The Hallowed Flame Event – An Interesting Take on Survival

Remember when the Emissary Assassination required killing Infested to keep a lamp lit so you could kill the boss? Turns out, that sort of thing makes for a great mini event! Hallowed Flame is the current Halloween event in Warframe, with a handful of nice rewards and a new twist on the old survival game mode, of all things. Which is nice, because last year’s event was just a copy of the event from the year before, the “fight a juggernaut by making it run into exploding pumpkins” mission.

Hallowed Flame is pretty simple. You kill a Zealot, pick up the glowing flame that the Zealot drops and keep it lit for as long as possible. You keep the flame lit by killing enemies that are hit by its light – all other enemies not within the flame’s light are invulnerable and unkillable.

It sounds simple at first. Kill enemies to keep the flame alight, the more enemies you kill the larger the area that the flame lights up. But you have to make sure that the enemies get to you. And as soon as that flame goes out, that’s it, the mission ends, you have to leg it to extraction before the immortal Infested kill you.

But both you and your enemies can work against the objective. You need to stick together with whoever is carrying the flame, making sure you keep on killing enemies, because the flame will very quickly start going out. And you also need to go to new locations where more enemies spawn. Because you can only kill enemies while they are lit up, they can still be stunned but stuck in the shadows, meaning you can accidentally screw yourself up and give yourself less enemies to kill. So not only do you need to kill enemies but you need to bring the enemies close to you so you can kill them. Stunning enemies outside of the lit areas helps no one.

Simply put, a little bit of communication is required to make sure everyone stick together. Which is somewhat tricky when there are three hidden caches with some very strange loot within them, luring players away. From the caches I’ve seen, we’ve gotten Kuva (<200), Forma blueprints, credit caches and relics, and apparently you can get other resources and Kubrow eggs as well.

Luckily, as long as you get those caches early on, having someone wander off to find them isn’t too bad. The longer you leave it though, the harder the enemies become. While the number of enemies is consistent, the enemies kill you quicker and become harder to kill, so sticking together and making sure everything stays illuminated and dead is important. That flame will die insanely quickly, so you really need to keep the ball rolling.

As for good loadouts? I’d really recommend Speed Nova, if only to make it so enemies rush towards you quicker. Tanky weapon buffers like Rhino and Chroma work well because a lot of nuke abilities will cause enemies to stumble or be stunned, slowing them down. Wukong works nice as well since you can let your clone do all the work. Thankfully though, unless you want a clan high score or otherwise want to push yourself, there’s no real reason to go past 16 minutes in the endurance mode since that will reward you the featured rewards: the Naberus Ephemera (literally bats) and a Stratos emblem.

The question is, how much fun would this be as a normal game mode? Because it IS basically a Survival game mode, but one that is far easier to fail…