Fighting Level 50+ Enemies with a Level 30 Flamethrower

For the majority of the hours I’ve spent playing Warframe, I’ve been using the same old weapons. I swap out weapons as and when I need to, but most of the time people see me, they see a yellow Volt Prime with a yellow Ignis. I’ve talked about Volt a lot, he is essentially my avatar in the game (a lot of people identify more with warframes than operators) but I haven’t really talked about the Ignis. I’ve mentioned my floating pet and ugly animals more than my weapons.

The Ignis is a flamethrower made by the Grineer. By default, it does heat (i.e. fire) damage with a small chance to make enemies catch fire and panic and flail. You will see several enemies using it, particularly Hyekka Masters (literally crazy cat ladies) at low levels and Scorches at higher levels. It fires in a large, narrow cone which fires for as long as you hold down the trigger and has a clip size of 150 and a range of about 25m, give or take. The range and clip size can be increased with mods, like most other things. More importantly, the Ignis has innate punch-through, meaning it can pass through walls.

With mods, the Ignis’s fire cone looks the same, but you can add a lot of bits and pieces. Popular mods for the Ignis are Combustion Beam, which causes explosions whenever you kill an enemy (although it doesn’t chain) and Firestorm, which increases the range and ‘blast radius’ of your cone of fire. As always, one can throw on your standard mods, like Serration, or increase range even more by combining Firestorm with Reach. Unfortunately, because of both a low critical chance and a low critical damage multiplier, crit-affecting mods aren’t really worth it. But multishot (Split Chamber), even if its effects are not obvious, is totally worth using.

The meat of the Ignis though is the elemental combinations you can put on it. The Ignis is not a weapon of damage but a weapon of utility and status procs. Because the Ignis is a pure elemental weapon, adding Slash/Impact/Puncture mods are useless. But adding other elemental mods will make weapon’s innate heat damage combine with them, meaning you could probably squeeze three different elements on your flamethrower. Whatever happens, the first element you mod on will combine with the heat damage, giving you radiation, blast or gas. The placement of your mods is almost an art when it comes to getting the elemental damage you want.

You will also want lots of status chance. With all continuous weapons, status procs (like removing shields with magnetism, slowing enemies with cold and causing explosions with blast) are calculated per second, with 100% status chance meaning you’ll proc your elemental status once every second. Luckily, increasing fire rate also increases status chance, so getting to 100% isn’t that hard. Rifle Aptitude, the status chance only mod, is borderline useless. The best element to use is corrosive, which is electricity and toxin, as it helps destroy armor, especially with Grineer. Technically Slash is better since it bypasses most defenses and slices though health, but you can’t put Slash on an Ignis. I tried.

As for me, I have several combinations I use. My normal one is corrosive and heat, which I take with me on most missions, since Infested hate heat and Grineer (and a handful of Corpus) dislike corrosive. My second loadout is more crowd-control based, using gas or blast and lots of cold.

My third loadout is a loadout for funsies and Loki. With the addition of the Hush mod, I can make my Ignis cause silent explosions. Yep, silent explosions. It’s amazing against anything below Pluto, but like my other two loadouts, it’s not very good against anything higher leveled.

That’s the sad thing about the Ignis. It’s a very cool, versatile weapon, absolutely awesome. I love it. But the Ignis, even at the maximum level of 30, struggles with high level enemies. Level 45 seems to be the limit with my builds. Even with the constant explosions, it just isn’t enough and you quickly end up using a whole clip/magazine to kill just a handful of enemies, even WITH its innate punch-through.

Sadly, this means that I may have to shop around for a new weapon, one that can carry my ass and doesn’t need more than 2-3 forma.

Although it turns out, I might already have one…