(Let me know if the link has any issues, haven’t linked anything on Lemmy before)
Last week had positive reception overall, so this week we’re following up with a fast favorite
This is Volt, a versatile warrior. Volt’s arsenal is powerful and electrifying. Handle with care, Tenno.
PASSIVE Grounded movement generates an electrical charge building up 1000 Damage per meter that is unleashed with the next attack.
1ST ABILITY Shock-Shoot a bolt of lightning at an enemy
2ND ABILITY Speed-Harness electrifying power to grant yourself and allies extra speed
3RD ABILITY Electric Shield-Summon a barrier that empowers projectiles shot through it, can be picked up
4TH ABILITY Discharge-Emit a high powered blast that electrocutes all enemies in a radius, becoming vulnerable
Progenitor Element-Electricity
Subsumed Ability-Shock
Tactical Ability-Speed
Volt is one of the 3 starter warframes alongside Excalibur and next weeks planned frame. His parts if not chosen can be obtained from the Tenno lab in your clan dojo, or bought from Teshin fully built after reaching Typhoon rank in Conclave for 60,000 standing.
Volt received a prime model in 2015, though now vaulted Baro Ki’teer will occasionally bring relics containing Volt Prime parts.
Volt is the first frame to receive 5 augment mods, 2 being Conclave exclusive
Volt has had 3 changes to his drop locations, originally dropping from the J3 Golem fight in the old days before being moved to Survival rewards, to his current resting spot in the clan labs.
It is possible to stack strength high enough that his speed can crash a mission, though not recommended
Volt scales really well due to a mix of CC, potential overshield charging with Capacitance augment, and Electric Shield giving you conal immunity, self-stagger resistance, and the frankly ludicrous ability to double your crit damage (so functionally a free double damage factor for most weapons you’ll want to use due to hybrid meta). Transistor Shield gives him nice party support too. The added electric procs from Electric Shield also give him nice access to free, semi-passive triggers of “on headshot” conditional mods. Speed is a nice free DPS boost due to the reload bonus and melee DPS buffing. At low levels, Discharge is a very nice nuke, and can be scaled indefinitely with Terrify builds.
Genuinely think he’s the best frame for new players due to always being good at everything at every level of play. Borne out by his usage stats. People that like Volt really like Volt. I think Mag is the best for high level players, but she requires a lot of modding investment and strong weapons before she really shines.
Volt was my starter and has remained one of my favourites throughout all my playtime. The little rework he got to allow primaries to also be used with his 3 when carried, and to stop his carried 3 draining energy, was just perfect. He’s my favourite to pick up and run through some SP fissures with. Makes gunplay very fun since the frontal shield gives you some breathing room to aim at what’s in front of you, and doubled crit damage is amazing
Volt is a pretty good frame and still sees a lot of use in ESO, Bosses (Eidolon/Profit Taker) and is also a pretty common pick for Relic missions or anything where you just want to run fast. If you see his relics available from Baro/Prime Resurgence, it is worth it to try farming him because of how well he performs in these missions.
Prime warframes just offer minor stat boosts and polarity differences. In Volt’s case his prime has +25 armor and +150 max energy at max rank along with an extra “V” polarity with everything else being exactly the same. If you don’t want to farm the Prime version/wait for it to become available, you can find the parts for his base version from the Tenno Lab in your dojo, or look for someone selling the set. (https://warframe.market will generally have better prices than what you will find in trade chat)
As for his Abilities:
Shock - I don’t find Shock particularly useful, but with its Shock Trooper Augment you can add electricity to your weapons or combine it with any unpaired base elements (Just be aware that it may mess with your teammates’ elemental combos, it’s still annoying having “Thermal Sunder Titanias” turning my Toxin damage into Gas with their Augment)
Speed - I generally like this ability because of how much warframe is focused around mobility, some teammates may find it annoying though, using a mod like Narrow Minded may mitigate how often teammates receive this buff and will also extend the usable time between casts.
Electric Shield - A pretty good ability, able to block all incoming damage from regular enemy attacks (Directional) and will buff your weapons with Electricity if they shoot through them and provide a Crit Damage bonus. This will not combine with other elements the way Shock Trooper does, it simply adds electric damage to your shots. It can also be picked up by volt to be used as a portable shield similar to Garuda’s Dread Mirror, and will still provide the Crit Damage bonus and added electricity damage.
Discharge - This ability is what you would use if you want to use Volt for ESO for nuking the map. It also has the Capacitance Augment which will refill shields for you and your allies if you want to play a more support roll, although it does have some issues in how useful it actually is due to base energy cost and how prevalent shield gating is. It will also grant shields to objectives but the effectiveness is very limited and capped at +250 shield and will not give an objective overshields.
Hopefully this isn’t too long, my goal was to write a somewhat in-depth overview for any newer players/anyone that has never played Volt that may stumble onto this thread.
Thank you for doing that, I understand the fear of not wanting to write too much lol.
This is a great, more in depth look at Volt overall. I would be appreciative if you do feel like putting something like this on other frame discussions
To add on for any new players, the prime version of all frames is nice to have but not mandatory, so don’t worry too much and you’ll get it at some point and just enjoy the base one to make see which frames you enjoy.
If I have the time, I’ll try to write something for anything I feel comfortable playing. These topic posts are more opinion based and I really don’t think that I would do a good description for a Warframe that I dislike/know little about.
Starts a streak of Warframes that I haven’t touched in years.
Love me some Volt, I got back into the game thanks to Gauss so any speedy boys (and girls, love Titania too) are high up for me.
In the old days Discharge (formerly Overload) used to do this fun thing where it would chain almost infinitely and wipe out a whole level which was just a good time
I remember when Volt’s 4 used to chain off of electronic devices in the tileset like the lights on the ceilings. It would blow them all out making the whole nearby tileset dark! Kinda sad we don’t have that sort of interactivity in out modern tilesets.
I did not either know or remember that, that is really cool and I hope they do bring something like that back in new maps
It wasn’t a massive change, the tileset didn’t go pitch black, just a little bit darker than the already dark look that old Warframe had. For those curious just how different things looked, I have this old screenshot from October 2013. You can even see some of the Corpus light fixtures that would be affected by the ability.
EDIT - Found this old video from 2013 that shows some of the effects that it had on the environment, you can see the electronics blow out and spark after it’s cast.
It’d be really cool if they added this effect in new tilesets but for all warframes - do enough random aoe damage to nearby components and it dims the lights for a while, so it’s not all that work just for one volt. It really adds a lot to atmosphere and overall feeling of destruction!
That is so damn cool!
Discharge still mostly can, or at least it gets enough range that it’s effectively the same thing. Love me a Volt for ESO. Among the starter frames he’s arguably the best one that remains viable well past the point where the others fall off. He might not be the best frame, but he’s always useful.
Mag has great scaling potential, in excess of Volt even, due to the Fracturing Crush buff. Then your choice of Magnetized Discharge for a LoS nuke or Counter Pulse for even more objective defense. Wound up liking her as much as Frost, maybe even a little bit more.
I agree, of almost all the frames you can get early game or as a new player, Volt is really up there in terms of power. Probably not the best way, but I do love building max range just for discharge
volt : the frame for slow players that cant bullet jump properly , still relevant because his shield buffs amps , ult that cant do anything unless you spoonfeed it , 2nd best electricity frame out of a total of 2
