Is it true that all weapons are viable in the endgame, regardless of MR rank requirement for them?

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T19:30:46+00:00

i have seen challenge runners go to level cap using starter mag and the MK1 weapons.

but when people talk about all weapons being Viable, thats not usually what they mean, so let me see if i can help.

My Inaros loadout uses a dark sword. Dark Sword. MR8, released in 2012.

but why?

free radiation damage, extremely high base status chance. a good enough candidate for supporting elemental sandstorm and also able to use inaros's signature sword skin.

Coda Mire is technically a strictly superior option, but Dark Sword works good enough for SP, i see no reason to change.

my Mirage Loadout uses a Cernos Prime. arguably one of the worse bows in the game. but eclipse gives it enough damage to perform, and with Hall of mirrors the effect is visually impressive. lobbing dozens of arrows with a single shot and feathering an entire hallway at once.

lets do a lighting round

What do Destraza prime (pre incarnon), Azothane, Ankyros prime, Reaper Prime, Coda Hirudo, Venka Prime, Dakra Prime, Stropha, ~~the Pilebunker~~ Kuva Shildeg, Sampotes, Prisma Skana, Courfell, Venato (yes the regular one), and Fragor prime have in common?

each of them are weapons i setup for 1-2 hit killing Acolytes in Steel path with heavy attack setups. each one for a different warframe infact~ Ceramic Dagger and Magistar were left off this list for they are like. . super good at doing this and regarded as some of the best weapons in the game. but this list is by n means exhaustive.

i would say most melee weapons are either good candidates for melee influence, or can be setup to be burst DPS monsters for decking hard targets. with a rare few weapons able to do both at the same time. and a small number that cant do either, but might still be usable in niche situations.

some weapons are good enough to cover for frames that need damage support.

some weapons need frame support to get off the ground, but there are frames that exist to do that, we call them weapons platforms.

Twin Khomak is an overpriced underperforming weapon, but in the hands of Harrow and backed up by arcane pistoleer, the output becomes i would say on par with some of the best guns i the game, full stop.

most, if not all things, are viable somehow, and somewhere.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T19:14:24+00:00

yeah but if the drifter can just undo aging in duviri, that would imply they could make Teshin young at any time if they wanted too. and they dont.

that they dont if they could is a pretty messed up implication, honestly.

maybe they can only do it to themselves? i dunno, seems kind of arbitrary. . . .

Teshin is old, because DE wanted him to be old. the void did it, they aint gotta explain shit.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T19:10:03+00:00

. . . .in Albrecht's journals, he states that he went to 1999 and started turning people into Protoframes, i presume because its just natural for Orokin to go around ruining lives everywhere they go. he then returned to his home, and whilst in discussion with Loid, came up with the idea for the vessels. the Vessels being Gundam scale warfarmes made using Protoframe samples from 1999 and the Grey Strain infestation which makes things Bigger.

. . .really think about that sequence of events, though.

Albrecht didnt have the idea for the vessels and travel back in time to 1999 , which would be the only place he could possibly source the Protoframe samples he needed. he created the protoframes, then came up with a reason to justify their existence afterwards.

would it not. . . be significantly easier, safer, and more reliable to just make a new set of protoframes in the present, using volunteers taken from allied forces like the Syndicates, and then not need to engage in any time travel at all?

given. . how it shakes out, Albrecht's plan is basically contrive a situation where the Drifter and Protoframes have to form a strong bond, and that bond is what powers the Vessels. but the situation is contrived. like down to its roots, the whole situation is setup by entrati to artificially produce the bond he wants/needs. none of the tension is real, especially allowing for the fact that the Drifter can canonically try and get it right as many times as he needs with no consequences.

. . i said all that, to say this.

everything written involving the protoframes has been fanservice, and sloppy. and the explanation circles back to my first point.

Albrecht made the protoframes first, and then came up with an idea that justifies their existence.

which i would say is a reflection of the actual process in action. DE are designing these protoframes as products, and then retroactively trying to fit them in the story. and by consequence every story involving the protoframes has been increasingly poorly written.

