Warframe Arbitrations Guide
By: Geek
Arbitration Goons Discord: https://discord.gg/8Xr8bgqHyk
*These are all my personal opinions, by no means the be all end all. Run any build you like, this is simply meant to provide a good starting point for those looking to improve their arbi game*
Introduction
Welcome to the endgame organized farming of Arbitrations, our primary goal is to acquire lots of vitus essence and exchange it for loads of Kuva to feed our crippling addiction to purble cards.
VIEW > SHOW OUTLINE (For easier navigation)
The idea is to buff the hek out of each other, and kill all the enemies on spawn as fast as possible. While collecting vitus drops at the right time (near the end of defense waves) and in a timely manner; meaning get back to the camp spot to continue spawn killing mobs as fast as possible. It all sounds harder than it is, but you’ll learn the spawns as you go so don’t worry too much if you’re new, just shoot the red dots on minimap. There are some additional resources in the discord #General pins.
*If you don’t have Primed Sure Footed yet, you can rely on ancient healer specters aura and or Unairu poise. You could also just utilize handspring exilus mod for faster knockdown recovery. Lastly, if you are willing to give up an additional mod slot you can run these two mods instead of primed sure footed. The Saryn and Mirage builds are a little tight, so it’s probably best to just do regular sure footed paired with archgun overguard and a free roam ancient healer specter. For the rest you can drop amar’s hatred or augur secrets to slot fortitude.
As of update 35: Whispers in the wall, Upon using an Archgun Deployer, players will now gain 2,000 Overguard (Prevents knockdowns). This can be easily depleted by allies getting electric proc’d from the rail on Cinxia/Casta/Seimeni tile for example, so you may have to reactivate it occasionally.
- The effect from the archgun deployer has a 60s cooldown.
- The Overguard gain is capped at 2,000, so re-deploying your Archgun after the cooldown resets will refresh your Overguard up to the 2,000 cap.
3:1 vs 2:2
🔻This comp is sort of an amalgam of the previous metas, as well as making good use of the corrosive green shards. When recruiting for squads you can refer to the playstyles as 2:2 or 3:1, they are the same frames but with different subsume choices and roles. Everyone runs nidus specter.
- 3:1 is 3 dps and 1 support, where Wisp runs afentis and can still use sporelacer/akarius to contribute to kills if needed. There is overall less risk of failing the mission in the later waves because there will be more players actively killing sneaky enemies that make it out of spawn.
- 2:2 is 2 dps and 2 support, Saryn and Mirage need to be ON POINT for this playstyle to work properly, maintaining constant spam fire and collecting vitus quickly and preferably not at the same time as each other. You will only have 2 out of 4 members of the squad outputting kills per minute, and if one or both dpsers are lacking it will be readily apparent, they have to cover all the spawns with napalm shots on a constant rotation. This is not as beginner friendly as 3:1. Wisp and Chroma/Octavia run afentis.
Host Migration
🔻Do not press TAB to view kills and damage% during arbitrations, especially later on in the mission. Game client becomes clunky during longer missions and people will disconnect from the host. I just wouldn’t press tab/P at all for defense, and for interception you can kinda get away with it during wave changes where you're capturing points. Another bug, If you are playing windowed or have a multi monitor setup and your game pauses when you ALT TAB, then you will disconnect from the host if you do so for more than 7 seconds.
- If the game puts you in your own instance the spawns are heavily reduced, and it's fairly easy to finish out.
- If one or two players migrate away from your session the spawns don't reduce until the end of the wave change state for defense or new round of interception. With less buffs and higher level enemies on later waves, you'll have to sit up in your gamer chair, throw down all your specters and on-call crew with Kuva Zarr, and you could utilize Vazarin dash to help keep operative alive.
- If the game host migrates you away from the group, if you're quick enough you can press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC and end the warframe process instead of pressing ALT+F4, then start up warframe and you should be able to reconnect to the group in more cases.
Recommended Settings ☆
🔻You can make Kuva Ogris full auto with this setting, be careful though, you can incinerate your ammo very quickly. You only need to shoot each spawn 2-3 times as you’re rotating through.
- Graphics Engine no longer matters for achieving maximum Eclipse percentage. Max FOV helps you see more at once, motion blur and depth of field can be annoying. Turning off bloom and elemental FX helps reduce strain on your GPU.
- Visual effects intensity set to 0/200 by typing it in and confirming (if you just drag the slider it can only go down to 10). Enable reduce teammate visual effects and disable screen shake:
- Set both energy colors on Kuva Ogris to smoke palette black to effectively mute napalm’s visuals:
Warframes
Saryn Prime ☆
🔻Saryn is the primary DPS - Don’t take this role for defense if you’re newer to arbi
Toxic lash applies 195.6% of weapons total damage as toxin alongside all sources of damage (not combining) including nightwatch napalm's fire ticks and contagion's toxin cloud ticks. This triple dips bane/roar. Lash benefits from base damage, elemental damage, and eclipse as well.
