Warframe Arbitrations Guide

By: Geek, Diza

Arbitration Goons Discord: https://discord.gg/Arbitrations

*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 endgame Arbitration farming. The goal is simple; stack Vitus Essence and turn it into Kuva for purple cards. Arbitrations unlock after Pluto and the Eris Junction “Equip a Focus Lens” task, and rotate every hour. We’re mainly looking for Interception, Defense, and Mirror Defense because the tiles are smaller and spawns are better. Vitus comes from Arbitration Shield Drones, and only five can be alive at a time, so they’re always the priority. 25 Vitus = 10,000 Kuva from the Arbiters of Hexis in relay, and you can realistically expect 200k+ Kuva an hour depending on the mission. Vendor also sells galvanized mods and other stuff if you don’t care about Riven rolling.

The gameplay is just maintaining buff uptime and killing everything as fast as possible. Instaloot Vitus on Interception so you don’t delay spawns. For defense missions, loot whenever but be sure to maintain buffs. Only loot Vitus as quickly as possible and get back to the camp spot. 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.

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Key Info

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. 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 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.
• 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.

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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. Generally you have around 20-30 seconds to loot so keep that in mind. 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 Munio, Akkad and Kala-Azar. Reddit post. Forum post.

• Large squad energy restores pulse every 7.5 seconds for a total of 4 times, totalling 30 seconds. Will restore 100 energy per pulse. You can purchase the 100x crafting blueprint from clan dojo, but don’t forget to slap them on your gearwheel. This is great if you drop below 90% of energy on cyte.
• 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.)

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.

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. Make sure your warframe is level 30 when you start the run.

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.

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AI bug & Anchor

🔻AI bug is caused by the defense operative roaming freely near spawns. This 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 triggering the start of the mission with an atomicycle. Make sure the person anchoring is closest to the operative. After that you drive to the camp spot and park there.

You can 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 who killed whatever damaged him. You can reanchor by making the person who the operative is following use atomicycle.

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Pre Buffing Before Mission ☆

Pre buffed motes are not optional for Cyte comp, the fire rate is too valuable. Ensure the squad knows what to do, because you need to complete pre buff and rejoin on your role BEFORE the 3 minute mark on mission timer, as that is when missions auto start.

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.

*Umbral vitality and fiber can be any rank. Primed continuity can be swapped to coaction drift if you are fine with lower duration.

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Nidus Prime

🔻As of Jade Update 43: Jade Shadows: Constellations, stack cost from Nidus link has been removed which allows him to be used easily as a prebuffer to reach over 700% haste motes. Nidus prebuff is generally done by client cyte.

1. Join as Nidus.
2. Cast Brightbonnet and use Arbucep to buff it to 200%
3. Wait for Jade 150% power of seven
4. Double sling to proc Madurai 40% and cast operator ability to proc Vigor 45%
5. Link to the Wisp
6. Wisp places their motes
7. Leave the mission, swap loadout to your actual role and rejoin

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.

*Umbral fiber and vitality can be any rank. They are only used to buff Umbral Intensify

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Warframes

🔻Cyte has fully replaced Ogris meta in most cases. Off Meta section houses Saryn and Ogris now. Cyte meta will always yield more vitus per minute than Ogris, but it can still be utilized for certain tilesets where the spawns are reachable and napalm makes it a more chill experience. Those tilesets include:

• Casta, Seimeni, Cinxia, Ose, Larzac, Paimon, Sechura, Tessera, Outer Terminus

*Cyte is often referred to as “client” in #arbi-lfg. Generally client means any player other than the host, but in arbitrations it is almost always the non-host Cyte due to client cyte often having performance issues.

1. DPS #1:

1. Cyte+Shock
2. Saryn+EM (old meta)

2. DPS #2:

1. Cyte+Shock/Smite/Thermal/EM
2. Saryn+EM (old meta)

3. Wisp+Roar (Thermal if w/ Rhino)
4. One of these supports (w/ jade pre):

1. Vauban+BB only if 2 Cyte
2. Rhino+BB only if 2 Cyte & large interception tile
3. Volt+Disp if Saryn (Saryn needs the ammo+reload)

1. ^If double Saryn, jade pre motes can be too much firerate for Ogris

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Cyte ☆

🔻Cytes first ability gives infinite terrain punch through (Fully intended), 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.

