Looking over my personal usage stats and my clan’s usage stats; and contrasting with the community usage stats, I noticed something interesting. One of the least-used archetypes, and one rife with frames with bad or polarising reputations, is the hybrid damage buffer/CC frame. Meanwhile these are really popular in my Alliance, as we have a few stalwarts spreading the good word. (I’m doing my part for Banshee propaganda.)
I can say that the usage stats reflect a sentiment I hear a lot: “just use <purported best frame>”. In this case, Nekros and Octavia dominate this particular role at 3.2% usage apiece, reflecting community belief that Octavia is the best frame in the game and renders other CCs useless. Meanwhile there is a harsh dropoff in the buffer/CC archetype after Octavia (or Nezha if you count him). The next most used is Mag at 1.5%, then Frost and Zephyr at 1.1%. After this, the rest of the archetype all have less than 1% usage.
Other support archetypes are in a similar place: the healer/buffer is dominated by Wisp, and the damage/CC archetype by Khora.
A second factor is the “death spiral”. If a frame has a bad launch or a rough patch as the meta shifts around them, they seem to never shake that bad reputation. For example, year on year, even with extensive positive coverage, Zephyr sees very little change in equip time. Yareli is Turbomurder Water Nezha now, but it’s still a common sentiment that she’s squishy and has poor damage potential. Everyone has an opinion about Sevagoth even though nobody plays him.
A third factor, and I think another kind of death spiral, is unappealing meta builds. For example, Nyx is dominated by Assimilate builds, Banshee by glass cannon builds, Caliban’s meta being a complete mess, one-button Frost and Loki builds, and so on. People don’t invest into the frame because it has been typecast and the builds ossify, and if the builds aren’t fun to play, nobody invests or experiments, and the cycle repeats.
So, that’s my take. I’d love to hear your opinions!
What makes supports unpopular? Many reasons. For one, we have a lot of warframes that are completely self reliant and can do any mission in the game alone, either with their abilities or good guns. Supports also tend to not stack with themselves that well. A Wisp and Mesa are gonna work great together, but Wisp and Trinity? Not so much. Meanwhile having multiple Mesas is nowhere near as bad, you will just have less things to shoot. Supports also rely on your teammates to have a brain to actually use your buffs properly, and we all know how the average public player is. The biggest reason of all is that Warframe rewards speed, as most content is incredibly easy but highly repetitive. Cracking open relics as an example, all that matters is how fast you can kill and how quickly you can extract, so appropriately people will bring nuke frames to speed things along. Death is also by far the best CC effect, all enemies are vulnerable to it and a dead enemy does nothing to threaten you or impact the mission (they also drop loot). Why CC enemies when I can cast 4 as Volt and watch the numbers pop? All of that together makes support/CC frames an unpopular pick, they are still good, sometimes straight up better than other common picks, but the common picks are lower effort while still getting the job done, and for most players that’s all that matters.
With the first point, I want to clarify, most “supports” (by my understanding of the term) actually have some kind of debuff that increases their damage. For example Nyx has access to Pacifying Bolts which is functionally a one-handed Tharros Strike, even on SP spawn densities. Enemies with no armour are functionally at a 20x or higher damage multiplier, albeit less assuming you’re running a Corrosive weapon and not building Viral around fullstrip. Frost has access to fullstrip and then some combination of a personal CC/CD buff, or a party-wide Viral amp through Freeze Force. Banshee has Sonic Fracture and optionally Sonar for the funnies or on Demos, Eximus and Acolytes.
The kind of support frame I was focusing on has good personal damage tools, but the support comes from the fact that these tools benefit the whole party as well.
Trinity is a bit of an outlier in that she’s all in on survivability, especially with something like Vampire Leech/Nourish builds which have the potential to shieldgate everyone constantly. Admittedly I think she and Wisp are what people think of a “support” as, and not say debuffers like Frost, Caliban, Sevagoth etc.
Edit:
That said, this is a great answer. It’s very insightful as to where my own personal biases were formed: the kind of content I do, which is primarily long solo runs, 5+ rotations of endless and Duviri, and usually with Alliance members and friends. In these situations, debuffer CCs shine. I do think someone like Nyx is very misunderstood for linear speed missions with pubbies though, as Pacifying Bolts is a very powerful damage booster when you’re moving quickly.
The problem is that all of that is completely unnecessary in 99% of the game people actually play (we’re not talking about Steel Path endurance). Armor stripping especially is a null point as Pillage is an incredible subsume that is used on a lot of nuke frames that struggle with high enemy armor. Is Banshee’s Sonar a huge dmg buff? Sure. But I can bring my Revenant with 105% Roar subsumed and any good weapon to a Steel Path Circulus on Lua, stay to rotation C and not have any issues killing enemies while not having to worry about a thing because of Mesmer Skin. Mesa can full armor strip in two casts of Pillage while having 95% DR, constant shield gating and an auto aim weapons for low effort crowd annihilation. Also, why would I bother supporting my teammates if I can instead get the job done myself? Why would they bother supporting me if they themselves can bring a frame that can get the job done themselves?
