Shocking Capacitance

Augments in Warframe are a weird thing. They’re supposed to allow you to customize your Warframe’s abilities so you can play more how you want, but most frames only have one or two augments in total. Even older characters like Frost and Volt only have one per ability, and I don’t think any frames have more than one for any of their abilities.

Really though, a lot of augments are simply buffs, with very minor downsides. Normally, the only downside is that you could put a normal mod where you put an augment, but it really depends on the character. For example, Despoil is heavily recommended for most Nekros players and Vampire Leech makes Trinity’s energy-sucking ability even better.

With Volt, it’s similar. All his augments are buffs. And kinda large buffs, actually, considering all they cost is a single mod slot. Which isn’t bad, except for the fact that these augments are only really available via the Red Veil, a syndicate dedicated to basically killing everyone. They’re the cult version of chopping off both your legs because you have a wart on your foot. I don’t fancy buying stuff from them. But luckily you can trade augments, same as any other mod.

Now, I have two of the three four Volt augments – Shocking Speed and Capacitance. And I’m only going to talk about those two, because Shock Trooper is super boring. All it does is allow you to cast Shock on team mates and give them electricity damage for a bit. While electricity is a good element when combined with others (it makes Corrosive when mixed with Toxin, the best combo element in the game), it’s rather mediocre on its own and effective only against Corpus. Plus shocking your team mates isn’t very nice. The Electric Shield augment is retarded, because allowing team mates to come along and steal your shields stupid when you’ve put them around an objective for a bloody reason.

Anyway, back to Shocking Speed and Capacitance, the other two augments, which are a million times better.

I’ve been using Shocking Speed for, well, forever almost. Davjo gave it to me super early on in my Warframe ‘career’ and I only took it off the other day when I got Capacitance. Shocking Speed is really simple – When you activate Speed, you get an electric aura around you that briefly stuns nearby enemies, doing guaranteed electric damage. The aura also is also applied to any Tenno allies who are nearby when Speed is activated.

Why is this so great? Because it allows you to safely run past the majority of threats, as well as briefly neutralize them and give yourself some breathing room. The stun is incredibly short (generally just a second or so) but since Speed makes you run (and reload) fast, it’s generally enough to get the fuck out of wherever you are. Shocking Speed is also great when used alongside a melee build, as the stuns mean you can melee enemies to death with ease.

There is one small downside though. Shocking Speed triggers things like explosive barrels and freezing barrels and cracks broken windows in Corpus ships, putting the whole ship on lock down. So run with caution.

Capacitance is an augment for Volt’s Discharge ability. Basically, 3% of all the damage you do via Discharge is turned into ‘overshields’, increasing your total shields. Overshields remain indefinitely and act the same as normal shields. The maximum overshield you can get is around 1200, which is a lot most of the time, but that gives my Volt Prime 2400 shields regularly. Capacitance though is not as strong as, say, Energy Vampire/Vampire Leech on Trinity, but Trinity is boring to play and Energy Vampire is a single-target ability, while Capacitance can stun an entire room with ease.

The downside to Capacitance though is that it means building Discharge as your main ability, and Discharge is a weird ability in general. While it is amazing at crowd control, Discharge has a weird cap of 4000 damage (assuming 100% power strength) at which it stops stunning enemies. This means you either have to build a lot of power strength to increase the cap at the cost of duration and range, which are fundamental to Discharge, or build for duration and range at the cost of strength, which means Discharge does no damage but it also takes longer to reach its damage cap.

Honestly, I will always prefer Shocking Speed over Capacitance, as it means I can build for Speed and still have Shock, Electric Shield and Discharge all have some sort of use.

Shame the augment for Electric Shield is so damn awful…