Arm Yourself: Warframe’s Good Early Weapons

Sometimes the hardest part of starting a game is determining which weapons a new player should seek out. With a game as complex as Warframe, this problem is amplified exponentially. To help you get over one of the biggest early game hurdles, let’s answer the question: What are Warframe’s good early weapons?

Primary Weapon

There are three main weapon types in Warframe: Primary, Secondary, and Melee. We’ll take them in order.

Hek

This Grineer shotgun does high damage with an extremely narrow shot cone. The narrow spread increases its viable range but does limit the gun’s ability to control crowds. It also has a relatively small magazine size. However, it’s high damage potential and ease with which you can acquire this weapon makes it a great item to seek out early on. You can purchase blueprints for the Hek at the market for 25,000 credits.

Grakata

If shotguns aren’t your style then we highly recommend the Grakata assault rifle. This Grineer weapon does low damage with high recoil, but the sheer speed at which it fires, high critical chance, and high status chance more than make up for its failings. This is a great starter weapon for players who haven’t quite mastered the finer points of aiming in Warframe. You can pick up the blueprints for this weapon at the market for 15,000 credits.

Secondary Weapon

Next up is Secondary weapons.

Lato

This is one of the starter pistol options for new Tenno recruits. During your awakening, you can choose between this and the MK1-Kunai, but we much prefer this weapon. It does have a relatively low damage output, but it has a high accuracy, fast reloads, and above-average stability for a weapon of this rarity. The fact that you essentially get the weapon for free makes it a hard value proposition to beat.

Lex

If you’re willing to spend some credits during the early game, we highly recommend the Lex. You can buy its blueprints at the market for 50,000 credits. The Lex is a highly accurate, powerful pistol, with great long-range capabilities. In the early parts of Warframe, most enemies can be taken out quickly with a well-aimed headshot, which will also help you conserve ammo.

Melee Weapon

Finally, those weapons that don’t use any ammo.

Tipedo

The Tipedo blueprints cost 20,000 credits at the market. It’s a simple staff melee weapon that has one incredibly nice bonus: An extremely high attack speed. We’re not joking, for an early game item, it’s impressive how fast you can swing this powerful blunt weapon. It mostly does slash damage, so keep that in mind if you decide to run with this one.

Atterax

This Grineer blade is the opposite of the Tipedo. Its speed stats are much lower, but it deals incredibly high slash damage. It also supports a very long range and has impressive critical stats. You can pick up the blueprints at the market for 20,000 credits, which makes this a great starting melee weapon.

The above list gives great examples of Warframe’s good early weapons, but there are plenty more to discover as you take your Tenno into battle. Before you do, make sure to check out a few of our other guides.