How to Make Any Warframe Faster, Pt. 1: Mods

Lots of mission types—most notably Capture, but also Exterminate, Rescue, and Spy—are gated by the speed and mobility of your Warframe. Once you have enough firepower to easily complete the mission objective, it helps a lot to choose a frame with high base speed, good movement tech, or both. Ideally, you’d even have multiple such frames: for instance, a Volt for group speed buffs, a Gauss for solo horizontal sprints, and a Titania for jumping-intensive tilesets (I’m looking at you, Corpus Gas City). But even if you don’t have a stable of fast frames already built, there’s a lot you can do to make your existing frames faster and more maneuverable. We’ll cover mods here, then come back for all the fun little extras in a follow-up post.

The basic modding plan is to add as many direct speed bonuses as you can, then fill in with maneuverability-oriented mods while restricting damage and survivability mods to those needed to reliably clear your missions.

Mod for Speed

This is the obvious starting point, but many people don’t realize just how many options are available for directly modding your speed. Between sprint speed and movement speed bonuses, you can turn even something with 1× base speed into a scorching-fast supercar of a frame. A frame with higher base speed and/or speed buff abilities (say, Gauss) will absolutely scream through missions with these same mods.

Sprint Speed Mods

There are no fewer than 6 mods (5 frame, 1 rifle) that directly increase sprint speed. The entry-level mod here is Rush, which gives up to a 30% bonus; this is both the single biggest sprint speed mod and the easiest to acquire. Sprint Boost (15% max) is an Aura worth having on hand, though in tougher missions you will likely want a more damage- or survivability-oriented Aura.

The rest of the pieces may be a little harder to get ahold of. Armored Agility (15% max) comes from Nightmare missions, and Speed Drift (12% max) comes from completing the Speed Test in the Orokin Moon tileset, available only after completing The Second Dream. (The test may be easier if you get some other speed mods first.) Amar’s Anguish (15% max) is a still more advanced option, since Narmer Bounties require you to finish The New War quest first. The sole weapon mod on the list is Amalgam Serration, a rifle mod with a max bonus of 25% and a solid base damage bonus to boot.

Altogether, these mods can more than double your sprint speed. Here’s where to get them:

Rush (max 30% bonus) has an 11% chance of dropping from any non-Void Capture mission.
Sprint Boost (15%), like other Auras, is available for Nora’s Choice Cred on a rotating weekly basis.
Amar’s Anguish (15% + 15% bullet jump speed) comes from Narmer Bounties.
- When Plains of Eidolon (Earth) are in the Day cycle, it drops from Cetus Narmer Bounties.
- When Plains of Eidolon are in the Night cycle, it drops from Fortuna Narmer Bounties.
Speed Drift (12%) is the prize for completing the Speed Test in Orokin Moon, which is the tileset for all repeatable Lua missions.
Armored Agility (15%) drops from Nightmare missions.
- Non-Rescue missions have a chance to drop it on Phobos, Ceres, Jupiter, Europa, Saturn, Lua, and Deimos; as well as in the Void and the Kuva Fortress.
- Rescue missions on any planet have a chance to drop it if you complete exactly two objectives (rescue hostage, stealth rescue, and/or kill all wardens).
Amalgam Serration (25%) is available through the recurring Thermia Fractures event (Orb Vallis, Venus).

With the exception of Amalgam Serration, all of the above mods are also tradeable, so you may be able to get them via trade chat or Warframe Market.

Movement Speed Mods

General movement speed mods are a little scarcer. Most grant a bonus tied to a specific action, such as aiming or a heavy attack. Aiming slows you down, so the movement-speed-on-aim mods are more an offset for that slowdown than a way to make yourself faster overall. The one standout mod here is Dispatch Overdrive, which goes on your melee weapon and gives up to +60% movement speed (for 15s) on a heavy attack hit. This makes a big difference in several mission types, e.g.,

Exterminate: weave in heavy melee attacks to keep the buff up more or less constantly.
Mobile Defense: land a heavy attack toward the end of each defense, and you’ll be that much faster getting to your next objective.
Capture: slow down to grab your capture target, bop ’em with a heavy attack, and race to extraction.
Rescue: heavy-attack a guard on the way out once you’ve rescued your hostage and get to extraction in a jiffy.

Dispatch Overdrive is a rare-ish drop (0.166% ≈ 1/600) from Corrupted Butchers. Those are the big gold Grineer football players with knives that you see everywhere in the Void. If you run even a few Void Exterminate missions, you will fight hundreds of these guys, so it shouldn’t take long to farm this up if you don’t have one already.

Mod for Maneuverability

Beyond the speed-bonus mods above, there are dozens of more situational mods for jumping, gliding, dashing, sliding, and landing gracefully. Except as noted, these are all Warframe mods, and nine of them are mutually incompatible, so you won’t be able to equip them all at once. They’re best used to fill in as needed around your main speed mods, which have much broader applicability.

Bullet Jump + Aim Glide + Wall Latch Mods

A whole family of mods provide a mix of bullet jump, aim glide, and wall latch bonuses. The wall latch isn’t super useful for our purposes, but the bullet jump + aim glide combo provides nice mobility. Here’s what we’ve got:

Battering Maneuver, Piercing Step, and Rending Turn each give a max of +18% to bullet jump speed, aim glide duration, and wall latch duration; they also add 60% of a specific physical damage type (Impact, Puncture, Slash) to your bullet jump.
Firewalker, Ice Spring, Lightning Dash, and Toxic Flight are the elemental version of the above. They give a max 24.2% bonus to bullet jump speed, aim glide duration, and wall latch duration, plus 275% of a given elemental damage type to your bullet jump.
Mobilize is the “consolation prize” mod of the group, with max +20% to bullet jump speed, aim glide duration, and wall latch duration but no damage bonus.
Patagium has no bullet jump or damage bonus, but it gives up to +90% to aim glide and wall latch duration.

