Warframe update overhaul — The calm before the storm

This year has shown to be an intriguing time to be a Warframe fan. The Operation Scarlet Spear update is coming this March, and it is the first major Lore Event of this year. The Sentients are coming, and the Origin System better be prepared for the war to follow.

But before all that arises, the Warframe development team has decided to make quite a bit of change to the overall game. Today, we’ll be looking at these changes and seeing how it’ll affect the game as a whole.

Railjacks

Railjacks are Orokin-era spacecraft used by the player in specific game modes, specifically for the upcoming Sentient threat in Operation Scarlet Spear. They can only be unlocked in the later stages of the game during The Rising Tide questline. Within future updates, Digital Extremes is seeing that these BP costs are reduced because they were simply too high for a lot of players. The BP costs will be reduced between 66% and 75% for the cost to the Railjack parts, which the building time will be reduced to six hours each.

As well as this, the developer has decided to also add an extra change for all players depending on their situation with the quest:

1. Those that haven’t started the Rising Tide quest will just have the new BP costs for the Railjack parts
2. Anyone that is currently completing the Rising Tide questline will get one Rush Repair Drone. Old BP costs will be refunded
3. Those that have completed the Rising Tide quest will get two Rush Repair Drones. All of their cost differences for BP will be refunded.

Alongside these changes, some Railjack bug fixes will also be implemented.

Armor/Health/Shield changes

Damage type changes have been updated for Slash and Toxin. Slash statuses now do damage over time to shields and do not ignore them. They will still be able to bypass armor. Toxin damage has no bonus to armor anymore but it can bypass shields.

Infested

Infestations are getting an increase in damage. They were already easy to deal with as they are mostly melee and easy to kill most of the time. The idea of this change is to keep players on their toes and to reward mobility. Survival missions particular should become more challenging now, which I’m looking forward too. 

Credit: R3N36AD3 via Warframe forums.

Shield Gating

Shield Gating is an upcoming mechanic where as long as the player has a shield, they cannot be one-shotted by an enemy. If a player has their shield depleted, the damage will not eat into the player’s health pool. For a limited time after this action occurs, the player is invulnerable as well. Enemies also, especially the Corus, have a form of shield gating as well. The idea is to play around this with mods, specifically auras and elemental mods.

Self Damage

Self-damaging is no longer going to be a thing, and has been replaced with the Stagger mechanic. You now cannot kill yourself, but instead the game interrupts your animation with stumbles or a knockdown depending on how close you are to explosions.

Excavation missions

Health and shields of excavators will now follow the same format as Mobile Defense Terminals. Shield regeneration will be a percent of health versus flat value because of scaling shields.

Sentinel Mods

Before, sentinels and weapons could not share the same mod, so you had to upgrade two of the same mods quite often. You can now equip the same mods to sentinels and weapons.

Status

Originally status chance was unable to go above the cap of 100%. With the following update, just like with red criticals, status chance can now proc two status effects from a single damage source. So let’s assume you have blast and toxin damage, both at 100%. A proc from your weapon will now deal both statuses at once.

To ensure that status’ appeal more to the players, all status standalone status mods are having a major buffs. Rifle Aptitude, Melee Prowess, Sure Shot, Shotgun Savvy all now will have a 90% status chance.

Other Sources and Changes

Now, I only listed the bare minimum changes to the gameplay that I thought had the biggest impact. There have been stat changes to a lot of Warframes, specifically Status Effect, and even changes to drop rates. These changes are simply a lot to go through. If you’re interested in checking out the following changes, the links will be available below. I’ll also put in the Devstream for this update, because honestly, they are a fun bunch to listen to. 

Warframe Stat Changes and Status Updates

Drop Rates and Rewards

Dev Stream 139:Operation Scarlet Spear

Operation Scarlet Spear for Warframe is set to begin this month.