Optimizing Frame Efficiency (Min/maxing)

[(PSN)iSh0tGuNzs]

I think it's important that people start to at least talk an not this because it does not seem to be a very common topic on the YouTubes. Please ask for and offer any advice on this topic.

Some quick notes:

Rank 3 fleeting expertise+ max streamline yields a 170% duration with only a 40% duration penalty.

Rank 4 fleeting expertise+ rank four streamline yields 175% efficiency with a 50% duration penalty.

Max fleeting + max streamline yields 175% efficiency with a 60% duration penalty and is a waste on most frames. Unless you are pulling duration down purposefully (EV Trinity) max streamline and fleeting should never be considered without using blind rage of at least rank 4 (anything lower and a max intensify would give you more power strength without an efficiency penalty.)

If you do care about having the best build possible you should acquire duplicates of most corrupted mods. The reason for this is that sometimes the huge bonuses in a single stat are eclipsed by the draw backs.

Another tip: flow is not necessary on most frames unless you have an ev trin on the team. With good build structure and energy management (something you will learn from playing limbo and banshee enough to not burn through 4 revives in an exterminate on Pluto) flow becomes a waste of capacity that could be given to a defensive mod to enhance survivability or even a natural talent.

Tip number 3: just because it's primed doesn't mean it's better.

My saryn uses a regular continuity because a primed continuity at r9 (the rank I'm stuck at indefinitely>.<) didn't get my duration above 133% to add another tick to miasma. Using the regular continuity gives me the space to add a vitality to compliment my rage mod.

Always pay attention to what you need and what you don't and remember to check the stat card to see your abilities' stats with you your mods accounted for. Play test and tweak as necessary. Look for the lowest amount of power strength you need to have your kill frame be viable through 20, 40, and even 60 waves of t4 defense.

Feel free to post questions, comments, concerns, and even blatantly rude comments saying I'm ignorant in the most flagrant English you can muster. I'm a big boy, I'll handle it.

Sincerely the frost main with 40% power strength.

Edited January 3, 2016 by (PS4)iSh0tGuNzs

[(PSN)chrisnysanda]

It All depends on your style of play. I use ember as a melee warframe with WOF. Max power strength, little range. So it becomes like a small shield that can kill or hold in place while I melee. It's all about play style and preference. Some say it wrong some say it right but it works for my play style. There is no wrong when modding.

It All depends on your style of play. I use ember as a melee warframe with WOF. Max power strength, little range. So it becomes like a small shield that can kill or hold in place while I melee. It's all about play style and preference. Some say it wrong some say it right but it works for my play style. There is no wrong when modding.

[Terrornaut]

When building for a frame, you should always build around a specific playstyle or set of abilities, but consider how much use you can get out of those other abilities you didn't build for that you can't out of simply having a gun.  (IE Nyx's importance became much less imo when you can just make a chaos gun via long range radioactive viral ignis)

 

Ev Trin blah

EV Trin isn't necessary for optimizing or ideal anything.  Really, if you have flow, a normal trinity's boosts are going to be enough for most spamming.  Building for EV is silly in 95% of cases in WF, its just absolutely over the top and not necessary at all.  If you can't kill fast at all (and lots of people don't, I will admit I find), sure, you're never going to see energy orbs or your abilities will just be inefficient since enemies aren't dying while your abilities are running down, but if you -need- an EV Trin, you should first look at why you're so lacking in the first place (unless you're buliding to take efficiency well below 100% on a spammy frame).  All systems in place in WF currently can keep you actively supplied during a mission once you've got a fully built frame (with corrupted mods at your disposal, not even primed).  And really, a bless trinity or abating link trinity can supply energy just fine. Or a Nekros. Or another frame that just outright kills things.  Basically, if you aren't killing things, you're wasting energy.

 

Frame optimization carries well beyond mods - playstyle and weapon selection also factors into it.

Some examples?

