Warframe Mod System Beginner’s Guide

Warframe Mod System Beginner’s Guide by Notso

Update 7 brought drastic changes to the way skill trees and mods for Warframes and weapons work. In this guide I will explain how the new systems works, and how to use it. I will work on the formatting more tomorrow, this is just a quick guide to help people through the night… xD

I know there is already anothe guide, but that is just on fusion. I hope this will be more comprehensive.

Glossary

1.0 Mods – mods from before Update 7 [v6.5 and earlier]
2.0 Mods – mods from U7 and later
Fusion cores – power-less mods which are only useful for increasing the fusion level of 2.0 mods
MCap – Mod Capacity
Double dash/Triangle/Y – types of mod polarity

Notso, what happened to my old mods? Did I lose my 400% stacked multishot mod equipped on my Braton Vandal?

All 1.0 mods have been converted into “Fusion Cores” [more on this later]. Any 1.0 mods that were equipped on your weapons/’frames have been removed from said weapons/’frames, and have also been converted into 2.0 fusion cores. So, yes, unfortunately all your epic 1.0 multishot mods now only have value for fusing to 2.0 mods.

Mods

Mod capacity

Mod capacity increases by 1 per level, or 2 per level if your weapon/’frame is supercharged with a potato. The Excalibur prime in the picture above is level 22, so he has 44 Mcap as he is supercharged with an Orokin Catalyst. MCap directly translates into a combination of the number of mods you can have equipped [up to a limit of 10 for ‘frames and 8 for weapons], and the strength of those mods. More powerful mods will cost more MCap to equip.

Mod capacity drain

Mod capacity drain is the amount of MCap each mod will drain when you equip it, show by the number on the middle-right of each mod [see above pic].

Mod fusion level

Mod fusion level is shown by the white and black dashes on the middle-left of the mod. The total number of dashes shows the number of fusion levels you can apply to a mod. In the above image you can see I have levelled Slash Dash to fusion level 2/3, and you can see Marathon and Fast Deflection each have a maximum fusion level of 5. Increasing the fusion level pretty obviously increases the strength of a mod, but it will also increase its MCap drain.

Mod polarity

Mod polarity is shown by the symbol on the top-right of each mod card. Matching the polarity of a mod to the slot you equip it to reduces the MCap drain, while mixing mod polarities increases the drain.

Equipping Mods

The act of equipping mods itself is a simple process. Simply drag and drop mods from your “Compatible Mods” to “Installed Mods”. However the system has more depth than this.

In the image above I have equipped three mods on to my Excalibur Prime. You can see that Marathon has been highlighted in red; this is because I equipped Marathon, a Triangle polarity, into a Double Dash polarity slot, meaning its MCap drain has increased. Similarly, Fast Defelction has been highlighted in blue, as I matched its Triangle polarity to a Triangle slot. Slash Dash’s drain has remained the same, because it was equipped into a neutral slot.

Fusing Mods

Fusing mods increases the fusion level of any 2.0 mod. To fuse a mod, click on the blue “MODS” button at the bottom left of your arsenal screen, select the 2.0 mod you want to fuse, then click the blue “FUSE” button.

Now here is the interesting part. You can see the mod I chose to fuse, Moult, is highlighted in dark orange. The other 4 mods I selected, highlighted in red, are the mods I want to fuse into Moult to make Moult more powerful. You can select both fusion cores or 2.0 mods to achieve this. With every new mod/fusion core you select, the verticle bar to the left of the mod you’re fusing will fill up. Once it is full, your mod will increase in fusion level when you click the “APPLY FUSION” button.

I the current build, the prices have been brought more in-line with each other. Price no longer increases exponentially with level of fusion cores used. However it can still be very expensive to upgrade mods, so I would suggest holding off upgrading your mods until we hear more from DE.

Warframe Powers

Instead of unlocking Warframe powers through the skill tree as you level up, instead your Warframe’s powers are now the same as 2.0 mods. Each ‘frame starts with all 4 of his or her power mods, however whether or not you can use them depends on the MCap of your ‘frame. For example, a level 1 Excalibur will have 1 energy, allowing him to equip Slash Dash [provided he puts it into a double dash polarity slot]. All your powers will be reset to fusion level 1 by Update 7! To increase the strength of your powers you will need to fuse them with fusion cores just like regular 2.0 mods.

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A possible explanation of why the fusion system seems so buggy [thanks to Cauldrath]

The order you pick the mods isn’t the order they are applied; you will get the most fusion experience when your largest mods cross the border from one rank to the next as much as possible.

It seems like it isn’t double the experience required to reach the next level as you level an item up, but reducing the amount of experience you get from fusing with a higher level mod, and the experience is all applied at once.  This would explain why you can toss a rare 10 into an unranked common and shoot straight to level 5 with half a bar of experience, but then adding another one hardly gives you anything at all.

Another weird thing is that certain mods that appear to be exactly the same give different amounts of experience.  I was fusing a bunch of uncommon 3s at the same time and then clicked some of them off and some of them hardly budged the experience bar when I’d toggle them, but others would move it a quarter of the bar.

I also saw fusing additional mods reducing the amount of total experience.  My guess as to why this occurs and also certain mods of the same type provide different levels of experience is that mods are applied in whatever order they are stored in your inventory in memory (not how they are sorted) and thus provide different levels of overflow to the next rank for different mods.  Overflow helps you because you get unpenalized exp growth for anything that overflows, and there may be other factors that make applying mods in different orders better.

For example, No Return is an uncommon, which requires the value of a rare 4 fusion mod to fill up, or 2 uncommon matched polarity, or 4 common matched polarity or uncommon unmatched, or 8 common unmatched.  (Rares are something weird like 2.5 unmatched and 1.25 matched.)  For the sake of attaching numbers, the fusion mod is worth 100, the uncommon matches are 50, and the common matches or uncommon unmatched are 25.

When I apply a 100 and a 50, I can get 2 different results depending on how they are applied.  If the 100 is applied first, then the 50 has the 50% penalty applied to it because it has already leveled up, so I get a total of 125, but if the 50 is applied first, I get all 150, because the 100 was applied while it was still unranked.  But then I could throw another 50 on there, and instead of going up to 175 as expected, it might be applied first, so the 100 is applied at level 1, reducing its value to 50 and the bar doesn’t move.

Let’s say I add a 100, a 50, a 25, then another 25.  Before the last 25, the best case is 175, because the 50 and 25 are applied first, then the 100 is applied while it still has no penalty.  Then you add another 25, and the new best case is it is applied last with the penalty, for a total of 187.5, but it could be applied first, which means the 100 is applied after ranking up, so you instead drop down to 150.  At this point removing the other 25 also boosts you back up to 175, and removing the 50 leaves you at 150.