Supports are generally less popular across all of gaming for a variety of reasons (“it’s boring”/“it relies on shit teammates”/“I want to carry” etc) but I think the biggest issue in Warframe is that supports generally aren’t needed. It’s very easy for people to build to be self sufficient. The game is fast paced with an end screen showing who did the most damage and got the most kills, so there’s a lot of psychological incentive to be the DPS carry and get the happy brain juice
I don’t like saying that supports aren’t needed, because a mission with one or two supports tends to go better than without, but the majority of the playerbase is running public lobbies and not doing content that’s super difficult, so there’s very little conscious cohesion or even paying attention to what their teammates are playing
Support is a particular mindset, there’s some of us that enjoy it and find it extremely fun and rewarding to play, but it’s obviously subjective. The easiest and most fluid supporting in Warframe, imo, takes the form of providing buffs, debuffs, armour stripping, crowd control, and status priming to allow your teammates to pop off, alongside being quick to revive if someone goes down. There can be some very proactive “traditional” stuff like timing a Trinity Blessing, a Vazarin void sling, or a Protea Shield Satellite, but generally I find that the quick pace means people are expected to be responsible for their own health bars (even with a great set-and-forget like Oberon’s Renewal with the Phoenix augment, the benefiting players have some personal responsibility to not fall off the map or kiss a Nullifier bubble and lose the heal)
So I do think the lack of support popularity in Warframe is entirely down to the kind of game it is - if you’re buffing your teammates, you’re also buffing yourself, so why wouldn’t you want to do all the damage and get all the kills? But the style of support Warframe has is very fun and satisfying, imo. The stereotypical “watch healthbars” healer support of times past could be quite boring, but otherwise the greatest example of a support class I’ve ever known was the Protection Monk in GW1, because it was proactive and based on the player’s reaction speed to be able to watch the field and prevent damage from occurring
GW1 is actually a really good example in another way: I think its Domination Mesmer was a fantastic offensive spin on the idea of a mezzer a la EQ’s Enchanters. In general the idea of an offensive curse-slinger that CCs vulns enemies is where I’ve been gravitating more and more in Warframe since the big armour strip changes in September of last year.
On the happy brain juice, I think this is something people miss. I know my Sevagoth and Nyx are easily able to get top kills unless there’s a dedicated murder machine like Gyre or Mesa. But I think I have a lot of bias due to having every weapon and almost all mods available to me, so I can easily configure a loadout to be highly performant. The gear-reliance is probably another factor deterring people from playing debuff frames, because it’s not immediately obvious how much offensive potential they have. Even for me it took a while before the murder gremlin hiding in my brain was like, “wait, doesn’t Nyx have a huge offensive potential?”
The GW1 Mesmer yes! Honestly, GW1 in its entirety was just an amazing game. The classes and general game balance was always pretty sublime. To date it still has my favourite pvp of all time
I think you’re right also that there is probably a correlation with more experienced players with broader arsenals enjoying the “support” frames more than newer/more casual players. Warframe is a complex game and the debuffers have their power hidden a little deeper into their kit. Someone like Equinox takes a bit more effort to figure out than a Thermal Sunder Titania. Lots of the most commonly played DPS focused frames perform straight forward tasks with straight forward builds, which is perfect for anyone who doesn’t have much time to invest
I know I’m getting off topic, but Mesmer was such a cool concept in general. Having a CC class focused on mindgames was a stroke of genius, because playing a mental game is a lot more fun than say, WoW style mezzers that take control away from the character. I enjoyed the fact that, aside from Elementalist knocking, hard CC also came at a cost to the mezzer too, in addition to typically being more tactical and of a short duration.
That said some people hate the whole “prison of the mind” thing too. I know zoners are typically pretty reviled in fighting games.
I agree the Mesmer was super cool! The way their spells forced the victim into their own tactical “do I or don’t I” situations. Diversion and Backfire were iconic. The game was full of it even for other classes - I loved the Frenzy Warrior for the risk/reward too. Activating Frenzy to pull off a spike and then you, the heavy armour class, suddenly being vulnerable so needing to react quickly with a cancel stance if your opponents targeted you with a spike. Good times
I know Warframe is a very different game, but I would love any new missions DE could put out that have mechanics to put players into situations where they have to think on the fly and react quickly. Cascade and Flood are good examples of it on the macro scale, and the Eximus rework is a good example on the micro scale. RJ was a better example around release before it got somewhat watered down. It really is where the fun comes from, imo
Some of the frames you listed suffer from usability issues, and others are overspecialized making them difficult to use in other content, while others like Wisp can cover a large range of content easily, meaning its stats are both inflated because it is multi-purpose and people are lazy and don’t want to change their loadout for every mission.
Wisp for example can pretty much do everything, Support, Increase teams dps, CC through Shock Motes (try not to use shock motes if you don’t need them, they tend to be overkill most of the time in lower level defense missions, can interfere with certain warframe abilities that require damage from enemies, and may even alert enemies in spy), Breach Surge’s blind and Rad Procs. Breach Surge kind of turns single target damage into a pseudo-aoe, and has a multiplier applied to the damage that spawned the spark. She’s also a great warframe for spy missions because of her passive, ability to blind and her 2 can bypass lasers and be teleported to.