 

Saryn and Optimal weapons

Sure, I could take a max range low power Saryn into an endless map and spore infect things around corners and hallways I probably won't engage for 10 seconds or so.  That's useless though (and I see a lot of people do it). Why? They aren't thinking about how the debuff will probably wear off in that time before the enemy is even engaged, and since spore's damage comes from being popped/enemies dying, that damage won't be dealt unless you have a wide ranged explosion of some sort to trigger it. Otherwise, your spores and that half health won't even be active by the time to get to you.

 

Better to do a mid/slightly post mid-range build with high power strength and an explosive weapon with toxic procs, and one weapon that can throw on a ton of toxic procs in a short time. Why? Spore only matters to get that debuff on, to pop and do its extra damage (and its significant damage when built for it), and to a lesser extent, acting as kind of an Xray vision to see where incoming mobs are.  With an explosive weapon, you'll pop all her spores and deal a chunk of damage, moreso if it can build toxic proc damage into its explosion -and- apply that higher damage spore to other enemies.  Also, since you're shooting into a crowd, ever spore popped will damage another enemy, but an explosion pops multiple spores and causes them to spread, so you are just getting extra damage per shot (ie torid, sonicor, tonkor).  Each explosive blast pops but makes new spores when in a crowd, and if you're working with something putting down toxic procs you're just escalating your damage as it levels a crowd.

 

You won't get that effect if you're using some silly regular rifle/pistol.

 

Ember can boost weapon damage better than anyone but Banshee, and almost as well as Mirage.

Ember does a lot of damage with her powers, but if you aren't putting heat on your guns you're using half the frame and probably need to consider how much you're not thinking about other warframes you might use.

Building Ember around WoF is a bad and ineffective idea, but that's for another time.  Accelerant boosts heat damage from any source it happens, even if you bullet jump with firewalker.  You do not have to use a heat based weapon at all, that's totally irrelevant.  If you put heat on a tonkor, boltor prime, sonicor, syn simulor, Tigris, you have very high heat damage getting multiplied (with my build, I essentially have a 650% heat damage mod to throw on guns).  Doing slightly more radiation damage than normal to a target that's weak against radiation and neutral against heat becomes meaningless because you just sheerly do so much heat damage, any other damage type doesn't matter save corrosive procs.  If you have someone stripping armor 100%, then no other damage type matters at all.

 

Between her hyper destructiveness and her constant stunning, you shouldn't have many opportunities for enemies to even attack you. She, like some of the other paper frames, requires a level of mobility to stay alive and well, only, she's doing more while being mobile thanks to WoF than most other frames.

 

 

Trinity and an explosive weapon

For Bless, being able to self damage safely is great.  Knowing whether you want a glaive, an ogris (no lol), or an attica with multishot, high fire rate, and thunderbolt to whittle down your shields and health precisely can do wonders.  Other than that, if you take abating link and some PS on Trin, a slash weapon is best most of the time because slash damage is best for unarmored, unshielded stuff.

 

Min Maxing may seem like the obvious thing to do, but sometimes, its just bad.  It depends on the specific purpose you're trying to accomplish.  Some frames are actually quite well useable with a fairly balanced power stat spread.  Others only need 2 or so stats, even some of the frames that /seem/ like they need all stats.  Until you play that frame and use all abilities in a variety of situations and drill in the technical details of abilities via the warframe wiki, you aren't going to be maxing out efficiency and use of much of any frame really.  IE if you think Mag is bad vs infested, Trinity is nearly mandatory for parties, or that Nekros is purely for loot, you really aren't well informed on Warframe on the whole and are probably thinking about gameplay elements with a little too narrow of a perspective.

 

Banshee is a good example of this.  If you max out her range, you'll get plenty out of soundquake of course, but silence will pretty much be destroyed. If you run 100-145% range on Banshee, you can stun everything around you, give you enough time to kill things closer to you, and whatever wakes up before you get to it you can run away from and back to in order to restun. You plainly can't do that if you max out range.  Power strength is another thing she doesn't need maxed completely.  Do you really need 2000% damage multiplication, or will say, 1200% or 1600% damage multiplication still let you one shot everything while perhaps being able to feed your other abilities a bit harder (increasing efficiency or something)?

