Warframe Modding Guide 2024

Modding is one of the cornerstone systems that makes Warframe infinitely exciting. It allows you to modify pretty much every equippable item in such a way that increases their stats and adds a ton of new effects to it. No matter what you’re modding, the same rules apply. With over one thousand mods available, the possibility to make unique builds for every moddable piece of equipment is almost endless. In this Warframe mods guide, we’ll explain how modding works and teach you how you can customize your equipment for different activities. 

We can’t stress enough the importance of knowing how to work with this system. If you intend to do any endgame content such as Eidolon or Profit-Taker hunting, Steel Path, defeating max-level enemies, etc., you need to be able to adapt your weapons to the task at hand. There are going to be a lot of things to go through, as we will cover every single detail regarding this system, so get ready to learn Warframe modding.

By the way, farming mods is one of those things that even the biggest Warframe fans truly hate. The chance of an enemy dropping a mod after death is so meager it could take a really long time to find a random mod. You can expedite this process if you buy Warframe Star Chart Completion Boost at SkyCoach. This will complete every node on the Star Chart, which will literally shower you with tons of mods. On top of that, you’ll get access to more quests and it’ll level up your Master Rank! This boosting service is your best chance to get unique mods. It’s also very safe because it is done by professional gamers who value your privacy. There’s SSL protection, personal support service, and many other perks. Place your order today and get tons of mods!

 

 

Introducing Mods

We’ll start our Warframe modding guide with the basics. The in-game Codex does a very good job explaining the basic theory of mods. You should go and check out those 5 pages because the game covers most of what we’re going to go over in a very concise and easy-to-understand way. Later on, we’ll answer questions like how to get better mods in Warframe and all that jazz.

To start off, Mods are essentially cards. If you played anything like Uno, Magick the Gathering, or Hearthstone, you already know what Mods look like. Equipment that can hold Mods has an Upgrade window that you can access from Arsenal in your Orbiter unless you’re modding Railjack or Necramechs. The upgrade window looks something like this: 

In the center of this window, you can see empty slots. On the bottom half you see the list of available mods. You just pick a mod and drag it onto one of the empty slots to apply its effects. The concept of modding is quite simple, but it gets a bit more nuanced with the addition of various mechanics like Warframe mod types and other stuff. Let’s break down every element that you see on a mod: 

• Rarity – determines the quality of the mod but doesn’t necessarily represent the chance of finding it. A lot of guides often mistake the Mod rarity for Mod type. The rarity shows how good the mod is, while the type adds new conditions or mechanics on top of what a mod does.
• Drain – is the number that represents the amount of capacity a mod is going to take when installed. Aura & Stance mods actually add capacity points instead of taking them.
• Polarity – is a symbol that can be found on a mod and some mod slots. When a mod is placed into a matching polarity slot, the cost of installing that mod is reduced by 50%. When you place a mod with a different polarity into the polarized slot, its Drain cost is increased by 25%. Polarity allows you to install more mods than you normally could if this mechanic didn’t exist. BLOG20
• Item – shows mod’s compatibility. Basically, it tells you what kind of equipment this mod is for. There are also mod sets that increase their effect based on how many mods of the same Item type are equipped. Mods can either fit a specific weapon or entire types of gear.
• Fusion – shows the current rank of a mod. The process of Fusion is how you upgrade the mod by increasing its rank.
• Equipped – a little mark that shows whether or not a mod you’re looking at is equipped on any of your items. This is useful for when you’re looking at your mod collection.
• Upgrade – describes the effect that the mod offers when it's installed into a slot.
• Name – simply the name of the mod. Sometimes, it may include Mod modifiers such as “Flawed” or “Primed” that represent alternative versions of the same mod with a few changes to how they work.

Types and rarities of mods, unique Polarities, variations, additional mod conditions – all of this makes modding something you must approach with a sense of understanding. In the following parts, we’ll explain the basics of using mods and creating viable builds. However, we’ll leave it up to you to discover how deep this system runs. You can find out how to get primed mods Warframe, and stuff like that on your own.

Installing Mods

In this part of the Warframe modding guide 2024, we’ll teach you how to apply mods and focus mainly on the Drain parameter. Once you’re looking at the upgrade window of the item you want to install mods into, you have two choices:

1. Drag & drop mods manually into any of the empty mod slots, minding the polarities if there are any at all.
2. Use Auto Install, which will automatically slot the mods using all of the available capacity. This option can be used by new players who are still learning how to manually mod. 