Compare Trinity to Wisp, and you can see the issues with overspecializing in support. If you want to kill anything with Trinity, it has to be done with your weapons, and your abilities don’t really contribute much in these circumstances. Some of the abilities are also fairly redundant, like Well of Life and Blessing. (She has some augments that are pretty good though, like Abating Link, and a build that only focuses on Vampire Leech for single target damage.) The problem with Trinity though is that most other frames are already self-sufficient, and the ones that weren’t before can patch that up with shield gating/helminth abilities. At this point Trinity is mostly only good for keeping an objective alive in sorties, and even then, a dead enemy is usually better than trying to heal an objective. (most objectives have a cap on how much they can be healed, Blessing caps at 500hp over 5s, which really isn’t a lot compared to the amount of damage enemies do to it).
Banshee has been a glass cannon for a very long time, which is probably the reason for her low usage; but with the helminth, you can fix that issue pretty easily. https://dormi.zone/post/46868 Banshee still kind of has a reputation for being too squishy for content, but it’s actually able to handle most content, and even excels in missions where you need very high damage like Demolition, where her 1 (with an augment) can fully strip armor from a Demolyst, and even push it away from the conduit you’re trying to defend. Her 2 is very fast to cast and will mark weak points on the Demolysts making them extremely easy to kill. Most other frames can only briefly CC the Demolysts, and I think they will gain resistance to CC over time, just like Sisters/Liches.
Then there are the frames that have usability issues like Yareli and Zephyr. A lot of what people dislike about Yareli is related to K-Drive. If you want Nezha Survivability on Yareli, you have to play K-Drive you’re limited to only using your pistol, your character model is too tall to fit through some doorways/loose all momentum every time you go through one and your camera can clip tends to jump to a “better” position every time to go past a low ceiling which can be very jarring. It doesn’t have the best controls either, and a lot of navigating through tilesets requires good mobility. There’s other issues where rewards can bug if you use the K-drive in a mission apparently (not sure how common this is, or if it’s still an issue (the most recent ticket I can find is from July).
Zephyr is just awkward to control if you aren’t used to low gravity, and requires an augment if you want to disable that passive so if someone builds Zephyr before they have access to that augment, they may have hated how controlling Zephyr and never bothered to try it again. (I think Zephyr’s Tailwind was better pre-rework, now I’m constantly stopping short when I was trying to skim along the ground)
Other factors can be as simple as people only copying what is Meta at the time, or just listening to community comments without trying something for themselves first. The randomized loadouts in the Duviri kind of revealed how little players drift away from Meta/what they’re already comfortable with. When Styanax released, there were lots of comments saying that he couldn’t survive because he couldn’t shield gate. Meanwhile, I had a half formed Styanax being treated as a punching bag in steel path without any real issues. I continued playing that way until around 45min in until one of the Acolytes decided that it wanted to keep teleporting me away from life support. (was bored and wanted to see how far I could take this, and if multiple Acolyte spawns could overlap)
*Someone may also perceive their own support buffs as potentially harmful to their team in certain content. If you know most of the player’s you’re matching with are going to be using Phenmor/Felarx/Laetum for certain content, do you really want to use Harrow to buff your squad’s Crit Chance?
I think support frames start making the cut only once you don’t need high damage frames to make up for lack of damage, unless you foresee playing with a team.
For instance, I never quite managed to master Volt in spite of it being one of my favorite frames, just because my low weapon damage output and survivability would always force me back into high damage/defense frames.
I also believe that the way some utility frames work is too much of a wall of text for me to care. I feel this especially with Octavia, Titania and a few others. Everything past Zephyr got too convoluted and it’s only logical that people won’t care for it unless there’s an extremely good reason for it (see people caring to learn how to use Wisp).
I tried to wrap my mind around Citrine, and even though I’m enjoying it, I can’t help but feel like the kit is as wonky and weird as it gets. I’m sure this happens with other new frames that are not purely “press 4 to kill”.
a quick look at the usage stats makes it clear , popular frames are the easy frames and usually one or two standouts from each archetype dominate and the rest stay niche
wisp got all the buffs , octavia goes invisible without becoming a turtle and has lots of damage , nekros is mindless looting , mesa is aim bot , saryn is piss easy nuke , volt for slowpokes that have yet to learn how to bulletjump properly , wukong was tanky and gave you a bot to make the game a cakewalk and is now replaced with revenant after the bot was kneecapped
with all the powercreep you can carry 3 super aoe weapons and slap your favorite flavor of buffs on any frame with helminth
This sums up how I feel about playing a support in Warframe:
Don’t know if you can classify oberon as support (i would) but he is pretty strong againt steelpath bosses and grineer As he can just remove their armor (sadly doesn’t work with archons)
why would you gamble on boosting someone elses numbers (or making a fight last longer) when you could always rely on your own numbers being big (or make a fight be over instantly)
This is a good insight, but I’d say the big appeal for a “support” character in a game where everyone has the same guns and weapons: if you’re making everyone else stronger, you’re making yourself stronger too.
