Warframe Arbitrations Guide

By: Geek

Arbitration Goons Discord: https://discord.gg/8Xr8bgqHyk

*These are all my personal opinions, by no means the be all end all. Run any build you like, this is simply meant to provide a good starting point for those looking to improve their arbi game*

Introduction

Welcome to the endgame organized farming of Arbitrations, our primary goal is to acquire lots of vitus essence and exchange it for loads of Kuva to feed our crippling addiction to purble cards. If you prefer DARK MODE, click HERE.

VIEW > SHOW OUTLINE (For easier side-bar navigation)

☆ Host Migration ☆

AI bug & Anchor

Unairu Focus School

Recommended Settings ☆

Pre-Buffing Before Mission

Primary: Kuva Sobek ☆

Primary: Kuva Ogris ☆

Primary: Afentis

Secondary: Akarius Prime

Spawn and Camp positions

Alator, Kadesh, Spear

Casta, Seimeni, Cinxia

Hydron, Helene, Odin

Hyf

Sechura, Tessera, Outer Terminus

Paimon, Larzac, Ose

Interception Arbitrations

The idea is to buff the hek out of each other, and kill all the enemies on spawn as fast as possible. I find it best to instaloot vitus during interception in order to avoid interrupting spawn points. For defense missions, loot near the ends of each wave. Focus on the vitus, ignore riven slivers and other drops, loot as quickly as possible and get back to the camp spot. Our main priority is the arbi drones, because they drop the vitus, because only 5 arbi drones can be spawned in at one given time. It all sounds harder than it really is, but you’ll learn the spawns as you go so don’t worry too much if you’re new, just shoot the red dots on minimap. There are some additional resources in the discord #General pins.

As of update 35: Whispers in the wall, Upon using an Archgun Deployer, players will now gain 2,000 Overguard (Prevents knockdowns). This can be easily depleted by allies getting electric proc’d from the rail on Cinxia/Casta/Seimeni tile for example, so you may have to reactivate it occasionally.

The effect from the archgun deployer has a 60s cooldown.
The Overguard gain is capped at 2,000, so re-deploying your Archgun after the cooldown resets will refresh your Overguard up to the 2,000 cap.

Be aware that past wave 80 or so, the 2000 overguard will vanish with 1 bullet, you’ll get 1 second of overguard gate, and then you'll be susceptible to knockdown again as well as potentially still taking damage.

☆ Host Migration ☆

🔻Do not press TAB or P to view kills and damage% during arbitrations, especially later on in the mission. Game client becomes clunky during longer missions and people will disconnect from the host. I just wouldn’t press tab/P at all for defense, and for interception you can kinda get away with it during wave changes where you're capturing points. Another bug, If you are playing windowed or have a multi monitor setup and your game pauses when you ALT TAB, then you will disconnect from the host if you do so for more than 7 seconds.

If the game puts you in your own instance the spawns are heavily reduced, and it's fairly easy to finish out.
If one or two players migrate away from your session the spawns don't reduce until the end of the wave change state for defense or new round of interception. With less buffs and higher level enemies on later waves, you'll have to sit up in your gamer chair, throw down all your specters and on-call crew with Kuva Zarr, and you could utilize Vazarin dash to help keep operative alive.
If the game host migrates you away from the group, if you're quick enough you can press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC and end the warframe process instead of pressing ALT+F4, then start up warframe and you should be able to reconnect to the group in more cases.

AI bug & Anchor

🔻AI bug is when the defense operative roaming freely in/near spawns often breaks them for 5~10 seconds, causing enemy ai to break for the rest of the mission and just stand there when they do finally spawn, leading to much less overall spawns and vitus. So until they fix it, anchoring is the solution.. Anchor is when the team goes into and stays in operator mode while triggering the start of the mission, the host should be the one to trigger the defense operative by going near him. After that you lead him to the camp spot with atomicycle or operator mode and then go back into frame. If you anchor via atomicycle this allows the team to freely go in and out of operator mode without breaking the anchor. But if the host did it via operator mode, then the host should not go in and out of operator mode for the rest of the mission. Occasionally he will follow someone other than the host, then that person will have to do it.

It helps to drop an On Call Crewmate at the start of the mission to handle the initial wave of enemies so he doesn't get shot right away breaking the anchor. Any aoe weapon works but Kuva Zarr is ideal.

(Crewmates do not utilize rivens in non railjack missions)

Other than the initial start of the mission, if the defense operative takes damage from any enemies, he will begin to follow the player+mode who killed whatever damaged him, whether that be a warframe with ogris, or an operator with an amp. Getting re anchored can be very annoying or impossible depending on the tileset. So you may need to just identify who he is following and have them be more careful when looting or have them loot in operator mode.

Unairu Focus School

🔻Unairu for the Cogron Tauron Strike which grants up to 5 armor motes that give 450 each to you and the team. You charge your operator ultimate by picking up a focus orb while having focus lenses of any tier on all of your weapons and frame, Including your archgun and Amp. 1 armor mote is consumed each time you take health damage, but not if you take overguard or shield damage. Uptime on these is good because we generally don’t take any damage. You may have to recast once or twice during an entire run. If you cannot be bothered with Unairu and lenses, drop your flex mod for Health Conversion which gives 3 armor motes that give 450 each. Even if it takes you a while to stack enough focus to cast Tauron Strike, you will have 266/350% of the multishot buff just from having base armor and primed flow starting the mission, so it’s still worth it just to have that flex mod slot.