 

Other times maxing stats may be bad? Duration with Ember.

Why? For all the lazy people out there that started using Ember with the WoF toggle change, this seemed like the thing to do.  The thing is, WoF has such a criminally low energy drain as it is, you don't need a high duration.  Accelerant lasts so long with even neutral duration that if for some reason you can't kill everything affected in the time it runs out, you didn't build with any power strength and you have terrible weapons for what you're facing.  Fireblast doesn't really count for much unless you want a better version of Tectonics (because that's really what it is, a knockdown + damage + area denial shield since nothing runs through it anymore lol).  If you build for efficiency and Strength, you're always going to be killing things, and you're going to be killing them enough that you can spam your abilities while getting more energy from mobs.

 

Valkyr is an odd case. You can build her to debuff entire rooms just about, by upping power strength and going for high range, but its generally not the most straightforward thing you do with Valk.  Its an effective strategy, but kind of like a melee oriented accelerant or a poor lady's m prime.  Most people would rather just build for Hysteria, which is of course fine.  I'd rather just kill things with a beefed up Warcry since so many melee weapons are more efficient than Hysteria's annoying combos and control.  At this point I prefer Ember over Valkyr as my melee frame anyway, so it doesn't matter too much.

 

Some random, detailed thoughts for whoever to consider.

[(PSN)iSh0tGuNzs]

For me, min/maxing is merely a balancing act and all depends on how you play the game, solo, pugs, premade team etc. You really can't use a universal rule for every frame because every frame has different powers with different needs and different combinations of needs.

For example, I have builds where I need max fleeting expertise and streamline...builds that need only streamline...builds that only need fleeting expertise...build that can't use either one at all. So in the case of that last one, Flow mods are absolutely necessary or else I won't have enough power to use any powers at all once enemy level gets to 30+.

Rhino is a good example when it comes to energy pool. Without flow, he only has 150 energy. This means if you don't use flow mods, it's mandatory that you use max power efficiency or else all 4 of his powers become 100% useless as you may only get to cast them once. It really all depends on how you play the game though because solo runs, this is absolutely a problem. But in a team, you'd have enough outside support to keep a supply of energy and so 150 energy may be enough (depends on how often you have to use a power).

Also when it comes to balancing the 4 stats, Vauban is a good example of a frame who really can't afford to have any stat in the red since all of his powers use and benefit from at least 3 of the 4 stats to the point where if any of them are in the red, it can make the use of the power far less effective.

For example, Bastille is a power that kind of gets really weak if you go too far into the red on any of the 4 stats because duration can't be too short, range can't be too small and if strength is too low it won't hold enough enemies to make a difference in survival or protection. Then when it comes to efficiency, it's cost is high (75 base) which means either you put flow mod on or you max efficiency or both (depends on how often you have to put bastille up).

That's honestly one of the reasons I use bastille the least because it's too hard to mod it for maximum potential. If you don't specialize in one of it's areas of effectiveness then either it's not strong enough to hold enough enemies late game, it's not reaching out far enough to trap the most deadliest enemies (usually ranged who stand way in the back nuking), it cost too much to keep using or it's duration isn't lasting long enough to matter. In almost all cases, Both Vortex and Bastille are extremely costly to keep active and useful to their fullest degree. While I can go mod most other frames 3 and 4 power to their absolute most powerful point, I find Vauban powers are not able to do that. You either have to sacrifice something or go with a build that only boost stats, not lower them (so no corrupt mods). When you do that, you are just creating an average frame with average power, a jack of all trades and master of none.

There's a few other frames with similar issues. It's not that I want every stat to be maximum effect. It's that some frames have powers where lowering one stat too much counteracts the positive benefits of the stat that you do raise. Again, increasing the duration of bastille while having reduction to range or strength or increased cost to cast, actually makes the power less effective. Back when we has 10 mod slots instead of 8, this wasn't a problem. With less mod slots, we are limited to how well we can mod powers like Vauban's. Meanwhile we have other frames who can get one or two stats down to zero, completely max out the other two stats and they can run around any mission with unlimited power.