• Shock ☆ subsume gives you electric damage buff, 5m radius so basically just for self. Both Cytes can run this to ensure they have good uptime. Better than Smite due to the instant AoE proc from electric being relevant. Use this with Sobek.
• Thermal Sunder Tap+hold drops lingering blast buff zone. Requires thermal transfer augment. Wisp will have this if running with Rhino support in most cases. Use this with Boar. Do not use nidus specter when using this.
• Energized Munitions gives you 75% ammo efficiency for full auto goodness. No augment required, extra flex slot.
• Wrathful Advance and infested mobility are both parkour subsumes. You can use Wrathful to reset double jump and infested mobility for extra parkour velocity.

Running 175% efficiency from arcane sculptor allows you to self sustain over 90% energy for Primary Overcharge without having Nourish on the squad. Natural Talent and Lightning Dash can be replaced with Blind Rage and Umbral Intensify if you need more damage. On smaller tilesets or when wisp is on enemy radar, you can drop Enemy Sense for coaction drift for 6% higher haste motes.

Unairu Focus School 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. Use archgun deployer at start of run to get overguard. If you don't have Unairu, you can drop your flex mod for Health Conversion to max out overcharge. You will be at 266/350% of the multishot buff just from primed flow at the start of 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. While at or above 90% energy pool, Primary Overcharge grants 350% multishot.

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Wisp Prime ☆

🔻Throw Afentis Prime  every 10~20 seconds at the camp location. 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. Use this actively to prevent blocking spawns.

The most important aspect is to upkeep nidus linked roar on both DPS players as much as possible. Wait for link, cast roar, throw Afentis and go loot. For interception it’s not as important for roar to be linked due to instalooting and slower enemy scaling. Subsume over 4th.

• Roar subsume ☆ will provide a multiplicative damage buff to allies. 
• Thermal Sunder [DO NOT CAST THIS WITH NIDUS LINK] Sunder will cause lag if buff is over 1500%] Tap+hold drops lingering blast buff zone. Requires thermal transfer augment. Only used on larger interception tilesets (not Cinxia) with Rhino as second support.  (this is not very popular anymore)

This build reaches 762% motes with optimal prebuff (768% if host is on coaction drift too). With power donation motes are 758%. Alone in simulacrum this build reaches 111% without Nidus Specter.

* USE POWER DONATION AS AURA IF YOU ARE NOT USING NIDUS PREBUFF. With Nidus Prebuff enemy radar gives higher motes!
*Augur reach is flexible for constitution or Amar’s Hatred

Nidus specter is a hard requirement for wisp

1. Place a weak health mote right away to max out arcane bellicose for nidus.
2. Wait for jade 150% str buff, 200% Brighbonnet and nidus link from nidus prebuff. Do not use nidus specter before placing motes if you have a nidus prebuff.
3. Go into operator and void sling twice to trigger Madurai 40% str for 20 seconds.
4. Use contamination wave to proc molt vigor.
5. Place health mote first to trigger Archon Intensify. Archon Intensify grants 30% str for 10 seconds.
6. Use contamination wave again to proc molt vigor, then place haste mote.
7. Place nidus specter.

*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.

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Vauban Prime ☆

🔻Vauban is responsible for jade prebuffing so you need both frames. He is the highest investment but is also in highest demand. 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 multiplicative buff to speed and damage. 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 a pad in a way where stepping on it launches you against a wall to prevent dps players from getting launched too far. Use madurai for stronger buffs and cast speed.

• 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.

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Weapons

Kuva Sobek ☆

🔻Kuva Sobek with magnetic 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. Magazine capacity can be nice especially for client with delayed resupply issue.
• 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. This is worth trying for yourself again, especially if you only tried it prior to Primary Overcharge. Adjust mod rank to taste.

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

Vicious Spread visualizer tool

*It is worth noting, Regular Sobek is better than Kuva Sobek if you have a decent riven and good buffs.

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Boar Prime ☆

🔻Some people prefer Boar Prime over Sobek for a higher spread, multishot and fire rate. Hitting enemies will be much easier but you will not have any AOE, so clearing huge groups is harder than with sobek.

