The Power That Is The Adaptation Mod

Adaptation is an amazingly powerful mod. It’s a Warframe mod that allows you to adapt to damage that you take for a small amount of time, earning damage resistance in the process. The best way to describe it, really, is with an example. But trust me, it’s a cool mod.

So let’s say that I am playing as Nidus and I get shot by a Grineer Lancer. That Lancer does Impact damage to me, so I get 10% Impact damage resistance for a little bit from my Adaptation mod. I get shot again before the Adaptation damage resistance goes away, the Impact damage resistance gets refreshed and is increased to 20%. This stacks to 90% damage resistance, and at maximum rank, lasts for 20 seconds. This damage resistance applies to every damage type, so if two enemies shoot at you, one doing Impact and the other doing Electric damage, you get damage resistance for both of those.

For those who know their Warframe lore, they might realise that this sounds a lot like the adaptation Sentients have. Because it kinda is. Okay, Sentients instantly adapt to damage types after losing a certain amount of health (and gain 95% damage reduction too) but the premise is the same. You adapt to the damage that you take as you take it.

What’s cool about Adaptation though is that it stacks with other forms of damage resistance. Most of the time, it stacks up multiplicatively, so you can’t often get 100% damage resistance. But with a few choice mods, you can get pretty damn close. The only issue is making sure that you can survive building up to 90% damage resistance with Adaptation. That’s easy enough with something like Impact or Cold or Electric damage, but Toxin and Slash, two pretty common and dangerous damage types, will do pretty nasty damage and can kill you very quickly, before you can build that damage resistance up.

The more important thing though is that Adaptation works on Shields. Which means that frames that use shields (mostly just Hildryn, Harrow, Mag and maybe Volt) can use Adaptation really well. Normally shield-preferring Warframes don’t get the benefit of damage reduction, but here, the damage reduction and the production of said damage reduction actually works. I’ve actually been switching out Vitality for Adaptation on Volt because, although Volt has very little armour, he can get enough damage reduction on his shields to not instantly keel over. On the likes of Harrow and Hildryn, the effect is even stronger.

Still, those who benefit the most from Adaptation are the Warframes that are already very tanky. Sure, a Mag using Adaptation can last longer against level 120+ enemies but someone like Valkyr would be fine for ages. In fact, you could probably put Adaptation on Inaros, get Scarab Swarm going, go to the bathroom and come back with most of your health intact.

There’s one small problem with Adaptation though. It is an insanely hard mod to acquire. You have to have completed every mission on the star chart to even have a chance at getting Adaptation. Why? because it’s got a sub-5% drop chance in Arbitrations.

Such a good mod, locked behind so many things…