On Maining The Most-Used Warframe

With 2023’s Warframe stats coming out during the last Dev Stream, it turns out, when you combine Primed Warframes and normal Warframes, Volt is the most-used Warframe. The stats can be seen here, and show Warframe usage based on all Mastery Ranks and over different ranks. At 7% usage (4% for Volt Prime and 3% for normal Volt), Volt edges out the starter frame and poster boy Excalibur, in spite of the fact that you get Excalibur Umbra at max rank for doing a rather simple story quest. At the same time, when looking at individual frames, there are only two more frames that edge out Volt Prime, the ever-popular Wukong Prime, and Revenant Prime, who has sneaked into first place. Normal Volt comes in 7th, after Excalibur, Khora Prime and Mesa Prime, two Warframes that have been staples for years.

To be fair, Volt and Volt Prime have been pretty highly used. They’ve been among the most-used frames since stats became available in 2020. But in all those previous years, Wukong Prime and Excalibur topped the charts. It’s only this year that Wukong Prime isn’t the most-used Warframe, and that’s because he received a nerf in 2023, where his Celestial Twin no longer has infinite ammo. Still, despite there being even more Warframes, including some REALLY GOOD Warframe releases and reworks like Citrine and Grendel, Volt and Volt Prime sit higher up than ever. Sure, Revenant Prime now takes the top spot, thanks to having been the main Warframe available in relics now and being an all-round easy Warframe to play, but Volt Prime has overtaken the literal main starter frame (something I thought would never happen), and normal Volt’s usage has increased as well.

I kinda don’t get this, because Volt hasn’t been buffed in any way. I mean, I’ve been saying for years that Volt is an amazing Warframe, capable of dealing tons of damage in different ways, as well as being a jack-of-all-trades Warframe that can do a bit of everything. At the same time, Volt Prime isn’t the easiest Warframe to get. Prime sets go for 100+ platinum, and he only recently got unvaulted. Sure, Baro did bring along some Volt Prime relics a handful of times, but he hasn’t done that in ages. Normal Volt, I totally get, he’s a starter frame AND you can just buy his parts in your clan dojo’s Tenno Lab. But accessibility isn’t the only thing here. After all, normal Wukong is a clan Warframe and has similar usage to Volt (coming in second when you combine normal and prime frames) but Banshee and Zephyr are also clan Warframes and have far lower usage rates.

Still, it’s nice to see a new number 1 Warframe, or a new number 3 Warframe (depending on whether you look at combined or separate frames). Wukong Prime has been sitting at the top for the last 3 years and now Volt Prime and Revenant Prime are nipping at his toes. Kinda sucks for Excalibur, losing his #2 position, but, well, everyone gets Umbra for free anyway so it doesn’t really matter. Volt is a good frame but he’s also not a mindless frame. With both Revenant and Wukong, you can just kinda ignore everything. Mesmer Skin stuns any enemy that shoots you, and Wukong has a clone that distracts enemies from you and gets three free revives. Capacitance does a lot to help keep Volt alive, but aside from shield-gating (which every Warframe has aside from Inaros and Nidus), you need to keep on your toes, otherwise you can easily die. That being said, a Discharge Volt can easily lock down multiple rooms for a good ten seconds, and is a staple when it comes to Sanctuary Onslaught.

Thing is though, I still think I’m kinda special. Because (despite what my profile stats say), these days, I take my normal Volt everywhere i go. My original starter frame is modded up to the nines, with Forma and Archon Shards and everything. And he does absolutely fine anywhere I take him. In fact, I took him to do the Ropalolyst the other day, alongside a random squad of 3 Nezha Primes, and came out on top, doing the most damage. The only thing I find disheartening (aside from the lower base energy) is that pretty much no one has noticed the weird LR2 person running around with a normal, bright yellow Volt.

According to Warframe’s stats, I’m the 0.04% of MR32 players that use normal Volt. Normal Volt’s usage falls off at around MR9 (the same time Volt Prime’s usage starts to pick up), but there is still a tiny percentage of players still using normal Volt past MR9. I’m in that tiny percentage and am proud of it. After all, Prime Warframes are slightly better, but most of the time the differences aren’t that major.

Still, it goes to show that 1. I was right that Volt is a stupidly good Warframe and 2. I’m not that special after all. Let’s just hope that DE don’t decide to nerf Volt in some way due to his insanely high usage, and instead buff other Warframes to be better…