- Venom dose will give the team 652% corrosive elemental damage and some nice status weighting.
- Contagion cloud is more significant than at first glance. It will create 10m diameter toxin clouds that last 29 seconds for each enemy killed while toxic lash is up. These 3,912 toxin damage clouds add up quickly and will overlap with each other, x2.47 roar = 9,662. Our main priority is the arbi drones, because they drop the vitus, and having as many possible damage instances at once is very beneficial for killing the drones (before they can shield gate) because only 5 arbi drones can be spawned in at one given time. Another side benefit of contagion are the damage ticks on screen as enemies spawn to allow for easy spotting and faster kills per minute.
- Energized Munitions gives you 12.15 seconds of 75% ammo efficiency for full auto goodness.
- Madurai focus tree with phoenix talons for an additional 30% physical damage passive and void strike active with fuel’s 40% ammo efficiency. Run Vazarin dash instead if running with inexperienced supports in order to safeguard operative for emergencies. Archon Continuity currently does not work with toxic lash/contagion, potential oversight.
The +45% more toxin status effect damage from the shards acts as a separate multiplier in the final calculation for toxic lash’s toxin DoT which is pretty darn good, and fully worth using but not required. Here is some maff for the da nerds showing Lash Toxin DoT from Nightwatch Napalm Ticks:
150 is the Nightwatch napalm damage tick
(1+0.6) is the Kuva Valence bonus
2.22 is the Toxic Lash ability %
0.5 is the calculation for toxin status effect damage
(1+1.65+3.6+23.59) is Heavy Cal, Primary Merciless and Chroma’s vex ‘base damage’
(1+0.9+7.39+7.39+3.49) is Toxin, Shock Trooper, Venom Dose, and Nourish ‘elemental’
0.3 is the Nightwatch Napalm modifier
(1+0.9) is the double dip on all strictly ‘modded Toxin’
(1+0.55+2.47) is the triple dipping on Bane and Roar ‘faction damage’
(1+1.35) is the Emerald archon shards (in my case, 3 Tauforged at 45% each)
(1+15.55) is Mirage’s Eclipse
This equation gets you very close to the expected in-game damage numbers, but warframe implements damage quantization to the nearest 16th at various steps of the calculation. Lash Toxin procs from the actual impact/AoE from Ogris shots will deal much more damage with higher base damage and without that 0.3 modifier from Nightwatch Napalm to consider. This is just showing Lash Toxin from napalm ticks.
Mirage Prime ☆
🔻Subsumed Eclipse is base 30% but Mirage herself still gives base 200%
Solar Eclipse will provide a 1,380% final multiplicative damage buff to allies within 15m, and requires augment mod. Buff does not persist, so when you move or your allies leave the radius they lose the buff. Make sure you invert abilities for Mirage specifically, so that Solar Eclipse becomes tap to cast.
- Mirage should run Zenurik focus school and make sure to drop hardened wellspring at the start of the run for chroma and wisp to give +20% strength for their initial buffs.
- Energized Munitions gives you 14.2 seconds of 75% ammo efficiency for full auto goodness.
With this build Mirage reaches (237 +60(molt aug) +50(energy conversion) +90(squad dono)) x1.58(tether)= 690.46 strength. Mirage's clones are granted crit and status chance 0.4x strength. So in the case of our unmodified 9% crit chance and 92.4% status chance (with a 3p1n +sc riven and 1 tau red primary status chance) and assuming 4 multishot, and only 2 clones shoot, the 8 pellets per shot from the clones would have 33.85% crit chance and 347.59% status chance (3 guaranteed status procs and 47.59% chance of a 4th for each pellet) With 1 tau corrosive green shard you can easily hit 13 corrosive stacks with each shot, stripping 98% of armor.
*Props to @z3rr for pointing out the clone bonuses and pushing for corrosive stripping.
Wisp Prime ☆
🔻Wisp's primary focus is to provide buffs, but you still help with kills via sporelacer or akarius.
Shock mote isn't necessary if trying to cover 3 separate camp spots. Other than that it’s good to throw down as it provides a meaningful form of cc that will end up covering a lot of area due to specters and kavats picking up shock mote as well. The cc can save your cheeks when looting, 15m range on the shock mote isn’t going to affect enemy spawns from the camp spot.
- Be sure to spawn a Nidus specter and wait for tether before placing motes in key positions, as they will keep that 1.58x final strength multiplier for the rest of the arbitration. This many strength shards is not necessary, just try to hit at least 170% haste mote with nidus noodle at minimum.