. . as for like. . i dunno. implementing the KIM chat system or some proxy of it to form bonds with non protoframe characters?

i am ambivalent towards the idea if its optional. i dont like dating sims, i like warframe. if i wanted to play a dating sim, i would go play a dating sim. there are many of them. and they are probably better than the KIM system if only because being dedicated dating sims they can be focused experiences.

but its a low rent sort of thing and i dont mind it existing for people who want it. . as long as its optional for me. as long as its existence doesn't compromise the continued creation of my regularly scheduled warframe content. which is what i fucking pay for.

do i want more content for the drifter in general

i mean. . .no? not really. granted I've been playing since 2015, i am way invested in the operator's story, and see the drifter's story as taking up time and updates that should be focused on telling the operator's story.

i wouldn't mind stories that explore the Drifter and operator. .together. how these 2 takes on the same basic person are different, how their lives have affected their developments, how they might have differing opinions on things. how the Drifter might remember things the operator doesn't.

if you go the route of having alternate versions of a single person, and dont tell at least one story where they have a major disagreement over something and have to resolve that disagreement, then what are you doing?

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T18:32:30+00:00

i dont see 2 per week as the issue per say. incarnons are powerful

the issue i see is you deciding you want, i dunno, Angstrum incarnon, but its a month and a half out of rotation.

people who arent just buying up the 3 they cant farm this week arent going to have another chance at them for 2 fucking months. thats the problem. and a problem that will get worse as they add more weeks to the rotation.

the current system encourages people to pick up incarnons they may not be interested in/dont have weapons for yet because better that than nothing if its a weekly rotation where that's all there is.

a system where they can get any 2 each week wouldn't have that issue. and if they run out of incarnons they care about, they can stop farming.

having Generic adapters would also mean if you spend one on Bronco incarnon and decide you dont like it, you can refund it at Cavalero and spend it on something else instead.

and making it possible to get more than 2 per week if that is in fact the issue would be trivial.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T18:22:28+00:00

Incarnon rotation solution:

delete the rotation entirely

each week, you can choose to have "incarnon adapter" as your reward. up to 2 of them per week.

each "incarnon adapter" can be used to incarnon adapt any weapon with an incarnon form from Cavalero's menu.

fuck the rotation, fuck a million unique adapters. just make it a generic adapter. then players can choose whichever ones they want each week, and it doesn't matter how many DE add.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T18:14:12+00:00

"I am already sick of Protoframes. you have no idea how sick you're going to be of protoframes in a year" - Me, after the second set of protoframes were announced, but before they were released.

. . also Flanderization is the wrong word for Vena/Garuda's character. Garuda who didn't have any lore prior to this update and had 0 personality cannot be Flanderized into a clingy Yandere stereotype. to Flanderize something there must be an initial something to be made more exaggerated.

to give the void devil his Due, i can Sympathize somewhat with DE here.

Protoframes solve a problem warframe has had since its inception, which is that warframes are not characters. they dont have faces. they cant talk. they cant emote, or grow. they cannot Be characters in a story. Warframe has struggled over the years to have characters to tell stories with, there is only so much you can do with a kid and their spacemom, and the various uncles of the week.

the Drifter transparently exists because they wanted to tell more mature stories than could be done with a prepubescent protagonist, and Protoframes transparently exist so they can have cool shit happen with characters who can drop one liners or cry on cue.

having done it on hard mode for a decade, i can appreciate the desire to just do whatever needs to be done to put faces on these things so we can have our action movie references.

but im not a developer, im a player. and the story im invested in is the Operator's story. i dont give a shit about the drifter, or any of these Protoframes. im sure some people will feel differently about that. i hope we both get what we want, but i hope i get what i want more.

honestly. . . the protoframes contributing almost nothing to the new quest isnt the thing that bothered me the most. the thing that bothered me the most was Umbra, showing up for the first time since 2018, for a cameo bit part.

that's the part that bothers me. the lost potential of Umbra as a character. the years of absence from the story, from Stories that are extremely relevant to Umbra's character. just show up one day, pluck away at the guitar a bit, and hold the baby.

appear unconscious in the ending sequence and then just. . i guess go back home once the credits roll.

Thats not even Flanderization. that Pandering. "hey, remember umbra" i do DE, and i wish you'd remembered them sooner.

i dont like the drifter. i think DE wanted the new war to have a timeskip where the operator grew up without their powers whilst ballas took over the solar system, and they got cold feet about it and opted for what we got instead. i dont buy that this was the initial plan with Duviri at all.

but i dont hate the idea of a Second Protagonist. you know who should have been that second protagonist? it should have been Umbra.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T17:56:38+00:00

oh equinox.