All of these mods come from the same mission: Sabotage (Desdemona, Uranus). Each mod has a ~4.5% drop chance in one of the mission’s rotations: Rotation C for the “elemental damage” quartet and Rotation B for the other five. Only one of these nine mods can be equipped at the same time.

A few other mods, compatible with any of the above nine, further boost aim glide and wall latch:

Stealth Drift gives up to +12% aim glide and wall latch duration and +18 enemy radar. It’s a reward for finishing the Stealth Test in the Orokin Moon tileset on Lua.
Aerodynamic gives a flat bonus of up to +6s to aim glide and wall latch duration in addition to up to 24% damage reduction when airborne. It has a 2% drop chance from Rotation A of Arbitrations. Since it’s an Aura, it can’t be equipped alongside the more generally useful Sprint Boost.
Boreal’s Anguish and Nira’s Anguish also give aim glide and wall latch bonuses, but they are incompatible with Amar’s Anguish, whose sprint speed buff is more widely helpful.

Slide + Friction Mods

Another three mods affect your slide speed (and thus distance) along with your friction when sliding.

Cunning Drift gives up to +12% slide, –30% friction, and +15% ability range. It comes from the Cunning Test (Orokin Moon tileset, Lua).
Maglev provides up to +30% slide and –30% friction. It has a ~0.2% drop chance from Corrupted Ancients, which appear reasonably often in Void missions.
Streamlined Form gives up to +15% slide, –15% friction, and +60% holster rate. It is a Rotation C drop from Nightmare missions with a ~22% drop chance. For non-Rescue Nightmare missions, “Rotation C” is anything on Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris, or Sedna; for Rescue Nightmare missions, it means successfully completing a stealth rescue and killing all the wardens.

These mods stack.

Misc. Mobility Mods

A few other mods provide various mobility perks.

Aero Vantage reduces aim glide gravity by up to 100%, effectively making the aim glide horizontal. It has an ~11% chance to drop from Rotation B of the Disruption mission at Ganymede (Jupiter).
Motus Signal increases double jump strength by up to 200%. It also comes from Ganymede at an ~11% drop rate, but in Rotation A.
Proton Pulse gives a bullet jump speed bonus of up to 100% after wall dashing. It has the same drop conditions as Motus Signal.
Kavat’s Grace increases the speed at which you can fall without triggering a hard landing (that clunky three-point landing that kills momentum and takes time to recover from). It’s a 1% drop from several mobs found only in Corpus Secret Laboratories.
Anti-Grav Array is a Robotic Companion mod that boosts jump height by up to 40%. It too drops 1% of the time from various Amalgams in the Corpus Secret Laboratories.

Which Mods to Use?

With all these mods to choose from, which ones are actually worth it? That depends on the frame, the mission, the tileset—as I said, it’s situational.

For Warframes with speed- and mobility-oriented abilities, ability strength/efficiency/duration are usually a bigger boon to clear rate than any jumping or gliding mod:

Titania only jumps and glides when she’s not flying in her much faster Razorwing form, so none of the maneuverability mods really move the needle. Instead, it makes most sense to focus on keeping Razorwing active by modding for energy and ability efficiency (e.g., Streamline).
For other frames with speed abilities (like Volt or Gauss), it likewise makes more sense to focus on ability strength, duration, and efficiency if your goal is just to clear as fast as possible (Umbral Intensify is one great mod here). This may leave you with room for one maneuverability mod, in which case see below.
For everyone else, it comes down to terrain. The jump/glide mods I find most consistently useful are Patagium and Motus Signal.
- I use Patagium if I know I’ll be doing a lot of Corpus Outpost maps in a row, so I can glide over those canyons rather than go the long way round. I also pack it if I’m farming on the Grineer Asteroid tileset, which is full of long gaps that can be cleared in a single glide.
- Motus Signal comes in handy for Orokin Tower maps, where it helps with all the ledges and balconies. When you’re trying to line up fiddly little vertical jumps, a boost to double jump is much easier to take advantage of than a bullet jump boost.

Examples

Volt Speed Mod Loadout

Here’s what I run on Volt if I am doing a bunch of Captures, Exterminates, or suchlike with a group (for instance, when cracking Void Relics). The overlaid numbers show sprint speed boosts: 87% total from the five mods at left, plus another 25% from an Amalgam Serration (not shown). The Umbral Intensify, Umbral Fiber, and Stretch are Volt-specific choices that increase the strength and range of his Speed ability. You could easily adapt this to Gauss by swapping out Stretch for Flow to help with the energy costs of Mach Rush.

Barebones Excalibur Speed Mod Loadout

Meanwhile, here’s what we can run on an Excal with no Orokin Reactor, no Polarization, and no Exilus unlock. There’s not a lot of headroom for anything but speed mods, and I’ve chosen Flow here to help manage Exalted Blade‘s energy drain. but it’s still possible to fit the 87% bonus (+25% on a rifle) onto a max-rank starter frame with no further upgrades. Add an Orokin Reactor, or repolarize your Aura slot, and you have considerably more capacity to play with.

You get the idea—with even a handful of mods, you can tear through low- to mid-level missions on the most basic of frames. A few mods more, and you have a Swiss Army knife of options for quickly navigating all kinds of tilesets.

Next up, a guide to fine-tuning your weapon choices and movement tech in pursuit of even more speed.