A Biased Guide on What to Subsume and Use with Helminth

I’m pretty biased when it comes to the Helminth system. When it comes to the surface idea, I think the Helminth system is great. But when you look more deeply at it, you can tell that it’s all a mess. The costs are arbitrary and all over the place, the abilities chosen are weird, some have been arbitrarily nerfed. And, of course, there was the Marked for Death ability that made Ash good for about five seconds.

That being said, I’ve been playing around a little with the Helminth system, and I’ve come up with a very simple, very biased guide on Helminth.

Just subsume whatever you have lying around.

I don’t see any real need to race towards subsuming every single Warframe immediately. While you could race ahead and subsume everything now, there’s no hurry. Most Warframe abilities are meh at best, and the cost to subsume Warframes is very high. Most Warframe abilities that get subsumed aren’t even that useful. So you might as well just subsume spare Warframes that you don’t need and already have the Primes or. Alternatively, just subsume frames that are really easy to farm, like the Dojo frames, or early level frames like Mag and Rhino.

Use the Helminth abilities to level up your Helminth.

Most Warframes are expensive to subsume. But worse, they’re also expensive to add to your other Warframes.

At the same time though, you need to do SOMETHING to level up your Helminth. That’s where the (mostly mediocre) Helminth abilities come in. Sure, Empower and Infested Mobility are alright, but most of the Helminth abilities are kinda crap. I mean, who on earth is willing to sacrifice an ability, so you can instantly hack a console? Seriously, we have ciphers for a reason, and there’s Parazon mods that are far easier to obtain and use, rather than wasting resources on an ability.

The ONLY good use for these abilities is for cheap leveling up. Your Helminth gains experience for any ability you put on a Warframe, and Helminth abilities are mostly cheaper than subsumed Warframe ones. So save your resources, grab a Warframe you never use and stick some random abilities on it.

Wait for others to experiment, but be cautious.

The costs to test out all these abilities are pretty high. Not everyone has the resources to keep up. Even if you take your time, you can still find yourself lacking – I’ve probably spent way too much Cryotic on my Helminth, to the point that I need to go farm some more to replenish my supplies. If you don’t have the supplies and resources to experiment, then just wait for everyone else to experiment for you. You don’t have to do too much work, just check in on the most popular Warframe partners and go from there. They have resources and platinum to burn.

Why should you be cautious though? Because of the next segment:

Expect nerfs.

I’ll admit, I was wrong. Originally, I thought that the pre-nerfs to some abilities wouldn’t be too bad and that maybe DE would consider buffing other abilities. They haven’t, and the only other major change we’ve seen has been to nerf an ability insanely. It’s clear that DE would rather just nerf what’s popular than buff what’s unpopular. I can sit here and hope that maybe Loki’s Decoy or Zephyr’s Air Burst will be made better, but that’s not going to happen.

But these nerfs can come at any time and at any moment. And are often disguised as “bug fixes”. Just like the original Venari nerf.

Build a wall and wait.

You know what? All this Helminth stuff is completely and utterly optional. So here is my biggest recommendation for you: Don’t use it. At all. Screw the Helminth system in its entirety. You don’t NEED anything that it offers.

So just leave it alone and don’t worry about it. Like most other things in Warframe, it’ll get ignored or made better later…