Warframe Devstream #139 recap: Quality of life changes galore

Recapping the latest devstream and highlighting the main takeaways from Warframe’s next mainline update along with upcoming event details.

First off, between now and March 4 people who own a Nintendo Switch and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate can partake in a spirit board event named ‘Spirits in Black’. You can earn certain spirits in the game fitting the theme including Warfame’s Lotus. Fittingly enough her spirit battle pits you against Bayonetta, which the voice actress for the Lotus (Rebecca Ford) cosplayed as a few Halloweens ago.

Onto actual Warframe updates: the first mainline update will be a hefty one. It includes several bug fixes, enemy AI and health value changes, balances to loadout options, and nice quality of life fixes. This will be the first major update to the game this year before any additional content is delivered.

Of course the biggest (and most urgent) one is to address the Railjack portion of the game. It launched in an awfully buggy and poorly optimized state back in December. More than 45 bugs are to be fixed such as fixing outright broken skills and improving performance to prevent client crashes. I’m glad that this isn’t going to face a similar fate like the conclave.

Another thing the devs brought to attention for the Railjack game mode was the high resource and credit cost needed to craft each part of the ship. It was a huge barrier for players who wanted to have their own railjack, so there is going to be an upcoming cost revision for the resources required. It was estimated to be lowered between 66% to 75%. Players who have already made their own railjacks or are in the process of making them will be reimbursed the resources that exceed the needed amounts along with rush repair drones.

Another group of notable upcoming changes to the mainline update are the enemy health values and AI changes. As enemy levels raise, their armor, shield, or health values raised at an exponential level, turning many of them into bullet sponges. This oftentimes led players to pursue certain elemental combos for their loadouts over others. It also means that some elements and damage types (toxic and slash) are seemingly going to get toned down.

At higher levels, ranged enemies had ridiculous accuracy in their shots and led to many sudden deaths. The team at Digital Extremes are looking into not outright nerfing enemy AI, but reducing the rate at which there were unnecessary difficulty spikes from things out of player control. I see this as a particularly positive change in the right direction especially in endurance runs where the meta is to just camp at a place where you have cover and let enemies come up to you to fight. It’ll incentivize players to be more interactive in higher level missions in general and open up to more loadout options.

Another big quality of life change is shield gating. The purpose of shields in Warframe is to prevent one-shotting on players. This will finally be implemented and hopefully work as intended. This will make frames that are ‘squishy’ or easily killable have more durability. Slash procs will not bypass shields when afflicted onto players.

Next, which I think is the biggest quality of life change, is the removal of self damage in the game. Gone are the days of blowing myself up in a narrow corridor or at the very moments when doors close on me. Instead, depending on the blast radius of explosive weapons and your proximity to the blast, your warframe will stagger. The closer you are will prompt you to either recover with this cool back dodging animation; the further you are will simply make you flinch. Obviously, the closer you are will take longer to recover from the animation. This does mean that self-damage builds for a certain dragon-themed warframe may no longer be viable for certain endgame activities.

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There will also be some further improvements to status chances surpassing 100%. Like orange and red critical numbers, status chances after that 100 mark would inflict two status procs, along with slightly more potent effects. This could mean that critical builds aren’t the only optimal strategy, assuming that doesn’t get affected and actually promotes build diversity over nerfing the current meta.

To end the stream, there are two content updates that are to be dropped soon after the mainline. The first is Operation Scarlet Spear. It’ll introduce the squad link feature which was teased in last year’s Tennocon. Slowly but surely, Railjack is turning into what was advertised in the past two years. More information like how it works and the rewards will be shown at a later time. The big takeaway from this is that it’ll further expand on the lore of Warframe and the new and old wars within the game’s universe.

Next in April, the Deadlock Protocol will be released. It includes a remastered Corpus ship tileset along with a new warframe— Protea. Hopefully this won’t be just another Jovian Concord and be forgotten about once the hype dies down.

Other upcoming changes addressed in the stream included Vauban and Titania changes to make them more viable and specialized in certain missions. Kuva Liches also got a handful of fixes. Infested enemies are getting a damage increase. It also includes the changes to arcanes with slight buffs and nerfs. There are many other slight tweaks to refresh the game and put it in a better direction which can all be checked by clicking here.