So due to design of powers and balance issues within them, it forces a different min/max philosophy for every frame and every combination of powers. There's not a universal right way to min/max for every frame. Maxing efficiency sounds good for every power and frame until you realize all the other issues when you make such a choice.

So because of that, you can never say Flow mod isn't needed on any frame or that every frame should get a specific amount of efficiency, range or power strength. You have to adjust the way you mod for your specific situation.

Now of course in your standard cookie cutter specialization builds, general modding rules apply...but if you want to do more than just be a one power wonder, there is no set rule for min/maxing then.

Beautifully said. Thank you for that.

[(PSN)iSh0tGuNzs]

When building for a frame, you should always build around a specific playstyle or set of abilities, but consider how much use you can get out of those other abilities you didn't build for that you can't out of simply having a gun. (IE Nyx's importance became much less imo when you can just make a chaos gun via long range radioactive viral ignis)

Ev Trin blah

EV Trin isn't necessary for optimizing or ideal anything. Really, if you have flow, a normal trinity's boosts are going to be enough for most spamming. Building for EV is silly in 95% of cases in WF, its just absolutely over the top and not necessary at all. If you can't kill fast at all (and lots of people don't, I will admit I find), sure, you're never going to see energy orbs or your abilities will just be inefficient since enemies aren't dying while your abilities are running down, but if you -need- an EV Trin, you should first look at why you're so lacking in the first place (unless you're buliding to take efficiency well below 100% on a spammy frame). All systems in place in WF currently can keep you actively supplied during a mission once you've got a fully built frame (with corrupted mods at your disposal, not even primed). And really, a bless trinity or abating link trinity can supply energy just fine. Or a Nekros. Or another frame that just outright kills things. Basically, if you aren't killing things, you're wasting energy.

Frame optimization carries well beyond mods - playstyle and weapon selection also factors into it.

Some examples?

Saryn and Optimal weapons

Sure, I could take a max range low power Saryn into an endless map and spore infect things around corners and hallways I probably won't engage for 10 seconds or so. That's useless though (and I see a lot of people do it). Why? They aren't thinking about how the debuff will probably wear off in that time before the enemy is even engaged, and since spore's damage comes from being popped/enemies dying, that damage won't be dealt unless you have a wide ranged explosion of some sort to trigger it. Otherwise, your spores and that half health won't even be active by the time to get to you.

Better to do a mid/slightly post mid-range build with high power strength and an explosive weapon with toxic procs, and one weapon that can throw on a ton of toxic procs in a short time. Why? Spore only matters to get that debuff on, to pop and do its extra damage (and its significant damage when built for it), and to a lesser extent, acting as kind of an Xray vision to see where incoming mobs are. With an explosive weapon, you'll pop all her spores and deal a chunk of damage, moreso if it can build toxic proc damage into its explosion -and- apply that higher damage spore to other enemies. Also, since you're shooting into a crowd, ever spore popped will damage another enemy, but an explosion pops multiple spores and causes them to spread, so you are just getting extra damage per shot (ie torid, sonicor, tonkor). Each explosive blast pops but makes new spores when in a crowd, and if you're working with something putting down toxic procs you're just escalating your damage as it levels a crowd.

You won't get that effect if you're using some silly regular rifle/pistol.

Ember can boost weapon damage better than anyone but Banshee, and almost as well as Mirage.

Ember does a lot of damage with her powers, but if you aren't putting heat on your guns you're using half the frame and probably need to consider how much you're not thinking about other warframes you might use.

Building Ember around WoF is a bad and ineffective idea, but that's for another time. Accelerant boosts heat damage from any source it happens, even if you bullet jump with firewalker. You do not have to use a heat based weapon at all, that's totally irrelevant. If you put heat on a tonkor, boltor prime, sonicor, syn simulor, Tigris, you have very high heat damage getting multiplied (with my build, I essentially have a 650% heat damage mod to throw on guns). Doing slightly more radiation damage than normal to a target that's weak against radiation and neutral against heat becomes meaningless because you just sheerly do so much heat damage, any other damage type doesn't matter save corrosive procs. If you have someone stripping armor 100%, then no other damage type matters at all.

