With the Soma Prime, Warframe had one of it’s first golden primed weapons. The typical look came with Soma Prime’s release in 2014 and quickly became well known and standard for other primed weapons.
Even though two years later the assault rifle was entered into the Prime Vault, it didn’t even take a year until you could get her again – with a one-time promotion, featuring Twitch Prime.
Even though nowadays you can only get her through trading with other players there will surely be a re-release during an upcoming Prime Vault opening.
So keep your eyes open for that and make sure to get your hands on that great weapon.
Because if you have Soma Prime you are probably going to love the rifle – at least if you find yourself using a good build!
- Very good slash and puncture damage
- Highest critical chance for assault rifles
- Highest critical multiplier
- Comes with two polarities
- Very large magazine size
- Fast fire rate
- Very large magazine reserves
- Very low damage
- Low impact damage
- Slow reload speed
- Low ammo efficiency
- High recoil
The Best Soma Prime Builds
Building Soma Prime is somewhat tricky since you want to increase your damage output by as much as possible, but you still need to bypass the fact that the total damage is super low.
So oftentimes people want to build a pretty standard build with elemental mods, some extra damage and just hope that this will suffice.
But the primed variant of the Soma does have some quirks and needs special treatment – starting with choosing your builds.
If you ever get lucky enough to find a Riven mod for your Soma Prime, feel free to reroll it a couple of times until you find a good roll with +damage, critical chance, multishot, faster (or lower) fire rate or critical damage.
A good Riven mod will put your rifle to a god-like position and will help you to shred even through high level enemies. Also make sure that you do have maxed out Vital Sense, Point Strike and Serration, since those mods are the core foundation of every Soma build.
Tip: If you want to know more about Soma Prime and its abilities, feel free to take a look at the wikia page!
Standard Soma Prime Build
This build might as well just be called Slash Damage Build, since you’re not obliged to use it as your standard build.
And it might look somewhat clunky, but really combines all the advantages of the Some Prime: You do have an already pretty fast fire rate and speed it up with Vile Acceleration (or Shred if you can use the extra punch through).
Combine that with a very high critical chance and a good critical damage multiplier and you get yourself a super fast assault rifle that will proc Hunter Munitions quite often.
You could even skip Critical Delay and put Fanged Fussilade in for higher slash damage.
Yes, ‘spray and prey‘ does describe this build very well, but a high fire rate and the already magazine capacity (and magazine reserves) make it possible to shoot 600 bullets in under a minute and still have more than enough ammo.
Just make sure to use the Carrier (or its primed version) as a companion to counteract ammo problems. Also you will need a few runs before you get a good feeling for the reload timing.
Since you will fire a lot of bullets in a few seconds you need to reload every time to get a chance.
This build is suited for almost every mission, regardless of the level requirements, but if you plan on killing higher level enemies you should know that you’re going to get some troubles with your ammo, because you simply need too many bullets to kill high armor or shield enemies.
So always watch your ammo count and have a good secondary with in high level missions.
Aim Soma Prime Build
While the first build was more ‘spray and pray’, this build concentrates on aiming and hitting your enemies.
If you succeed in that you are going to benefit from the effects of Argon Scope and Bladed Rounds.
Since you are also using Critical Delay you’re not using anywhere close to the amounts of bullets you need in the first build, so ammo should never be a problem.
Split Chamber and Vigilante Armaments will help counteracting your slower fire rate by increasing multishot by a lot.
While this build is very strong you should also be aware of it’s shortcomings. First of all aiming has a lot of downsides, since it will reduce your field of view and also makes you super slow, which means you are easier to hit.
So combining this build with an already squishy Warframe can be disadvantageous. The second problem revolves around your ability to actually hit head shots on longer distances.
Accuracy is already low on the Soma Prime, so you really need to carefully aim (or waste bullets while spraying), before you can use the Argon Scope bonus.
And last but not least you have a super low status chance and status damage, which can lead to some awkward situations against high level armored or shielded enemies.
Elemental Damage Soma Prime Build
A lot of Soma Prime users most likely use something like this build as their main choice – and that is a very good choice indeed.
It is well rounded, does have a good damage output and uses a good combination of multishot, extra fire rate and critical damage.
As always, feel free to switch out the two elemental mods based on your own preferences and missions you want to beat.
The biggest advantage of this build is that it is just plain stable in every situation.
A group of mobs is in your way? Spray them down! A big enemy is rushing towards you? Shoot his face! Do you want to kill a boss?
Crit his weak points and enjoy him dying. And while this build will give you a lot of what you are looking for in an assault rifle it doesn’t really have peaks.
You aren’t super fast, you aren’t using your high magazine size and you’re not abusing the whole potential of your critical damage.
So if you are looking for a ‘sure thing’, you will like this build. Otherwise pick another one.
By the way: If you want to try out Argon Scope or Bladed Rounds here, feel free to switch them in for either Shred or Vigilante Armaments.
Conclusion
Soma Prime is still to this day one of the best weapons in the game and especially if you manage to get the assault rifle during early or mid game it will boost your damage output by a lot.
Yes, getting the weapon is currently somewhat difficult and expensive, but keep your eyes open for any opportunity to get it. It will be unvaulted at some point or maybe giving out again in some form or another.
Try out any of the builds above and find your favorite, but keep in mind that you can build her any way you want.
Huge amount of ammo you carry around with will make sure you’re usually not getting any ammo problems and the fact that you can simply shred down entire mob groups in a few seconds is also quite nice.
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