- Roar subsume ☆ will provide 247% multiplicative damage buff similar to bane mods, to allies within 25m and persists. With the augment mod you can re-cast if you miss one of the dpsers, or just jump off the tile so it resets roar cooldown.
After Mirage drops Zenurik’s hardened wellspring for 20% str, Using Madurai’s 40% str on double dash, and molt vigor’s 45% on operator ability cast and nidus specter’s tether you drop your initial motes. Vigor is for one cast so you’ll have to do that for each mote. You can do health mote then haste mote, or if you were too slow, just use specter or on-call crew to trigger Archon Intensify. This build reaches 207% haste mote, so 311.7% bonus fire rate.
*You could go for tri-umbral and drop amar’s hatred and primed sure footed or primed continuity. I highly recommend you keep primed sure footed on there, because if you get knocked - you’re very likely to die. And if wisp dies, the team loses all their fire rate, and it can easily ruin runs.
Chroma Prime ☆
🔻Lizard man
Vex armor can be quickly stacked on grineer shipyard tileset with the electric rail. For other tilesets, as of update 35.5.6, you can now stack the damage portion of vex armor via ranged kills, granting base 15% per kill and scaling with strength. It will take around 19 kills. It will provide 2,359% base damage to allies within 14.2m. Once you’ve done all the work for the initial cast, build up to the max value before refreshing, and the value will stay that high. Buff does not persist, so when you move or your allies leave the radius they lose the buff.
- Elemental ward with toxin energy color will grant 101% reload speed to allies within 9.5m and persists with the augment mod everlasting ward. It is preferable to subsume over chroma’s 4th ability so that you can retain the ability to rotate through the elements on ward just in case you don't want to forfeit your energy color choice just to get toxin on ward.
- Dispensary ☆ when the player is below 70% energy/health or 70% ammo on primary or secondary (reserves). Lasts 33 seconds with 98% chance of triple drop.
*To easily maintain Arcane Power Ramp, just refresh your Vex armor after each dispensary cast.
Octavia Prime
🔻Alternative to Chroma
Amp can be thrown down to create an 11m radius zone that provides 1,760% base damage for allies standing the zone for 87 seconds. Can be recast, and persists at the location it was thrown. You can only have one zone at a time.
- Metronome gives 3 buffs that are triggered in different ways. The main one we care about is the 264% Multishot buff that is triggered just by shooting while within 9.5m of Octavia, buff lasts 39 seconds and persists and is refreshable. The 264% movement speed buff can be triggered by jumping while within 9.5m of Octavia, so it’ll mainly just be her getting that buff. The invis buff from spam crouching isn’t really needed. But it’s nice if mirage does it, so she hides her clones.
- Dispensary ☆ when the player is below 70% energy/health or 70% ammo on primary or secondary (reserves). Lasts 33 seconds with 20% chance of triple drop. Allies can run Fractalized reset or reload speed mod if they want to make up for the lack of Ward.
- Elemental Ward provides 101% reload to the team for 63 seconds in a 9.5m radius, and persists when they leave the area when using the augment mod.
In comparison to Chroma, if you go dispensary you’re giving up reload speed in favor of ammo and multishot. If you go elemental ward, you’re giving up consistent ammo in favor of reload speed and multishot. You can either run 2 protea specters (Saryn and Octavia) orrrr you can just spend ammo pads and keep the benefits of running 4 nidus specters. Ammo pads benefit teammates so it doesn’t have to be just one person dropping pads throughout the mission.
*Set energy color to smoke black, and mute mandachord for everyone's sanity.
Pre-Buffing Before Mission
Nidus Prime
🔻This requires communicating with your team before the mission, but you can go in with nidus initially and give a stronger nidus tether to your wisp and or chroma for strength snapshotting. You cannot rejoin the mission if it goes past defense wave 3, so make sure the team doesn’t start nuking the map yet. Nidus pre-buffing is only really necessary when people don’t have full builds or if attempting to go past 100w, don’t feel like you have to do this for every mission. With equinox, This build gives a 2.82x strength multiplier.
- Join as Nidus and go get a couple stacks.
- Cast Empower. Throw down protea specter or find an energy orb for Energy Conversion.
- Double sling to proc Madurai 40% and cast operator ability to proc Vigor 45%.
- Alt fire with Grimoir on a cluster of enemies for 60%.
- Wait for Jade buff, then use tether on wisp/chroma.
- They place their motes, using their own Madurai/Vigor/Energy Conversion etc.
- Leave the mission, swap loadout to your actual role, rejoin the mission before wave 3.
- Make sure Wisp/Chroma knows NOT to have their own nidus specter summoned, their specter's tether will cancel yours. Also worth mentioning that you would not benefit from a nidus specter yourself, it would remove your specter’s tether once you cast tether, plus it could cancel your tether early as well.