The purpose is to max out Arcane Battery, giving us over 1,000 energy. Equilibrium will convert health pickups into energy, helping us stay at or above 90% energy pool for Primary Overcharge granting 350% multishot.

Recommended Settings ☆

🔻You can vote yes quickly between waves by spamming the Y key (default normally unless you bound something else to Y) and for controller it would be ▲. A good signal to start pressing that is right before the vote screen appears, the whole team is granted invulnerability and health turns gray.

You can make Kuva Ogris full auto with this setting, be careful though, you can incinerate your ammo very quickly. You only need to shoot each spawn 2-3 times as you’re rotating through.

Graphics Engine no longer matters for achieving maximum Eclipse percentage. Disable screen shake. Max FOV helps you see more at once, motion blur and depth of field can be annoying. Turning off bloom and elemental FX helps reduce strain on your GPU.

Visual effects intensity set to 10/200 and enable Reduce Teammate Visual Effects.

Enemy highlighting still works with effects intensity at 10/200, and is nice for helping to spot enemies that can start to blend with the terrain if they escape spawns.

Set both energy colors on Kuva Ogris to smoke palette black to effectively mute napalm’s visuals.

Warframes:

🔻Cyte makes a lot of previously unplayable tiles for double ogris DPS playable again. Depending on the tile, you can run 2 Cyte, 1 Cyte 1 Ogris or just 2 Ogris comps. It comes down to player skill level if you want to play Cyte on tiles where Ogris is already viable, but Cyte often yields better vitus.

Host DPS either:

Cyte+sobek+elec
Saryn+EM

Client DPS either:

Cyte+Boar+blast
Saryn+EM

Wisp+Roar
One of these supports:

Vauban+BB only if 2 cyte (w/ jade pre)
Volt+BB only if 2 cyte (w/ jade pre)
Volt+Disp if saryn (w/ jade pre)
Citrine if gas setup (w/ jade pre)

Cyte squads will always prefer to have prebuff or jade on squad for the stronger haste motes. If you are running 2 Ogris comp, prebuff is not needed, but nice to have for the stronger dispensary. Before you try to hop right in and attempt to shyte dps, you need to fully understand a few things:

Cyte is way more aim intensive, and requires CONSTANT firing uptime.
Sobek doesn’t have the leisurely lingering aoe that is nightwatch napalm to cover your mistakes.
You need to fully understand the spawn locations, and where to aim to hit them. Don’t try to first time a tileset on shyte, run it as an ogris dps a few times first to learn the spawns.
If you suck, the vitus for the run will suck. He only makes certain bad tiles good if you can properly take advantage of how he can reach those previously unreachable spawns.
Saryn needs to keep shooting, their nightwatch napalm provides invaluable crowd control and keeps enemies from swarming out of spawns or getting too close if you get overwhelmed. Don’t let them just afk because “shyte is killing fast.”

Cyte ☆

🔻Host Cyte runs Kuva Sobek

Cytes first ability gives infinite terrain punch through, the punch thru value listed in mod screen is for body punch through, 3.4m with this build which is sufficient. Cytes 3 makes you invisible and its duration is extended via weak point kills. Subsume over 4th. Run Unairu.

Nourish ☆ gives viral elemental damage as well as a roughly 4.5x multiplier to all energy sources. Flex mod here is Kavat’s grace or parkour.
Energized Munitions gives you 11.3 seconds of 75% ammo efficiency for full auto goodness. Can drop equilibrium to run both parkour and cast speed mods as long as there is a dispensary or bb user. If no volt present, drop primed ravage on sobek for prime charged shell.

On smaller tilesets where all spawns are within 93m, can drop Enemy Sense for additional flex mod.

CLIENT Cyte

🔻Sobek Acid Shells is currently bugged and does not trigger Cyte’s resupply damage instance if you are playing as a client, it works fine only if you are the host. So, in order to comfortably play as client Cyte you run Boar Incarnon and Thermal Sunder while using blast resupply. Generally the client cyte will be the one doing jade prebuff, so it’s a good opportunity to slot Enemy Radar instead of Power Donation if the tileset calls for it, or you and the other Cyte can slot something over Enemy Sense instead.

Thermal Sunder is used when playing as client cyte, alongside Boar incarnon. Drop flex mod for thermal transfer augment. Tap and hold cast to get blast buff.

If your PC can handle the insane FPS tanking from Primary Overcharge multishot amount as client, then run that instead of Bulwark and drop Crepuscular for Arcane Battery. Ideal riven stats for Boar are multishot, crit damage, damage, crit chance, 2p1n or 3p1n is fine. Status duration not applicable since even on Gas comp with citrine you still run blast as client. Any negative besides +recoil is fine.

Hopefully next code fix we get the Client Acid Shells fix, and we no longer have to use Boar.

