Mirror Defense Is Way Better Than Normal Defense

I’ve never really liked defense missions in Warframe. They are slow and tedious and always prone to breaking due to having to make sure everything is dead. The main reason I play defense missions is either me starting the day doing the defense mission Seimeni on Ceres, or because it’s in the current sortie or Archon hunt.

There are two basic forms of defense and both of them are boring. The first is protecting a static object, generally some sort of metal pod with an unconscious person inside it. The second involves protecting an NPC, who will always try and get himself or herself killed. The operative wanders around the map with a giant “shoot me!” target painted on their backs, and we have to stop them from basically committing suicide. However, rather than protecting these targets, the only way you can finish each wave is to kill every single enemy on the map. This isn’t too hard on a small map like Hydron, but most defense maps are annoyingly large, and there are always some enemies who will hide rather than fight.

Because the mission involves killing every last enemy, defense missions can be very slow and boring, even if you do have a massive nuker Warframe on your team. There is only so much you can do to speed things up, and missing enemies will always slow things down.

But with Citrine’s Last Wish, the first update of 2023, we get something better. Mirror Defense is a new variation of the old defense mission type, but is better in almost every way.

Mirror Defense is simple. You defend two large crystals, apparently left by the original Citrine Warframe in a permanent state of frozen-ness so that they don’t die. However, one crystal is located in a Corpus defense tile and the other is located on Mars, with a portal through the void keeping them permanently connected. We take it in turns defending each crystal, before traversing the void tunnel to go and defend the other crystal. Throughout the match, you can pick up crystals left by Citrine and getting enough of them gives the defense targets a small aura effect that helps kill enemies.

However, what makes this mission type particularly good is that you don’t have to kill every enemy. You need to kill lots of enemies for the small crystals to spawn, but instead of the body count, a round is decided by a timer. This does mean that the game mode can’t be sped up, but that’s way better than running around, looking for an errant enemy hiding in a corner.

Things aren’t perfect though. All the good rewards are pretty damn rare, and are stuck in rotation C. Otak and Loid do have a shop that you can buy the parts from, but they’re pretty expensive too. On the plus side though, you can at least be guaranteed a shot at both Citrine and her weapons.

Seriously, mirror defense is a much better mission than normal defense. I just wish the rewards were a tad better. And, sadly, the single node for Mirror Defense will slowly get less and less interest as more people obtain Citrine, but at least it actually is a good variant of a bad game mode…