Basic RPG archetypes and Warframe.

[eelektrik]

From D&D to modern RPGs and MMOs, there has commonly been four primary character roles in any RPG group. The standard Fighter, Rogue, Mage, and Cleric, with many variations and hybrids between these on top of them, but those are pretty much the basics. Most people who play games are familiar with these and I started thinking about the current 8 warframes in terms of these roles and they pretty much fit at two each right now.

Fighters are usually the frontline character, most commonly melee damage dealers or tanks, obviously exemplified in Warframe by Excalibur and Rhino.

Rogues tend to be melee or ranged, very commonly stealth based utility characters. Right now Warframe has Loki and Ash filling the stealth role.

Mages are usually ranged elemental damage dealers and crowd control, which gives us Volt and Ember currently.

Clerics are the healer or support archetype. Trinity is the obvious fit, but Mag could be classified support as well with the skills Shield Polarize and Bullet Attractor, even Pull is useful for providing situational advantages to your group.

So where am I going with this? I'd like to see any future revisions of powers for these warframes try and make the characters fit those roles better, starting the game off with 8 good role defined Warframes on top of what gets added later.

In addition you will notice that three of the starting warframes, fall into three different archetypes already, ideally I would say they should add a fourth starting Warframe choice, either Trinity or Mag currently, or if they add any other support types before Open Beta, they could fit in there as well, I don't know what their plans are for when they will add more though. Not only would that give everyone that wants to play a support character an option to start with, but being that this a 4-player co-op game it allows groups of friends that start together the option of all picking a different starting character.

[Enfo]

Yeah, i too really hope to see some improvising on the different frames to fit their roles better.

Right now they're all pretty cliche and imbalanced.

[Junichiro]

True and I still think they need to balance all the warframes that are currently out right now, before they implement new ones.

[Ronyn]

Excelent observations OP.