• Evolutions: Reified Bane, Ready Retaliation, Critical Parallel

• Riven: Aim for a 3p1n riven with MS CD DMG FR CC with a harmless negative, like -ammo max or -reload speed. MS CD DMG is best in slot

Client Cyte will lag with Overcharge. Swap Overcharge for Primary Deadhead and Point Blank for Shotgun barrage if you are not hosting. Lag depends on ping, tileset and PC specs. Aim to play with people in the same region as you. Recommended lower end hardware Client Cyte run Sobek.

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Afentis Prime 

🔻Wisp throws 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 is only there to give enough crit for Tenacious Bond on Sahasa with Hunter Synergy.

*While regular Afentis works, the prime variant has 4x larger buff area. Make sure you are using the prime variant to guarantee buffing both DPS players*

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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.

*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 migrate.

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Praedos

🔻With Parkour and movement speed incarnon evolutions. For modding, max attack speed is all that matters, in order to speed up slam animations and allow for faster recovery. Riven is not needed. Everything else is quality of life.

• Truth’s Flame gives Truth effect after gaining 1000 affinity the next time you swap to melee for like a ground slam. Truth gives 25% Parkour velocity for 30 seconds and has a 30 second cooldown. Not worth going out of your way to proc it, but the extra parkour is nice while collecting vitus.
• Melee Careen freezes enemies within 5.5m whenever you roll. Might save you at some point.
• Jugulus Barbs (2/3 set with Jugulus spines on secondary) 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. You can slot Primary and Secondary Dexterity on your gear wheel archgun for an additional 15s combo duration.

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

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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*

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.

*Balanced Posture instead of Elusive helps kavat get in range of enemies to cast Cat’s Eye more often.

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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.

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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 if you have Sly, Survival Instinct is a nice small QOL.

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Off Meta

Saryn Prime

🔻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 and double dips modded toxin. 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.

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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/duration 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 Bright Bonnet.
• 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.

Knockdown

🔻Ogris has self stagger/knockdown, so you’ll want some form of knock down resistance. As of update 35: Whispers in the wall, Upon using an Archgun Deployer, players will now gain 2,000 Overguard, which prevents knockdowns. Eliminating the need for Primed Sure Footed. 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.

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Rhino Prime

🔻Rhino’s roar has a 45.5m radius with this build, which some prefer over vauban for large interception tilesets (not Cinxia), where near constant looting can make it difficult for some inexperienced supports to land roar as Wisp. Running Rhino instead of Vauban means giving up the speed buff and the multiplicative damage, which is fine since interception has lower enemy scaling. Subsume over 1 or 4. Use madurai for stronger buffs and cast speed.

• 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.

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Volt Prime

🔻Only used if you don’t have Vauban setup, or Saryn is in the squad for Ammo+Reload

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 1.5x 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 users should be running vazarin to protect the defense operative if needed*

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Miscellaneous

Tierlist

🔻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. F-Tier maps are not listed (ie NON defense/mirror/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.

The interception and Mirror defense missions far outclass the defense style missions due there being no hard set number of spawns per wave like defense has. This is with optimal squad and conditions. It does not take into consideration tile size, number of spawns, spawn frequency, ease of looting or accessibility. Strictly vitus essence per minute.

Too many Survival and Disruption tile names to include on tierlist, but they all share one of three main tilesets: Corpus Ship, Grineer Galleon, and Oro Dialect.

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FAQ

🔻Frequently Asked Questions. Have suggestions for FAQ? Pong me or DM on discord.

• What is client?

•  Generally client means any player other than the host, but in arbitrations it is almost always the non-host Cyte. This is specified because client Cyte often has FPS issues.

• What is SP tier?

• Special tier. These Arbitrations have the potential to be highest ve/min but are by far the hardest tiles to perform well on. Make sure at least your host knows what they are doing before running these.

• What is the tierlist based on?

• VE/minute from an average group. This is based on a dataset of around 100 runs per tile with top and bottom 25% of runs filtered out to prevent skill issue and extreme highrolls from skewing data.

• What is the easiest frame to play?

• The supports. Wisp and Vauban.

