What if I were to rework Volt?

A while back, I wrote two very silly articles on silly rewords for both Vauban and Ember, two Warframes who are currently struggling to, well, be Warframes. Unfortunately, Digital Extremes didn’t go with any of my ideas and I really don’t blame them – after all, I am neither a game designer nor someone who actually plays Vauban or Ember. Both are important when it comes to reworking a Warframe’s abilities.

However, there is one frame I play well and know almost as well as the back of my hand: Volt. Now, Volt doesn’t actually need reworking in any way. He’s a very, very good frame with multiple niches and capable of filling out multiple roles in a squad, whether it’s mass-nuking in places like Sanctuary Onslaught, spamming speed buffs to a team in Capture missions and void fissures or providing unique means of extra damage for Eidolon hunts. So Volt doesn’t need any work at all.

Buuuuut what if I could get my hands on Volt and rework him however I pleased?

Well, frankly, I wouldn’t do that much. As far as I’m concerned, Speed and Discharge are awesome abilities, and even Volt’s passive, as tiny as it is, feels pretty fitting. That being said, there are… a few things I would change…

The first would be Volt’s Electric Shield. This ability is also great. While it doesn’t block movement the way Gara’s glass walls can or induce crowd control like Khora’s Strangle Dome, Electric Shield blocks everything apart from weapons with punch-through. And enemies with punch-through weapons are very sparse, we’re looking at a handful of Orb Vallis Corpus and new Gas City enemies, clones created by Amalgam Corpus and the Trinity Specter on Ceres. And Volt’s shields are both cheap to cast and can be lifted up and moved around.

The only issue with this is that no one carries shields around because they switch you to secondary only (like all other pickups) but they have both a duration and drain energy. So by the time you’ve cast Electric Shield and picked it up, you have about 25-30 seconds to use it before you have to cast a new shield. I actually don’t have a problem with the energy drain, especially since they made the drain more reasonable, but it should be one or the other. You should have a duration or an energy drain, not both. The change I’d make would be that the duration on an Electric Shield pauses and drains energy, up until you put the shield down, at which point the energy drain stops and the duration starts ticking down again.

I’d also add an augment to change the shape of it – in exchange for being unable to carry it any more and a reduction in the maximum number of shields (from 6 to 4), an augment would make Electric Shield’s size scale with Ability Range and be more rounded, a sort of half-sphere shape. Like half of Frost’s Snow Globe.

The only other change I’d make would be to Volt’s Shock ability. I’d make it so you can hold down the 1 key and keep on firing lightning, draining energy over time, the same way Volt seems to do in the handful of cinematics he’s appeared in. Basically Chroma’s elemental breath ability but cooler and more lightning-y. Because while Shock is a cool ability, it doesn’t feel very powerful.

But otherwise, Volt doesn’t need any changes. He’s fine as is. Sure, his abilities aren’t useful all the time, but you’ll never be able to make a Warframe who is useful no matter what.