My Continued Obsession with Volt

I’m still obsessed with this one character. It’s no longer a growing obsession. Volt, one of three starter characters in the game Warframe. The ‘mage-like’ character who provides a more caster-based play style than Excalibur or Mag. The electric one. The derpy looking thing with weird crotch armour and weird, square knees.

I’ve been using this guy from the start, and he makes up a good 40% of my play time, the other 60% being split between Volt Prime and my slowly growing collection of other frames – Frost, Ember, Trinity and Valkyr. Frost has some obvious uses, but the other characters, I haven’t found their, well, niches, yet.

In fact, I ended the last article claiming that I’d just unlocked Trinity and would probably find myself addicted to the default healing character of the game. Turns out, I was completely wrong and I haven’t even finished leveling her up. The weird, flappy skirted, round headed, angel-like character just doesn’t seem to do it for me and she’s sitting in my inventory begrudgingly at level 30, unwanted. Valkyr, a gift from an awesome Redditor, is currently at max level, reached far quicker than Trinity, and is actually fun to play.

But still, there I am, doing most missions as Volt or Volt Prime. Nightmare alerts get done as Frost, because he’s tankier than Volt (and Valkyr because I don’t have a great build for her yet) but for everything above level 20, I use Volt.

It seems weird, but it’s not really.

You see, Volt has all the abilities I want out of a character. He has an ability where you press a button and fire something – Shock. He has a shield that blocks a lot of stuff – Electric Shield. He has a speed boost – helpfully called Speed. And then there’s a channeled ultimate that looks pretty badass and stuns everything around him – Discharge.

Unlike other characters, Volt’s abilities just sort of snap in my mind. Frost is pretty good, he fires a frozen snowball, he has a shield and he has a pretty badass freezing ability for his fourth ability, but Frost walks so damn slow. He also looks like some sort of horned critter wearing a heavy coat and a tie. I’m enjoying Valkyr, but I have similar problems – I barely use two of her abilities because I’m not sure when I should use them. Volt though, I can press buttons and everything will be okay.

I think, really, it’s because I don’t need to aim with half of Volt’s abilities. I kid you not, the ability that requires the most aim is Electric Shield, because it deploys in the direction you are looking at.

Ironically, Electric Shield doesn’t stop lightning from hurting you. Oh, and some weapons, like the MK1-Paris starter weapon, go straight through your shield for some reason. Shock though targets the closest enemy who has line of sight and bounces to other enemies, Speed is a self-cast ability and Discharge is a channeled ability – you just need to make sure you won’t be killed by channeling it and the channel time can be reduced with mods.

Perhaps, if I’d started with Excalibur or Mag, I would have ended up just as obsessed with those frames. But I doubt it. Excalibur is a lot more about melee and is a tankier character and according to a lot of older Warframe players, Mag falls off when it comes to mid-late game because her abilities just don’t scale well. But also Excalibur just looks like a weird full body racing suit, and Mag’s head is weird and consists of nothing but glass. Better-looking than Nova, but still.

I mean, it’s not that Volt is good-looking or anything. He isn’t. He’s actually pretty ugly if you look closely. But he just ticks all those little check boxes of things I like.

And he is even better with a Continuity mod.