Saryn Prime ☆

🔻Toxic lash go brrrrrrr

Toxic lash applies 195.6% of weapons total damage as toxin alongside all sources of damage (not combining) including nightwatch napalm's fire ticks. This triple dips bane/roar. Lash benefits from base damage, elemental damage, and eclipse as well. Venom dose will give the team 652% corrosive elemental damage and some nice status weighting. You can drop Constitution or Energy Conversion if you prefer more casting speed or enemy radar. Subsume over 4th and run Unairu focus school.

Energized Munitions gives you 14.1 seconds of 75% ammo efficiency for full auto goodness.

Wisp Prime ☆

🔻Throw afentis every 10~20 seconds at the camp location, but you can also help with kills via akarius if you’re playing with an inexperienced squad to reduce risk to defense operative. For interception missions, you should be placing a pair of health and haste motes at the camp spot and both of the main two capture points so that dps do not lose the buffs between waves. Wisp is also usually responsible for neutralizing the 3rd point for 2 cap interceptions. Do not place shock motes, they only contribute to causing AI bug to occur. You can use wisp’s 2nd ability to teleport back to spawn after looting if you dropped it before going to collect. Double tapping it also makes you invulnerable for 3 seconds in panic situations.

The most important aspect is to upkeep nidus linked roar on both DPS players as much as possible. Wait for link, cast roar (if you don't hit both, you can recast at any point due to augment mod), throw afentis before going to loot at least 40m away, this breaks the link and nidus will recast his link 20s later. For interception it’s not as important for roar to be linked, due to instalooting. You can easily ensure you hit both DPS by observing the minimap or looking at their buff timers for the infinity symbol which means they are standing within motes. Subsume over 4th.

Roar subsume ☆ will provide 317% multiplicative damage buff (similar to bane mods) for 49 seconds, to allies within 35m and persists. Without Molt Efficiency its duration is 38 seconds.

Nidus specter is a hard requirement for wisp role

Wait for jade 150% str buff if jade in squad or prebuffing. Use nidus specter and wait for link.
Go into operator and void sling twice to trigger Madurai 40% str for 20 seconds.

(if using molt vigor, cast contamination wave (2) to trigger it for next cast)

Ensure you've picked up an energy orb to proc energy conversion 50% str on next cast.
Ensure you have zenurik's hardened wellspring 20% str buff, if an ally is running that.
Place health mote first to trigger bellicose. Archon intensify grants 30% str for 10 seconds.
Pick up another energy orb and recast contamination wave if using vigor.

(should be energy orbs around from ally dispensary and Sahasa kubrows)

(use a specter or on-call crew to trigger Archon Intensify again on demand if too slow)

Place haste mote. Done correctly it should be 213 with this build. 190 without shards.

*You can only have 6 motes down at a given time. If you were to place a 7th mote, it would delete the oldest one. You don't need to buff all of your motes, just the initial health and haste mote. If allies lose the buffed mote at any point during the run, they can return to buffed mote location:

For Mirror Defense tilesets specifically, you will want to place a pair of fully prebuffed motes at both of the camp locations at either end of the map. That way, even if DPS players lose their mote buffs at any point, they won't have to run back to the prebuffed mote set to get max firerate.

Vauban Prime ☆

🔻Better than Volt specifically for 2 Cyte comps

For non 2 cyte comps, you’ll want to have volt with dispensary in the squad instead. Vaubro’s 2nd ability can put down vector pads in up to 4 separate locations at a time. Upon stepping on the vector pad, allies receive a 108 second buff that provides roughly 2x speed and damage. The damage is multiplicative instead of additive. Invert ability so pad is tap to cast. Subsume over anything but your 2.

When allies step on the vector pad, it launches them in the direction it was placed, so be mindful when placing these. Don’t place too close to the camp spot or in high traffic areas. Place 1 pad in useful spots that the launch can be taken advantage of, or just place very close to a wall out of the way.

Bright Bonnet ☆ (BB) gives strength and energy. You shoot shrooms with Arbucep archgun to double the strength from 100 to 200%. Do your best to upkeep 2 shrooms at all times for squad energy, place them close to the DPS, but not right on top of them to avoid accidental bunny hopping.

*Arcane Concentration does not work for the vector pads, the ability duration does not snapshot. Neither does the ability strength, so when allies trigger a pad while you do not have nidus tether, their buff will be weaker.

Volt Prime

🔻Volt’s 2 increases ally movement speed to make collecting vitus essence faster so they can get back to covering spawns faster. It is re-castable at any point, lasts 34.8 seconds with Molt Eff, has a 20m radius, persists, and provides a 3.25x speed multiplier. Shock trooper provides 767% electric for the team that does not combine with other elements, it lasts 104 seconds and has a 12m radius. Volt’s electric shield can be used to grant further electric damage to shots fired through it as well as doubling critical damage. Not needed, but it can be used strategically to defend the operative in certain scenarios. Subsume over 4th and run Vazarin.

