I missed a week, but I’m back with another (bi)weekly warframe thread! Last time we discussed Rhino, an “unofficial” 4th starter, so this week I thought to bring a warframe that actually used to BE a starter - Loki!
Release date: 2012-10-25
Abilities:
Decoy - Loki deploys a holographic copy of himself, drawing enemy fire.
Invisibility - Loki camouflages himself, becoming invisible to enemies.
Switch Teleport - Loki instantaneously swaps positions with a target, confusing the enemy.
Radial Disarm - Lets forth a wave of energy, disrupting the projectile weapons of enemies in range and forcing them to revert to melee combat.
Acquisition: Blueprint purchasable from the market, components drop from Hyena Pack on Psamathe, Neptune.
Loki is a bit of a niche warframe, whose main use is spy but also provides utility elsewhere outside of spy vaults.
Decoy - This ability actually synergizes extremely well with Switch Teleport, letting you bypass lasers by simply placing the decoy on the opposite side and switching places with it, although I rarely see anyone playing Loki making use of it inside spy missions.
Invisibility - A pretty basic ability, but as long as enemies can’t see you, you’re pretty much invulnerable. Enemies do try to “guess” where you are by firing their weapons towards where they were getting shot from, and you’ll have to watch out for AOE attacks. If you don’t like the orange filter when you go invisible, you can disable it by going to Settings > Video > Color: Off.
Switch Teleport - This is probably more of a gimmicky ability but is very useful for certain objectives, especially when combined with the Safeguard Switch Augment. My main use for this outside of Spy is escorting drones in open world missions thanks to how far it can swap if you’re modded for range, and Safeguard Switch means that you don’t need to worry about it being teleported into a group of enemies. Use either a Sniper or Mining Drill set to high zoom to make targeting the drone easier at a distance. My other use for this ability is Gas City fissure missions to help teammates that are struggling to parkour across the large gaps.
Radial Disarm and Irradiating Disarm (augment) - This is a fairly strong CC ability, forcing enemies to melee instead of being able to use their guns, and with Irradiating Disarm, enemies will tend to prioritize fighting themselves instead of trying to attack an objective. The augment is probably most useful for Defense/Excavation but may be a bit of a hinderance in Survival because they will be focused on fighting themselves instead of moving towards a centralized point around the player. This ability does suffer from the update that add Overguard unfortunately, and this is very noticeable when playing a mission with increased Eximus units as a modifier.