You can use the second option to make your gear as powerful as possible, given its capacity. On top of regular mod slots, which are suited for the majority of mods, some mods require to be fitted into special slots. Each moddable piece of gear has its own amount of available slots for mods:

Railjacks also have two grids of special mod slots for Battle and Tactical mods. Now, it’s a good idea to explain what each type of slot means:

• General slot – houses any regular mods, there’s not much more to it.
• Exilus slot – houses Exilus mods, which focus on utility and movement bonuses. Exilus mods can be put into general slots. However, it's way more efficient to install them into their Exilus slots in order to free up space for other mods. This slot can be unlocked by installing something called an Exilus Adapter.
• Aura slot – houses Aura mods; these provide team-wide, passive buffs. Even if you play solo, Aura effect will be applied to you. They also increase the total mod capacity, so it’s really important to have them installed, as they’re always beneficial to you.
• Stance slot – is a slot exclusive to melee weapons that houses Stance mods that add combos to your melee weapons. Some melee weapons can take different Stance mods, which changes their combos.

When you install a mod, it depletes the item’s mod capacity, which increases with the item’s rank (i.e., level). Usually, the maximum capacity at the maximum rank is 30. However, for some items, it’s 40. What’s cool is that you can double the maximum capacity by using either:

And that’s how to increase mod capacity Warframe. Mods can have different Drain that vary anywhere from 0 to 20. If you increase the Mod’s rank through Fusion, it will also increase its Drain. Don’t worry, we’ll explain how Fusion works in a little bit.

Polarity Explained

We’ve already mentioned Polarities. It is a super important mechanic to keep in mind when installing mods. It can either help your modding and allow you to install more mods or better ones, or make it worse.

To put it in simple terms, each mod and some mod slots have one of 8 symbols, which you don’t have to memorize at all:

You don’t need to memorize the names or symbols of polarities when installing mods. All you need to do is install a mod with a polarity into a matching slot with the same polarity. Doing so will reduce the drain of that mod by 50%!!! And that’s it.

Since approximately 94% of mods have polarities, you can safely put them into any slot that doesn’t have a polarity. You just won’t get the 50% reduced Drain.

Here’s one of the coolest Warframe modding tips – there are two types of Mods that actually give you extra mod capacity if you slot them into a matching polarity slot. The matching polarity of Aura or Stance mods actually doubles the maximum mod capacity! However, non-matching polarity reduces it by 20%.

Items come with a different (yet pre-determined) set of polarity slots. Some even don’t have any at all. If only there were a way to add a polarity to a mod slot…

Polarization and Forma

You can do it by using an item called Forma and a process called Polarization. Akin to Orokin Catalysts and Reactors, 

Forma is a unique (and rare!) resource item that is used to supercharge your equipment.

Forma’s main purpose is to add or change the polarity of a mod slot. This will allow you to install more mods and use them more efficiently. On top of that, Formas are used as required components in some Blueprints.

When you have a Forma, go to the Actions menu and select Polarization to install it. You just have to be mindful of a few things:

1. In order to make Polarization possible, you must first achieve the maximum rank of the item you want to Polarize.
2. Whenever you install a Forma, the rank will reset back to 0, and you will have to level it up again. Reaching the maximum rank for the second and any subsequent time will not give you any Mastery Points!
3. There’s no cap on how many times you can apply a Forma to add or change a slot's polarity. If you want, you can make all empty slots the same polarity, which is not advisable at all but totally possible.

Now, you can install really powerful mods by saving up extra mod capacity when matching the polarities and adding new ones. Well done!

How To Level Up Mods in Warframe?

Installing mods is just one of many possible things you can do to a mod. You can install as many of those as you want, but a build really starts to work when you make your mods more powerful and potent, increasing their effectiveness. That is done through something called Fusion.

Once again, increasing a mod’s rank increases its effectiveness and Drain. Unlike warframes, weapons, and other items, mods don’t have an experience gauge and do not increase rank automatically. Instead, you must spend a resource called Endo to increase a mod’s rank. Additionally, you’ll pay a small fee in Credits (a universal currency in the game).

The cost of Endo and Credits increases with each new rank. The rarity of a mod also reflects how much you’ll spend on Fusion. Just so you know how much of a difference a rarity of mod makes, the cost to rank up a legendary mod is approximately 300% higher than the cost to rank up a common mod.

To increase your mod’s rank, do the following:

1. Go to the Mods Console in your ship.
2. Select a mod (one instance of it if you have a stack).
3. Select the “Fusion” option.
4. Select how many ranks you want to increase. You can go from 0 to the max rank in one Fusion as long as you can pay the price.
5. Select Apply Fusion and click "Yes" to confirm the selection.

You can see exactly what is going to be improved in a mod after the Fusion before you spend your Endo and Credits, which is super handy. That way, you can analyze and increase the ranks by as many as you need.

