Hello everyone! Welcome to a Warframe beginners guide. This is a game that I’ve played on and off for several years now. And this guide is something that I’ve wanted to do for awhile. Warframe new player experience is a bit lackluster to say at least.
The game has a lot of systems and mechanics and it can be very overwhelming for new players and since the recent Plains of Eidolon updates got a lot of attention and an undoubtedly attracted a lot of new players as well. I figured this is a good time to finally make this guide. The guide will consist of several articles where I will go through and explain a lot of the game systems and mechanics. I won’t focus too much on actual game progression though. Just a couple of tips here and there.
Other parts of the Beginners Guide:
So, to start things off, let’s begin the first part of this guide by talking about combat and movements. If you’re reading this, I will assume you’ve already done the tutorial and picked a starting warframe. If you haven’t started the game yet, let me just explain what you should expect.
When you start, you will have to pick between three different warframes. You have Excalibur, Mag, and Volt. They are all good warframes to start the game with and they can all get the job done so it doesn’t really matter which one you pick as your starter. As a matter of fact, you can even get the other two later, but if I had to pick one to start with, I would pick Excalibur. In the tutorial, you will also be asked to pick between a selection of three weapons for each of your primary, secondary, and melee weapons slots. I don’t really have a recommendation about those, so just pick the ones that you liked the best. You can get all the others later.
Your basic load outs consist of a warframe, a primary weapon, a secondary weapon, and a melee weapon. Primary weapons consist of larger weapons like rifles and shotguns. Secondary weapons are smaller weapons like pistols and throwing knives. And melee weapons consists of, well, melee weapons like swords and hammers. You can switch between primary and secondary weapons with the switch weapon button. You can also switch to your melee weapon by holding the same weapons switch button.
While holding a primary or secondary weapon, you can also use the quick melee button to perform a basic melee attack without having to equip your melee weapon. Some weapons even have alternate fire modes. For this alternate mode can be something like a simple toggle between full auto mode and semi-auto or it can be a different attack altogether.
Well, let’s talk more about melee. While holding the melee weapon you are able to perform combos. Combos are basically a chain of button presses that change your melee attacks in some way. They can do more damage, cover a wider area, or make you move in a certain direction. Melee combos can only be used if you equip a stance mods on your melee weapon and the type of combos available also depends on the mod equipped. We will talk extensively about mods in the future, so for now, just know that they exist.
Some other things you can do with melee weapons include a charge attack by holding your melee button and you can even do a ground slam to knock down enemies around you by facing downwards while jumping and pressing the melee button.
Another thing you can do while having your melee weapon equipped is blocking. By pressing the block button you can deflect both melees and ranged attacks. In reality, blocking is used to give you a certain amount of damage reduction. You won’t be completely immune to damage while blocking. The amount of damage reduction depends on the melee weapon that you use. Smaller weapons like daggers will give you less damage reduction than larger weapons like polearms. Each successful melee hits within a short period of time while holding your melee weapon will start a hit counter.
This counter tracks how many successful hits have been performed and after a certain amount of successful hits, you will gain a damage multiplier for your melee weapon. This multiplier will increase your melee weapon damage while active. The multiplier will keep increasing the more enemies you hit with your weapon and will disappear completely after a few seconds when you hit nothing at all.
Another thing you can do with melee, our channeling attacks. If you hold the melee channel button, you were melee attacks will deal extra damage at the cost of some of the energy from your energy pool. The same energy warframes required to use their special abilities. One last thing about melee. You can perform finisher attacks that will delay a large amount of damage to a single enemy. These finishers can be performed by stunning them or putting them to sleep with the warframe ability and by attacking them while they can’t do anything.
You can also perform a finisher by attacking an enemy from behind while undetected.
Another way to perform a finisher is to perform a special counterattack move. A counterattack occurs when you are blocking an enemy attack and you use melee channeling right before being hit with it. This will cause the enemy to be stunned for a little while and you can just finish them with the melee attack.
One other thing about combat that we haven’t discussed yet are warframes themselves. Each warframe has four unique abilities that they can use. These abilities can be activated with the four difference ability buttons, and they each cost some amount of energy to cast. With a brand new warframe all of these abilities will not be available at the start, but they will unlock as you level up the warframe itself. Each ability also has three different ranks which also unlock by leveling up, becoming more powerful with each one. Each one of the abilities has an energy cost when you cast them. However, the last power is a channeled ability. Channeled abilities will also drain energy while the ability is active. To deactivate it, just press the ability button again.
And now for some special movement maneuvers. You can sprints, crouch, and jump. If you jump again in the air, you can double jump. You can slide while moving and pressing the crouch button. By combining crouch with the jump, you can double a jump. This type of jump we’ll do a small amount of damage in the area where you start to jump from. While airborne from any type of jump, you can press the aim weapon button and you will perform glides.
You can also roll by tapping the sprint button. While rolling you have a 75% damage reduction. Besides rolling, you can also flip backward and sideways. To do that, you need to press the aim weapon button first and then just perform a regular roll either to the left to the right or backward. Another maneuver you can do is wall running. Simply approach or jump towards a wall and press the jump button. You can also latch to a wall by pressing the aim weapon button while close to it. All of these maneuvers can be chained together to parkour all over the map.
And that’s it for this article. That’s pretty much all you need to know about combat and movements. Next time we will cover your ship and some of the things you can do on it. Until then, thanks for reading and I will see you all next time.