*Chroma needs to build up his vex armor dmg % to max before he recasts otherwise he will lose the snapshotted strength. Once he is maxed, he can safely recast vex armor and keep it for the rest of the mission as long as he doesn’t let it expire.
Jade
🔻Her 2nd ability gives strength to allies within affinity range up to 150% strength. You would need to proc molt vigor, 4x power ramp, energy conversion and growing power along with Zenurik’s hardened wellspring to reach the breakpoint of 600% strength. If you don’t meet the breakpoint, and don’t want Nidus to waste a stack buffing you, you could utilize a nidus specter to hit the breakpoint. Dispensary subsume to help squad proc energy conversion.
*For both pre-buffing loadouts it's a good idea to run Sahasa Kubrow with its Dig augment, in order to make proccing Energy Conversion even easier for everyone.
AURA CHOICE
🔻Enemy Radar helping with ai pathing is a MYTH, in defense missions the operative is marked as a priority target and mobs will sprint towards him. In interception the enemies will gravitate towards captured points or allies whichever is closer. The spawn engine only relies on squad members' line of sight (or FOV, as it will attempt to spawn enemies outside of your rendered view) with bias towards the host. So the only benefit to running enemy radar is easier spotting of mobs via the minimap.
- Majority of the tiles only require the innate 30m radar to provide full coverage with Primed Animal Instinct to see all of the spawns. Infested ship ”F1” requires 1 enemy radar if you do want to see all the spawns, which ideally Wisp would run, since the additional 30% strength benefits her the most.
- Growing power auras do stack and are easy to proc, but do NOT affect specters.
- Power Donation makes you lose 30% strength and gives +30% to allies. If all 4 squad members have this equipt everyone will receive 90% strength and end up with +60% because each person had -30. Power Donation also applies to allied specters, with 4 power donation(+120%) the nidus specter’s tether gives 1.58x strength multiplier instead of base 1.28x
Weapons
Primary: Kuva Ogris ☆
🔻Kuva Ogris is the main source of mob clearing
The napalm ticks are one of the main things that kill the arbitration drones after the initial impact breaks their shield, instantly, before they can shield gate. The mobs will stack many heat status procs but the drones will not. Nightwatch napalm stays on the ground for 6 seconds and is not affected by status duration. The heat procs are affected by status duration, but it's not that big of a deal since heat constantly refreshes all heat procs after each new proc. If you are shooting very quickly with energized munitions for example, there is a limit to the amount of napalms alive at once, and you'll be forcing them to despawn earlier than 6 seconds.
- Nightwatch napalm's damage is only increased by flat damage, bane/Roar, Eclipse and Kuva valence percentage. The valence percentage amount does not matter, 25% would be just fine. But if you can, you might as well go for 60%. IF you want to min max and farm more than 1 Kuva Ogris to have the ideal valence for every role then go toxin valence for Mirage for the corrosive weighting full strip nonsense, cold valence on Saryn since she always runs ‘modded toxin’ and it’ll give her some viral weighting, and heat valence for the rest of the frames.
This is unnecessary for 100 wave runs, if you only want to farm 1 Kuva Ogris just go toxin valence.
- 3p1n rivens can no longer hit 70% Multishot breakpoint, but it's still the most preferred stat for any Ogris riven. For Saryn, an ideal secondary stat is Toxin. For Mirage, an ideal secondary stat is Status Chance. For the 3rd stat it just depends, if you are going to be using energized munitions I highly recommend Mag capacity on riven alongside Primed Magazine Warp will grant you 6 mag, which has a higher impact when paired with energized munitions; it's like having 24 shots instead of 20. The breakpoint for reaching 6 magazine with riven is 28.33% and the current disposition allows for 3p1n to reach 29.5-36.1%, but try for at least B+ to be safe down to 0.6 dispo in the future. If you don’t mind 5 magazine, Projectile flight speed, -Recoil, Reload, Bane or Damage in descending order. If you just want an all around good riven then go for ms,mag,pfs.
- 2p1n rivens can be a wide variety of things paired with Multishot. Toxin, Status chance, Magazine capacity, Projectile flight speed, Reload speed… etc
- As far as riven Negative stat, the most ideal is -Zoom. Negative crit chance or crit damage is kinda cope, but still okay. You really don't want status chance, but status duration is fine. Everything is dying with 1 or 2 ticks so it is negligible. +Recoil is technically harmless but many people greatly dislike it for Kuva Ogris. It’s worth noting that the standard Ogris has 0 recoil.
- If you don’t have a riven, slot Vigilante Armaments.
- Punch thru from shred/primed shred or riven is crucial for locking down all the spawns thru the walls. *Punch thru currently not working on many projectile based weapons, DE pls fix*
- Primary Merciless gives 360% damage and 30% reload speed, you could swap this for Primary Blight on Saryn, IF you for sure have Chroma or Octavia on the squad to make up for the lost damage. You will get 72% multishot and 144% crit damage.
