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!
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?