Dispensary ☆ when the player is below 70% energy/health or 70% ammo on primary or secondary (reserves). Lasts 33 seconds with 52.52% chance of triple drop. Only used when you have Ogris DPS in the squad.
Bright Bonnet (BB) gives strength and energy, only used for 2 cyte comps. You shoot shrooms with Arbucep archgun to double the strength from 100 to 200%. Do your best to upkeep 2 shrooms at all times for squad energy, place them close to the DPS, but not right on top of them to avoid accidental bunny hopping.

Dispensary User Note

You should always be casting buffs/dispensary while nidus specter linked to increase the amount of drops per pulse. Nidus specter link lasts 60 seconds and he will recast 20 seconds after it breaks or expires. To manage this easily, cast dispensary while linked, then run/jump more than 40m away to collect vitus so that it breaks the tether. By the time he links you again it will be just in time for another dispensary with zero down time. This will make the dps very happy :)

*Dispensary users should be running vazarin to protect the defense operative if needed*

Citrine

🔻Alternative to volt, for gas comp

Citrine is used for her 3, which gives 512% status duration (based on ability duration) to allies while they're standing within its radius. This combined with modded status duration on Cyte’s sobek brings the gas cloud durations to roughly 36 seconds, and those gas clouds will linger at the death location of each target. Subsume over 4th.

Bright Bonnet ☆ Bright Bonnet ☆ (BB) gives strength and energy. You shoot shrooms with Arbucep archgun to double the strength from 100 to 200%. Do your best to upkeep 2 shrooms at all times for squad energy, place them close to the DPS, but not right on top of them to avoid accidental bunny hopping. Use this for 2 cyte gas comps.
Dispensary when the player is below 70% energy/health or 70% ammo on primary or secondary (reserves). Lasts 33 seconds with 48.9% chance of triple drop. You’d only take this if you had an ogris dps, and in most cases, based on tile, squad will prefer volt+disp with jade pre instead of citrine+disp. But occasionally a 1 cyte squad may call for citrine+disp.

Citrine is a low energy pool frame, but you can cast BB straight into Prismatic Gem (3) if you were at full energy. Which you should be, her ability durations are quite long. Zenurik focus school tauron strike spectral pages can be used to give a larger effective energy pool and increased duration. Citrine’s 3 gives assists and allows you to gain focus energy if you have lenses on everything.

Pre-Buffing Before Mission

Jade

🔻Place Zenurik’s hardened wellspring, drop a shroom and shoot it with Arbucep archgun to double the strength of 100% to 200% from BB. Finally, cast your 2 with the default “Power of the Seven” pictured below. Wait for wisp to finish motes, then leave and rejoin on your primary role. Her 2nd ability gives strength to allies within affinity range up to 150% strength maximum. Subsume over 4th.

Bright Bonnet ☆ (BB) subsume gives strength and energy.

*For both pre-buffing loadouts it's a good idea to run Sahasa Kubrow with its Dig augment, in order to make proccing Energy Conversion easier for wisp.

Nidus Prime

🔻This requires communicating with your team before the mission, but you can go in with nidus initially and give a stronger nidus tether to your wisp for strength snapshotting. You cannot rejoin the mission if it goes past defense wave 3, so make sure the team doesn’t start nuking the map yet. Nidus pre-buffing is only really necessary when people don’t have full builds or if attempting to go past 102w, don’t feel like you have to do this for every mission. Subsume Empower over 4th ability.

Join as Nidus and go get a couple stacks.
Cast Empower. Throw down protea specter or find an energy orb for Energy Conversion.
Double sling to proc Madurai 40% and cast operator ability to proc Vigor 45%.
Alt fire with Grimoir on a cluster of enemies for 60%.
Wait for Jade buff, then use tether on wisp.
They place their motes, using their own Madurai/Vigor/Energy Conversion etc.
Leave the mission, swap loadout to your actual role, rejoin the mission before wave 3.

Make sure Wisp knows NOT to have their own nidus specter summoned, their specter's tether will cancel yours. Also worth mentioning that you would not benefit from a nidus specter yourself, it would remove your specter’s tether once you cast tether, plus it could cancel your tether early as well.

AURA CHOICE

🔻Enemy Radar helping with ai pathing is a MYTH, in defense missions the operative is marked as a priority target and mobs will sprint towards him. In interception the enemies will gravitate towards captured points or allies whichever is closer. The spawn engine only relies on squad members' line of sight (or FOV, as it will attempt to spawn enemies outside of your rendered view) with bias towards the host. So the only benefit to running enemy radar is easier spotting of mobs via the minimap.

Majority of the tiles only require the innate 30m radar to provide full coverage with Primed Animal Instinct to see all of the spawns. Infested ship ”F1” requires 1 enemy radar if you do want to see all the spawns.

Power Donation makes you lose 30% strength and gives +30% to allies. If all 4 squad members have this equipped, everyone will receive 90% strength and end up with +60% because each person had -30. Power Donation also applies to allied specters, with 4 power donation(+120%) the nidus specter’s tether gives 1.58x strength multiplier instead of base 1.28x
Growing power auras do stack and are easy to proc, but do NOT affect specters.

