World on Fire

When you think of a group of elemental powers, you normally think of something like Fire, Water, Earth, Air. Perhaps you think of elemental powers like Light and Shadow. Secondary elements could include things like Lightning and Ice. Warframe though, they’ve got a completely different set of elements, their primary ones composed of Cold, Heat, Toxin and Electricity, and their secondary elements being Viral, Gas, Corrosive, Magnetism, Radiation and Blast. Of course, several Warframes are based on these elements. Volt uses Electricity, Frost uses Cold, the really hard to get Saryn is based around Toxin and Ember, judging by her name alone, uses Heat. Then there’s Chroma, who can use all four base elements.

As I don’t have Saryn yet (because she is a royal pain in the backside to obtain), Ember is who we’re going to talk about today.

Ember is obtained by killing the boss on Saturn. Each time you kill him, you’ll randomly get one of three parts of her (neuroptics, system, chassis) and you can buy her blueprint for credits on the market. The boss in question is General Sargas Ruk, located on Tethys and he likes to use powers similar to Ember. It’s not a hard fight, just a tad hectic, and he also drops rare items like the Continuity mod and Orokin Cells, so you’ll quickly get used to his fight. The cost of Ember’s construction is pretty typical for the average Warframe.

As obviously pointed out by her name, Ember’s abilities all do Heat damage. Her passive takes this further; being set on fire (or damaged by a heat damage proc) increases the power strength of her abilities and also gives her 10 energy for every second she’s on fire. An interesting passive, but as Ember is considered a glass cannon nuker and heat damage ignores your shields and directly damages what little health Ember has, it’s not exactly a sustainable passive.

Her other abilities are all fire-based too. Her first ability, Fireball, is similar to that of Frost – throwing a fireball at enemies, leaving a 5m crater of fire on the ground and setting enemies hit by it on fire. It’s a one-handed ability meaning it can be cast when running around and won’t make you stand still.

Her second ability is Accelerant, which briefly stuns nearby enemies and increases all Heat damage that Ember does. It also grants her a 50% faster casting speed,  so she can use her other abilities more quickly. This buff lasts for 30 seconds.

Her third ability is Fire Blast. Ember smacks the ground, creating an expanding ring of fire that, you guessed it, causes heat damage to enemies. It pushes back nearby enemies and leaves a ring of fire on the ground that also deals heat damage to anyone who walks through it.

Ember’s last ability, and the name of this article, is World on Fire. Unlike Ember’s other abilities, this is a toggle-able ability. When activated, the ground randomly erupts around Ember, prioritizing enemies and causing explosions that, once again, cause heat damage. It drains energy over time, so you’ll have to get yourself a Flow or a Streamline (or preferably both) to keep it up.

Unlike the other characters I’ve talked about – Volt with his utility, Frost with his defense, Trinity as a support and whatever the fuck Titania is supposed to be, Ember has a very different role. Her job is to kill everything as fast as possible. Ember is best known for mowing through lower level maps with ease, just turning on World on Fire and running through the maps like that.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that there’s a limit to how much power strength one can have, this means that Ember kinda falls off when it comes to the very high-level stuff. But throughout the majority of the solar system, Ember does a perfectly good job killing everything. Even more unfortunately, Ember Prime is a lot harder to come across in comparison with other Prime warframes (excluding the never-to-be-released-again Excalibur Prime), but that’s okay, because most of her changes are cosmetic ones.

If you want someone who does tons of damage, then Ember is a good choice. She’s an even better choice if you just want to watch the world burn.