Warframe Gauss is the latest addition Digital Extremes’ highly kinetic action-MMO. It brings the game’s signature speed and fluidity to new heights with kit focused around blinding speed, explosive crowd control, and shrugging off whatever comes your way.
Playing Gauss in Warframe is a blast, and you’ll immediately get that hit of adrenaline whenever you start his signature dash. So, let’s take a look at his abilities and how you can best utilize them in concert.
Warframe Gauss abilities
Electrokinetic Battery
First is Gauss’ passive. As soon as you start playing with this new frame, you’ll notice a new UI element on the bottom right-hand part of the screen. This vertical bar measures up and then caps off in a special Redline area. This is Gauss’ battery, and it’ll charge whenever you’re on the move. For every 1.875 meters you move, the battery will charge 1 percent.
That means it’s in your best interests to be moving as quickly as possible at all times. The faster you go, the faster the battery will charge, which lets you use Gauss’ other abilities to the fullest. A good foundation for every Gauss player is to practice your movement as it’ll convert directly into your combat effectiveness.
Mach Rush
This is Gauss’ most straightforward ability, but that’s kind of the point. Press the ability button to have Gauss perform a supersonic dash, instantly charging his battery 10 percent. If you hold the button down, Gauss will continue to dash at the same speed and drain energy. While dashing, Gauss is capable of some amazing feats not limited to running on large bodies of water you’ll find in the Plains of Eidolon and Orb Vallis.
Passing within a few meters of enemies will have them swept up in your slipstream and knock them over. If you collide with a solid object while dashing, Gauss will hit the target with so much force that it’ll generate a powerful shockwave. This will knockdown foes in a large radius. When using Mach Rush, you’ll have to get used to deciding on the fly if you want to use the ability just for movement or for crowd control, in which case you’ll want to do what you normally do the opposite of: Head straight for a wall. While you can easily avoid danger while using Mach Rush, there’s also a simpler way for Gauss to tank through damage. That brings us to his second active ability.
Kinetic Plating
Activating Kinetic Plating gives Gauss a shield that defends against Impact, Slash, Puncture, Cold, Heat, and Blast weapon types. It’ll also let you shrug off staggers and knockdowns for an extended period of time. You can manually deactivate the ability by toggling it, but you’ll want to play around with the Kinetic Plating as it’s going to be one of your main sources of protection while Mach Rushing around the map. Hitting enemies directly or with the contact shockwave from Mach Rush while Kinetic Plating is activated will proc Slash damage, causing bleeding. Damage will be reduced by a larger amount the more your Electrokinetic Battery is charged, so carefully planning your movement will benefit you in more than ways than one. Absorbed damage is also partially converted into energy.
With this in mind, you can see the bigger arc of Gauss’ playstyle. Manage battery levels by keeping your movement slick and then use that battery power to protect yourself and regenerate energy to begin the loop once again. Like a dynamo waiting to be unleashed, Gauss is the perfect balance between energy and power. Complicating things further is Gauss’ third ability, Thermal Sunder.
Thermal Sunder
Thermal Sunder has two distinct functions. Tying directly to Gauss’ battery theme, depending on how you choose to manipulate the energy around you affects your own battery strength and the status applied. Pressing the ability has Gauss rend the kinetic energy in the surrounding area, absorbing it into its own battery and supercooling the resultant forces. Enemies will take Cold damage, and if they already have the Cold status, they’ll instead be flash Frozen for the duration. If your battery is running hot and you’ve got some excess power to burn, you can instead hold the ability key to expend the kinetic energy, bringing forth a scorching flame. Enemies will take Heat damage, and similarly, if they’ve already been afflicted, will instead be set ablaze to take significant extra damage.
But that’s not all. Hitting enemies who have procced the opposite status effect will produce a third outcome where the damage types are combined into a Blast detonation for a high damage burst. Tenno even have a little more control in using the ability. Depending on the order of the status effects you apply, you can either blast enemies away (Cold>Heat) for some breathing room or draw them into you (Heat>Cold) for a followup combo. With so many options at Gauss’ disposal, you might be wondering what direction his ultimate could even go in.
Redline
Overclocking his Electrokinetic Battery, Gauss gains access to the precious extra power node with Redline. This has the side effect of granting bonus weapon fire rate, melee attack speed, reload speed and holster speed. With Redline activated, moving around will charge the overlocked battery as long as it’s above the node threshold (80 percent), indicated by a counter percentage. As long as you stay on the move and keep that Redline threshold up, you’ll damage foes even just from moving around as you let off periodic electricity arcs. Better still, each of Gauss’ basic abilities are powered up during Redline.
Mach Rush has its energy cost halved here, letting you dance around the battlefield to better increase your Redline charge more easily. Kinetic Plating receives an additional melee damage bonus and knockdown potential. Finally, Thermal Sunder’s secondary effect procs will activate immediately without first requiring a priming status effect.
Redline’s ultimate potential is something that’ll take some practice to achieve, but once you are capable, it’ll let you keep up buffs, crowd control enemies, and get into and out of conflict at a moment’s notice.
How to get Gauss in Warframe
Gauss can be added to your stable of frames by visiting Sedna and taking on the Tier C Disruption mission at Kelpie. With a 10 percent drop chance for each component blueprint, expect to run the missions around 20 times. There are a few different materials to gather for manufacturing the frame. Make sure to take note of the Radiant Zodian and Marquise Thyst that are only craftable at the foundry to be able to create the systems. Add some Orb Vallis materials and you’ll be right there.
Much like the last frame Wisp, make sure you’ve got an Argon Crystal ready to go for Gauss, lest it decay. The wait to build this speedy frame might feel like it’s dragging on, but you can let out all that pent up aggression once he’s ready for use.
Warframe Gauss build ideas
Immediately what jumps out in terms of Warframe Gauss builds when taking a look at Kinetic Plating is that you can easily have fun with something like Adaptation attached. Kinetic Plating affords you a burst of protection against singular hits, which lets Adaptation do the work over time to build a resistance to specific damage types, up to 90 percent. Hunter Adrenaline also creates a fun combo. With the protection from the shield, damage received will give you even more energy, feeding into Gauss’ other abilities.
Whether you want to be a Redlining battlemaster, laying status effects on top of status effects, or just the Tenno-sized Cannonball, you’ve got options with Gauss. There’s a lot of behavior you’ll have to retrain yourself into pursuing with Gauss, but that’s really just part of the fun.