Tips on doing Warframe Sorties

For ages I held off on doing Sorties. Part of it was because, back before the War Within came out, I wasn’t a particularly good player and most of my weapons and frames were lacking in forma and Orokin reactors and catalysts. Then the War Within came out and locked Sorties away from me, meaning I couldn’t do them until I finished that infernal quest. Still, almost everything else in the solar system is under level 50, so the idea of sorties always seemed scary to me, especially when the chances of good loot weren’t that great.

Now I’m finally doing Sorties on a regular basis – almost every day. Alright, I’ve received a fuckton of Endo and Ayatan Sculptures and very little good loot, but that’s the nature of random chance. And I’m not falling over all the time and dying constantly as well, which is a plus. In fact, sometimes I even carry in Sorties. Sometimes.

Sometimes is better than never, so here’s a bunch of random tips for people just getting started with Sorties and level 50+ content.

Don’t worry about sucking, just tell people that you’re learning.

Everyone sucks at first. That’s an inescapable fact. But if you don’t tell anyone, then you’ll be expected to pull your weight. And when you don’t carry your weight, people will get annoyed. Luckily the Warframe community is a very nice community, but everyone has a bad day. If you’re having problems though, tell your team! Not only will they understand, especially if you’re a newer player, but they’re also often willing to give advice.

And if you get downed a lot, try and and move yourself into a corner so you can be revived, and provide cover fire. But if it’s the end of the mission, let yourself die, so that everyone can extract – don’t worry, you’ll still get rewards, unless you’ve run out of revives.

This advice is most important for Spy missions, which often have extra puzzles and stuff, and in the case of the Lua Spy mission, can be genuinely quite hard. It’s better to stand on guard and let a team mate deal with the vault, then to try it yourself, screw it up and fail the mission. Speaking of which…

If you’re good at Spy missions and want to minimize failure, play them solo.

Spy missions in Sorties are particularly hard because you have to get all three of them, while often facing super strong enemies. If you play in pubs though, there’s always a chance that someone might trigger an alarm and fail the mission, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. While a pub Spy mission is often a lot faster as everyone can just go to one vault each, the chance of failure is higher too. At least if you screw up a vault on your own, you can rush ahead, you can drop an air support charge, whatever, it’s all on you, it’s all under your control.

Play with what you are comfortable with.

It’s all well and good saying that a Limbo is the best choice for a Rescue mission if you don’t really know how to play Limbo effectively, or taking a Tigris Prime into a shotgun only Exterminate if you haven’t modded it correctly or hate how it feels, but if you’re not sure what you’re doing, then sometimes it’s better just to play what you like. For me, while Volt isn’t as effective as Limbo in a Rescue mission, I am experienced enough with him that I can complete the mission no problem.

What makes this better is that sometimes you’ll find better ways to do missions. With my aforementioned Volt, a speed boost helps get to extraction more quickly, and Electric Shield allows you to hack consoles in peace, meaning everyone can hack, not just that invisible Loki.

Of course, there are scenarios where X is always better than Y, but if your X isn’t up to scratch, then let someone with a better Warframe deal with the situation for you while you provide support in another way.

Use elemental weaknesses to your advantage.

Grineer hate Corrosive damage. Corpus dislike Viral and Infested HATE gas damage. It’s worth checking your weapons before you go into a mission to make sure you have the right elemental damage. But even if you don’t have a weapon that has 100% status chance, you still do bonus damage to enemies who lack elemental resistances. Even a little bit of extra damage is more helpful. If you have weapons with 100% status chance though, then it’s definitely worth using them, as the procs from elements are very useful – particularly with Corrosive, which strips enemies’ armour, making them easier to kill.

The same doesn’t really apply to Warframes, so don’t feel you have to take Saryn into every sortie.

Use the Liset, get Air Support Charges!

Ordis and your default ship, the Liset, can help you in your mission, way more than you’d expect. When an Air Support Charge is used, Ordis will do an action depending on what ship you have equipped. The Liset Air Support will remove Lock Downs and stops all alarm triggers – that means that you can give yourself an extra few seconds to do both messed up Spy vaults AND you get extra time to save the hostage in rescue missions. Timed right, you can double the amount of time to complete a vault or save a hapless operator. The Air Support Charge is absolutely amazing, and it genuinely makes me sad that people don’t take their Lisets to Spy and Rescue missions more often.

Bring some Gear…

Energy pancakes – discs you drop on the ground to replenish energy – are so useful. So are health and ammo pancakes. Also useful are the aforementioned Air Support Charges. Specters are useful as well, as they scale with enemies and will also revive Hostages and Operators if they get the chance to. Ciphers do not work in Sorties, so you will have to result in hacking manually.

Get yourself a Trinity!

There’s no situation where a Trinity isn’t useful, apart from maybe one where you can’t use your powers, like at the end of the War Within. You can heal, you can revive faster, you can give energy, you can heal some more. The only thing you can’t heal are mobile defense targets, excavators and cryopods, but that doesn’t matter when you make Sortie defense missions – with dumb as fuck operators who walk around and need healing – utterly trivial.

If you can’t get a Trinity, bring Crowd Control.

When you’re going against increasingly stronger enemies, it gets harder to kill them. So don’t! Unless it’s an exterminate mission, you can often get by with not killing many enemies and simply stopping them from moving. How you do this is up to you, but no matter what, a bunch of crowd control is always useful. Good examples include Nova with high power strength, Frost with Avalanche and pretty much all his abilities; and Rhino, who can use Stomp combined with high duration to keep enemies at bay.

Don’t worry if you can’t do a Sortie!

If at the end of the day, you just CAN’T get past a specific sortie, then don’t worry about it! There will always be another sortie you can do tomorrow. And another the next day. And another and another and another. You probably would have just gotten some Endo anyway.

What’s more important at the end of the day is that you have fun!