Warframe is a game where you play as a space ninja wielding everything from simple pistols to bizarre, fleshy cannons. For many, the most confusing part of the game isn’t the wide variety of options, but how complex even simple weapons can be when attempting to understand their statistics.
This guide will explain the basics of your weaponry, and how to interpret their statistics. I will be using one of the first weapons a new player will acquire: the Braton.
The Braton is a simple automatic weapon. There’s nothing special about it; you just point it in a direction and fire. The stat screen for the Braton is below.
At first glance, there are a lot of confusing numbers and words. We can see that the Braton is an automatic weapon because of the first word, “Auto”, but its fire rate isn’t as clear.
Fire rate affects how many bullets a weapon fires in a second. For the Braton, it fires 8.75 bullets per second. With a magazine size of 45, this means the Braton can fire continuously for just over five seconds before it needs to reload. The reload stat is fairly easy to understand: it takes a mere two seconds to reload.
Accuracy, on the other hand, just tells us that it’s “High”. For most weapons, accuracy affects the spread of bullets when you fire the weapon. A high accuracy means that most of the bullets will hit within your reticle, and makes your gun more effective in mid to long range combat.
The clip below shows the Braton’s fire rate, reload, and accuracy. Note that the accuracy affects how far the bullets hit from the center of the aiming reticle.
The second half of the Braton’s stats are shown under “Damage”. Oddly, the first information we’re given isn’t the raw damage, it’s the critical chance. Let’s ignore that for now and look at the last line, the “Total”.
The “Total” is the damage each bullet will inflict before any other damage calculations are made, such as dealing bonus damage when you shoot an enemy’s head or weak point. The three lines above the total are the types of damage the Braton deals, as well as how much damage of each type every bullet inflicts.
The Braton has three damage types: Slash, Puncture, and Impact. The details of these types aren’t important right now, just know that they’re each unique. Above them is the “Status”, which tells us how likely each bullet is to inflict a special condition on an enemy. Since the Braton has three damage types, it has a 6% chance to inflict either a slash, puncture, or impact status on an enemy.
Finally, we return to “Critical Chance” and “Critical Multiplier”. “Critical Chance” tells us the chance each bullet has to deal extra damage. That extra damage is affected the “Critical Multiplier”. For the Braton, we have a 12% chance for each bullet to deal 1.6 times the original damage of the bullet. Without any other multipliers, this means that a critical hit will make a bullet deal 38.4 damage instead of 24. The exact numbers will be different when we shoot an actual enemy, as shown below.
The white numbers appear when we deal non-critical damage, while the yellow numbers are critical hits. If you look closely, you can even see that a couple statuses were inflicted!
Once you grasp these basics, you are well on your way to understanding how weapons work in Warframe.
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