The draconic hunter, (former) master of the elements - Chroma!
Release date: 2015-03-19
Passive: Chroma possesses an extra midair jump and bullet jump.
Spectral Scream - Exhale a deep breath of elemental destruction. Chroma’s energy color determines the element.
Elemental Ward - Depending on Chroma’s elemental alignment, an offensive area-of-effect is created. Chroma and his nearby allies are imbued with defensive energy.
Vex Armor - When shields are hit, Chroma’s armor grows stronger, when health takes a hit, weapon damage increases. Active for a limited time, maximum increases correspond to rank.
Effigy - Chroma turns his pelt into a massive sentry that strengthens nearby allies and engulfs enemies in elemental attacks.
Acquisition: Main blueprint is rewarded upon completion of the quest The New Strange. Component blueprints are awarded by completing Junctions.
It always amazed me how DE managed to make a DRAGON themed frame so… boring. Half of his abilities do nothing, the other half are just buffs that gradually got worse with time. Nowadays Chroma is only really used on Profit Taker, mainly due to the weird random credit doubling his Effigy causes. It’s kinda sad Inaros is gonna get a rework before he does. He just got a really cool new skin, too! C’mon DE, give us a reason to actually use this frame!
IMO Chroma suffers from the two concurrent issues of DE design, which are “having a specialty in a game where 95% of the focus is ultraviolence” and “I’m you but better”
The first is obvious, at the end of the day Warframe is about killing everything as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sometimes you need to kill while protecting, sometimes you need to kill while flying, but you’re almost always going to be killing. That is, until you get something like a Sortie Spy. That’s when - and probably only when - you break out Ash or Ivara; Are they bad? No, but they clearly have 1 Specific Function.
The second is, with time, DE just makes a better frame that works in that specialty. Back when I started playing in 2019-ish, Oberon and Trinity were the healing frames, Chroma was something of a tank. They were the ones you’d take on Eidolon, for example, given that Harrow was absurd to farm. Nowadays you have Wisp, Hildryn, more prime versions, and they keep releasing more. I haven’t seen an Oberon ever since getting back to playing at the end of last year (funny enough, I also haven’t Eidolon farmed since the new open world areas are much more interesting)
Honestly, I’m not sure what even to do with some of these. When you have 50+ frames and still counting, you’re going to run into redundancies and more precise augmentations.
Chroma’s my favorite brain-off frame. I’ve got a Infested Mobility STR/DUR build I use in place of volt for speeding through levels. And his Deluxe skin comes with that big sword, probably my favorite in the game.
I use the Combat Discipline Aura, so his buffs are always active. Beyond just being a fast weapons platform, I’ve also tanked his efficiency and slapped on the zariman arcane that heals when you use abilities, so he’s also fairly competent team healer. He can’t heal objectives though, which kinda sucks.