Weekly Warframe:Mag

I love Mag. She was the only frame I played during the Mirror Defense farm, so I did 20 hours of nothing but Mag over about a week. Partly because she specifically had a bug where she could overshield the objective indefinitely, partly because her kit is ridiculously good.

Of all the CC-oriented frames not named Loki, I think her survivability is the best. Polarise is a quick one-handed cast that shield gates you, and with Counter Pulse, it also stops enemies moving and shooting. Magnetize will plug paths and works on a surprisingly large amount of threats, including Acolyte bullets (but not abilities or melee), and Eximus. Crush will shieldgate you and your party, and with Fracturing Crush provides full armour removal and a much faster cast, at a modest Strength requirement.

Nowadays I prefer the agility of Nyx to literally any other Warframe in the game to Mag, but she'll always have a special place in my heart as one of the ultimate easy cheesy frames to sleepwalk through content with.

I don’t really “main” any frame, but if I did, it would be Mag. Her play style is just what I want—active, interesting, and most importantly, creative in a way that most frames are not.

If there’s one thing that’s awkward about Mag, it’s that the mods to make her kit strong are not the sort of mods that most starting players know how to get. The main thing I’m thinking of here is Transient Fortitude. More on that later.

Pull is, to me, her star ability and the one that makes playing her creative. Since the buffs to starting frames, it’s even better. Pull has an extremely high base range. Maybe the highest of all powers on all frames, but I can’t say that for sure. It is cheap to cast, can CC a huge number of enemies, breaks cameras, and with its Greedy Pull augment allows triggering all sorts of Arcanes when you want to trigger them.

Magnetize is an incredible and (to me at least) fun damage increase ability and CC all in one. You can lock down a hall, block an entire quadrant of the map, and most importantly target Eximus units. In fact, of literally ALL abilities in the game, only Magentize got STRONGER with the Eximus rework. That’s because while you can put Magnetize on an Eximus, that unit is not frozen in place like regular units. And while nothing lives long inside Magnetize, the eximus unit moving around acts like a roomba, grabbing up more mobs to die in Magnetize. Magnetize has a unique interaction with primary and secondary weapons, and finding the right weapons to fire into is critically important for higher level Mag play.

• Hit-scan weapons are bad, and projectile weapons are good.
• Beam weapons are also good.
• Punch through is important, but if you refuse to use a projectile weapon, it doesn’t matter.
• Boltors of all variants, all kinds of Tetras, Synapse, Gaze, Quellor, and the true star of the Magnetize show: Exergis with its infinite body punch through. If you fire UP toward the top of the bubble, you can trigger Primary Deadhead.
• For secondaries, Aksomati are projectile based.
• Sadly, bows (except for the Nataruk for some crazy reason) do not synergize with Magnetize. Probably because they’d be completely OP. Same for all glaives.
• When it comes to melee weapons, I’ve tested extensively and never found anything better than a heavy attack build Quassus. I only ever accidentally use the “Hold” version of Magnetize. It’s weak.

Polarize got a buff with the starter frame bufffs, and is an incredible force multiplier for Magnetize. Don’t try to make this ability kill things on its own beyond about level 17, but Polarize+Magnetize will kill things up to about level 170 even before you pull out your Exergis.

Crush is instant shield regen for the whole squad. With its augment Fracturing Crush, it trivializes Steel Path by stripping 100% of armor on every enemy you can see.

I recommend building Mag with Overextended and Transient Fortitude. You want to Crush everyone, and you don’t want Crush or Magnetize to hang around for very long. Everything in a bubble will be dead in 2 seconds anyway!

While I don't play Mag very often, she tends to excel in endurance missions like Survival and Defense; everywhere else, enemies tend to die too quickly to really make use of her abilities.

Pull

• A fairly useful grouping ability which briefly ragdolls enemies and groups them into a pile in front of Mag. Useful for separating fodder enemies away from Eximus Units (or anything else immune to ragdolls), so that you can focus on the more dangerous enemies. This ability is somewhat redundant as Magnetize generally does the same thing but better. This is the ability that the Helminth will get if you feed the Base Mag to it.

Magnetize

• Spawns a bubble around a targeted enemy which will suck in other nearby enemies as long as the bubble exists. This is probably Mag's best ability, but it does have some issues. This ability requires a lot of testing to find the weapons that really work well with it. Generally, you want a Projectile Weapon with good Punch Through/Infinite Punch Through and Status Chance. It works extremely well with Gas or Electricity because of overlapping damage.
• If you're noticing Magnetize not casting on an enemy, it is probably because the enemy is either currently being ragdolled or recovering from being knocked down. Give the enemy a chance to stand back up and Magnetize should function correctly on them.

Some Weapons that work well with Magnetize

Primary Weapons

• Exergis
• Arca Plasmor/Tenet Arca Plasmor
• Penta/Secura Penta. Avoid using Napalm Grenades, and remember to manually detonate the Grenades with Alt-Fire if you aren't using them anymore as there is a limit to the number of grenades you can have floating around at one time.
• Lanka
• Nataruk

Secondary Weapons

• Catchmoon
• Epitaph
• Zakti (modded for Gas or Electric)

Melee Weapons

• Stropha
• Ghoul Saw (x12 Heavy Attack Build)
• Tenet Grigori (An enemy can only be hit once by the projectile even though it is bouncing around and makes contact multiple times. This is the normal behaviour of the projectile, it's just more noticeable when using Magnetize)
• Corufell
• Vitrica

Weapons that do not work well

This is the main reason you want to test how weapons interact with Magnetize as some of them have bugged interactions while others seem to act as if Magnetize was never cast in the first place.

• Spearguns - The Scourge used to have a fun interaction with Mag's bubble but since the Speargun rework is limited to only one instance of damage to each enemy.
• Kompressa - *I don't have a recording of this effect with Magnetize but it's essentially the same bug with anything that redirects the Kompressa's projectiles. https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1296103-mag-kompressa-bug/
• Exodia Contagion Zaw - Projectile not effected by Magnetize
• Redeemer/Vastilok/Sarpa - Projectile not effected by Magnetize

Polarize

• A weak armor strip ability based on the damage dealt by the ability. Other Armor strip abilities work on a percentage of base armor making them more effective at higher levels. Useful for restoring Mag's/Allies shields but is slow to expand. Its main use is creating shards which will orbit around within Magnetize damaging enemies and procing Slash and Puncture. Enemies that have no armor/shields are not affected by Polarize, try to avoid 100% armor strip if you want to make use of this ability, or cast before Striping Armor to create shards.

Crush + Fracturing Crush

• Another Shield Restore ability for Mag which will strip a percentage of enemy's base armor if you use its Fracturing Crush Augment. While you generally don't need to worry about armor stripping in lower level content, it does become very useful if you're playing an endurance mission or Steel Path.

Maybe it's just the build but I could never find a proper way to play Mag. Her polarize is great but it's kinda boring to base your entire survival (in high lvl missions) on spamming one ability and abuse shield gate. Her pull and crush are kinda meh, especially with so many eximus units recently, and magnetize can be good but it's also kinda janky and slow - it would often appear elsewhere rather than on my target, it doesn't pull everyone always inside, can be annoying for teammates trying to land headshots and you need specific weapons that synergize with it.

But it's such a thematically cool warframe, the closest one that comes to the fantasy telekinesis mage archetype that just throws enemies around! Just feels really outdated by now IMHO.

For once, I don't have too much to say about this week's so feel free to share any opinions, builds, or anything else. I played her some but just didn't quite vibe with the playstyle, other than Polarize that ability is sweet