Weapons

Primary: Kuva Sobek ☆

🔻Use this for Host Cyte

Kuva Sobek with cold valence element to prevent overflow issues causing you to deal 0 damage to drones when doubling up on elemental buffs. Cytes resupply set to electric for example will force proc electric regardless of which valence element you choose. This force proc is applied to every pellet that makes contact with an enemy, as well as the acid shells explosions themselves, which is how the damage can self propagate and clear whole spawns.

For 2p1n Rivens Multishot and Firerate is the most comfortable. For 3p1n rivens, third stat being damage, crit damage, and electric are all good as well. Status duration is niche, but good for gas comp.
Ideal negatives are reload speed and ammo max. You cannot roll zoom on shotguns. Status chance is fine as well, with Resupply’s forced status.
For Gas comp you can drop Primed Ravage for Hunter Track or Lingering Torment.

Vicious Spread can be used to increase shot coverage area. Ranks 0-2 do basically nothing, Rank 3 is conservative and Rank 5 is all out. Adjust to taste.

The above example is using 124ms 2p1n riven, galv stacked, primary overcharge 350ms @ 50m distance. The orange dot is an arbi drone, the center circle is spread with no Vicious.

originalgeektaken.github.io/Vicious.spread.sobek

Primary: Kuva Ogris ☆

🔻Non Cyte DPS

The napalm ticks are one of the main things that kill the arbitration drones after the initial impact breaks their shield, instantly, before they can shield gate. The mobs will stack many heat status procs but the drones will not. Nightwatch napalm stays on the ground for 6 seconds and is not affected by status duration.

Use cold valence on Ogris since Saryn always runs ‘modded toxin’ and it’ll give her some viral weighting. The valence percentage amount does not matter, 25% would be just fine. But if you can, you might as well go for 60% to maximise damage output.

3p1n rivens Ogris rivens used for QOL rather than damage. Desired stats are Multishot, Toxin Magazine Capacity, Projectile Flight Speed, Reload Speed and -Recoil in that order. You need at least +28.33% mag to reach 6 magazine. If you just want an all around good riven then go for ms,mag,pfs.
Ideal negative is -Zoom. -Crit chance/damage, -Status chance/damage are acceptable as well.

If you don’t have a riven, slot Vigilante Armaments.
Primary Overcharge gives 35% of max energy as long as you are at or above 90% energy, to a maximum of 350% multishot with 1000+ energy. We accomplish this with Unairu & Arcane Battery, and maintain it with Equilibrium.
Ammo Drum increases your ammo pool, but also makes it so you get 2 ammo from dispensary. You can replace this for Infected Clip if you don’t have a toxin riven or want the extra damage. You will be fine without Ammo Drum so long as the Afentis thrower isn’t eeping.
Adhesive Blast, specifically rank 2, makes it so that 50% of your projectiles will explode on impact like normal, and the other 50% will land and explode after 5 seconds. This increases the effective coverage time of Nightwatch Napalm from 6 to 11 seconds. However, it reduces your initial shot coverage, so Energized Munitions and rank 6 Heavy Caliber is strongly recommended to compensate.

Heavy caliber r6 because the extra spread is good for coverage, if you're confident on nailing all the spawns or don't like the spread then Amalgam Serration's 25% sprint speed helps collect vitus essence that much faster. I’m recommending r6 due to the variance in coverage area with the addition of Adhesive Blast. You can run a higher/lower ranked heavy caliber based on how much spread you prefer. Big circle below is r10, then the smaller inner circles are r4, r5 and r6 respectively.

Primary: Afentis

🔻Support(s) throw it down shortly after the start of every wave or every time you cast roar. Spear lasts for 10 seconds, allies that kill 1 enemy while in the spear's aura receive 100% ammo pool, 50% reload, 20% firerate, and -50% recoil for 40 seconds. The only mods that matter for afentis are reload speed and firerate. You do not need a riven or any mods on this for that matter. Firestorm does not affect buff radius. Amalgam Serration is nice for the movement speed. Fractalized Reset isn’t required but if you already have it, it's nice as well. Critical Delay only there to give enough crit for Tenacious Bond on Sahasa with Hunter Synergy.

Secondary: Akarius Prime

🔻General use secondary for all roles

Cyte can struggle with very close spawns, where Ogris users don't have this issue. Akarius covers that gap. Synth Deconstruct on your companion will grant pocket reload, letting you return to your primary immediately without worrying about finishing the reload. The Synth set also helps generate extra health orbs, which convert to energy via Equilibrium.

*For support, secondary can be anything you want or nothing at all. It’s a nice to have, mainly in the event that DPS gets eepy or you host a migrate.

Melee: Praedos

🔻With movement evolutions. Max cap heavy wind up speed for those occasions where you accidentally go to shoot with melee still out. Jugulus mod set (2/3) creates a pillar that stuns enemies within 6m when using slam attack to get around faster. Nothin too special, just kinda nice AOE stun if you land in a pile of mobs. The number of tendrils scales with combo multiplier, with the 5th evolution you will have 12x combo the entire run unless there’s a large amount of downtime. You can slot Primary and Secondary Dexterity on your gear wheel archgun for an additional 15s combo duration.

Max attack speed just allows for faster recovery from slam attack animation.

