The Curiosity of the Umbral Forma

The end of Night Wave season 1 is coming up, and with it we will lose the first opportunity to obtain the Umbral Forma, the reward for reaching level 29 in Nightwave. The Umbral Forma was probably the most anticipated reward when Nightwave came out. After all, it’s the first non-normal Forma we have ever seen, and only recently did we get a third type of Forma, the Aura Forma. But despite the Aura Forma being newer, it still doesn’t beat the Umbral Forma in just how… curious it is.

The main reason for that is simple. The Aura Forma may be a very rare drop in Arbitrations, a long slogfest of a game mode that turns people off for just how long it is, but you can always get more than one, as long as you keep on doing Arbitrations. With the Umbral Forma though, there is only ONE way to obtain ONE Umbral Forma. For now at least. You get to rank 29 with Nightwave and you get that Forma and that’s it.

One Forma, with which you can add the Umbral Polarity to any item you wish.

With only one Umbrak Forma and about 500 items in Warframe to choose from, it’s a hard decision to make. Well, it’s not exactly 500 items. There are only five Umbral Mods – Umbral Intensify, Fiber and Vitality, and Sacrificial Steel and Pressure. That’s three Warframe mods and 2 Melee weapons mods. Meaning if you put your Umbral Forma on pretty much anything else, it’s a massive waste. It’s actually more of a hindrance because you’ve now got a slot that you can’t really put anything in without costing extra cacapity.

But even then, you have like 150 melee weapons and a ton of Warframes to choose from as well. You can ignore Excalibur Umbra and his signature weapons since they all already have enough Umbral Polarities on them, but you’re very easily spoiled for choice. Alright, you can probably trim that number down further still. No one would seriously put an Umbral Forma on a Plasma Sword or something like that. In fact, putting an Umbral Forma on a Melee weapon is probably a bit of a waste as well because Sacrificial Pressure is actually WEAKER and more expensive than Primed Pressure Point.

So you’ll want to put your Umbral Forma on a Warframe most likely. After all, almost every frame can make good use of Umbral Intensify and Umbral Vitality. Umbral Fiber though is a little trickier though as not every Warframe has a high enough armour value to get much use out of additional armour.

We can narrow this down even further though. You see, the Umbral mods get stronger the more of them you have equipped. Having Umbral Intensify alone is great, but it’s even stronger if you use Umbral Fiber and Vitality as well. When you consider who you want to put your Umbral Forma on, you’ll also want to consider using all three Umbral mods. This actually does a huge job of narrowing things down because otherwise you’re… almost wasting potential.

Currently, the best candidates for an Umbral Forma are those who need Intensify, Vitality and Steel Fiber for their builds. This includes more tanky Warframes like Oberon, Rhino and Nezha.

But one can spend hours upon hours trying to decide where to use this ONE single special Forma. And that’s where the curiosity lies. You might end up not bothering to even use the Umbral Forma, simply because you can only get one, you can’t get another one and you can’t get your Forma back if you waste it. If you have a well-used, well-forma’d Warframe, you might not have room to stick an Umbral Forma in, because it might conflict with other builds. Or you might not want to overwrite an existing polarity. And at the same time, all the Umbral mods are both expensive and work best when used together, so maybe one Forma isn’t enough?

So maybe it’s better off just not using your Umbral Forma? Or at least waiting until we can get more of them.

Just whatever you do, don’t use your Umbral Forma to craft an item…