Becoming Obsessed with Frost Again

So a while back, Frost Prime was released as a Warframe bonus for Twitch Prime. He’d been re-vaulted a while back, and alongside the Soma Prime and Scindo Prime, was always a well-rounded frame, so as a free Warframe, Frost Prime was perfect for the huge amount of new players looking to try something other than Excalibur, Volt and Mag. Of course, because you could get these items with the Twitch Prime trial and a valid credit/debit card, it meant that almost everyone had Frost Prime.

Unfortunately, this meant that everyone was using Frost Prime, and there simply wasn’t enough room for me to use my own Frost Prime, which I had worked hard to get during the 2016 winter Unvaulting. And now that Frost Prime back again during the February Unvaulting, it means everyone will be using Frost Prime again.

But in the mean time, I’ve got a small window where I can use Frost and not be considered “one of those newbies who have twitch prime and don’t know what to do with their snow globes.” And it means I can get obsessed with him for a bit and give poor Volt a break.

Turns out, Frost’s Snow Globe is really his most boring ability anyway.

What spurred me into playing Frost again was being dragged into a Defense Sortie where no one wanted to play a healing character. In Sorties, the defense target isn’t a cryopod but an operative, a random NPC who wanders around like a fucking idiot, who you have to protect. for ten waves. It takes forever, mostly because the NPC has to wander to a new location between waves and enemies tend to get stuck. And because the bastard wanders around, Frost’s Snow Globe isn’t particularly useful. Instead, I went for a new build, using high efficiency and the augment Icy Avalanche, which basically gives nearby allies a miniature version of Iron Skin. So they got brief damage immunity. Whether this applied to the hapless defense target or not, I have no idea, but it was fun being semi immortal.

I then took this Frost build into normal missions. High efficiency, high power strength, high range, low duration. Up until about level 50, Avalanche basically becomes a room-wide nuke which also grants invulnerability and Freeze and Ice Wave basically become smaller nukes. Frost becomes an incredibly tanky caster frame who does more than just protect objectives.

But the thing is, he can still protect objectives. High efficiency combined with high power strength still makes for a pretty strong Snow Globe if you repeatedly re-cast it. The only real issue is the range, which makes it much easier for Nullifiers to destroy the Snow Globe and more enemies will fire upon it, reducing Snow Globe’s health more quickly.

It’s worth noting that Snow Globe isn’t useful for Infested missions. Because the Infested have a habit of just charging at the defense target, and you can’t shoot through the Snow Globe to kill them. If you have a Zenistar though, you can just throw that into the middle of your Snow Globe and basically create an Infested blender.

Oh and don’t forget you can destroy Snow Globes from the outside by casting Freeze at them.

There is one downside to the low duration, ability-spamming build. Avalanche actually does both Cold Damage and Corrosive damage, stripping the armor of frozen enemies. The short duration means that few people will be able to make use of the armor-less enemies. But at the same time, frozen enemies don’t receive status procs the same way normal enemies do, so the downside isn’t really that horrible.

So yeah, the low duration is fine. It only affects Avalanche and Freeze anyway.

At the end of the day, it’s easy to get bored of ‘meta Snow Globe Frost’ but changing up what ability you focus on can make all the difference, and really invigorate how you play a Warframe.

Although if you’re looking to play and enjoy Frost, I suggest you do so now, before the swarms of Frost Primes come back…