Utilizing arcane persistence on as many warframes as I can.

I love arcane persistence because it does the exact thing that is pretty much like crack for me. Allow you to build something in a completely different way and opens up a ton of different possibilities that were much harder before.

Arcane persistence has 2 approaches to it.

* Slotted in as 1 shot protection for frames that usually never take much damage * The sole defensive measure on a warframe that isn’t inherently tanky

The latter is where the fun comes in. Because of how persistence works, you don’t strictly need damage reduction at all. You just need the bare minimum armor and potentially a way to deal with that armor getting reduced (status immunity/more armor). There are ways to even make glass cannons pretty tanky, but they require layers that persistence takes away. With no in-between, you might as well go all in on persistence.

What makes persistence different to normal health tanking is that you are now a regen tank. Instead of eating damage and using small amounts of healing that get effectively multiplied by your DR, you rely entirely on your healing sources. Persistence tells you exactly how much you need. 500 hp/s. Very few frames can outright hit that. Oraxia, nidus, inaros come to mind with arcane grace.

But the healing doesn’t need to be constant 500/s. It only needs to average that. So burst healing is an option so long as you can get it off consistently within an allotted timeframe. As a result, way more warframes can utilize persistence than you might immediately think.

One special note before I show some warframe setups that I’ve personally used and proven they work well:

**Gloom.** That’s it. Gloom with this arcane requires you to deal damage once every 4-5 seconds at minimum to be unkillable pretty much. Because it also CC’s you have way more time than that since enemies won’t be shooting you that often.

But that’s dumb and obvious, I ain't about that. Plus, the goal of this is to focus on base kits that work so you can build them however you want with persistence in mind. But it exists if you want even less effort!

Also these builds are expensive because nearly every warframe will require archon shards.

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**Sustained healing - Jade/Garuda**

Unless stated otherwise, every build will follow the same formula. To get 700 armor on frames who don’t spam orbs or have 270-350 base armor we use 4 azure shards, or 2 tauforged and 1 normal azure shard.

There is a concern that any corrosive/heat/magnetic proc can be instant death. But my experience of running only persistence builds since the update has gone out is that it's not a major concern. Your mileage may very but we have so much passive distraction and CC with pets that even when I'm on fire and get knocked down I get away with it fairly regularly.

Every build will be using blessing because more HP = more time to heal up. Getting 50 Hp orbs is not a big ask, especially in steel path with all the eximus and synth deconstruct.

Jade is special for having a consistent % based heal over time that starts off at a respectably high base 8%. With vitality + blessing you get 2130 HP. Or 2269 with umbral intensify/vitality. So you only need 24% and 22% health regen requiring 300% and 275% strength respectively. If you want, you can use your last remaining shard slots for more HP bringing the requirement down to 18-20% depending.

300% strength can be obtained from: Max blind rage, archon intensify, growing power, augur secret.

275% strength can be obtained from: Max Blind rage, umbral intensify/vitality, growing power.

If you have sling strength on madurai, this greatly reduces the pressure from modding.

Don’t stress if you can't hit the exact number. Even if you have, let’s say… 400 health regen/second. At 2130 life it will still take you 21 seconds of constant damage to die. If enemies stop hitting you for even a moment you can make it all up. This is also why the ramp up for blessing isn’t a big deal. You can still achieve large buffer windows even at base HP thanks to the healing and the fact that enemies aren’t always hitting you 24/7. Which is something I will keep reinforcing.

The rest of your build is up to you. You are now immortal. I find rage to be very good at sustaining energy since you have no true DR. So taking chunks of 500 damage instantly caps your energy quickly. It also means you are never without energy when you need it.

This concept also works with Garuda. Her directional shield + % missing health heal + cleansing status works extremely well if you stack HP on her. Funnily enough she has a good bit less base HP than jade, but 315 base armor. So you can either run double/triple umbra or just 3 normal/2 TF shards for the base or 2 normal shards for the prime.

At 1940 hp with normal vitality/blessing. That’s enough to become immortal with a single blood altar at less than 200% strength. I stick to around 200% just because the way blood altar ticks doesn’t mean your heal rate is perfectly consistent and the way the arcane makes you take 500 damage instantly before making you effectively invincible for 1 second can get fucky if you rely on being at less than 30% HP to reach 500 hp/s. But that’s also the worst case situation. You have a shield and on demand invulnerability.

If you use blood letting, make sure you stay at over 500 HP after it’s cast for the reason above. Its damage isn’t counted for persistence and you can end up getting hit with the full 500 hp immediately after, killing you. But if you have even 501. You’ll have 1 HP left and become fully immune to damage for 1 second roughly as the damage taken averages out and your health skyrockets back up.