- Ammo Drum increases your ammo pool, but also makes it so you get 2 ammo from dispensary. For Saryn, you can replace this for Infected Clip if you don’t have a toxin riven. You will be fine without Ammo Drum so long as the Afentis thrower isn’t eeping.
- Adhesive Blast, specifically rank 2, makes it so that 50% of your projectiles will explode on impact like normal, and the other 50% will land and explode after 5 seconds. This increases the effective coverage time of Nightwatch Napalm from 6 to 11 seconds. However, it reduces your initial shot coverage, so Energized Munitions and rank 6 Heavy Caliber is strongly recommended to compensate.
Heavy caliber r6 because the extra spread is good for coverage, if you're confident on nailing all the spawns or don't like the spread then Amalgam Serration's 25% sprint speed helps collect vitus essence that much faster. I’m recommending r6 due to the variance in coverage area with the addition of Adhesive Blast. You can run a higher/lower ranked heavy caliber based on how much spread you prefer. Big circle below is r10, then the smaller inner circles are r4, r5 and r6 respectively.
Primary: Afentis
🔻Support(s) throw it down shortly after the start of every wave or every time you cast roar. Spear lasts for 10 seconds, allies that kill 1 enemy while in the spear's aura receive 100% ammo pool, 50% reload, 20% firerate, and -50% recoil for 40 seconds. Only need reload speed, fire rate and twitch mods on Afentis. Firestorm does not affect buff radius. Amalgam Serration is nice for the movement speed. Fractalized Reset isn’t required but if you already have it, it's nice as well.
*Twitch can be activated normally by swappin to Afentis for alt fire, or when performing a quick melee or ground slam then returning to fire, and the -recoil lasts 8 seconds. This buff also applies to your secondary.
Secondary: Sporelacer
🔻This is for your warframe’s secondary slot if you are running Afentis in primary slot.
Sporelacer - Haymaker - Splat for assisting the team with killing mobs. Run lethal torrent if you don’t have a riven. You could use a Kuva Grattler with an archgun deployer on your gear wheel for the first few minutes of the run to build up to 250 molt aug stacks faster if you really wanted to. The only issue with this is having to get rid of it to throw Afentis buff for your team and redeploy it roughly every 50 seconds. So it’s not worth running Grattler the entire time, only for getting stacks.
Secondary: Akarius Prime
🔻An alternative to Sporelacer, which feels slightly nicer to use, but really needs all the buffs the team provides. So if you get host migrated in the later waves, the damage is too low to finish out the waves sometimes. If you have good internet and aren’t worried about migration this may be a better option, or if you’re the host you don’t have to worry at all then.
🔻GENERIC secondary to pair with Ogris - no kill potential, passive benefits only mod config. Just like the twitch mod on Afentis, reflex draw can be activated normally by swapping, or when performing a quick melee or ground slam then returning to fire, and the -recoil lasts 8 seconds. The -spread can come in handy for hitting some of the harder to reach spawns where one enemy is hiding at the ends of waves.
Melee: Praedos
🔻With movement evolutions. Max cap heavy wind up speed for those occasions where you accidentally go to shoot with melee still out. Jugulus mod set (2/3) creates a pillar that stuns enemies within 6m when using slam attack to get around faster. Nothin too special, just kinda nice AOE stun if you land in a pile of mobs. Max attack speed allows for faster recovery from slam attack animation, can right click and resume firing sooner.
**LESS TIME SPENT COLLECTING = HIGHER KPM = MORE VITUS**
Companions
Chesa Kubrow’s Retrieve mod falls under the same category as Nekros desecrate, and does not affect the arbitration drones.
Adarza Kavat ☆
🔻Crit pogris :glueless:
Smeeta charm no longer gives double resource buff, and has been replaced by Resourceful Retriever, which can be run on any beast companion. It gives an 18% chance to double every resource pickup and has no cooldown. This allows us to run several other variants of companion and receive other benefits from various precept mods.
- If you don’t want to forma up 3 companions, and only want to do ONE, then go for Adarza Kavat. Cat’s Eye gives 60% flat critical chance for 10 seconds (13 with Tek Enhance) and goes on cooldown for 20 seconds. This buff affects everyone with 25m. Multiple players in the squad can run this for more uptime, but the buffs do not stack with each other.
*The only two mods on the claws that really matter are Bite and Elusive Posture for Adarza.