**LESS TIME SPENT COLLECTING = HIGHER KPM = MORE VITUS**

Companions

Chesa Kubrow’s Retrieve mod falls under the same category as Nekros desecrate, and does not affect the arbitration drones.

*Reinforced bond is still bugged for clients, you will not get shields from reloading, but you can use shield pads on gear wheel to grant your companion enough overshields*

Sahasa Kubrow ☆

🔻Dig Dog Dug, best buddy for supports

Roughly every 20 seconds, Dig will give 2 drops with 70% chance at a 3rd drop of ammo/energy. It will not dig if the player is attacking, and checks every 3 seconds. It also will not recast in the same spot, unless you move a few meters to reset it. While it’s very inconsistent and cannot replace Dispensary, it can offer some additional ammo, and make proccing energy conversion easier for Wisp with no Dispensary on 2 cyte comps.

Adarza Kavat

🔻Shytie Car

Adarza kavat provides a FLAT 60% critical chance to all allies within 25m for 13 seconds then goes on cooldown for 20 seconds. The additional FLAT crit chance is mainly beneficial when running Shyte. The synth mod is mainly used for pocket reloading the akarius when you (rarely) have to pull it out to clear super close panic spawns, so that you can swap back to sobek immediately without having to worry about finishing the reload for next time. It can also help spawn some extra health orbs which turn into extra energy with equilibrium.

Sly Vulpaphyla

🔻Skill Issue kavat

Since reinforced bond is bugged for clients, if you can’t be bothered to use a shield pad here and there, this can be your no thoughts empty head solution. Vulpahyla will have over 1200 shields consistently without needing to pad, reaches breakpoint for critical chance for tenacious bond, and will provide you a get out of jail free card if you manage to die. It will sacrifice itself to heal you and give you 1 second of invulnerability. Any Vulpaphyla works, but Survival Instinct from Sly is nice small QOL if you have it.

*Claws build the same as Adarza.

Gear Items

🔻Everybody should obviously have Resource booster if you’re gonna be farmin any kind of resource. Next is Resource Drop Chance Booster, as long as one person in the squad has this, it should be fine. But, it’s best if the host has it just to be sure it gets applied. 30 day Boosters can be purchased from the Market for 200 platinum. Finally, there is Resource Drop Chance Blessing, which MR30+ players can bestow at relays once per 24 hours. Blessings last 3 hours. You have to leave the relay, or navigate to another relay after receiving the blessing in order for it to apply. If the whole squad doesn’t have bless, It is best if at least both of the DPS players have Drop Chance Blessing. You preferably do NOT want Mod Drop Chance Booster in the squad, due to it making vitus despawn faster.

Large squad ammo restores pulse every 7.5 seconds for a total of 4 times, totalling 30 seconds. Will restore 3 ammo for Kuva Ogris per pulse. You can purchase the 100x crafting blueprint from clan dojo, but don’t forget to slap them on your gearwheel.
Large squad shield restores pulse every 7.5 seconds for a total of 4 times, totalling 30 seconds. Will grant 300 shields/overshields to allies, including companions. You need to use these to trigger reinforced bond as a client. For host, the bond mod works fine.
Atomicycle Summon for holding open doors in order to allow for easier spawn access or to prevent enemies from getting stuck. Also sometimes used for anchoring.
Med Tower air support from Mantis landing craft, similar to Sentry Gun (but taller), used as an elevated platform to shoot from. Lasts 20 minutes and cannot be destroyed. These can be harder to place, as they don’t always land where you try to place them. Landing craft air supports have a 10 minute cooldown (5 minutes with Engineering Intrinsics rank 2).
Railjack on-call crew can help if you start to get overwhelmed. Zarr is the go to for OCC due to AI only having to reload one shell for full 5 magazine and good AOE damage. (You should be checking Ticker in Fortuna’s shop after each daily reset looking for elite crewmembers with 0 points in pilot and gunnery that have the +150% Crit chance for Rifles. These are sought after for profit taker as well, and it can take a very long time to encounter such a crewmate as only 2 or 3 appear randomly each day.)

Warframe Specters ☆

🔻Warframe specters and their weapons DO NOT copy the installed mods or appearances (On-call crew does copy weapon’s mods, but not rivens). Star level affects specter spawn level, but that's not important. Just use 1 star for Nidus because you get 10 specters per craft, and 5 per craft on 2 stars. The blueprints can be farmed quickly via low level rescue missions, I recommend Nuovo on Ceres.

Nidus specter ☆ will tether to you granting 1.28x strength bonus frequently. Nidus passive gives him 15% strength and with 4 power donations his tether becomes 1.58x. Generally, all four players will run nidus specter.
Protea specter casts dispensary when the player is below 70% energy/health or 70% ammo on primary or secondary (reserves). Lasts 25 seconds with a cooldown of 40 seconds after casting. With 4 power donations her base 25% at extra ammo drop will become 55% chance at 2 ammo drops. Have the Protea hold position near the camp location, so they don’t follow you and drop dispensary away from the team.
Dante Specter, NEVER use these during defense missions. Defense operative cannot be vazarin dashed when he has overguard for some reason. This can lead to failed runs.