Between her hyper destructiveness and her constant stunning, you shouldn't have many opportunities for enemies to even attack you. She, like some of the other paper frames, requires a level of mobility to stay alive and well, only, she's doing more while being mobile thanks to WoF than most other frames.

Trinity and an explosive weapon

For Bless, being able to self damage safely is great. Knowing whether you want a glaive, an ogris (no lol), or an attica with multishot, high fire rate, and thunderbolt to whittle down your shields and health precisely can do wonders. Other than that, if you take abating link and some PS on Trin, a slash weapon is best most of the time because slash damage is best for unarmored, unshielded stuff.

Min Maxing may seem like the obvious thing to do, but sometimes, its just bad. It depends on the specific purpose you're trying to accomplish. Some frames are actually quite well useable with a fairly balanced power stat spread. Others only need 2 or so stats, even some of the frames that /seem/ like they need all stats. Until you play that frame and use all abilities in a variety of situations and drill in the technical details of abilities via the warframe wiki, you aren't going to be maxing out efficiency and use of much of any frame really. IE if you think Mag is bad vs infested, Trinity is nearly mandatory for parties, or that Nekros is purely for loot, you really aren't well informed on Warframe on the whole and are probably thinking about gameplay elements with a little too narrow of a perspective.

Banshee is a good example of this. If you max out her range, you'll get plenty out of soundquake of course, but silence will pretty much be destroyed. If you run 100-145% range on Banshee, you can stun everything around you, give you enough time to kill things closer to you, and whatever wakes up before you get to it you can run away from and back to in order to restun. You plainly can't do that if you max out range. Power strength is another thing she doesn't need maxed completely. Do you really need 2000% damage multiplication, or will say, 1200% or 1600% damage multiplication still let you one shot everything while perhaps being able to feed your other abilities a bit harder (increasing efficiency or something)?

Other times maxing stats may be bad? Duration with Ember.

Why? For all the lazy people out there that started using Ember with the WoF toggle change, this seemed like the thing to do. The thing is, WoF has such a criminally low energy drain as it is, you don't need a high duration. Accelerant lasts so long with even neutral duration that if for some reason you can't kill everything affected in the time it runs out, you didn't build with any power strength and you have terrible weapons for what you're facing. Fireblast doesn't really count for much unless you want a better version of Tectonics (because that's really what it is, a knockdown + damage + area denial shield since nothing runs through it anymore lol). If you build for efficiency and Strength, you're always going to be killing things, and you're going to be killing them enough that you can spam your abilities while getting more energy from mobs.

Valkyr is an odd case. You can build her to debuff entire rooms just about, by upping power strength and going for high range, but its generally not the most straightforward thing you do with Valk. Its an effective strategy, but kind of like a melee oriented accelerant or a poor lady's m prime. Most people would rather just build for Hysteria, which is of course fine. I'd rather just kill things with a beefed up Warcry since so many melee weapons are more efficient than Hysteria's annoying combos and control. At this point I prefer Ember over Valkyr as my melee frame anyway, so it doesn't matter too much.

Some random, detailed thoughts for whoever to consider.

Thank you for this, very helpful and I hope many read it.

[(PSN)KrakenUnchained]

Meh, I like to use QT+Flow on every frame.

That's just how I roll.

If you ask me, I think using either vitality or redirection is a waste of a mod slot.

This, qt + maxed primed flow gives more hp points compared to maxed redirection + maxed vitality so using pr flow as energy and hp pool is the best way to save your mod slots for something useful

[Forblaze]

This, qt + maxed primed flow gives more hp points compared to maxed redirection + maxed vitality so using pr flow as energy and hp pool is the best way to save your mod slots for something useful

 

But QT+Flow take two mod slots, just like using both Vitality and Redirection. Even worse, you pretty much have to take Flow to take QT, but you don't need both Redirection and Vitality. Lastly, what do you do if you're relying on abilities and catch a bullet at an inconvenient time? Taking 500 shield damage out of nowhere is worrying, but at least it doesn't stop you from using Shatter Shield and saving yourself.