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Game Settings

🔻You can vote yes quickly between waves by spamming the Y key by default and for controller ▲.

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. Set recoil type to camera. 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.

You can change the color of your vitus drop icons to something more high contrast than default white. Setting loot to dark gray will make normal loot less noticeable in the map so you can focus only on looting vitus.

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)

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Movement

🔻Here is an example of being efficient 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.

Defense 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.

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Mission Types

Interception

🔻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.

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Defense

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.

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Mirror Defense

🔻

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Survival

🔻Strategy 1 (Boundary)

This strategy involves playing mainly one room and either letting Vitus despawn outside a designated boundary or looting only when the team determines it worthwhile (multiple drops outside boundary).

For this strategy, you would camp in a hallway between Spawn and First Room OR Extraction and Last Room. The boundary would usually be the connector exiting the Main Room and entering the Middle Room. Either let the VE despawn outside the boundary or determine as a team how many drops until it is worth looting (this may depend on tile and clear speed).

You can occasionally run towards Spawn or into Hallways of the Main Room in order to force enemy spawns. For this strategy, you should look for a tile that can provide a good boundary (longer connector to middle room so less enemies spawn in the middle room).

Strategy 2 (Full Map)

This strategy involves freely running around the entire map and looting all Vitus. Due to force spawn mechanics, playing the entire map will cause a lot more enemies to spawn (~20% more) but this will also require a higher level of skill as the more enemies spawning as well as enemies spawning 300m+ away from the DPS fairly often causing clear to be harder.

If you can clear the map well enough, playing the full map is better due to the increased number of spawns. Note that when playing the full map, your actual VE looted may be greatly different from expected VE due to VE being further away so despawns are more common. For this strategy, you should look for a tile that is not very long so enemies do not spawn as far as well as easy to loot tile.

Strategy 1 is less enemies/closer enemies so clear is easier.

Strategy 2 is more enemies/further enemies so clear is harder. Higher potential due to increased # of enemies if you can clear the map well enough.

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Disruption

🔻2 sets of vitality and haste motes will be placed inside the large rooms, with 2 extra haste motes being placed inside corridors of your choosing that you will run down. This can change in Laomedeia or Apollo, where you might want to place both prebuff motes in a safe place to prevent nullifiers or nullifying conduits from deleting them, and have only 2 sets of motes in each main room only.

Currently, the best known strategy for spawning enemies is to run into a large room as a group, clear all enemies and loot vitus, run into the other large room to do the same, then run into a corridor connected to the large room you're currently in and clear it until both large rooms have their enemy cooldowns reset. Repeat this process on the other side, using the other large room’s highest vitus yielding corridor.

The strategy can change depending on the current situation, focusing on obtaining the highest ve/m. If a single vitus drops 250 meters away, it's sometimes not the best choice to loot it over triggering more spawns. If 3 vitus drops in a room you just cleared and ran past, it's worth causing chaotic spawns by calling out that the team should return and loot it.

To prevent enemies from spawning in unexpected places such as rooms you just cleared and ran past, all teammates are expected to move fast enough to be roughly next to each other at all times. Builds are curated to allow all teammates, especially supports, to move at a roughly equal speed. If a notable amount of enemies are appearing in rooms behind you, you should try to catch up.

The amount of vitus you will get depends entirely on how fast you are. Inefficient/new teams can get around 10 ve/m consistently, but groups that can force spawns and clear incredibly fast are able to push 17.5+ currently. The factors that need the most optimization are how fast you can clear rooms, and how long you take going down corridors. While spending time inside corridors waiting for spawns to reset in the large rooms  is optimal, make sure you are ready to enter the next big room as soon as the spawn wave resets. I only have a vague estimation of 10-15 seconds for spawn wave resets to describe it, but I promise you will get a feel for it when you start. When you see enemies starting to spawn around/inside a main room, know that it's safe to begin entering it.