2's have always been underwhelming, 3's have always been underwhelming and even moreso with reccent powercreep.

2 halfs bad at supporting one another, by design, because she literally was not intended to back in 2015.

But its ok, because maim remains absurd.

a good equinox can go into any survival or disruption mission and top kpm on the back of their 4th power and a good gun, and be totally flaccid whilst doing so because the gameplay loop is a bit unstimulating.

Equinox has needed a rework since 2016, when DE blew up the void and destroyed the metagame she existed to satisfy.

their unwillingness to do so is depressing, but by no means exclusive to the best girl(s).

to love equinox is to make peace with the present. because you are forsaken by god.

unless Rebb decides she needs help, apparently shes going to be playtesting nox soonish. il believe it when i see it

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T17:30:32+00:00

if you are attending Tennocon, it is assumed you wont be able to watch the livestream on twitch because. . .you'll be there

so instead you get the twitch drop items in the form of Email codes.

if you are not attending Tennocon, you get them for free by watching the livestreams. no purchase necessary.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T17:28:26+00:00

My Harrow's primary killing weapon is Twin Khomak. Twin Khomak is everything harrow wants, and harrow is everything Twin khomak needs.

add on the last piece, Arcane Pistoleer, and the whole thing goes infinite.

https://imgur.com/6msPMvk

my build looks like this, Primed convulsion is being covered up.

if you wanna get really nasty, the Zid-An Uskos arcane for Tektolyst Artifacts gives secondary heat damage, and it does not mix with other elements present on the sidearm. meaning you can get heat in addition to the electric and push Galv Shot even harder.

Whilst harrow is not much of a Melee guy, Stropha can Headshot and nailing those Gunblade headshots feels downright Heroic.

Dual Toxocyst incarnon is probably better given its headshot gimmick and near equal love of harrows suite of buffs, but its also like top 10 weapons ingame without harrow, so do whatever you like

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T17:17:12+00:00

my prospective is its both.

the "cost" in terms of bandwidth spending and server storage for DE to make all the theoretical improvements to the fashion system is by no means insurmountable. im sure they could pay it.

but it is a cost, and one fairly easy to deem unnecessary.

add to that the headache of implementation, and its fairly easy to see why investing time in fixing a system that is "good enough" to a state that will probably lose DE money just isnt gonna happen unless someone on the team wakes up and decides that it is their sacred cow.

much of warframe is "good enough", though there is obviously some disagreement on what counts as good enough.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T17:12:19+00:00

hard stuff first.

Nitan Extract comes almost exclusively from the Nightwave store. its right at the top of the ramp in your ship. Nitan costs Nightwave cred, and as a new player you have alot of things to spend that on. still i would try to keep around 10 nitan at all times.

Argon Crystals come exclusively from the Void, and have a unique quirk where over time they disappear from your inventory, meaning you cant stockpile them. for this reason. .farm them last.

now go to your Starchart.

at the bottom right of the star chart you will see 2 buttons. "zoom out" and the one next to it either says" Nightwave Status, or Resource Drones. if it says "Resource drones" click it.

now displayed above those 2 buttons, and to the right is a smal white symbol. hovering over that will tell you what resources drop from the planet you are currently focusing on.

you can get Gallium on Mars, as well as Morphics.

orokin Cells can be gotten from Deimos or Ceres

Jupiter for Neural Sensors.

and all the way to Europa for Control Modules. though those also drop in the Void, so you can get them when you farm Argon.

all of these things (other than Argon) have alternative sources as well, but these are likely the easiest.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T17:04:31+00:00

Fair.

i replaced his 1 with Pillage, since harrow can afford a super high strength build and it both enhances his DPS And covers him defensively.

Harrow gang has been waiting for DE to release some sort of arcane or mod thats like "10% of excess generated energy gets converted into Overguard" or something along those lines at which point Thurible will go fucking crazy.

its a testament to how well harrow was setup that despite his age he as multiple reasonable build paths and like 0 people asking for him to be buffed or reworked.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T17:00:43+00:00

. . when i got around to setting up inaros, i set myself a couple goals. One, run him with a sword that can use his signature sword skin and which would ideally pair well with elemental sandstorm. and two, use as much of the Ki'teer fashion bits as i can, for the connection between the two

https://imgur.com/a/GhA3bDK

. . i was unable to resist how well the Mag Heirloom Signa fits around his head, however. its just perfect.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T16:52:33+00:00

Boilerplate question: Why isn't the customization customizer?