[(PSN)YankeeClippah]

When building for a frame, you should always build around a specific playstyle or set of abilities, but consider how much use you can get out of those other abilities you didn't build for that you can't out of simply having a gun. (IE Nyx's importance became much less imo when you can just make a chaos gun via long range radioactive viral ignis)

Ev Trin blah

EV Trin isn't necessary for optimizing or ideal anything. Really, if you have flow, a normal trinity's boosts are going to be enough for most spamming. Building for EV is silly in 95% of cases in WF, its just absolutely over the top and not necessary at all. If you can't kill fast at all (and lots of people don't, I will admit I find), sure, you're never going to see energy orbs or your abilities will just be inefficient since enemies aren't dying while your abilities are running down, but if you -need- an EV Trin, you should first look at why you're so lacking in the first place (unless you're buliding to take efficiency well below 100% on a spammy frame). All systems in place in WF currently can keep you actively supplied during a mission once you've got a fully built frame (with corrupted mods at your disposal, not even primed). And really, a bless trinity or abating link trinity can supply energy just fine. Or a Nekros. Or another frame that just outright kills things. Basically, if you aren't killing things, you're wasting energy.

Frame optimization carries well beyond mods - playstyle and weapon selection also factors into it.

Some examples?

Saryn and Optimal weapons

Sure, I could take a max range low power Saryn into an endless map and spore infect things around corners and hallways I probably won't engage for 10 seconds or so. That's useless though (and I see a lot of people do it). Why? They aren't thinking about how the debuff will probably wear off in that time before the enemy is even engaged, and since spore's damage comes from being popped/enemies dying, that damage won't be dealt unless you have a wide ranged explosion of some sort to trigger it. Otherwise, your spores and that half health won't even be active by the time to get to you.

Better to do a mid/slightly post mid-range build with high power strength and an explosive weapon with toxic procs, and one weapon that can throw on a ton of toxic procs in a short time. Why? Spore only matters to get that debuff on, to pop and do its extra damage (and its significant damage when built for it), and to a lesser extent, acting as kind of an Xray vision to see where incoming mobs are. With an explosive weapon, you'll pop all her spores and deal a chunk of damage, moreso if it can build toxic proc damage into its explosion -and- apply that higher damage spore to other enemies. Also, since you're shooting into a crowd, ever spore popped will damage another enemy, but an explosion pops multiple spores and causes them to spread, so you are just getting extra damage per shot (ie torid, sonicor, tonkor). Each explosive blast pops but makes new spores when in a crowd, and if you're working with something putting down toxic procs you're just escalating your damage as it levels a crowd.

You won't get that effect if you're using some silly regular rifle/pistol.

Ember can boost weapon damage better than anyone but Banshee, and almost as well as Mirage.

Ember does a lot of damage with her powers, but if you aren't putting heat on your guns you're using half the frame and probably need to consider how much you're not thinking about other warframes you might use.

Building Ember around WoF is a bad and ineffective idea, but that's for another time. Accelerant boosts heat damage from any source it happens, even if you bullet jump with firewalker. You do not have to use a heat based weapon at all, that's totally irrelevant. If you put heat on a tonkor, boltor prime, sonicor, syn simulor, Tigris, you have very high heat damage getting multiplied (with my build, I essentially have a 650% heat damage mod to throw on guns). Doing slightly more radiation damage than normal to a target that's weak against radiation and neutral against heat becomes meaningless because you just sheerly do so much heat damage, any other damage type doesn't matter save corrosive procs. If you have someone stripping armor 100%, then no other damage type matters at all.

Between her hyper destructiveness and her constant stunning, you shouldn't have many opportunities for enemies to even attack you. She, like some of the other paper frames, requires a level of mobility to stay alive and well, only, she's doing more while being mobile thanks to WoF than most other frames.

