5 Old Facts about the 3 Starter Frames
The three starter Warframes are old. Excalibur, Mag and Volt are among the original 8 Warframes that were in the game on release and they’re the three options you choose from, should you create a new account and start from the beginning. But each of these Warframes has a long and colourful history, most of which is forgotten these days.
So here are six ancient facts about our three favourite starter Warframes.
Their blueprint locations have been all over the place
While Mag has pretty much always been the drop from the Sergeant, Volt and Excalibur have been a bit more scattered. Volt now happily sits in clan Dojos, waiting to be bought, but he originally dropped from the J3-Golem (what later became the Jordas Golem on Eris), before bring moved to being a reward from Survival missions. Volt joined Banshee in the clan dojo research, and was later joined by Zephyr, Nezha and Wukong.
Excalibur on the other hand used to drop from the Ambulas fight. This was fine back when Ambulas was just a black MOA, but with Ambulas Reborn, players complained that the grind for such a basic frame was simply too muthech. So Excalibur was moved to Lech Kril on Mars, Frost was moved to the combo fight on Ceres and Trinity was sent to Pluto.
They all have weird passives
Passives don’t normally mean a lot in Warframe, but the passives of each of the starters are kinda weird. Excalibur just gets 10% more damage and attack speed on all sword weapons. This specifically means swords, dual swords, Nikanas and Rapiers, which are all small swords. No +10% damage on your Gram Prime, sadly.
Volt’s passive is doing extra electrical damage on your next attack. Based on how much you’ve been running around. It’s hard to use Volt’s passive well, since you immediately use any stacked damage the second you fire. It does however have a niche use for fishing, meaning you only ever need one spear for the Plains of Eidolon.
Mag though has the best starter. She has free vacuum. Only when bullet jumping. It’s not great, but it’s better than nothing. Great for the early game where you probably don’t even have a Taxon, or if you don’t have Fetch for companions yet, but it’s fine.
They all waited ages for deluxe skins
For some reason, although the three starters all have plenty of really nice Tennogen skins, it took a long time for them to get deluxe skins. Sure, Excalibur has the Proto Skin, but that was never really a deluxe, as it still uses Excalibur’s default shape. Mag got her deluxe skin in late 2017. Volt got his ‘deluxe’ skin in late 2017. Excalibur got a real deluxe skin in December 2019.
Then again, Excalibur has SOOOOO many skins, what with him being the poster boy of Warframe.
All three frames have a source of damage mitigation
For Mag, this is obvious. Crush gives you Overshields, which are very, very helpful early on. While most Volts use Capacitance, Volt can also get protection from damage in front of him, due to Electric Shield. People seem to forget you can also pick up Electric Shield, although it does slow you down and force you to secondary/melee.
Excalibur though has fricking invulnerability frames. Whenever you use Slash Dash, you actually get some brief moments of invulnerability!
You can buy all three Warframes from Teshin or the Market
For some reason, Teshin sells all three starter frames in his Conclave shop. Why? Who knows. By the time you’ve reached the max rank in Conclave, you probably already have the three starter frames anyway.
But you can also buy each of the starter Warframes for 75 Platinum in the market. It’s actually cheaper to buy them from the market, where they come with slots and reactors, than it is to rush these frames. In fact, if you see a discount on any of the starter frames for Platinum, it’s actually worth buying them.
Well, assuming you don’t own them already…