Making Operators Good

I’ve never really liked the whole Operator thing in Warframe. I mean, your Operator has his or her uses, but they don’t have the best personalities and take away from the mystery of the whole Warframe thing, what with them being basically edgy kids from a familiar anime. But that being said, with some effort, you can make them into pretty useful weapons, just like your Warframes. And maybe some cosmetics.

Actually, definitely some cosmetics. Because I’ll be honest, most humans in Warframe are pretty fucking ugly and the Operators are no exception. It takes extreme dedication and tedious amounts of work to make an Operator who looks genuinely nice. It also takes Platinum to give your Space Kid some decent hair, because the default options are pretty mediocre. Then again, you might be better off just buying a helmet or something and covering your face entirely.

Okay, you don’t have to spend platinum. In fact, quite a few Operator get-ups are obtainable by purchasing them either from Onkko or Little Duck in Cetus or Fortuna. Except they’re pretty expensive to make, so you’ll need to go and farm resources for them. Still, the option is there, even if the Cetus stuff is pretty ugly and plastic-looking. The really nice stuff though is mostly Platinum only, notably the Umbra items.

Anyway, back to the Operators themselves as weapons of mass destruction. Because that is what they are. Or at least that is what they are made out to be. Operators are considered demons, ultra-powerful monsters that even the Orokin feared. But all of that power is locked away, closed off from everything. You want to be a super strong monster? You have to work for it.

You gotta start working on that Focus of yours.

Thankfully, farming Focus IS a lot easier than it used to be. If you enjoy doing the same specific things over and over. Currently, if you want Focus, your best bet is doing Elite Sanctuary Onslaught, which gives you extra Focus gains every wave. If you do Eidolon hunts on a regular base, you can trade Sentient Shards for Focus gains as well. Before those though, all you could really do was something like Adaro, Sedna, where people meticulously and stealthily kill everything, using the stealth multiplier to earn more focus. Stealth exterminate missions are okay, but nothing beats Elite Sanctuary Onslaught.

Still, you need a lot of Focus. Especially if you want to unlock the Waybounds. For example, on my Operator, I have the Vazarin waybound that increases my Operator’s maximum health. That cost about 500,000 focus to get to the maximum rank plus another 1,000,000 focus to unlock it so I can use the perk on any Focus school, plus goodness knows how much standing to actually get enough capacity on the other Focus schools to be able to use the Waybound in the first place.

Heavens forbid you want more than one Waybound. Ideally, you’ll want to unlock Zenurik’s Void Flow before anything else so you can spend more time in Void Mode and dash more often before running out of energy. Other recommended multi-school perks include Zenurik’s Void Siphon (energy regeneration), Naramon’s Mind Sprint (Void Dash distance), Naramon’s Mind Step (increase running speed so you can actually move at a decent pace) and either Inner Gaze or Eternal Gaze on Maduari to increase Amp energy and regeneration respectively.

That’s a fuckton of Focus, hard-earned unless you put time aside to specifically farm for Focus.

Of course, I’ve missed the most important thing. Amps. Because fuck sharing a pool for both Void Dash and your Void Blast. The Mote Amp is also bloody awful, but thankfully even just the Amp built from the lowest level of the Quills is a billion times better. Just make sure you stock up on Cetus Wisps before you get building.

You’ll also want to get yourself some Arcanes. Operators have two sorts of Arcanes, Virtuous ones that go on Amps and Magus ones that go on the Operators themselves. These are also very costly to build, normally needing ALL THE CETUS WISPS. Or at least, you used to. With the Plains of Eidolon remaster, the Arcanes from the Quills can just be bought for flat standing. You no longer need to build them (which wasn’t the case when I originally wrote this article!)

The Arcanes for Amps are somewhat optional, but you’ll want some Magus Arcanes for your Operator. I’m currently using Magus Vigor to give my Operator more health but there’s various ones, particularly Magus Elevate, which has up to a 75% chance of healing your Warframe when you exit it.

But with Arcanes, you need 10 of each one. Because you have to fuse them together to increase their stats. So you’ll need to farm Quills and Vox Solaris standing because having just one of an arcane isn’t very useful.

The thing is, Operators need a ton of farming to be even remotely good. Operators CAN be really good! They can be tanky and have loads of health and do all sorts of nice utility things. But bloody hell, it’s just so much easier to forma your Warframe and your weapons a few more times…