Trinity and an explosive weapon

For Bless, being able to self damage safely is great. Knowing whether you want a glaive, an ogris (no lol), or an attica with multishot, high fire rate, and thunderbolt to whittle down your shields and health precisely can do wonders. Other than that, if you take abating link and some PS on Trin, a slash weapon is best most of the time because slash damage is best for unarmored, unshielded stuff.

Min Maxing may seem like the obvious thing to do, but sometimes, its just bad. It depends on the specific purpose you're trying to accomplish. Some frames are actually quite well useable with a fairly balanced power stat spread. Others only need 2 or so stats, even some of the frames that /seem/ like they need all stats. Until you play that frame and use all abilities in a variety of situations and drill in the technical details of abilities via the warframe wiki, you aren't going to be maxing out efficiency and use of much of any frame really. IE if you think Mag is bad vs infested, Trinity is nearly mandatory for parties, or that Nekros is purely for loot, you really aren't well informed on Warframe on the whole and are probably thinking about gameplay elements with a little too narrow of a perspective.

Banshee is a good example of this. If you max out her range, you'll get plenty out of soundquake of course, but silence will pretty much be destroyed. If you run 100-145% range on Banshee, you can stun everything around you, give you enough time to kill things closer to you, and whatever wakes up before you get to it you can run away from and back to in order to restun. You plainly can't do that if you max out range. Power strength is another thing she doesn't need maxed completely. Do you really need 2000% damage multiplication, or will say, 1200% or 1600% damage multiplication still let you one shot everything while perhaps being able to feed your other abilities a bit harder (increasing efficiency or something)?

Other times maxing stats may be bad? Duration with Ember.

Why? For all the lazy people out there that started using Ember with the WoF toggle change, this seemed like the thing to do. The thing is, WoF has such a criminally low energy drain as it is, you don't need a high duration. Accelerant lasts so long with even neutral duration that if for some reason you can't kill everything affected in the time it runs out, you didn't build with any power strength and you have terrible weapons for what you're facing. Fireblast doesn't really count for much unless you want a better version of Tectonics (because that's really what it is, a knockdown + damage + area denial shield since nothing runs through it anymore lol). If you build for efficiency and Strength, you're always going to be killing things, and you're going to be killing them enough that you can spam your abilities while getting more energy from mobs.

Valkyr is an odd case. You can build her to debuff entire rooms just about, by upping power strength and going for high range, but its generally not the most straightforward thing you do with Valk. Its an effective strategy, but kind of like a melee oriented accelerant or a poor lady's m prime. Most people would rather just build for Hysteria, which is of course fine. I'd rather just kill things with a beefed up Warcry since so many melee weapons are more efficient than Hysteria's annoying combos and control. At this point I prefer Ember over Valkyr as my melee frame anyway, so it doesn't matter too much.

Some random, detailed thoughts for whoever to consider.

Good read and some great great points

[Forblaze]

Min Maxing may seem like the obvious thing to do, but sometimes, its just bad.  It depends on the specific purpose you're trying to accomplish.  Some frames are actually quite well useable with a fairly balanced power stat spread.  Others only need 2 or so stats, even some of the frames that /seem/ like they need all stats.  Until you play that frame and use all abilities in a variety of situations and drill in the technical details of abilities via the warframe wiki, you aren't going to be maxing out efficiency and use of much of any frame really.  IE if you think Mag is bad vs infested, Trinity is nearly mandatory for parties, or that Nekros is purely for loot, you really aren't well informed on Warframe on the whole and are probably thinking about gameplay elements with a little too narrow of a perspective.

 

Banshee is a good example of this.  If you max out her range, you'll get plenty out of soundquake of course, but silence will pretty much be destroyed. If you run 100-145% range on Banshee, you can stun everything around you, give you enough time to kill things closer to you, and whatever wakes up before you get to it you can run away from and back to in order to restun. You plainly can't do that if you max out range.  Power strength is another thing she doesn't need maxed completely.  Do you really need 2000% damage multiplication, or will say, 1200% or 1600% damage multiplication still let you one shot everything while perhaps being able to feed your other abilities a bit harder (increasing efficiency or something)?