Some large rooms are able to be partially triggered, allowing you to segment enemy spawns for more efficient clear, at the cost of time. Some examples of rooms that can have this are “Reactor” on grineer galleon, and “Hangar” on corpus ship. If you are using this strategy, which I almost always recommend if there's a tile like this available, try to have both main rooms connected in a way that allows you to do this in both rooms back-to-back (further explained in Tiles and Rolling) (or will be when I actually add that section of info)

For maximum coordination, each team should have a designated “shot caller” that can quickly explain what rooms the team will enter to force spawns, as well as call out vitus spawns that everyone should loot with priority. This means that voice chat is sadly, for now, a pretty big requirement to prevent chaotic enemy spawns caused by uncoordinated looting. When calling shots, it is important to prioritize calling out a path that allows the most vitus to be collected before they despawn. This means calling out the closest drops or the oldest drops that likely won't despawn by the time the team arrives.

The main purpose of calling shots is to keep the team as close to each other as possible. If you give calls that lead to vitus despawns for the team, don't beat yourself up too much about it. Large tile missions like disruption and survival will occasionally have unfortunate vitus drop locations that will always lead to something despawning.

Spawn and Camp positions

Callisto, Sinai, Io

🔻Difficulty: Callisto:Hard, Sinai/Io:Very Hard

• Every time someone loots the starting area past the big door at the top of the stairs, it breaks the rest of the spawns for a noticeable amount of time. So either do NOT loot the starting section vitus at all, or only loot if the team all agrees to not loot unless there are 3 or more drops in there.
• Camp location for Callisto either C or B. Sinai/Io either top of zipline or middle under generator.
• Callisto expected VE 800-1000, Sinai/Io expected VE 400-500
• There are 4 different starting tilesets to roll, look for the two short hallway one depicted below.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.

Umbriel, Stephano

🔻Difficulty: Umbriel:Hard, Stephano:Easy

• Umbriel tileset changed, current variant has certain tunnels closed off and vitus drops in places where it cannot be collected.
• Expected VE for Umbriel 400-700, Stephano 450-550.
• Roll for cave network tile for Umbriel, and the sealab tile for Stephano.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.

Cytherean, Xini, Gulliver, Romula, Proteus

🔻Difficulty: Very Hard

• Expected VE for Cytherean and Xini (interception) 800-1000,
• Gas tends to be suboptimal in interception because it causes spawn delay but due to the high density of spawns it is fine for a newer / less experienced player to play gas. Boar host is highly recommended as it is easier to hit spawns after the corpus filters out of the spawns.
• Expected VE for Gulliver, Romula and Proteus (defense) 400-500.
• Standard or Gas comp is fine. It is one of if not the hardest defense tile and takes a lot of practice in order to clear at a good pace. Recommend Boar host for ease of clearing as enemies will be running around more.

Alator, Kadesh, Spear

🔻Difficulty: Hard

• Expected VE for Alator 800-1000. Expected VE for Kadesh or Spear 450-550.
• Camp location can be either C or D point, I recommend D point.
• 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.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AxLdauS7JY

Tyana Pass

🔻Difficulty: Hard

• Expected VE is 700-1000.
• Two spawns in the void area between tiles, best thing to do is take turns dropping a Kuva Zarr on call crewmate and make them hold position in the void platform between wave changes.
• Every time someone loots the void area, it breaks the rest of the spawns for a noticeable amount of time. So either do NOT loot the void section vitus at all, or only loot if the team all agrees to not loot unless there are 3 or more drops in there.
• When prebuffing, set up buffed motes on both sides of the map, to avoid DPS having to run back to the prebuffed set of motes if they lose their motes.
• Gas comp is ideal for Tyana Pass.

Munio

🔻Difficulty: Hard

• Expected VE is 600-900.
• When prebuffing, set up buffed motes on both sides of the map, to avoid DPS having to run back to the prebuffed set of motes if they lose their motes.
• Collect VE fast on this tile as it despawns very quickly due to the amount of drops.
• Standard setup and or gas is fine.

Mithra, Taranis, Belenus

🔻Difficulty: Mithra:Easy, Taranis/Belenus:Medium

• Expected VE for Mithra 600-750, Expected VE for Taranis or Belenus is 450-550.
• Drops will NOT appear as they should on the map when you go to collect. Collecting is harder in comparison to the Mithra (interception) variant.
• You can set up camp either below the bridge or on top of it.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.

