What are mods? baby don’t hurt me.
If this is your first foray into Warframe, you may not even know that modding exists. Now, this is not your fault, currently Warframe does a terrible job of explaining certain mechanics to newer players.
Mods are a vital part of Warframe, every piece of equipment, weapon, warframe, companion, can be modded to increase damage, survivability and utility.
Therefore, learning how to properly mod gear is essential to be able to continue on your journey through the star chart.
So what actually is a mod?
You can apply mods to anything they say they can be slotted into. For the mod above, at the bottom it says “MELEE”. This means you can stick it in any melee weapon to get the desired effect. In this case, it would grant +15% status chance to the weapon its slotted in.
This card shows us everything we need to know about each specific mod.
What does it all mean though?
I’ve gone ahead and labelled all the main features on this example mod card.
Starting at the top, we have the copy/duplicate count. This is literally just the number of same mods you have. In this example, I have 497 copies of this exact mod at this rank.
The Drain is how much capacity that specific mod will use when slotted into a gear piece. The symbol next to it also represents the polarity of the mod.
The mod name is literally just the name of the mod.
Mod description gives us an overview of what the mod does, in this case, like before, it increases the status chance of the weapon its slotted in by 15%.
The mod rank is a measure of how levelled up each mod is. Each dot represents one potential level, or rank. For Melee Prowess, we can see there are a total of 5 dots, meaning we can rank up this mod 5 times. Every time we rank it up, a dot will become a glowing blue colour until its fully ranked and all dots will be lit up.
How do I rank up mods then?
Ranking mods up can be done in the mods section on your Orbiter. This is located on the right as you go towards the lower section of your orbiter.
Welcome to the mod screen, yours should look similar to this.
Here, we’ve just searched for the mod we used above – Melee Prowess – for the sake of consistency.
You can see underneath where it says modding, we have four greyed out options, all we need to do here is choose the mod we want.
Beneath the mod, we have 2 arrows and the word “UNRANKED”. This is the current rank of the mod and buttons to change the rank of said mod.
On the left it shows all the attributes that will change. In this case, the status chance will increase from +15% to +90% and the drain will increase from 2 up to 7.
Near the right we can see how much it’ll cost to upgrade the mod to our chosen level. For us to fully upgrade this mod from unranked we can see it’ll cost us 310 Endo and 14,973 credits.
It’s worth noting at this point that mods can only be upgraded, its not possible to remove ranks on a mod, only an issue in very few circumstances but still something to be aware of.
Once we’ve decided how far we want to rank a mod up by, confirm it by clicking the “APPLY FUSION” button and confirming the popup that appears.
We now have a ranked up mod. If you didn’t upgrade it fully, you’ll be able to upgrade it in the future minus the cost it took to upgrade to its current rank.
What are the main rules to follow when modding?
Actually mod your gear:
While it may sound silly, mods are how the game was meant to be played.
Dying too much?
Look at your mods. Add some survivability. Look towards getting some mods like Adaptation and Quick thinking, and upgrading your vitality. Maybe look at getting some tanky frames, Rhino, for instance is a great one.
Not killing quick enough?
Look at your mods. Add some damage. Maybe go to the Wiki to find what damage enemies are weaker to and look at how to mod for those damage types. Make sure you keep building and levelling different weapons. This will go towards increasing your mastery rank and help you figure out what you like playing.
Not slidey enough?
Look at your mods. Yep, mods like Cunning drift increase your slideyness and decrease friction, they can be used in some very fun builds. Nezha’s passive also increases slide speed and length
With that said, as a newer player, you probably haven’t got a large variety of mods. This is why I encourage you to just KEEP running missions and KEEP killing enemies. Warframe is first and foremost, a grind. The more time you spend in missions, the more progress you’ll make.
Never be afraid to leave the Wiki open and look around to find the next thing you want to aim for.
Play to the weapons strengths
On the upgrades screen for every weapon, you can see all their stats. Take note of these and build around them.
For example, does the weapon have a good crit chance like 15+% or at least a decent crit multiplier 2.5X or more? Slap some critical mods on it.
Does it deal a high proportion of slash damage? Slap some slash mods on it
Play to your strengths
However, it’s important to play how YOU feel comfortable and enjoy. Quite often, the meta gear for content makes said content boring and just another mindless grind. This is great for efficiency, but its also a great way to get burned out.
Don’t neglect status
While it certainly doesn’t sound as good as Crit and raw damage, status scales much better. It’s even possible for some weapons to have >100% status chance, meaning you can potentially apply multiple statuses per shot.
Where Crit damage starts to fall off against high level enemies, a weapon that can stack status on them will keep up the damage for much longer with the right combo.
For example, for every stack of Viral you have on an enemy, you’ll get 25% increased damage to their health, up to 325% with a 100% bonus for the first stack
Remember to Forma
Although it isn’t essential in the early game, Forma becomes much more important into mid and later game.
It can give a 50% drain reduction to any mod of the same polarity in a specific slot, allowing you to fit more and higher level mods into your builds.
To actually Forma your gear, it needs to be levelled up to max, usually level 30, and will have its level reset after Formaing. You can do this as many times as you want.
Take advice from others
Warframe has an incredibly steep learning curve, it likes to just throw you into the action from the beginning. This is overwhelming for a lot of people. Thankfully though, the community is wonderful.
Is there a player in your mission killing everything without breaking a sweat? Most players will be flattered if you ask them to share their build.
There’s also a dedicated Q&A chat channel in game for any questions you may have, although it can move quite quick at peak times.
There’s also a good Twitch community that follow the game, a lot of streamers there are open for questions
Sites like Overframe are also useful to get some inspiration for builds, it might take some work to find builds you enjoy though.