You might have already gathered a lot of copies of the same mod. You can see how many copies of mods you have if you sort them by Duplicates. Since you can’t install the same mod more than once on the same item, there’s absolutely no reason to keep more than one duplicate of a mod. Unless you plan to use the same mod on different equipment, in which case you better have around 5-10 duplicates based on the number of items you wish to have this mod on. 

Anyway, you need to get rid of extra copies. What can you do? You have a few cool options here.

1. Sell – this one is really simple. You just sell any amount of mods for Credits.
2. Dissolve – you can kind of deconstruct the mods to get Endo instead, which, as you know is used for a super important process of ranking up your mods.
3. Transmute – for this one, you need to select any 4 different and unranked mods to replace them with a new random one. Doing so will cost you some credits, but it is another way to get rid of unwanted mods and get a new one. This method gives you completely random results, and there are no specific mod combinations that give you specific mods in return.

While the first two methods are quite simple, Transmutation deserves to be explained further. BLOG20

You can’t Transmute Legendary and Set mods. Furthermore, you must unequip mods before doing it. The Credit cost that you will pay depends on the rarity of mods you’re using, and it can go from 0 to 84k Credits.

Moreover, there are mods called Transmutation Cores, which can be used instead of 1 of the four mods required for this process.

These Cores ensure that the result will have the same polarity as the Transmutation Core itself. Using such a Core is also free, so the final cost for Transumation is cheaper when you’re using them.

 

 

 

Essential Mods for Every Tenno

Okay, so this next part is about the meta mods. There are over a thousand mods in the game, and you can mix and match them all as you wish. But there will be those who insist that some mods are absolutely must-haves. Here, we’ve prepared several lists that include the mods that the Warframe community believes to be meta. If you don’t know where to start or what mods to use, start with these.

Warframe Mods

Your Warframe is your most vital tool in battle, and equipping it with the right mods can significantly enhance its performance. Consider prioritizing the following essential mods:

• Vitality: Boosts Health to increase survivability.
• Redirection: Strengthens Shields for added protection.
• Vigor: Enhances both Health and Shields for balanced defense.
• Steel Fiber: Increases Armor to mitigate incoming damage.
• Intensify: Augments Ability Strength for more potent offensive capabilities.
• Stretch: Expands Ability Range to reach enemies from a greater distance.
• Continuity: Extends Ability Duration to maintain powerful effects for longer durations.
• Streamline: Reduces Ability Costs, allowing for more frequent use of abilities.

Primary Weapon Mods

Primary weapons usually deal more damage, so modding them is kind of a big deal. You don’t want to make mistakes here. Therefore, try these mods:

• Serration: Amplifies weapon damage for rifles, bows, and snipers.
• Point Blank: Enhances shotgun damage for devastating close-range attacks.
• Split Chamber: Boosts multi-shot capability for rifles, bows, and snipers.
• Hell's Chamber: Increases multi-shot capability for shotguns.
• Point Strike: Raises critical chance for rifles, bows, and snipers.
• Blunderbuss: Elevates critical chance for shotguns.
• Vital Sense: Amplifies critical damage for rifles, bows, and snipers.
• Ravage: Boosts critical damage for shotguns.

Secondary Weapon Mods

Secondary weapons offer versatility and backup firepower in combat. Ensure you have access to these essential mods:

• Hornet Strike: Increases pistol damage for reliable sidearm firepower.
• Barrel Diffusion: Boosts multi-shot capability for pistols.
• Lethal Torrent: Elevates pistol fire rate and multi-shot capability.
• Pistol Gambit: Raises critical chance for pistols.
• Target Cracker: Enhances critical damage for pistols.

Melee Weapon Mods

Melee combat is often mistakenly referred to as the last resort, but it's nothing like that. In fact, some players prefer using melee weapons over any ranged weapons, and for good reasons. If you mod your melee weapons well, there’ll be no stopping you. Prioritize the following essential mods:

• Pressure Point: Boosts melee damage for devastating strikes.
• Reach: Expands melee range for increased reach.
• Fury: Increases melee attack speed for rapid strikes.
• True Steel: Elevates critical chance for melee attacks.
• Organ Shatter: Amplifies critical damage for melee attacks.

