold + Electric = Magnetic
Heat + Electric = Radiation
Heat + Toxin = Gas
Heat + Cold = Blast
It is worth noting that there are "dual stat elemental" mods that instead of giving you a +90% in an element like stormbringer or convulsion it will give you +60%elemental and +60% status chance effectively giving you damage and boosting that chance that some kind of status will proc on the weapon. The Higher status will have a higher chance of being proc'd when it does proc so having a weapon that does say 60 slash 10 impact 10 puncture and 70 corrosive will most likely have corrosive be what procs. However, slash is pretty high and almost as high as slash so it will have an almost equal chance to proc each hit.
So when adding mods to a weapon it will be
Essential mods for weapon type > elemental or dual stat elementals > crit or status mods
If you have any space left you can place anything you want in here such as Life Strike(melee) that will heal you based on a percentage of damage you do when channeling, fire rate mods, reload mods, ammo mutation(converts picked up ammo into ammo this specific weapon can use) or even your riven mods if you have one for the weapon you are modding.
Now applying all of this to a build would look something like this
We have the Soma Prime weapon here, it is a primary weapon and an assault rifle. You can see we started with our base mods of Serration and Split Chamber. from there we added in our dual stat elementals High Voltage(electric) & Malignant Force(toxic) to give us corrosive and increase our status chance a bit. From there we know the Soma Prime is a crit weapon so we put in our crit chance and crit damage mods Vital Sense and Point Strike. Following our guide, that means we have free reign over what we put in our last two slots. In this case, I went with Stormbringer(+90% electric) to further increase my corrosive damage and for the last mod, I added Heavy Caliber a mod some would argue is an essential mod for everything but bows. Heavy Caliber increases overall damage by +165% but reduces accuracy by -55% and max rank.
So you can see following this simple guide you are able to put a build together step by step and in this case, the Soma Prime can be brought against enemies over level 100 with no special modding secrets.
Good Luck, Happy Modding, & if you have any questions feel free to stop by a stream to ask us live!
So you can see following this simple guide you are able to put a build together step by step and in this case, the Soma Prime can be brought against enemies over level 100 with no special modding secrets.
Good Luck, Happy Modding, & if you have any questions feel free to stop by a stream to ask us live!