It is important that you equip “innate” battery style primary and secondary weapons when building your warframe specters loadout. Kitguns with pax charge do NOT count, specters do not copy mods or arcanes. Grimoire does work for this but it makes a lot of visual effects and noise that people dislike. Plinx blueprint can be bought from the market for 20k credits. Giving specters “innate” battery weapons prevents them from stealing your ammo drops as well as the constant reload sound bug when specter is out of ammo and you’re full. Ammo drops are player independent, but specters cause you to pickup even when full, deleting ammo. Give them a short range melee such as Vastilok or Furax so they shoot instead of trying to melee. Aside from these factors it doesn’t much matter what you put on them for arbi, they aren’t doing much killing. Recommended specter weapons in order of which is best fit for arbi:

Primary: Shedu, Bubonico, Nataruk, Basmu, Fulmin, Flux Rifle (NOT tenet)
Secondary: Tenet Cycron, Cycron, Tenet Plinx, Plinx
Melee: Vastilok, Furax, Ankyros, Obex, Kogake, Tekko, Hirudo

Keep in mind when specters are summoned they copy your currently equipped warframes level, so if you just forma'd your warframe, the specter will be level 0 as well, and tether will be minimum rank only giving 1.1x multiplier at base. you should summon another one once your frame reaches 30.

Old gen console players (ps4) can crash if you throw your specters straight downwards, so throw them straight up in the air if you have an old gen player on your squad.

Arbitration Tilesets

🔻These are my personal opinions, based on NOT JUST average vitus/minute, but number of spawns, spawn frequency, ease of looting, accessibility and dark sector resource drop chance bonus. F-Tier maps are not listed (ie NON defense/interception maps), because they are abysmal vitus/run, mostly due to bad spawns, or large tilesets that are way too spread out to be efficient on.

No matter the tileset, defense or interception arbitrations are much better kuva/hr than Kuva survival on Taveuni which caps out at about 70k/hr, even a bad arbi map with randos can net you 300 vitus essence in an hour or 120k Kuva.

*When organizing a squad make sure to set the party to friends only, so that if someone disconnects from the group, a rando doesn't pop in. Any squad member can then re-invite and they should be able to reconnect as long as it's before wave 3, if they get an error message have everybody reset. (invite only mode only allows host to send invites)

Efficient Movement

🔻Here is an example of spawn killing and using bullet jump, rolls and ground slams to go fast. After launching yourself into the atmosphere you can aim down sights with right click to slow down slightly while you aim where you’d like to land with ground slam.

Operative tends to follow a random player and can be 1 shot easily past 90w. So to avoid this, Collect vitus near the end of the waves and try to maintain high KPM and spawn kill enemies.

Anchoring fixes this issue, click to read more on that.

Spawn and Camp positions

🔻To see more video examples of where to aim for spawns check #general in the discord and look at pinned messages. If you’re still confused: shoot the red dots on minimap.

Red star indicates enemy spawn points

Blue circle indicates which interception capture points to utilize for 2 cap.

Green circle indicates atomicycle or ancient healer locations that can be used to hold doors open to either make spawns more accessible or to keep enemies from getting stuck.

Alator, Kadesh, Spear

🔻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AxLdauS7JY

More spawns than Cinxia, but majority of them are only reachable via Cyte, supporting dps Saryn will have to be more active and move around to help cover spawns.
Camp location can be either C or D point, I recommend D point.
If you are worried about maintaining winning percentage in Alator, you can have supports neutralize multiple times, or 3cap just to be safe..
Kadesh and Spear are the defense variants of this tile, Kadesh is infested and more manageable. Spear is grineer and they can overwhelm you very quickly, and defense operative is highly likely to die.

*Spear and Kadesh can roll 2 different starting rooms, look for this specific one so that you do not get the random spawn 130m away from the camp area. Alator does not have this issue.*

Casta, Seimeni, Cinxia

🔻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOCBQu6UPQU

Plenty of spawn locations, all easily accessible from camp spot. Do not bother with Shyte here.
There is a 50/50 chance the tile has rain each time you start the mission.

Hydron, Helene, Odin

🔻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL0in8XSot4

Very bottom spawn and top left spawn are the only ones that are not able to be cleared easily from the camp spot and may require you to move a bit or go loot to clear them faster.
Shyte meta is probably the easiest on this tileset, and makes it much more playable. All of the spawns are on roughly the same level/plane and are easy to get the hang of.

Hyf

🔻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HsabIutq14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGZ3l39V16U

When running with shyte, Supporting ogris dps needs to keep good uptime on napalm for the spawns they can reach to prevent getting easily overrun.
For this tile I strongly recommend everyone place down atomicycles and specters to keep the doors open to allow for better accessibility and prevent enemies getting stuck.
Do not place atomicycle or specter at the 2nd floor middle doorway, if it dies/expires it will cause a hard crash and clients will disconnect from the host.
Be careful of the right side spawns, it's a short run for them to get to the operative.

Sechura, Tessera, Outer Terminus

🔻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj_VKXuPc6o

Be careful when looting inside the top area spawns, if the operative follows you in there, he's quite vulnerable in tight quarters and active spawns.
The majority of spawns accessible, bottom right spawn occasionally require somebody to go over there and clear it. Shyte comp works nicely here, but is not as easy as Hydron/Helene.
A corpus ship flies by every other 5th wave and wastes about 30 seconds.

