The Humble Capture Mission

After a mediocre day, there is always one thing that cheers me up. Capture missions. Ideally Void Fissure ones. Even better if they’re Lith Fissures on Venus or Mars. There’s something about their simplicity that I truly enjoy.

Capture missions are one of the easiest mission types in Warframe. You leap into the mission, leap through randomly picked tiles to get to the Capture Target, you attack the target until he or she falls down, then you stand over them and turn them into little cubes. After that, you’re free to do whatever you want. Most people will just head straight to extraction, others will run around killing things, and if you’re doing a Syndicate or Fissure mission, you’ll want to collect your various Medallions and Reactant.

Even on higher difficulties, Capture missions are pretty easy. There are only two real issues you might come across. Grineer capture targets tend to have really high armour. Corpus capture targets almost always have Nullifier abilities. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll stumble across the Arctic Corpus target, who carries a Glaxion and deploys Frost-like globes. In a Tenno’s hands, the Glaxion is an awful weapon, but you quickly learn not to underestimate Arctic Corpus targets, they WILL tear you to shreds if you’re not careful.

Most of the time though, Capture missions are almost impossible to fail. They can be failed, simply by letting the capture target reach a specific area on the map, but honestly these rooms are pretty far away and almost never seen. One of the ‘extraction’ rooms for capture targets is actually the same room used to evacuate Grineer during the Defection mission. The other way to fail is for the target to get over 1000 meters away or get killed and removed from the game. The latter two only seem to happen because of bugs, the capture targets, once downed, are almost immortal. What can kill them though is falling through the floor and into the abyss below – once they (or anything else that isn’t a Tenno) reach about 1000m away, everything hits an invisible floor and is killed. Warframes normally get respawned on solid ground.

Of course, there’s the matter of capturing the target, having them scream as they are turned into data and sent to the Lotus. That can be a little traumatic. Heck, they actually made it less traumatic over the years.

While you’re capturing, you’re vulnerable to any other enemies you may have pissed off, but most of the time a bit of crowd control or your team mates will keep enemies occupied. Or you can just use Void Mode as an Operator and be invulnerable. It’s like a very brief defense mission, where the defense target is a team mate capturing an enemy. It’s a very, very short amount of time though, and quite often you can just tank any damage that comes your way.

Still, would be cool if you had to carry your target on one shoulder, restricted to secondaries only, akin to carrying other objects, but I bet that would play havoc with various animations and stuff.

Capture missions are easy, but they have their uses. They’re actually a really good spot to do various riven challenges, from missions that require X number of kills doing Y thing as there’s a constant supply of enemies, to sustaining a x3 melee combo for 30 seconds since the capture target is immortal and won’t die. Because there’s no time limit once you’ve captured your target, you can spend as much time as you want just… killing things. Enemies won’t scale or anything like that, but killing things is always good.

Funnily enough, you can use capture missions as resource farms for common materials like polymer bundles, plastids or Oxium, since enemies won’t ever stop spawning. Capture missions probably aren’t as efficient as other missions, especially low level ones due to weaker enemies, but it’s easier than managing life support.

It’s worth pointing out that capture missions do not appear in Sorties. Probably because they’re too easy, or more likely, too fast. Considering how fast anyone can do a capture mission, they don’t exactly make for challenging content.

That doesn’t matter. Not everything needs to be hard. Sometimes it’s nice just to have some relaxed fun.