 

Other times maxing stats may be bad? Duration with Ember.

Why? For all the lazy people out there that started using Ember with the WoF toggle change, this seemed like the thing to do.  The thing is, WoF has such a criminally low energy drain as it is, you don't need a high duration.  Accelerant lasts so long with even neutral duration that if for some reason you can't kill everything affected in the time it runs out, you didn't build with any power strength and you have terrible weapons for what you're facing.  Fireblast doesn't really count for much unless you want a better version of Tectonics (because that's really what it is, a knockdown + damage + area denial shield since nothing runs through it anymore lol).  If you build for efficiency and Strength, you're always going to be killing things, and you're going to be killing them enough that you can spam your abilities while getting more energy from mobs.

 

You seem to be operating under the faulty assumption that min-maxing automatically means maxing out a stat. Min-maxing is always relative to what's desirable. If maxing out range is not desirable, then doing so is not min-maxing.

[(PSN)KrakenUnchained]

But QT+Flow take two mod slots, just like using both Vitality and Redirection. Even worse, you pretty much have to take Flow to take QT, but you don't need both Redirection and Vitality. Lastly, what do you do if you're relying on abilities and catch a bullet at an inconvenient time? Taking 500 shield damage out of nowhere is worrying, but at least it doesn't stop you from using Shatter Shield and saving yourself.

Point is that high level content is just a matter of crowd control and usually an experienced player care more of make enemies harmless instead take a lot of damage without dying.

Thats why qt is a better choice, if needed will save your life, if not needed thanks to pr flow anyway you will get an higher energy pool thats always welcome.

How many hp points gives you redirection +/or vitality? 1000 at best?

Heres some math about quick thinking, worth to get a look by people not used to this mod

https://m.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/2ui1vm/quick_thinking_is_a_pretty_good_mod_and_some_math/

[Forblaze]

Point is that high level content is just a matter of crowd control and usually an experienced player care more of make enemies harmless instead take a lot of damage without dying.

Thats why qt is a better choice, if needed will save your life, if not needed thanks to pr flow anyway you will get an higher energy pool thats always welcome.

How many hp points gives you redirection +/or vitality? 1000 at best?

Heres some math about quick thinking, worth to get a look by people not used to this mod

https://m.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/2ui1vm/quick_thinking_is_a_pretty_good_mod_and_some_math/

 

Flow is welcome, sure, but I'd usually rather have some other power stat in that slot. Maybe QT is good for a frame that already requires flow, but I consider it to be a waste of a slot in all but a select few cases, as is having both redirection and vitality.

 

Redirection and Vitality can also give less effective health and still considered better, because you can lose that health without it sucking up your energy.

[(PSN)KrakenUnchained]

Flow is welcome, sure, but I'd usually rather have some other power stat in that slot. Maybe QT is good for a frame that already requires flow, but I consider it to be a waste of a slot in all but a select few cases, as is having both redirection and vitality.

Redirection and Vitality can also give less effective health and still considered better, because you can lose that health without it sucking up your energy.

Personally i run qt on any frame but valkyr, on the other hand i use redirection on none of my frames and vitality on few of them, mainly the ones where i use rage mod also (atlas, valkyr, zephyr, oberon, saryn)

[(PSN)nysudyrgh]

I always use QT, it gives my friend who mains Trin some extra time to save my butt when I get hit. xD

[(PSN)IIIDevoidIII]

Moved to Players Helping Players subforum.

[OniGanon]

With Chroma/Atlas (with Vitality, Steel Fiber, Redirection, Armoured Agility, QT, Rage and Primed Flow) I can survive a T4 Death Orb's laser for a couple minutes standing still...

That sounds like it would be really useful, if ever I found myself in need of facetanking Void lasers for several minutes straight.

Seriously though, Vigor + Steel Fiber + Ice Element already renders Chroma effectively immortal.

Edited January 9, 2016 by OniGanon