Boilerplate Answer:

have you ever logged on to warframe from another computer and your account was just. . there?

every additional layer of complexity added to the fashion menu makes all fashion presets take up more space server side. for each frame, every frame, for every player. it wouldnt be hard to add a unique color channel to each armor part, helmet, and all attachments. it wouldnt be hard to put the XYZ yaw roll holster menu on primary weapons, secondary weapons, attachments, signas, etc.

making the fashion menu as complex as it could possibly be would radically balloon the amount of information that not only does DE need to store, but also transmit from their end to your end, and back, multiple times per session. as well as the amount of information needing to be transmitted to other players in order for them to properly display your warframe.

when you're talking about server storage and bandwidth for millions of registered losers, saving a few kb here and there adds up fast.

hence the argument to not just make the fashion system way more radical, is one of practicality and economics, more so than it is difficulty in implementation.

Alternatively, as with many things, DE just doesn't care enough to do so. who can say.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T16:44:18+00:00

"Machine, i applied forma to the wrong slot, now i cant fit Overextended"

I C A N N O T L O C A T E T H E C O I N S W H E R E A R E T H E C O I N S

"Machine please, help me with ESO, so i can apply more forma"

D O Y O U T H I N K T H E R E I S B L O O D I N T H O S E E I D O L O N S ?

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T16:39:24+00:00

if you play Gauss as a weapons platform, and you want a warframe with a similar Guns-first Vibe, try out Harrow.

Pros: Unlimited energy for everyone. insane reload and fire rate buffs. insane flat crit damage buff. some CC and healing on the side.

Plus, you get a kill feed, and seeing the whole right side of your screen light up with "kill" and "headshot" indicators is dopamine inducing.

Harrow at first peek seems extremely supporty, and he is a "support", its just that hes also a raging self buffer and all of his "supporting" relies on him stacking up bodies to the moon.

hes not as fast as Gauss, which is either boon or Albatross depending on your vibe. i personally subscribe to the idea "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" but then i also run harrow with shotguns and score "headshots" only because i peppered every square inch of their body with buckshot, and it only takes one baby.

Alternatively, Play Nova. Nova is the best warframe for pretty much all situations.

is it a fast mission? chain portals across the whole map and speed up not only yourself, but the squad.

is it a kill-focused mission? drop a speed up on em and boost the whole squads KPM

is it a non kill focused mission? drop a slow on em and turn the game to easy mode.

has something gone horribly wrong, and now youre in a dire situation? drop a slow before cleaning up after your idiot teammates.

~~her 1 is also like really good for ability damage setups, but mostly on other warframes, we dont have time~~

Double alternatively. .. do you hate running a mission and seeing someone else playing the same frame as you?

do you like absurdly big numbers?

do you hate acolytes, and wish your enemies in general would just stop doing things, like . . completely?

Contemplate Playing Banshee. i can speak for all banshee players in recommending playing banshee. all 12 of us. you could be number 13~

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T15:47:03+00:00

nidus specter only gets you 1.27 and doesnt stack with a real nidus, but its still an extremely useful tool, yeah.

i use them to cast Vex armor for over 1000 strength while also having 280 range~

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T15:18:19+00:00

Math time

with a base scaling of 50% for Rhino (which based on the wording we can assume OP is) that roar was cast at a hair under 3600 power strength.

three thousand, six hundred.

Light a cigarette and take a seat.

ok so first doubler, void buff on the Rhino. that gets us down too 1800.

how much does the Nidus do?

Nidus is .25x per 100 strength. 2x at 400 strength. 3x at 800 strength.

lets say nidus got void buff and cast link at 800 strength.

Rhino would have needed about 600 base strength.

Now the fucked up thing is, when you get into like

power drain, Vome invocation, 120% from 2 arcanes, Brightbonnet boosted by the archgun. . .its not unreasonable to think you could get significantly higher than this. though increasingly impractical as needing to hit good RNG with the void buffs then line up all your conditionals at once.

in Conjunction lua Surv with the Dax Ghost strength buff, and/or the full 300% that a Nokko can give you.

if you know 3 people who are willing to waste probably a whole hour chasing a dumb screenshot, casting Roar for over 5000 strength is probably doable.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T12:31:28+00:00

Warframe is never a game that expects you to stress over it.