One more example of potential regen tanks include: Grendel (250% strength gives you 500 health/sec regen on his pulverise for 5 seconds, 250/s after and nourish will heal 2500 hp per cast.)

If I miss any other frames/ideas that can work. It’s either because I did think of them but they are already tanky (I don’t do endurance runs), or I just didn’t think of it. I mentioned Grendel because he has 2 massive heals and it’s funny.

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**Burst healing - Uriel/Temple/Hydroid**

Same set up as before with blessing/persistence and azure shards. Except for hydroid

The defense keeping them alive is their ability to become invincible and heal to full very quickly thanks to ripper’s wail and remedium with only 200% strength required to hit 100%. Hydroids rousing plunder augment is capable of massive burst healing with good strength. At base it’s 50 per enemy and per corrosive proc. One enemy with max corrosive procs is 550 hp before strength.

Uriel with blessing and vitality can reach 2532 HP. At absolute max you’re casting remedium every 4-4.5 seconds. It also cleanses status letting you deal with heat procs. There is a delay after the proc is gone for the armor to come back. If you’re worried, you can chain remedium a couple times until it returns.

But also you have 3 minions, all proccing heat, stunning, and slowing enemies while also spitting out tons of health orbs. I almost never use remedium on uriel because the passive distraction/CC means the balls are more than enough to keep him topped up.

Temple is very similar but with less HP. Not by much, though. Going up to 2210. It’s effectively the same flow but with the added benefit that by timing the rippers wail you gain 4 seconds of extended invulnerability. Giving you time to recover from any procs taking your armor away.

Hydroid has even less HP than temple (1940), but can go without azure shards because of plunder. You ARE vulnerable until you get the first plunder cast off, and if you mis-cast plunder causing you to have a lower armor value you can die. But you can also get so much armor you bypass the armor strip of heat AND corrosive.

His armor is base 290 so it’s possible to have minimum 700 if you use full umbral mods or 2-3 azure shards. But that’s just for security to prevent death from not having plunder/miscasting plunder.

Hydroid with normal vitality and full azure shards for HP can get 2690-3065.

Other quick examples include: Equinox’s night form, and sevagoth's gloom. I’m putting it in burst because it’s the closest analogue.

**Edit:** random thought I haven't been able to test because life busy. Koumei/omamori subsume. 50% chance at all times to avoid damage, and every 3 seconds you heal a bunch from a hit that has no DR applied to it. If the end damage gate of persistence doesn't block it, you could potentially cap your heal in 1 go. Probably quite inconsistent but given you have 5 seconds of straight damage needed to kill you, and you only take half the hits. It could be good.

***

**Orb generators - Dagath**

This is an extension to any ball creation warframes too. But I was very curious to see how it would work with dagath since her orb generation isn’t as on-demand

The concept is this: Balls heal. The end.

But, they only heal 50. That’s not a lot when dagath gets 2532 HP. While balls are plentiful, the average game doesn’t look like the jello section at a buffet. So it’s hard to get 10 balls every single second.

EXCEPT. We don’t have to take this meager 50 HP sitting down. Because there’s actually a couple ways to increase how potent these balls are that I legit don’t think I’ve ever seen people seriously use in a build (beyond “it’s something I guess”) let alone discuss because the current healing rates are either fine for tanks or pointless to worry about for everyone else.

First, restorative bond. Any companion can use it and it adds 60 HP to existing balls.

Next is amber archon shards. “Effectiveness of health orbs” can be used to add 50-75 health to normal balls. If you use TF azure shards, you have 2 open slots letting you get 100-150 extra HP per ball.

Together a single health ball heals you 260. Now we went from needing to scorf down 10 balls a second to only 2. Of course we’re working with averages here. So you don’t need a jello shot IV to keep you alive. If you haven’t healed in 5 seconds and are about to die, so long as there’s a pile of health orbs to shoot you back to full you’re good to not heal for another 5 seconds.

Dagaths passive is apparently multiplicative with orb effectiveness. Turning this 260 HP into a whopping 1040. But I try not to rely on it, and I feel it doesn't show up on the UI to get an idea of just how often it's popping off.

There's also mending shot which adds an extra 55 HP per ball. But I never liked the flow of using it and with vacuum you'll end up sucking up most balls on accident.

That time between needing to heal is also slowed down by the fact that eximus drop 2-3 health orbs per kill. So just killing eximus can sometimes keep you at full HP constantly.