Pharaoh Predasite
🔻Saryn’s best friend, with caveats*
Anabolic Pollination gives a +100% toxin damage buff for 15 seconds when you pass through the spore cloud. The spore cloud has a 2m radius, and cannot reach you from on top of a med tower, so you need to run the turret air support and jump at least once every 15 seconds to refresh the buff. If you just stand inside the spore cloud it does not refresh the buff, you have to leave and re-enter it. I recommend utilizing archgun deploy overguard so you don’t accidentally kill your turret with electric procs from touching rail on shipyard tile.
*With Bite it doesn’t reach 50% crit until you get an Adarza buff, then Hunter Synergy will take you over the 50% and allow you to benefit from Tenacious Bond.
Sahasa Kubrow
🔻Support squad role pupper
If you’re playing Wisp or support afentis Chroma, you can run Sahasa for the additional ammo it can provide alongside Dispensary. Roughly every 20 seconds, Dig will give 2 drops with 70% chance at a 3rd drop of ammo/energy. It will not dig if the player is attacking, and checks every 3 seconds. It also will not recast in the same spot, unless you move a few meters to reset it. So it’s very inconsistent and cannot replace Dispensary, but it can offer some additional ammo.
*With Bite it doesn’t reach 50% crit until you get an Adarza buff, then Hunter Synergy will take you over the 50% and allow you to benefit from Tenacious Bond.
Gear Items
🔻Current data suggests only the host needs market drop chance booster, doesn't hurt to have it incase host migration occurs or you start a squad. This stacks with drop chance blessing and only one person on the team needs to have this, again preferably the host. Everyone should always have the market resource booster as well, it’d be silly not to.
- You need to leave the relay once the squad has received a drop chance blessing then form up again once everyone has exited the relay. This ensures the blessing takes effect.
- Ancient healer grants 90% damage reduction, status and knockdown immunity to allies within 14m. If it absorbs radiation effects someone received it will become hostile for the duration and you will lose its buffs during that time. Highly recommend bringing if you're missing primed sure footed or just to soak damage (toxin can one shot you past waves 80+). Can also be placed in doorways to hold them open with hold position, helps with ai not getting stuck behind doors in certain locations.
- Large squad ammo restores pulse every 7.5 seconds for a total of 4 times, totalling 30 seconds. Will restore 3 ammo for Kuva Ogris per pulse. You can purchase the 100x crafting blueprint from clan dojo, but don’t forget to slap them on your gearwheel.
- Sentry Gun air support from Xiphos landing craft, I use it to provide an elevated platform to shoot from at the camp spots for the various maps. Helps prevent you from accidentally shooting your bunny hopping teammate in the face and covering your screen in napalm. These last for around 60 minutes unless destroyed, for example from electric procs from grineer shipyard rail. These are much easier to place and will generally land right where you try to place them, unlike med towers.
- Med Tower air support from Mantis landing craft, similar to Sentry Gun (but taller), used as an elevated platform to shoot from. Lasts 20 minutes and cannot be destroyed like the Sentry Gun can. These are harder to place, as they don’t always land where you try to place them. Landing craft air supports have a 10 minute cooldown (5 minutes with Engineering Intrinsics rank 2).
- Railjack on-call crew can also be spawned every so often to spout their nonsense and clean up occasional mobs. They might help you when the rest of the team is running around collecting vitus essence if you start to get overwhelmed. You'd think Kuva Ogris would be good on them but they hardly fire it, so Zarr is the go to here due to AI only having to reload one shell for full 5 magazine and good AOE damage.
Warframe Specters
🔻Warframe specters and their weapons DO NOT copy the installed mods or appearances (On-call crew does copy weapon’s mods, but not rivens). Just use 1 star for Nidus because you get 10 specters per craft, and 5 per craft on 2 stars. Star level affects specter spawn level, but that's not important.
- Nidus specter will tether to you granting 1.28x strength bonus frequently. Nidus passive gives him 15% strength and with 4 power donations his tether becomes 1.58x. Generally, all four players will run nidus specter if Chroma/Octavia are running dispensary subsume.
- Protea specter casts dispensary when the player is below 70% energy/health or 70% ammo on primary or secondary (reserves). Lasts 25 seconds with a cooldown of 40 seconds after casting. With 4 power donations her base 25% at extra ammo drop will become 55% chance at 2 ammo drops. Have the Protea hold position near the camp location, so they don’t follow you and drop dispensary away from the team.
Give your warframe specters an innate battery style weapon, such as the Shedu. This not only prevents the constant reload sound bug when specter is out of ammo and you’re full, but it also prevents specters from stealing your ammo drops. Shedu is the best option out of the battery primary weapons due to large AOE stagger/electric procs, heat inherit shenanigans, and decent base crit/fire rate. Ammo drops are player independent, but specters share with you. Also equip them with an innate battery style secondary weapon such as Tenet Cycron, since they seem to swap to secondary occasionally. Give them a short range melee such as Vastilok or Furax so they shoot Shedu instead of trying to melee. Kitguns with pax charge do not count, specters do not copy mods or arcanes.
