Top 5 Primary Weapons for Beginners

Weapons in Warframe are often times a little bit tricky, especially for beginner: Without having the perfect mods, it often feels way too strong to simply go into melee mode and fight your way through mob groups with just your sword, hammer, whips, or whatever else you might get your hands on.

While there is nothing wrong with using the melee style, primary weapons offer a wide variety of different bonuses that often get overlooked by newer players.

5 Best Primary Weapons for Beginners

With currently over 130 different primary weapons in the game, we try to focus our Top 5 choices on weapons that will not only increase your damage output, but also might help with survivability. We also try to cut down our list to weapons that will be strong even if you don’t own all the mods or if you simply lack enough Endo to max those mods out.

#1 Tigris (MR 7)

If you can’t use (or get your hands on) the Tigris Prime or the Sancti Tigris, starting out with the normal version of the Tigris is a great way to increase your damage potential against higher level enemies or even during boss fights.

The Tigris has a great damage burst with its two-shot-barrel and will help you deal with high health pool units.

While the weapon itself might not be your best choice against large mob groups, you can easily combine it with other weapons or Warframe abilities to kill burst down a lot of lower level mobs and only use the shotgun against enemies that will survive your damage output otherwise.

#2 Fulmin (MR 8)

The Fulmin is Wisp’s signature weapon and eventually will have its own primed version in the game.

But in the end it doesn’t matter if you get the primed version or buy the standard blueprint from the market, because it will always be a great way to help you through longer or harder missions – especially if you’re a newer player.

The reason is fairly simple: Not only does the Fulmin feature two different, strong fire types, but it will never run out of ammunition.

Instead, after you stopped shooting for one second, it will automatically regenerate ammo (30 per second), until it is back to the maximum amount.

So if you find yourself having ammunition problems during your runs, try playing with this weapon!

#3 Ignis Wraith (MR 9)

This weapon is probably the hardest to get in our Top 5 selection, but it will be totally worth it.

Currently you can either wait for Baro Ki’Teer to sell it in his shop, you can buy it from other players via Trade Chat or from Warframe Market – or you can try and get it from one of the clans that actually do own the blueprint.

The main reason why you want to get your hands on the Ignis Wraith is because it features a great area-of-effect range in combination with innate Heat damage, which can easily be transformed to Blast damage.

So not only do you get a lot of damage against mob groups, but you also get the ability to use easy crowd control against enemies that won’t die within a second.

#4 Zhuge (MR 10)

Sadly, bows and crossbows are not the greatest weapon choices in Warframe (unless you do have a maxed out Lenz or a great Kuva Bramma), mainly because they are super slow in comparison to other primary weapon types.

That said, the Zhuge (or its primed version) is an exception to that rule: The weapon features a fairly high base damage, an automatic fire mode as well as a great status chance.

As a bow-weapon it also gains double bonuses from fire rate mods and it can even use Thunderbolt mod, which will give you some amount of area-of-effect damage as well as some blast damage to get some crowd control.

But be cautious: You can inflict self-stagger if you jump into your own explosions!

#5 Vaykor Hek (MR 12)

The Hek can already be obtained once you’ve level up to Mastery Rank 4. It is a great shotgun to start out with, but eventually you really want to upgrade to the Syndicate version, the Vaykor Hek.

It doesn’t matter if you trade for it with other players or if you get Steel Meridian to the highest rank yourself – the weapon will increase your damage output as well as your survivability by a lot.

Besides the ‘normal’ damage output by just shooting enemies, the shotgun also features the so-called Justice effect, which triggers automatically after a certain amount affinity is gained.

Not only will the effect deal 1.000 Blast damage to every enemy within 25 meters around you, but it also heals yourself for 25% of your maximum health as well as increases your base armor by 15% for 30 seconds.

So you each effect deals damage, heals and also increases your survivability!

Conclusion

As you constantly improve your mods, get new ones, and farm more weapons, you will be open to use more and more primary weapons to their full potential.

Until that moment however, using one of our Top 5 weapons might help you progress faster through the game and improve your damage output.

If you think we forgot a great weapon or if you want to simply share your own Top 5, make sure to leave us your comment!