Looking at the bottom 20% of frames by cumulative usage, most of which I play often, a few stand out to me as potentially benefiting from a rework. Might have some bad takes, so feel free to tell me how you play them! Always happy to learn something new about frames I haven’t clicked with.
Need a refresh
Atlas: very tied to weapon selection which makes SP Circuit dicy. I’d like to see more innate power on his kit, or a change to petrifaction that improves its damage buffing, maybe with armour removal.
Equinox: augment syndrome. Some of them could be passives or otherwise extended (e.g. Energy Transfer could work on Pacify & Provoke too). Major systems rework could let her mod Day and Night separately, which would be nice as they both like different stats.
Chroma: funny damage man. Got a good buff with Circuit scaling his Spectral Scream (but not Effigy! what!) into actual strong damage abilities. The “keep two buffs rolling” playstyle is bad though. Spectral Scream could be a one-handed single cast that shoots actually good projectiles. Would also be nice to have Vex Armour store its buffs for recast, for accessibility reasons. Let Elemental Ward be recastable. Otherwise give him an augment or a passive that lets Ward and Armour refresh on some condition. Why does Gyre get to have all the braindead pew pew fun?
Could benefit, arguably fine
Gara: due to how full and synergistic her kit is, hard to fit shield gating on her build without Decaying Key usage. Good at health tanking, but that has scaling limits. Mass Vitrify deserves a buff to bring it in line with how easy Snow Globe is to scale infinitely.
Oberon: his damage buffing is very conditional on enemies reaching his garden. Very harsh range (235%!) and strength requirements if you want a fullstrip build without giving yourself RSI by double-casting Hallowed Ground constantly. Reckoning being able to blind on kills within a duration would be nice. Renewal could benefit from shield generation due to how healtanking falls off.
Lavos: please give him scaling survivability without dipping into Muzzle Flash or Resonator, or Arcane Trickery.
Trinity: absolutely horrible to play with the agonisingly short buff durations; this one is definitely personal preference though. Might benefit from damage buffing such as EV applying a small damage vulnerability in its area, or Abating Link being a target-radial armour strip that can be recast.
Out of the other low-usage frames, who would you like see refreshed or reworked?
Weapon variety seems dead in the Secondary Weapon category with the top 3 weapons making up ~33% of the most used weapons. (Total Secondaries: 134)
Primary weapons are a little better with the top 3 weapons making up ~23% of used weapons, but I’m not sure how accurate this chart is for the current meta considering the explosive/ammo nerfs happened in September and the data recorded is only up to the end of 2022. (Total Primaries: 168)
Melee weapons seem to taper off a little flatter than the other two categories of weapons. Top 3 melee weapons make up ~17% of total usage. (Total Melee: 199)
For Warframes, Wukong is the only real outlier with more than double the usage of the next most used warframe (Wisp). Only about 3 months of data since the clone nerfs so his usage will probably be a lot lower in 2023. Seeing a lot fewer afk Wukongs since that update though which is nice.
Be interesting to see if Secondary Encumber changes the skew at all in the 2023 stats. Due to the grind, probably not, but it’s definitely lifted a lot of weapons out of a pit of being kind of bad to use.