Companion Mods

Your loyal companions are invaluable allies on the battlefield, and equipping them with the right mods can make them even more effective. Consider prioritizing these essential companion mods:

• Enhanced Vitality: Increases companion health for improved survivability.
• Calculated Redirection: Strengthens companion shields for added protection.
• Vacuum and Fetch: Facilitates resource and mod collection for increased efficiency.
• Regen: Allows companions to revive fallen allies for continued support.
• Medi-Ray: Enables companions to regenerate your health for added sustainability.
• Shield Charger: Allows companions to regenerate your shields for enhanced defense.
• Animal Instinct: Reveals enemy and resource locations for improved awareness.
• Sacrifice: Enables companions to revive you in dire situations for continued combat effectiveness.
• Maul: Boosts companion damage for increased offensive capabilities.
• Bite: Enhances companion critical damage and a chance for more effective attacks.
• Link Armor, Health, and Shields: Boosts companion stats based on your Warframe's stats for improved performance.

These essential mods are invaluable for both beginner and veteran players alike. While some may be readily available, others may require more effort to obtain. Remember, modding is a personal journey, and finding the right combination of mods for your playstyle is key to success.

Learn To Mod The Right Way

In this section, we’ll try to explain some important concepts about modding so that you can stop using the Auto Install and meta mods and instead install your own mods, knowing exactly why you’re doing it. Let’s start with modding warframes.

When it comes to warframes, it's crucial to understand their stats and how they impact your gameplay. Warframes have two sets of stats: abilities and passive stats.

Abilities:

• Ability Duration: This stat determines how long your abilities last and affects the Energy drain of certain channeled abilities.
• Ability Efficiency: Governs how much Energy your abilities drain, with a cap of 175%. Increasing Efficiency allows you to cast abilities more frequently.
• Ability Range: Dictates the distance each ability can cover, affecting projectile range, skill radius, and AoE cone angle.
• Ability Strength: Determines the potency of your abilities, including damage, buffs, and debuffs.

In general, prioritize increasing Ability Strength and Efficiency for most Warframes. Strength enhances ability effectiveness, while Efficiency enables more frequent ability usage.

Passive Stats:

• Armor: Reduces damage taken to health.
• Energy: Determines the ability Energy pool.
• Health: Affects total HP.
• Shields: Second health source that takes damage before health.
• Sprint Speed: Determines movement speed while sprinting.

Shields regenerate, while health does not. Initially, focus on shields for survivability. As you acquire healing methods, consider shifting focus to health.

Efficiency interacts uniquely with Duration for channeled skills—abilities that drain Energy until toggled off, or Energy is depleted. Increasing Duration reduces Energy drain frequency while decreasing it accelerates drain.

Efficiency is subject to a 175% cap. While Efficiency and Duration can be adjusted to reach this cap, Efficiency is more effective at reducing channeled ability drain per second. Aim for 100% Duration for a true 75% Energy cost reduction in channeled skills, adjusting Efficiency accordingly.

By mastering these concepts, you can mod your warframes intelligently to optimize their performance in combat.

Modding your Weapons

For all kinds of weapons, you really have to understand their stats in order to make informed decisions as to what mods you want to install. BLOG20

Primary Stats:

• Accuracy: Determines how closely projectiles align with your reticle. Higher accuracy is preferable.
• Falloff: Dictates the distance before projectiles experience damage reduction, particularly relevant for shotguns.
• Fire Rate: Indicates the rate of fire per second, crucial for sustained damage output.
• Magazine: Specifies the number of rounds before reloading becomes necessary.
• Multishot: Determines the number of projectiles fired per shot, enhancing damage potential.
• Noise: Indicates the likelihood of alerting nearby enemies when firing.
• Reload: Defines the speed at which your weapon reloads.
• Trigger: Describes how the weapon behaves upon firing, such as semi-auto, burst, or automatic.
  For most builds, prioritize fire rate and reload speed. Multishot is essential but doesn't factor into mod configurations.

 

Damage Properties:

• Critical Chance: Reflects the likelihood of scoring critical hits, which apply a damage multiplier.
• Critical Multiplier: Specifies the increased damage upon landing a critical hit.
• Status / Projectile: Represents the chance per projectile to trigger a status effect influenced by damage types.
• Total Damage: Indicates the overall damage dealt per shot.

Focus on adding elemental damage types like Corrosive, Viral, or Heat to your weapons, especially if you're new to Warframe. Corrosive (Electricity + Toxin), Viral (Toxin + Cold), and Heat (standalone) are effective against different enemy types. Corrosive and Heat are recommended for armored targets and low-status-chance weapons, while Viral and Heat excel with high-status-chance weapons.

Ideally, you want to make different mod loadouts and save them. Then, whenever you start a mission, change the mods loadout by picking the loadout which will be most effective against the enemy type that will be present during the mission.

Equip essential mods like Serration and Hornet Strike alongside multishot mods like Split Chamber and Barrel Diffusion to maximize your weapon's damage per second (DPS). These mods synergize to amplify your gun's damage output significantly.

