I can’t stop turning my favorite Warframe into a ball of swirling glass. The damage is colossal. It’s making me worse in every way. But I cannot and will not stop.
Here’s the situation: When I started playing Warframe earlier this year, I set my sights on building a Warframe called Gara. This whole process was kind of a pain in the ass, but something in my soul cried out for her. I knew she would be my main.
Gara is an elegant warrior whose special power is just glass. She whips enemies with streams of glass, she creates swirling balls of broken glass, she makes mirrors that reflect enemies’ attacks back at them and, finally, she can just make a big damn wall of glass.
I love her! Her abilities fit neatly with my playstyle, which is to beat enemies relentlessly with things that don’t require aiming because I’m playing with a controller and sometimes that just sucks. Gara’s first ability, her Shattered Lash, can sort of wipe out entire groups of enemies without requiring pinpoint accuracy.
I have also enjoyed her fourth ability, Mass Vitrify, which creates a wall of glass, then freezes enemies caught inside it. It’s an awesome maneuver to trot out on defense missions, as it keeps enemies from damaging the objective. They’re all stuck outside my dang wall! Even cooler, when you toss Shattered Lash at the glass wall, it explodes and deals a ton of damage to all the enemies trying to bash it in. That’s what we call synergy.
I even sometimes remember to use her second ability, Splinter Storm, which creates a swirling cloud of glass around Gara, one of her allies, or a target. Splinter Storm damages enemies when you’re near them, and I thought it was Cool I Guess, but not nearly as cool as Shattered Lash, which turned everyone around me into meat.
But then I learned: Splinter Storm is the ultimate meat machine
Splinter Storm can turn Gara into a walking flesh mincer who can do hundreds of thousands of damage at all times. There was another, deeper synergy waiting for me to exploit it, and now that I can, I am unstoppable.
Here’s the simplest explanation of how it works: Splinter Storm lasts for 30 seconds, and does a small amount of damage — for me it starts at 325. However, when you cast Mass Vitrify, the timer on Splinter Storm resets, so as long as you have enough energy, you can keep Splinter Storm up permanently.
But also… when you use Shattered Lash to destroy the glass wall that you create with Mass Vitrify, some of that damage gets stored in your Splinter Storm.
Essentially what I am saying is you can create a swirling cloud of broken glass whose damage scales infinitely forever and ever and ever and you can walk around surrounded by this glass cloud causing every enemy in your immediate radius to explode.
This video from MHBlacky on YouTube goes deeper into how this strategy works, and what mods players should use to really make it sing. I recommend watching the video because, like most aspects of Warframe, if you want to be a real pervert about the numbers, the possibilities are truly stunning.
Here’s what an average Warframe mission looks like for me now
I cast Splinter Storm. I cast Mass Vitrify. I explode Mass Vitrify with Shattered Lash. I run around doing absolutely nothing and every enemy who dares to approach me collapses in a heap, there is a constant ringing sound of spinning glass, breakable objects are exploding into pieces, and I am watching Number Go Up and cackling like a demon.
Unfortunately, this has caused some problems.
For one, it’s very important to keep resetting the Splinter Storm timer because if it runs out, all the damage goes away and you have to start from zero. Or rather, from 300, which might as well be zero when you’ve gotten really used to being a deadly ball of hundreds of thousands of damage at all times.
Nothing on this godforsaken earth feels worse than realizing that I’ve let the timer run out, and watching my damage disappear. There’s a sound that surrounds you when Splinter Storm is up, a sort of barely perceptible whirling that ends when Splinter Storm does. It is devastating. It feels like all of the energy has been sucked out of the world and it makes me want to die.
Secondly, I think it’s making me worse at Warframe. Recently I was doing a Disruption mission with my partner. This is an Endless-type mission, where after a certain point you get the option to leave, but if you stay the difficulty keeps ramping up and you get more and more rewards. It’s the perfect kind of mission for the Splinter Storm synergy, because your damage can scale as much as the enemies do.
When we finally extracted, he jubilantly texted me that he’d picked up six Entrati Lanthorns! A pretty rare resource, and one that I desperately need to build stuff.
How many had I picked up? Zero!
Because I was too busy running around like an absolute goon, cackling and scaling my damn glass cloud up to do hundreds of thousands of damage, and watching enemies literally explode into bits when I so much as approached them! I felt incredibly stupid, but I had been so intently focused on turning myself into a killing machine that I didn’t even notice the map icon for the lanthorns. I am still kind of mad about it three days later.
Gara is power. Gara is my ideal. Gara is my Warframe. I am not giving up. So what now? The only thing that could possibly make me feel better would be to create a swirling cloud of glass that does hundreds of thousands of damage at all times… I’ll be right back.