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Warframe has been out in the market for over 10 years now. As expected of a live-service game that goes on for such a long stretch, it has evolved a lot. Every content update ships with its bundle of assorted new equipment, resources, Syndicates, modes, and sometimes altogether fresh mechanics. By the time the Tenno get to Warframe's late-game, they have a diverse swath of apparatus at their disposal.
A title where farming and grinding take such a center stage is bound to have a bad case of equipment bloat, and some less-advertised little mechanics get lost in the way. The following are some of the lesser-known gear and other nifty features that can provide great aid in specific contexts of Warframe.
Note: This article is subjective and reflects the writer's views.
5 powerful in-game tools in Warframe that are underused
1) Specters
Specters are AI-controlled allies that can be deployed during non-Archwing missions. Broadly, there are 11 types in Warframe, ranging from Grineer Rollers to Infested Chargers. Arguably, only two of these are worthwhile: Ancient Healer Specters and Warframe Specters.
The only two ways to get Ancient Healer Specters in the game are tied to the syndicate called New Loka. You can get their blueprints for a measly 2,500 standing at the Humane rank. Alternately, you can get invaded by the Ancient Healer Specter platoon by getting the Exiled rank, whereupon defeating them will grant you 5x blueprints. Deployed during gameplay, these give you huge survivability buffs:
- 30 HP per second regeneration
- 90% flat damage reduction from most sources
Meanwhile, Warframe Specters come in three different tiers, all of which can be farmed by completing a Rescue mission of the corresponding tier. The tiers only have a marginal difference, where a Vapor (lowest tier) Specter will match the current mission level, and a Cosmic (highest tier) Specter will have a 10 level advantage.
The trick is that Vapor, Force, Phase, and Cosmic variants emulate a custom loadout that you can set up yourself from your available gear. Warframe Specters themselves tend to be extremely durable in Steel Path because they match the enemy level.
The Specters use abilities at no energy cost, meaning a Wisp Specter is possibly the best choice for added benefits, followed by a Nidus or Khora for good crowd control. Those with abilities that scale off armor such as Frost or Gara are also good. The weapons they use are unmodded, so utility armaments like Epitaph work best.
2) Orokin eye
The Echoes of the Zariman update, released in 2022, added a new Landing Craft called Parallax. Landing Crafts are the ship that you inhabit and are featured most prominently in the pre-mission loading screen. They come with their unique air-support ability that usually gets ignored, consequently leading to their treatment as a decorative-flex purchase. Parallax's air support ability, Orokin Eye, changed that.
Once an air support charge is dropped, Orokin Eye detects and highlights rare resources and valuable items in the current tileset within a 150 meter radius, much like the Golden Instinct helminth ability. Unlike the latter, it marks these resources for everyone in your squad, meaning you can potentially four-stack it to detect goodies almost throughout the whole map. This includes: Quills in the Zariman Ten-Zero, Orokin Forma Containers, Syndicate Medallions, and even Ayatan Treasures.
3) Synth Fiber
Released alongside Fortuna, the Synth mod set is all about auto-reloading holstered weapons for uninterrupted gunplay. The Synth Fiber mod, equippable on Sentinels, Kavats, Kubrows, and MOA companions, grants them armor upon Health Orb pickups. There is also another hidden property: it allows you to pick up Health Orbs at full health.
This opens up numerous avenues for managing the Warframe energy economy in particular. A lot of abilities can generate Health Orbs, including but not limited to: Citrine's Fractured Blast, Protea's Dispensary, Nekros' Desecrate, Voruna's Lycanth's Hunt, Nezha's Blazing Chakram, and Oberon's Reckoning.
All these can give you more energy than any Energy Orb with the Equilibrium. The de-facto best-case candidate for this is Dispensary. Used as a helminth ability, it is the cheapest energy-battery crutch, with over 135 flat energy granted per complete rotation.
4) Spare Parts
Warframe is ultimately a farming game for the most part, given how important loot-duplication frames like Nekros and Khora are deemed in organized squads. The most fundamental of these are materials and ores, the building block of the crafting system. While even rare materials can be bagged by the dozens once you use a Nekros, some items still remain elusive.
Some are the kin of Scintillants and Cetus wisps, which must be obtained by hand manually outside of mission rewards. Meanwhile, others just have an astronomically low drop rate from all sources; examples of these include Argon Crystals and the ever-notorious, Entrati Lanthorn.
Spare Parts is arguably the most underrated method of farming these items in Warframe. It is a Sentinel mod that adds a 45% chance to drop a rare resource upon the death of the Sentinel. In the Zariman nodes, for example, this has a good chance to drop an Entrati Lanthorn. The way to exploit this is intentionally modding your Sentinel to be fragile, get it killed, and then respawn it via Hard Reset, or the Repair Dispensary augment mod.
5) Elite On-call Crew
The Railjack Intrinsics come with a few perks that aid you in many ways outside of Empyrean missions, too. Most are half-decent numeric buffs, like higher Necramech health, shorter Archwing blink cooldown, and so on. However, On-Call Crew, the ninth-ranked perk on the Command Intrinsics tree, gives you one of the most underrated combat tools in Warframe.
It only shines once you also take the Intrinsic directly after it, i.e. Elite Crewmates. With the latter perk, Ticker in Fortuna now offers one "Elite" crewmate that you can recruit. An Elite Crewmate has two additional competency points compared to the average Joe crewmate, meaning you can often max out both Combat and Endurance.
You can assign this Elite Crewmate to be your On-Call Crew. What makes them really overpowered is the fact that they do take your weapon mods into account, unlike Warframe Specters. You can equip them with low-ammo area-of-effect weapons like Kuva Zarr to turn it into an infinite-ammo nuke.
Furthermore, the Combat perk grants the Crewmate a +200% damage boost once maxed out. The weapons specifically have to be set up with no conditionals like Galvanized Mods, as they do not trigger on Crewmates. They do take into account all other mods, meaning that their overall DPS with certain weapons will be higher than your actual Warframe since the ammunition changes.
The cherry to top off this cake is the bonus "trait" that the Eltie Crewmate comes with. The clear winner here is the trait "Killing an enemy heals all nearby allies by 500 over 10 seconds." Set it up with a high rate of fire on a decent weapon and it will give both you and the Crewmate remarkable HP sustain, making the Crew a fire-and-forget summon when the going gets tough.
