Weird Little Warframe Facts About Weapons
Years and years ago, aabicus wrote an article about little-known mechanics in Team Fortress 2. He went into a detailed list of various things that really aren’t obvious at all. Some of these were minor differences like how a Sniper’s rifle’s laser will detect invisible spies. However, some mechanics were rather large, like how crouching breaks hitboxes. The article is quite an interesting read, and aabicus suggested I write one about Warframe, with my insane knowledge.
Small problem with that: There are SO MANY little-known mechanics that it’s impossible to list even some of them in a single item. That brings us here: today’s article will look at some little Warframe mechanics and factoids, but only about weapons. Otherwise we’d be here all day.
All melee weapons are silent unless you hit something.
As long as you don’t clang your weapon against a wall or something, your melee is always silent. Enemies will not become alerted until they see you and get brutally stabbed in the back. Or see you stabbing them in the back. This also means that melee won’t break the stealth of Ivara, and you can break cameras and items quite peacefully.
The only exception to this are Gunblades. The bullet-firing part of a Gunblade does make a loud bang, and the bang is not affected by any of the silencer mods. However Banshee’s passive does make Gunblades silent.
Rolling cancels reloads, most of the time.
Most of the time, when you roll, it cancels what you are doing, particularly reloading. If this happens, you’ll have to start the reload again. It takes longer to reload an empty clip compared to manually reloading, and rolling cancels both. But a handful of weapons, namely the Soma and Supra families, will finish their reload if you roll (or otherwise cancel the reload) when the reload is about 1/3 completed.
A handful of other weapons have small benefits. The Zhuge Prime reloads faster when empty, and Gauss’s signature weapons both reload faster while sprinting.
Some abilities can be cast while reloading without interruption.
Quite a few abilities in Warframe can actually be cast without interrupting what you’re doing. These are known as one-handed actions. Not every Warframe has one-handed actions as abilities. You can tell what is a one-handed action if you can do it while jumping and aren’t locked in an animation. But one-handed actions can also be cast while reloading your weapon! This gives you a a small window of protection for yourself while you reload.
One-handed actions include abilities like Oberon’s Smile, Volt’s Shock and Valkyr’s Ripline. If it doesn’t lock you in place and in an animation, then it’s probably a one-handed ability.
Valuable set mods don’t need to be on your weapons, they can be put on Sentinel weapons.
There are a LOT of useful set mods that we simply don’t have room for on our weapons. After all, where the hell am I going to fit Vigilante Fervor on my rifle, for that sweet, sweet chance to upgrade crits? Don’t worry, because we can put set mods on our Sentinel weapons! If you just want the set bonus, it doesn’t matter where the mod is equipped, as long as it’s equipped. Sentinel weapons tend to fall off after a while, due to their crappy AI meaning they don’t hit anything. So you might as well fill them with set mods you wouldn’t be able to use anyway.
Anyone can be invisible with the Skiajati.
Normally invisibility is something restricted to the invisible Warframes: Loki, Ash, Ivara, Wisp while in mid-air and, uh, Octavia. But the Skiajati is the exception that makes Warframes invisible too. Whenever you get a finisher kill, you turn invisible for a bit.
Tons of weapons have small additional buffs to them. For example, the Pyrana Prime will spawn a ghost Pyrana and double your fire rate if you get kills in a short succession. And the Ballistica Prime can spawn ghost enemies on kill.
Bonus factoid: Deconstructor Rivens are obvious.
If you buy a Sentinel weapon riven, you can tell immediately if it is or is not a Deconstructor riven. Because Helios’s Deconstructor counts as a melee weapon, the Sentinel weapon riven will also be for melee.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll probably end up doing a few more of these in the future, because there is just SO MUCH that isn’t really known in Warframe. After all, most of the game is a mystery…