*Also keep in mind when specters are summoned they copy your currently equipped warframes level, so if you just forma'd your warframe, the specter will be level 0 as well, and tether will be minimum rank only giving 1.1x multiplier at base. you should summon another one once your frame reaches 30.
Old gen console players (ps4) can crash if you throw your specters straight downwards, so throw them straight up in the air if you have an old gen player on your squad.
Arcanes
🔻Potential arcane alternatives to the ones shown in listed builds
- Molt Augmented ☆ stacks on kill up to 250x and gives 60% ability strength at max stacks that last until death and does not decay.
- Molt Efficiency ☆ gives 36% ability duration while you have shields up.
- Molt Vigor grants 45% ability strength on next cast, for one ability upon casting operator ability.
- Arcane Power Ramp grands 9% ability strength each time you cast a different ability than the last, up to 36%. Resets if you cast the same ability twice in a row.
- Arcane Acceleration has a 30% chance to provide 90% fire rate for 9 seconds on critical hit.
- Arcane Energize has 60% chance to provide 150 energy to squadmates within 15m with 15 second cooldown when picking up energy orbs. This may not be needed due to all the protea dispensaries dropping plenty of energy orbs at camp spot.
- Arcane Avenger has a 21% chance upon being damaged (via Combat Discipline for example on chroma) to provide a 45% flat crit chance for 12 seconds.
- Arcane Resistance has a 100% chance of resisting toxin status effects, not toxin damage itself. This loses its effectiveness on the higher waves where enemies are level 400+ and the initial toxin damage that still bypasses shields can still oneshot you regardless of status proc.
- Cascadia Overcharge is a secondary arcane that gives 300% crit chance while the player has overshields up. Useful with Wisp’s sporelacer/akarius setup when using afentis.
- Pax Charge makes a kitgun into a battery style weapon and reduces reload delay.
Arbitration Tilesets
🔻These are my personal opinions, based on average vitus/run or drones killed per hour, spawn locations, buff proximity on camp spots and time per round.
- I won't bother with F tier maps if they perform very poorly in one or more of these categories.
- Infested spaceship "F1" is F tier unless every squadmate has punchthru then it squeaks into C tier. Also helps to have Nova drop a wormhole to the back corner.
- Paimon "B1" has this same issue with all the walls, the spawns are better and are manageable if at least one or two squadmates have punch through. and sometimes a ship flies by every other 5th wave and wastes about 30 seconds. It's also typically corpus and ppl forget to watch the underground back part of the map and that's how the operator dies at wave 99 wasting everyone's time.
- "F5" and "F6" have such terrible spawns and terrain they hurt my soul.
- Please note that the names for the tileset vary between factions, hence the pictures. On the larger maps infested tend to yield the best results due to their movement speed being higher helping with spread out spawns. No matter the tileset, defense or interception arbitrations are much better kuva/hr than steel essence Kuva survival on Taveuni which caps out at about 70k/hr, even a bad arbi map with randos can net you 300 vitus essence in an hour or 120k Kuva.
- Don't bother trying to remember the names of each tile, just hop into it solo to take a look and you can quit without penalty as long as you do it before wave 5 on defense. This can also be helpful if somebody brought the wrong build or whatever. If you go past wave 5 the arbitration is marked as completed and removed from availability for that hour.
*When organizing a squad make sure to set the party to friends only, so that if someone disconnects from the group, a rando doesn't pop in. Any squad member can then re-invite and they should be able to reconnect as long as it's before wave 5, if they get an error message have everybody reset. (invite only mode only allows host to send invites)
Make your own tier list: https://tiermaker.com/categories/warframe/arbitration-defenses-1423313
Here is a node name tier list based on vitus/time/kills from submissions in #run-showcase:
Efficient Movement
🔻Here is an example of spawn killing and using bullet jump, rolls and ground slams to go fast. After launching yourself into the atmosphere you can aim down sights with right click to slow down slightly while you aim where you’d like to land with ground slam.
Operative tends to follow a random player and can be 1 shot easily past 90w. So to avoid this, Collect vitus near the end of the waves and try to maintain high KPM and spawn kill enemies.
Spawn and Camp positions
🔻To see more video examples of where to aim for spawns check #general in the discord and look at pinned messages. If you’re still confused: shoot the red dots on minimap.
