Tips for New Warframe Players

Soulivium

Tribe of Judah Warframe Chapter Leader
Staff member
Top 10 Tips for New Players

As much as I love Warframe, the game admittedly has a significant barrier to entry for new players.

There's so much content yet arguably little direction on understanding the basic mechanics of the game or how to progress. They speak a different language when it comes to terminologies (i.e. think of energy = mana and affinity = experience). It often takes veteran players to guide new players into getting comfortable with the game.

So, in an effort to spare new players from shooting themselves in the foot with their MK1-Braton, here are my top 10 tips:
  1. The Warframe Wiki is the place to go if you need information on just about everything in the game.
  2. If at all possible, do not read the spoilers. Otherwise, you will not get to enjoy the full experience of the story. Trust me on this. To all the veteran players, do a favor for the new players and don't spoil them. :p
  3. Save your platinum! Warframe has premium currency called platinum that you can buy with real money (technically, you can also "farm" them by farming Prime sets and trading them for platinum). You need platinum to open up more Warframe slots, weapon slots, archwing slots, etc. Yes, there is limited space in your inventory unless you pay with platinum (except for crafting materials and resources).
  4. Ask for a taxi from veteran players if you need to level up quicker or if you need to farm for a specific resource. Normally, you have to work your way through the Star Chart to progress and gain access to other planets. But if you need to run a mission on a planet that you haven't even reached yet, a veteran player can help you get there.
  5. Mods are basically special cards that boost the stats of your Warframes, weapons, companions/sentinels, archwings, other deployables, you name it. You can also upgrade your mods to make them have a stronger effect on the stat boosts.
  6. Speaking of mods, don't waste your resources on upgrading flawed/damaged mods! Get the full versions and upgrade those instead.
  7. Always level your Warframes, weapons, everything to max (usually level 30, though some exceptions apply). This way, you earn the most possible points for your Mastery Rank (player account level). Leveling your Mastery Rank will unlock weapons and more content, which in turn can help you continue leveling your Mastery Rank even more. :)
  8. Always keep your Prime variants. If you have a max-level regular Volt (aka: vanilla Volt) and you have a max-level Volt Prime, get rid of your regular Volt in a certain manner... ;) The Prime Warframes have slightly better stats and have some nice gold accents/trims. In my opinion, I don't even recommend installing Orokin Reactors and Formas onto the vanilla Warframes because DE will release the Prime versions in the later future. So don't spend too much resources on upgrading vanilla Warframes unless you really love playing as them. Same concept goes for vanilla vs. Prime weapons. That said...
  9. Be very careful of throwing away Warframes, weapons, and blueprints. Some weapons build into others (which you can then level to get more affinity for your Mastery Rank), and any blueprints that you acquire through a story mission can only be received once. If you throw away the blueprint or its fully built version, you cannot get them again from repeating the story. You will have to farm from a different source to get new versions of whatever you threw away. Or, you may be forced to buy the fully built version at the store with platinum. Double-check via Warframe Wiki to make sure you're not throwing away an item that you might regret.
  10. Join a clan. A clan is basically a guild of players. There are items, weapons, and vanilla Warframes that can only be accessed through the clan's dojo (i.e. guild hall). If you wanna be a part of a clan, I am more than happy to invite you to mine at Heralds of the Sanctuary!
At the end of the day, take the time to enjoy the game and have fun. Explore and immerse yourself in Warframe's world and lore. For a free-to-play game, it is rich with content.

And if you need help, don't hesitate to ask. I'm happy to help any way I can and am often hanging around in the Christian Gamers Alliance Discord.

There's so many more tips I'd like to give, but I think these 10 tips are good to have in mind when you first begin the game.

Fellow players, what other tips would you give to newbies?
 
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Essential Mods for Warframes and Sentinels

In this post, I'll talk about some essential mods that will help you through most of early-mid game. I'll talk about mods for Warframes and sentinels (those little robotic companions that float around with you). Weapon mods for Warframes and sentinels are extremely varied (and something I'm not always familiar with), so that will be for another topic someday.

Important notes:
  • All mods need to be full versions and NOT the damaged/flawed versions! Any mods that have the more powerful Prime versions available will be noted.
  • Sentinels have Precept polarities (kind of looks like this |- character) that prioritize what particular actions the sentinel will activate first (see image in the sentinel mods section below).
Essential Mods for Warframes:
  • Vitality - Increases health
  • Redirection - Increases shields
  • Steel Fiber - Increases armor
  • Intensify - Increases strength of the Warframe's abilities
  • Continuity (prime available) - Increases duration time of the Warframe's abilities (basically)
  • Stretch - Increases range of the Warframe's abilities
  • Flow (prime available) - Increases total energy (mana) pool
  • Streamline - Decreases energy cost of Warframe's abilities
Essential Mods for Sentinels (most are similar to Warframe mods):
  • Vacuum - As long as your sentinel is alive, it brings all item drops near you (at max range of 11.5m) so you don't have to go pick them up one by one. Most important mod to get ASAP! Will make your (farming) life 10x easier!
  • Assault Mode - Attacks the first enemy within range. Without this mod, your sentinel WILL NOT attack, which can be good or bad depending on what you’re trying to do.
  • Enhanced Vitality - Health
  • Calculated Redirection - Shields
  • Metal Fiber - Armor
  • Animal Instinct (prime available) - Helpful to have when you need to see loot and enemies on the map (so you can either Vacuum up the item drops and/or kill enemies). The loot radar in Animal Instinct will also show hidden caches on the map (helpful for sabotage/bounty missions).
  • Regen (prime available) - When your sentinel dies, it will auto-revive at a certain health and be invulnerable for x seconds. Can revive x times depending on how powerful the mod is.
  • Guardian - When your shields are reduced to zero, your sentinel with insta-boost your shields back to full. Has a cooldown of 30 seconds.
  • Sanctuary - Sentinel generates a shield around you while you're healing fallen allies who are bleeding out.
  • Medi-Ray - Available way later in the game, but I wanted to list this as it's a useful mod. It allows the sentinel to heal you (the Warframe) a percentage of your max health over 4 seconds. Has a cooldown of 15 seconds.
2219
Source: Warframe Wiki

That's all for now. As more Warframe updates come along, I'll do my best to change this post as well.

If you need any mods, let me know as I may have a few unranked duplicates!
 
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I would recommend working on acquiring the Frost frame and the Rhino frame. Frost can solo most any static defense-type (defense, mobile defense, interception, excavation) mission in the star map and Rhino can breeze through most anything else. Primed versions are available but might be more difficult to acquire (not sure if they are in active rotation or not). There are other (better? More fun?) options later on in the game as more frames are collected and more modding options are available but those are the primary two I unlocked most of the star chart with.

For weapons, I felt underpowered until I acquired the Hek (MR4 required) along with the syndicate mod from Steel Meridian (and the damage/multishot mods for shotguns). That really changed the game for me. I've moved on to far more powerful weapons but I've never had trouble with normal star-map content since then (unless you count Vay Hek - he is just a pain either way you slice it).
 
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