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Armor is the foundation of durability for many enemy units in Warframe. Their benefit is simply adding damage mitigation on top of health. This is why Grineer units have the highest effective HP in the game despite their overall lowest health pool. As enemy levels increase, armor also scales up additively, resulting in a tremendous damage negation, especially in the Steel Path.
Thankfully, there are multiple ways you can reduce enemy armor in Warframe. The Corrosive elemental status and the Corrosive Projection aura mod reduce overall armor, while Shattering Impact reduces base armor.
The armor-stripping abilities, however, currently trump these band-aid forms of armor reduction. Update 32 of the game also buffed armor reduction abilities so that they remove total armor value and do not have marginal returns over successive uses in Warframe.
5 best Warframe abilities that can strip armor ranked from worst to best
5) Shuriken
Shuriken is Ash's Helminth ability that can throw shurikens towards targets within a 6-meter radius and apply a Slash tick over them. The augment mod Seeking Shuriken adds an armor reduction effect on all targets hit by the ability.
This is an extremely high 70% baseline armor reduction, converted to a full armor strip with just 144% ability strength. Overall, it is a good single-target armor strip that has not aged well into the current patch.
Firstly, Caustic Strike can achieve an almost identical effect in a similar area of effect. Secondly, on top of a Helminth ability on other Warframes, Seeking Shuriken eats up a mod slot just to have the basic armor strip property.
4) Caustic Strike
This differs from the other entries on this list as it is technically not a Warframe ability. Caustic Strike is an Operator ability that you can get from the Uniaru school of focus.
It is not a Way-bound node, meaning you can only utilize this ability when tapped into Uniaru. Uniaru's other utilities, such as Last Gasp, make this restriction less burdensome.
Unlocking it costs 95,000 focus points atop the 25,000 focus prerequisite to get through Poise first. However, if you want a single-cast armor strip, unlocking it fully is a much higher investment of 1,180,000 points cumulatively.
In return, you are awarded an easily accessible armor strip that costs virtually no resources. The opportunity cost for this is a small area of effect and the additional time it takes to switch back and forth from the Operator mode.
3) Pillage
Pillage is Hildryn's second ability, which you can extract with the Helminth system to use in other builds. The acquisition of Hildryn already implies that you are at the game's later stages, and this is specifically where Pillage becomes a viable armor strip solution.
This is because Pillage is easily the most high-investment armor strip candidate in the game. Casting it sends out a radial pulse that strips enemy armor and shields and refunds it as an overshield for you. The issue is that it only starts off as a 25% defense reduction at the base, meaning you need 400% ability strength for a complete strip.
In return, Pillage doubles as a decent tank-up ability. A single cast can generate enough overshields to easily tank a full round of Steel Path firing squad if you are not going up against level 400+ enemies. Even at level cap, the fact that it instantly resets shield gating makes you immortal if you have a good energy economy.
2) Tharros Strike
The newest addition to the Tenno's armor-stripping repertoire, Tharros Strike is arguably the best ability in Stayanax's kit. It also just so happens to be his Helminth ability.
Tharros Strike is among the easiest armor strip ability for build setup. It strips 50% of armor at the base, meaning you only need 200% ability strength to fully power strip in one cast.
On top of this, it has two properties no other armor strip ability grants. The first is a benevolent flat Health regain based on the number of enemies hit. The second is a crowd control ability with a distinct knockback ability that can deter Demolyst units, making it an essential quality-of-life tool in Steel Path Disruption mode.
1) Terrify
Terrify used to be a hit-or-miss flavor skill that was easily seen as the weakest among Nekros' abilities. This changed in Update 32, where the armor strip was buffed massively. Since then, Terrify has the highest base armor strip at 60%.
The Warframe community near-unanimously nominates Terrify as their best-in-slot armor strip ability, followed closely by Tharros Strike. While it does not offer the Demolyst-controlling potential that Tharros Strike boasts, two things about Terrify put it on the top.
Firstly, you can do a full armor strip with one cast of Terrify with only 67% additional ability strength. This ties directly into the second boon, its ease of use. Terrify does not need to be targeted in any general direction. With only a minor investment into ability range, it can clear an entire room of enemy armor and apply aggro control.
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