By understanding and optimizing these stats and mod combinations, you can enhance the effectiveness of your ranged weapons.

As for melee weapons, to effectively mod those, you also need to learn their stats and what they do. 

Primary Stats:

• Attack Speed: Dictates how rapidly you can strike with your melee weapon each second, influencing overall damage output.
• Blocking Angle: Determines the angle from which frontal attacks are blocked, enhancing defensive capabilities.
• Combo Duration: Determines the duration of built-up combos, affecting sustained damage potential.
• Follow Through: Specifies the damage carried over to subsequent targets from a single swing, maximizing efficiency in crowd control.
• Range: Affects the reach of your melee weapon during attacks, allowing you to engage enemies from a distance.
• Slam Attack: Triggered by a mid-air melee input while facing the ground, determines the damage of slam attacks.
• Slam Radial Damage: Specifies the area-of-effect damage of slam attacks.
• Slam Radius: Defines the coverage area of slam attacks.

Heavy Attacks consume the entire combo counter to unleash devastating attacks with higher base damage multiplied by the combo counter. Certain mods exclusively affect Heavy Attacks, with some scaling based on the combo counter, which reaches a maximum of x12 after 240 melee hits.

Damage Properties:

• Critical Chance: Reflects the likelihood of landing critical hits, applying a multiplier to damage output.
• Critical Multiplier: Determines the increased damage upon landing critical hits.
• Status / Projectile: Represents the chance per projectile to trigger status effects from damage types, influencing crowd control and debuffing.
• Total Damage: Indicates the overall damage dealt per strike.

When modding your melee weapons, consider prioritizing attack speed to increase overall DPS and combo duration for sustained damage potential. Additionally, focus on enhancing critical chance and critical multiplier to capitalize on high-damage critical hits.

How To Get Mods in Warframe?

Mods can be found in various sources. 

1. Most commonly they drop from almost all enemies in the game with a 3% chance. Each enemy in the game has its own loot table, which includes specific mods that they can drop. If you’re looking for a specific mod, it’s best to do your own research on the best places to farm it.
2. Mods also drop from various containers and are given as mission rewards. Endless game modes (such as Survival, Defense, etc.) offer several rewards at the end of each rotation. One of these rewards might be a mod.
3. Alerts & Events – some of these have predetermined rewards, which include mods. You can check the rewards of any currently active alert in your Star Chart.

But if you really want know how to get good mods Warframe, there are certain types of missions you can check out. First of all, the Vaults. In addition to that, if you get a mission with the Void or Orokin-style tileset, there’ll be a special type of canisters that drop mods with a very high chance. Plus, there’s always a chance to get a random mod for a daily login.

And, finally, you can always use trading to get your mods. If you have spare Platinum from selling blueprints or something else, you can always find someone who is selling the mod you need.

Orokin Vaults, if you open them, will always contain one of Corrupted mods. While opening Isolation Valuts will always give you Necramech mods.

Conclusion

Mods are a really cool feature that is difficult to learn due to it’s sheer depth and complexity. If we tried to summarise everything said in this guide, it would be pretty much impossible. So, instead, let us revisit some basics.

Mods, in general, improve some stats. You can install them, but keep in mind that they drain the mod capacity of an item. The mod capacity can be increased by installing Orogin Reactors and Catalysts as well as making use of polarities. Just put the mod into a slot with a matching polarity to decrease its Drain. You can add or change the polarity of slots using Forma.

Don’t forget to upgrade your mods by spending Endo and Credits, making them more powerful.

If you want to know which mods to install, have a look at the item’s stats. Understand what they do (you can actually hover over each stat to read the tooltip that will explain it) and then decide which of these stats you want to improve. Then, you just find the mods that improve that stat and install them. That is basically it. With time and a little bit of practice, you’ll start identifying useful mods and making your own builds.

F.A.Q.

How do I mod my Warframe?

Go to Arsenal and then click on “Upgrade”. This will open the Upgrade window, where you’ll see mod slots and available mods. Simply drag your mods onto any empty slots to install them.

How do I start getting better mods in Warframe?

Just farm enemies and keep a lookout for some Alerts and Events, which can have some cool mods for rewards. Baro Ki’Teer always has at least one mod to offer you. He usually sells really good mods – primed ones or auras, etc.

How do you rank up mods in Warframe?

You do this through a process called Fusion. Open your Mods collection, select the mod you want to upgrade, and click Fusion. Then select the rank you want to get and pay the required amount of Endo & Credits to complete the Fusion.

Where to buy mods in Warframe?

You can buy mods from several sources:

• Player trading
• Baro Ki’Teer
• Nightwave reward track
• Maroo