Warframe's Operation Plague Star event is here, and with it, tons of Forma and other exclusive rewards to farm. This activity can be challenging, especially when you're facing the Hemocyte Cystolith boss on Steel Path difficulty. Luckily, there are many specialized builds for Plague Star that can make farming Forma extremely easy for you.
Armor Stripping For Faster DPS
The Hemocyte Cystolith has a ton of armor in Steel Path and can significantly hinder your DPS, which is why you'll need either a Warframe with innate armor strip or a weapon that can remove armor. Some of the best sources of armor strip you can get are:
- Vastilok with Shattering Impact mod
- Styanax's Tharros Strike
- Hildryn's Pillage
- Nyx's Psychic Bolts
- Mag's Polarize
- Unairu Caustic Strike
Stripping away 100% of the Hemocyte's armor can augment your DPS significantly, as more of your damage will come through its health instead of being mitigated. However, you still need to deal with damage attenuation.
Hemocyte Damage Attenuation
Like all other bosses in Warframe, damage attenuation is one of the biggest hurdles you need to deal with in order to kill bosses quickly. With damage attenuation, massive bursts of damage will cause the boss to take less damage on the next damage instance, making slow-firing burst DPS weapons less ideal.
For the Hemocyte, you will want fast-firing, high multishot weapons like the Boar Prime, Kuva Kohm, and Cedo Prime for consistent DPS, but full-auto Incarnons like the Burston Prime Incarnon and Boltor Incarnon are also top-tier picks for shooting the Hemocyte's weak spots.
Best Warframes for Operation Plague Star
For speedrunning this mission, you'll need a fast team.
- One player should play Nova and spam Molecular Prime. When held down, this ability makes enemies move faster. This speeds up your mission clear time by making the Hemocyte come out of the boil faster and reveal its weak spots more often. Nova can also use her portals to teleport the Thrax toxin drone towards the objective, cutting down on the mission time.
- One player as Volt for his Speed ability to assist in drone escorting and Electric Shield to deal massive damage to the Hemocyte's weak spots. Since the shield's bonus crit damage effect can apply to allied projectiles passing through it, this can add extra DPS.
- One player as Wisp for her Reservoirs to support the team and Breach Surge to crowd-control Infested enemies near the boil.
For Warframe subsumes, any damage-buff application abilities like Rhino's Roar, Mirage's Eclipse, Harrow's Covenant, and Grendel's Nourish will help a lot with mission clear time.