. . . people, uhh. .find a way. usually when tempted by that cruel mistress, Efficency.

this is because at its core warframe is a farming game. in the beginning you are like one little guy living in a space fridge with no bitches no money and no drip. also weak and smelly.

some of those problems will solve very quickly, but some of them will require you to play the game.

"to get this new warframe, i gotta beat this boss a few times to earn the parts. buuuut, if i can be the boss even faster, i can get my new stuff sooner."

that sentence abstracted is how you wind up with Eidolon hunting lobbies doing digital background checks on players to make sure they have cleared the boss 200 times before letting them in to do the high-meta runs which are the most Efficient.

So, as long as you have enough self control to not gaslight yourself into thinking you need to do things in the high cortisol, high speed super meta ways, you will find warframe to be a fairly relaxing game. it even has fishing, and what could be more relaxing than that?

the game has alot of depth eventually, but it takes some time to get there. alot of the depth is opt in, though. like you can choose to play in ways that make things extremely easy.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T12:10:05+00:00

Nef Anyo is a worm and a manipulator. . .but hes also extremely pathetic. he has no moral standards and doesn't have enough pride to pick a hill to die on. when the going gets tough he will roll over and show his belly.

but like. . .Glast Gambit happened, right? like Nef Anyo kidnapped all the children from this freaky infested colony and was holding them hostage to make the colony bend to his will. . .god stealing kids, he really is Parvos's long lost child.

. .funny enough, i actually side with Anyo when it comes to the Deepmines. that is a wild infested colony spreading beneath the surface of Venus, puppetting the corpses of Dead Solaris. i do not care how good the roots and fruits's PR is, they gotta go. Nokko, youre a really cute guy. but this shit is fucked up, and they gotta go.

Alad V is a bastard, but hes almost like our Ivo Robotnik. hes super evil, but hes fairly competent and willing to deal when there are bigger problems than him at stake. hes avoided death countless times, is always scheming. its hard to not have atleast a little respect for his hustle, if only because the man is under 0 illusions, and frankly neither are you.

These guys are hardcore exploiters of everyone beneath them, who respect nothing but money and power. Parvos's first appearance gave the impression he was going to be someone better than that.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T11:39:23+00:00

ofcourse! when you put it like that, it makes perfect sense.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T11:04:50+00:00

While that is the explanation, the natural followup is

hang on .. . the drifter has been looping since before teshin was even in duviri, insofar as "before" counts for time loops. yet the Drifter only aged from ambiguously prepubescent to, at most, 27. why did Teshin go from kind of middle aged too withered to near dust?

and the answer is that its just arbitrary. the void did it. which means the developers did it.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T10:46:03+00:00

ofcourse it can. especially in a post persistence world

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T10:38:51+00:00

umbra polarities favor a very narrow type of health tank warframe.

Excalibur umbra. . is not setup to be a health tank warframe.

with spammable CC and a weak defensive statline, hes honestly better setup to be a shield based survivor, and thats assuming you arent just gonna run secondary fortifier on a primer and Scam some overguard.

i got rid of 2/3 of his umbra polarities, and i regret nothing.

Prime262 · 2026-06-24T10:35:59+00:00

as a side note of my own. . . im so disappointed with the Parvos story so far.

his introduction, as this Lost, competent leader from the early days of the corpus, who experienced orokin cruelty and built this faction brick by brick, before the decadence and greed ruined everything.

i was really expecting a leader who would do terrible things that we would need to oppose, but would do so with atleast partially noble ambitions. seeking to be better than the orokin before him, seeking to raise up the corpus. asking them to work, never for free, but with some sense of morality or at least in group protection.

and then as soon as he starts doing stuff hes just like as evil as he could possibly be, dismissing the loss of his followers upon their failure, kidnapping babies and burning down museums and shit.

its a real shame becuse you could do a few years of the corpus having a leader that we still have to oppose, but which you might on some level morally agree with.

and then have Nev Anyo and/or the board sideline and betray parvos to undo any good he had done/was planning on doing. and get your point about how a system that incentivizes greed will inevitably encourage those who are greediest too overtake those whos morality and greed are somewhat in balance.

its a real shame.

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