Warframe status rework changes vital game mechanics to force build diversity

Earlier this year, we reported on some major changes to the way players can deal and take damage in Warframe, which came about as part of Digital Extremes's ongoing work to polish the game and improve player quality of life. Well, they've done it again, this time addressing status effects and different types of resistance that players encounter throughout the game in an upcoming update called Jade Shadows, which is due in June 2024.

Along with paving the way for yet another new playable warframe, Jade, her quest, and her three signature weapons, the Jade Shadows update aims to both better communicate and streamline how Warframe handles different types of health and different status effects.

So, let’s simplify the system: Health, Armor, and Shields. All Flesh types become Health, Alloy or Ferrite becomes just Armor, and the difference between Protoshields fold into Shields.

Instead of 13 Enemy Health types to juggle, we can work with 3 to better develop Faction Resistances and Weaknesses and create a more approachable system.

As the Warframe Jade Shadows dev blog explains, the new health system pairs down what was once a complex mess, with hundreds of possible combinations of health types and status effects, into just three different health types — Health, Armor, and Shields. These three health types, down from 13 before, interact with weaknesses, resistances, and status effects that will vary per enemy faction, location, and the different units within those factions.

Digital Extremes is also addressing enemy armour to make the damage reductions, which can often turn enemies into bullet sponges. Warframe enemy armour will now have minimum and maximum percentage caps in order to encourage corrosive and armour-stripping builds, rather than having players rely on builds that bypass the armour instead.

Shielded enemies will also be affected by the new changes, with Corpus enemies getting buffs to shield regen times and delays. While shielded enemies will see no change to health, armoured enemies, like the Grineer faction, will have drastically increased health and health scaling at increasing enemy levels.

As of the announcement, the Cold status effect will be changed to freeze enemies after reaching a max stack level, which increases critical damage and hinders shield regeneration and will work together with other status effects.

The Gas status effect doesn't get any damage changes, but visual indicators and new particle effects will make it more useful, with changes making the gas cloud more visible and scalable as the effect radius grows, among other indicators to help players avoid inflicting damage on themselves.

The Magnetic status effect, on the other hand, is now more useful against shielded enemies, reducing shield reset and regeneration delays as well as regeneration rates.

There are more changes coming down the line, but this is what the Digital Extremes team has announced so far, and the changes appear to be significant enough to make a marked impact on gameplay across the board. However, time will tell what the player base thinks of the changes to the space ninja shooter.