A Cheap Coward’s Guide to the Steel Path

The Steel Path can seem intimidating. All enemies are over level 100, and they’re all heavily armoured. The Corpus have tons of shields and the Infested are… Well, actually, the Infested are fine, as long as there are no Swarm Mutalist Moas around. Because they give the Infested tons of armour. Either way, the Steel Path is not a place for casual players.

However, you don’t need to spend forever formaing your gear and making super OP ultra umbral forma builds. In fact, you can get through the Steel Path very cheaply. But only if you are patient.

Can’t hit what you can’t see.

The trick is to be invisible. Enemies in Warframe may hit hard, but they’re not that smart. Actually, I take that back. They do try and run for cover and things like that. But we normally kill them too fast to see any of this in action. When it comes to invisibility though, enemy AI gets even more confused. They’ll try to shoot where they heard things, but they’ll also not shoot at all.

As long as you remain invisible and use silenced weapons, then most enemy AI won’t be able to shoot you. The risk of death is greatly reduced and, more importantly, you can just take your time.

What invisibility though?

Ivara and Loki have plenty of invisibility, but Ivara wins out. While yes, you can shoot loud weapons and bullet jump as Loki, Ivara’s invisibility lasts longer. She’s also tankier than Loki and can put enemies to sleep. The downside is that Ivara is a lot slower, and shooting a non-silenced gun will break your stealth.

Ash’s invisibility is a lot shorter, but he does have his own niche. His Seeking Shuriken augment will easily strip armour. If you have plenty of patience, you can strip every enemy on the map of their armour. If that doesn’t work, then you can use Fatal Teleport to insta-kill most humanoid enemies.

Honestly though, Octavia does work best. While refreshing your invisibility is tedious, the invisibility lasts nearly as long as Loki and Ivara. But at the same time, the rest of your abilities are actually killing things. The downside to Octavia is that, when your invisibility does disappear, you’ll be right in the middle of the noise and thus easier to kill.

Wisp gets invisibility while in mid air and is a good choice as well, but her invisibility is hard to keep up.

Specters are cheap too.

Specters aren’t invisible. In fact, I don’t think any of them really try to cast invisibility. However, they are AMAZING distractions. Normally, Specters are pretty flimsy. But on the Steel Path, Specters get the same power boost enemies do. Any Specter aside from a Limbo Specter will do, since they are just distractions while you work.

That being said, I did once see an Octavia Specter accidentally make itself invisible. By making it hold position then aiming at the Specter, you can force a Specter to crouch repeatedly. It’s hard to time it to work alongside an Octavia Specter’s music though, mostly because Specters kinda do as they please.

For everything else, there’s Khora.

And by everything else, I mostly mean Defense and Mobile Defense. Things that need you to defend a console. You don’t even need that many forma. My Khora has 2 forma in it and that’s honestly enough. While a nice stat-stick is handy, Khora does allow you to take your time. Strangle Dome and Entangle do all the crowd control, while you murder things as you please.

Really though, at the end of the day, you can do the Steel Path with pretty much any Warframe. You just have to be willing to be patient.