Casta, Seimeni, Cinxia

🔻Difficulty: Easy

• Expected VE on Cinxia 600-800, Expected VE on Casta or Seimeni is 450-550.
• There is a 50/50 chance the tile has rain each time you start the mission.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOCBQu6UPQU

Hydron, Helene, Odin

🔻Difficulty: Easy

• Expected VE for Odin 500-700, Expected VE for Hydron or Helene is 400-550.
• This is absolutely the easiest tile to learn how to play Cyte on. All of the spawns are on roughly the same level/plane and are easy to get the hang of.
• Loot fast and as soon as Vitus Spawns, delay kills: delaying kills involves waiting for the entire spawn to spawn in, the most simple way to do this on Odin is to wait until the next spawn starts spawning and then shoot the previous spawn if done correctly your saturation should be around 13-14%, requires both dps to delay.
• If you are a newer player it is easier to run boar on this tile.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL0in8XSot4

Sechura, Tessera, Outer Terminus, Cerberus

🔻Difficulty: Easy

• Expected VE is 450-550.
• 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.
• A corpus ship will spawn every few waves behind the mountain, which cyte can easily clear. Drones can spawn on that ship, and vitus they drop will appear on the overhanging platform.
• Cerberus cannot roll the small tile, only the other two.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj_VKXuPc6o 

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

Ose, Paimon, Larzac

🔻Difficulty: Easy

• Expected VE for Ose 600-800, Expected VE for Paimon or Larzac is 450-550.
• A corpus ship will spawn every few waves behind the mountain, which cyte can easily clear. Drones can spawn on that ship, and vitus they drop will appear near the camp pillar area.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErfZb69yjhQ 

Rhea, Larezzz, Sangeru

🔻Difficulty: Very Easy

• Expected VE is 550-625.
• This tileset only really has 6 active spawns, so the defense missions take much longer for 102w. Around 1 hour 20 minutes minimum usually. Looting faster helps.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.

Akkad, Kala-Azar

🔻Difficulty: Easy

• Expected VE is 450-550.
• Loot despawns really fast due to sheer number of drops from infested, loot quickly. Even worse if someone has a Mod drop chance booster.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.

Coba, Lith

🔻Difficulty: Hard

• Expected VE is 400-550.
• This tileset is massive, if you do embark upon it ensure you have plenty of parkour.
• Avoid gas on these tiles.

Berehynia

🔻Difficulty: Easy

• Expected VE is 200-400.. Pretty awful considering it's an interception tileset..

Oestrus

🔻Difficulty: Hard

• Expected VE is 500-700.
• GAS IS IDEAL HERE DUE TO HIGH SPAWN RATES.
• Setup motes close to A point and make sure to keep A point alive. Have supports pickup batteries and press “x” when close to A to upkeep the points healthbar.
• Boar on host is recommended because infested spread out quickly when leaving spawn, spawn coverage is much harder on sobek.

Gaia

🔻Difficulty: Easy

• Expected VE is 400-500.
• Loot fast and as soon as Vitus Spawns, delay kills: delaying kills involves waiting for the entire spawn to spawn in, the most simple way to do this is to wait until the next spawn starts spawning and then shoot the previous spawn if done correctly your saturation should be around 13-14%, requires both dps to delay.
• Avoid gas on this tile.

*The other tile, the iron wake variant has significantly more potential spawn points, still experimenting with ideal camp location to not block spawns and benefit from this. Still uncertain which tile is superior.

Hyf

🔻Difficulty: Easy

• Expected VE is 450-600.
• 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.
• Avoid gas it will make the mission take longer and will insta kill infested pods (infested pods give more drone spawns).  
• If you are a newer player it is easier to run boar on this tile.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HsabIutq14
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGZ3l39V16U

Stöfler

🔻Difficulty: Very Hard

• Expected VE is 400-500.
• The map changes twice, after the first two rounds. Setup prebuffed motes (1 health and 1 haste only) right outside of the middle ring area. Save 2 motes for middle zone and 2 motes for final zone at bottom.
• Bottom zone is where the majority of the mission will be spent, spawns are very spread out and loot despawns VERY fast on this tileset for some reason. So, loot quickly.
• Avoid gas on this tile.

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🔻MadLad @UMBRAL_MASH#8049🔻