Look for the below tile out of the 3 possible for this node:

Paimon, Larzac, Ose

🔻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErfZb69yjhQ

Spawns are very spread out but still accessible for the most part.
A corpus ship flies by every other 5th wave and wastes about 30 seconds.
Do your best to not neglect the left spawn with the ice tunnel. Enemies coming out of here get a nice line of sight on the camp spot and can easily 1 shot the defense operative.

Interception Arbitrations

🔻Capture 2 of the easily maintainable points and half capture a 3rd point up to about 40% and let the enemies re-capture it to allow you to stay 2-3% ahead of the enemies. Points capture faster with 2 people, so when each round starts send 2 players to each of the 2 full capture points. The sooner the 2 points are captured the sooner enemies will spawn in. Designate a person on the team to manage the half capping of the 3rd point, I recommend they do it immediately after the primary 2 points are captured while the other 3 players get to camp spot. Less likely to forget if you just do it right away every round. If you notice the designated person didn’t do this either say something to remind them or do it yourself if someone isn’t already doing it.

Defense Arbitrations

Enemy level scales exponentially until wave 96, where enemies are level 1628.

At wave 96 and up enemies scale linearly, increasing in level by 18 per wave. Data sheet.

Miscellaneous

Loot Despawn Timer

🔻Depending on your squads KPM and various other factors like Mod Drop Chance Booster on top of drop chance boosters and blessing on the team you may want to increase the frequency at which you collect drops. From what I could find, the hard cap is 50, the 51st deleting the 1st and so on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/2r5x0f/resource_drop_limit/

https://forums.warframe.com/topic/164093-update-1170-1171/

Since the squad’s KPM is so high, the 5 minute despawn timer on Vitus essence doesn’t even matter at this point, as it can easily be removed when the 50 total drop capacity rounds over. Typically you’d see the icon blinking on screen to indicate it’s about to despawn, but when it gets removed earlier like this there is no visual indicator. If you start to notice vitus despawning, increase the frequency at which you collect. This can happen on a few of the defense tiles, namely Akkad and Kala-Azar.

Holding Missions

Way #1 is to have a friend in the party and queue up the arbi mission, best to do it relay so u can get blessings while you hold. Make sure the friend knows not to vote to accept the mission so it does not start. If they leave the party that also removes the mission queue. It is possible to have a 3rd person join and stay so the 2nd person can leave if they have to. This is the best way to hold the mission and can be done as long as needed. Set party to friends only.

*Also worth noting, if you change loadouts while in queue, you lose the 300% arbi buff if you had it say on saryn+300 and you swapped to volt to link a build and swapped back to Saryn. If you stay on the same loadout you get to keep the 300% buff.

Way #2 is to change your region to one located geographically far away from your position, and to set the minimum squad ping requirement to 100. This method kind of sucks because you can still get random people joining you because you have to set the party to public in order to pause the mission queue. I think this is due to other people attempting the same thing as you at the same time. You cannot leave the navigation menu or it cancels the queue.

Using way #2 it is best to organize the squad via a discord thread and ensure correct roles and loadouts ahead of time before inviting anyone, including who is running enemy radar (if needed based on tileset). Once everyone is ready to begin, invite one of them only, once they join the 20 second countdown will begin, you need to wait till the mission starts to send the invite to the other 2 players to avoid it canceling the mission. Make sure the squad knows NOT to use /join or to join from the friends list as it can cancel the mission.

*Players that have already completed the arbitration(or have it marked as completed for going past wave 3 on defense, or from failing) can still join another squad for the same one, they just cannot see it or queue the mission for the squad. Another player can join temporarily just to queue a mission if needed.

Double Dipping (dd)

🔻(Discovered by: MeisterKleister)

Doing this lets you get more out of a good defense tileset without having to risk going past 102w with defense operative. This can be good just in case the next arbi ends up not being a good tileset. For an Interception; this is not necessary due to the much slower enemy level scaling.

Form a group and then go to relay for blessing.
Navigate to another relay.
Start arbi mission from the new relay.
Extract 5-10 minutes before the hour changes the arbitration alert.
While inside relay and you will be able to do the arbi again for a full 102w.

**If you exit the relay after extracting from the first run, it will remove the arbi from navigation.**

This works out well for most defense tilesets, except for the Ice planet tileset which has 3 possible spawns, it's not worth trying to double dip unless all 4 players are trackin to keep pm's open for the 3 other members to be able to easily invite them as all 4 players attempt to find the good ice planet tile, then once someone finds it they send invites to the other 3. Don’t forget to set the party to “Friends only” or “Invite Only” to avoid randoms. Most prefer not to bother double dipping for Ice planet tile due to not getting the right tile the 2nd time around or if one of the players that gets it could potentially prove to have poor connection as a host.

Steps 1-3 can be employed as a failsafe for all missions. In the event someone DCs early on or if someone has to leave, you’ll be able to do the arbi again.

🔻MadLad @UMBRAL_MASH#8049🔻