Skip To...
Getting randomly killed in one shot in Warframe is one of the most puzzling failures you can experience. This used to happen to low- or mid-ranking players, even to those who hadn’t reached the Steel Path difficulty. Out of nowhere, suddenly, a Kuva Lich or Tenet Sister will obliterate a full-health Defense target or something else. Now, that has changed because Warframe enemy crits are gone.
Warframe Enemy Crits Have Been Patched Out
This new balance change came into effect back in Whispers in the Walls Hotfix 35.0.9. The developers dropped this patch on January 17, 2024. It’s also otherwise known as the “Gauss Prime” update.
Here’s the big change to enemy crits, as stated in the hotfix:
- “Removed the ability for enemies to deal critical hits to players, Defense targets, Extractors, Rescue targets, and all other friendly targets.
- In most cases, enemies equipped with “player” weapons (Grineer Ballista using the Vulkar for example) could land critical hits due to those weapons using the same crit setup as their player counterpart. With a lack of feedback to inform players as to why or how sudden damage spikes were occurring, these enemies could easily jeopardize a mission. Additionally, while it makes sense to reward players for landing critical headshots, whether an enemy hits a head or not is outside of player control – which ultimately made countering it near impossible. So, in an effort to provide more consistent and predictable damage output from enemies, we have removed their ability to deal critical hits.“
In short, enemies will be doing significantly less damage and no random damage spikes. The change is a lot more palpable when you are doing Defense missions or are protecting another target. That’s because enemies instantly killing your targets can also cause the mission to fail abruptly.
The change should alleviate some frustrations related to enemy difficulty, especially outside of Steel Path difficulty. Early on in the game, players don’t expect regular enemies to murder anything in one shot.
As it turns out, this enemy crit threat has been in the game for a decade, more or less. Some players didn’t even know enemies could deal critical hits up until the developers announced its removal.
High-level Players Won’t Feel the Survivability Buff
While the Warframe enemy crit getting patched out is good for beginner, low-level, or even intermediate players, high-level players or those already in the endgame might be largely unaffected. Anyone regularly basking in Steel Path difficulty is probably already used to dying in one shot.
Once the game has reached a certain point where enemy damage has scaled too high, they can “one-shot” players even without critical hits or regardless of damage reduction (armor, etc.). It’s an all too common threat in enemies past level 100+.
Players have long come up with solutions to this difficulty spike in the form of shield-gating. It’s where players rely on 1.3 seconds of invulnerability after their shield breaks. Shield-gating prevents any enemy from killing a player in one hit, no matter how high the damage.
Other forms of infinitely scaling damage mitigation come in the form of the Rolling Guard mod. Hence, you won’t see many high-ranking Warframe players celebrating the removal of enemy crit.
Still, this is a good change for low-ranking players or those who haven’t reached Steel Path yet. Everything should be safer for them now until the training wheels come off.