Cinxia, Casta, Seimeni | Odin, Hydron, Helene |
Sechura, Outer Terminus | Ose, Paimon |
Hyf |
Interception Arbitrations
🔻Mainly Odin and Cinxia are good, Ose is manageable with some punch through. There’s two primary methods for interception: 2 cap and 3 cap
- For 2 cap you capture 2 of the easily maintainable points and half capture a 3rd point up to about 40% and let the enemies re-capture it to allow you to stay 2-3% ahead of the enemies. Points capture faster with 2 people, so when each round starts send 2 players to each of the 2 full capture points. The sooner the 2 points are captured the sooner enemies will spawn in. Designate a person on the team to manage the half capping of the 3rd point, I recommend they do it immediately after the primary 2 points are captured while the other 3 players sit at camp spot. Less likely to forget if you just do it right away every round. If you notice the designated person didn’t do this either say something to remind them or do it yourself if someone isn’t already doing it.
- For 3 cap you simply leave the capture point that's closest to your camp spot uncaptured and then take over the other 3 points. This will cause the spawns furthest from camp spot to be more active. Maintaining 3 points will cause waves to go by faster and net more ‘wave rewards’ per hour but also increase enemy level scaling pace.
Defense Arbitrations
Enemy level scales exponentially until wave 96, where enemies are level 1628.
At wave 96 and up enemies scale linearly, increasing in level by 18 per wave. Data sheet.
Miscellaneous
- Depending on your squads KPM and various other factors like mod drop chance booster on top of drop chance boosters and blessing on the team you may want to increase the frequency at which you collect drops. From what I could find, the hard cap is 50, the 51st deleting the 1st and so on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/2r5x0f/resource_drop_limit/
https://forums.warframe.com/topic/164093-update-1170-1171/
- Since the squad’s KPM is so high, the 5 minute despawn timer on Vitus essence doesn’t even matter at this point, as it can easily be removed when the 50 total drop capacity rounds over. Typically you’d see the icon blinking on screen to indicate it’s about to despawn, but when it gets removed earlier like this there is no visual indicator. I find it best to collect every 20% of 2 cap interception and every 2 waves of defense. If you start to notice vitus despawning, increase the frequency at which you collect.
Holding Missions
Way #1 is to have a friend in the party and queue up the arbi mission, best to do it relay so u can get blessings while you hold. Make sure the friend knows not to vote to accept the mission so it does not start. If they leave the party that also removes the mission queue. It is possible to have a 3rd person join and stay so the 2nd person can leave if they have to. This is the best way to hold the mission and can be done as long as needed. Set party to friends only.
*Also worth noting, if you change loadouts while in queue, you lose the 300% arbi buff if you had it say on saryn+300 and you swapped to volt to link a build and swapped back to Saryn. If you stay on the same loadout you get to keep the 300% buff.
Way #2 is to change your region to one located geographically far away from your position, and to set the minimum squad ping requirement to 100. This method kind of sucks because you can still get random people joining you because you have to set the party to public in order to pause the mission queue. I think this is due to other people attempting the same thing as you at the same time. You cannot leave the navigation menu or it cancels the queue.
Using way #2 it is best to organize the squad via a discord thread and ensure correct roles and loadouts ahead of time before inviting anyone, including who is running enemy radar (if needed based on tileset). Once everyone is ready to begin, invite one of them only, once they join the 20 second countdown will begin, you need to wait till the mission starts to send the invite to the other 2 players to avoid it canceling the mission. Make sure the squad knows NOT to use /join or to join from the friends list as it can cancel the mission.
*Players that have already completed the arbitration(or have it marked as completed for going past wave 5 on defense or from failing) can still join another squad for the same one, they just cannot see it or queue the mission for the squad. Another player can join temporarily just to queue a mission if needed.
Double Dipping (dd)
(Discovered by: MeisterKleister)
Doing this lets you get more out of a good defense tileset without having to risk going past 100w with defense operative. This can be good just in case the next arbi ends up not being a good tileset. For an Interception; this is not necessary due to the much slower enemy level scaling.
- Form a group and then go to relay for blessing.
- All 4 players leave the relay, after that group back up.
- Go back into relay, start arbi mission from the relay
- After 60-70w Extract 5-10 minutes before the hour changes the arbi.
- While inside relay and you will be able to do the arbi again for full 100w
**If you exit the relay after doing it the first time it will remove the arbi from navigation.**
This works out well for most defense tilesets, except for the Ice planet tileset which has 3 possible spawns, it's not worth trying to double dip unless all 4 players are trackin to keep pm's open for the 3 other members to be able to easily invite them as all 4 players attempt to find the good ice planet tile, then once someone finds it they send invites to the other 3. Don’t forget to set the party to “Friends only” or “Invite Only” to avoid randoms. Most prefer not to bother double dipping for Ice planet tile due to not getting the right tile the 2nd time around or if one of the players that gets it could potentially prove to have poor connection as a host.
Steps 1-3 can be employed as a failsafe for all missions. In the event someone DCs early on or if someone has to leave, you’ll be able to do the arbi again.
🔻MadLad @UMBRAL_MASH#8049🔻
