Modding the Awkward Way

Lately, I’ve been playing Warframe with my brother Smeghead. I introduced him to the game in April last year, and he’s really enjoyed it, having reached Mastery Rank 21 with ease. His favourite character is Rhino, and his glorious Rubedo-plated Rhino Prime is his most used frame, complete with several Forma and all the maxed mods. Meanwhile, my beloved Volt Prime still does not have a single Forma embedded in him.

You see, Smeghead mods like a normal person. He fully upgrades his mods. If a Warframe or weapon doesn’t have enough room for a mod, then he sticks a Forma in them. Yeah sure, it means he has to level said Warframe or weapon up again, but it means he can stick more mods in and make everything more powerful. And at Mastery Rank 21, he has 21 capacity on unranked weapons and Warframes. 42 if the item he is Forma’ing has an Orokin Catalyst or Reactor in it. In the mean time, if there’s some spare space where he can’t fit a whole mod in, he’ll place an unranked mod there instead.

Me, I don’t do that. No, I do things the stupid way.

I should point out, I’ve Forma’d weapons I like. I Forma’d my Ignis 6 times, and my Ignis Wraith 5 times. I’ve forma’d my Sonicor 5 times, but I can’t bring myself to use it after DE nerfed the poor blighter. My Zenistar, Lesion and Orthos Prime also have a bunch of forma in them. But Warframes? None of them have forma in them. A lot of them have been potato’d and since I have a ton of Exilus Adapters now, they have those too, but no Forma.

How do I do this then? How do I have multiple Sortie-viable Warframes? Currently, I can take both my Volts and both my Frosts (because I didn’t have the heart to sell normal Frost and normal Volt) into level 50-100 missions with ease.

I just have loads of duplicate mods. For example I have lots of different Redirection (shield) mods, one at max rank, one with 12 capacity, one with 11 capacity, one with 9 capacity and one with 6 capacity. As I level up a Warframe, I’ll just swap out Redirections as needed. There are some mods that I always have maxed out (things like Streamline and Intensify) but if I have a duplicate of a mod I need, I won’t hesitate to upgrade it only as needed.

Admittedly, part of this is because it costs a fortune to max out some mods. For mods with 10 ranks, it costs as much to get from rank 9 to rank 10 as it does to get from rank 0 to rank 8 or 9.

There are mods you should ALWAYS max though – stance mods for melee weapons and aura mods for Warframes, as these INCREASE your max capacity.

Thing is, this kinda works really well. Of course I can’t min-max any of my builds since I can’t normally fit maxed mods on my Warframes, but really, I’m only losing out on a few percent here and there, space I could fill with another mod. I mean, yes, I could build my Volt so I have 300% power strength but then I’d be running into every wall there is, I wouldn’t have room for my augment mods, I would have to leave out a survival mod AND I’d have to Forma Volt multiple times. Which means having to level him up again. And chances are, if I change my mind on a build, I have to work around that Forma’d slot too.

Unfortunately, this system just doesn’t work well on weapons. Melee weapons sure, since you can squeeze extra mod space in by using stances, and a lot of melee mods actually don’t require many slots. But primary and secondary slots need all the capacity they can get.

It’s a stupid thing to do, really. My Warframes and weapons could all be so much more powerful. But I spend so much time messing around with weird builds that really, Forma’ing slots sometimes backfires on me. At least, it has with some weapons.

But really, I’m just lazy and don’t want to level things up again.