Capture

Capture missions are usually the fastest mission types!

Pro-tip: is to bring a Speedster modded Volt and rush towards the Red-waypointer in the mission, once there, attack the target until they fall down, once down, stand above the target, Press “X” (on PC) to capture your target.

After this is completed, you have the choice to either leave or stay – there is a beautiful feature of Capture missions – which is that once a target has been captured – the “level-scaling” of enemies hits a stand-still – meaning no matter how many enemies you kill after that point, enemies will remain the same level! Could be quite nice for farming (*cough* Oxium farm @ galatea, neptune *cough* ;P)

Spy

Spy missions are a sort of “Puzzle mission” in Warframe where to goal is to successfully obtain data secrets from 3 separate data centrals by hacking and using smarts to reach the data terminal without being detected. A Stealth frame would be to recommend here – Loki got longest duration if you want to maintain speed to run with – get some Ciphers crafted as well to instantaneously hack encryptions – no matter their difficulty.

It might take you a few tries to figure out the tilesets for each Spy mission node, but after a while you know then by hand and can finish these missions with ease :)

In Spy missions you get “Unidentified” rewards that will be revealed upon completion of mission node – could be nice mods or something else.

Rescue

Rescue missions are sort-of like Spy missions in the way that Stealth frames have an advantage here – as well as bringing with you Ciphers for hacking. The objective is to move through the mission node until you reach a station that needs to be hacked, once you get through you should reach a “hostage room” where there usually are 3 separate hostage rooms that can be unlocked by hacking – there might be a time limit on you for hacking these cells depending on whether you were detected or not when entering the room where the hostages are being held.

Once you have successfully breached through the specific room that held the hostage (one out of the three rooms only holds a hostage), then you get the option to give the hostage your secondary weapon with mods and all temporarily, to allow the hostage to defend itself, while you and the hostage head for extraction – clear a path for the hostage while moving towards extraction and if hostage gets hurt you can heal or in worst case resurrect if your fast enough to avoid failing the mission.

Survivals

Survival mission are nice for a lot of reasons – enemies keep on coming and the only requirement to stay in these missions is to keep your oxygen levels above 1%, if it hits 0% you will slowly suffocate and eventually die – if this were to happen you can try and desperately make a run for extraction if the time has passed 5 minutes minimum (thats when extraction is made available).

Many new players seem to struggle to understand something about survival missions, “Pillars” will occasionally be dropped and these contain Oxygen that can be refilled when needed – but new players tend to use them as soon as they see the pillars, and most of the times this might be done when oxygen levels already are 90-100% which means wasting an oxygen tank which is limited supply.

Oxygen Pillars explained

You want to wait at least until 60-70% to refill oxygen by Pillars in survivals, but usually you can wait even longer than that, the Pillars contain Oxygen worth of 30% refills – good thing to keep in mind when doing these missions. So you know when it’s not being wasted – because you can never know how many of these Oxygen Pillars the Lotus will send you, you might not have so many that you can afford to waste even 10% of these oxygen refills.

Oxygen packs of 5% for ALL team members – chance to drop on enemies killed

When killing enemies in Survivals you also occasionally get “Oxygen packs” dropped from enemies (Nekros increase these oxygen packs drop rate as well), each oxygen pack dropped restore 5% oxygen FOR EVERYONE ON TEAM! Also good thing to know :)

Survival rotations

Every 5 minutes you survive in survivals rewards will be handed out to you – the rarity and value of these rewards are based on a “Rotational system” which is the first 5 minutes is called “A Rotation”, as well is the 10 minutes, then 15 is “B rotation” and 20 is “C rotation” – this will be helpful to know when doing higher-level survivals which promise loot on C rotation for example.

Defense

Defense missions are quite straight forward – basically you run into the mission to find a “Pod” that you need to defend from threats, the pod has a base shield as well as health that allows you some wiggle-room when defending it.

Rotations on Defense are the same as Survival Rotations for loot – B and C rotations usually contain Rarer loot than A rotations.

Frost is really good for defense – especially with a Snow Globe build as you probably can imagine :)

If you want to do Defense missions fast a Speed Nova could help out with this as well together with an AoE DPS warframe such as Saryn, (RJ) Excalibur, Equinox or Banshee for example.

You get reward in defense missions every 5 waves.

Mobile Defense

Mobile Defense are quite chill missions where again a Volt could be useful. This because of both his speed as well as his ability to summon Projectile shields. Frost could also be useful in these missions.

In Mobile defense the objective is to pickup a Data-terminal key with pressing “X” on PC which makes you only able to use your secondary weapon while holding the data-terminal key, you can drop it if you want by pressing “X” on PC once again. This key you will carry with you through the mission until you reach waypointed data terminals, where you will insert the key and after that defend the data terminal from any enemies that will try to interrupt your work. Once one terminal is done, key will drop out of terminal again, for you to pick up and carry along towards the next terminal in line. Every Mobile Defense Mission got 3 terminals total that will need to be run to and defended after insertion of key.

Excavation

Excavation missions is much like Survivals in the way that the Excavation drills need to be supplied with Power that drops from flying infested Ospreys looking like blue-batteries that are dropped by killing the osprey and picked up using “X” on PC.

Every Power Core gives the Excavator +20% power – which is the equivalent of 20seconds (use wisely because supply of these might be scarce – ospreys might not come as often as you’d wish).

And every Excavator needs 100 seconds to finish drilling (equivalence of 5 power cores) – the meter to the left on the screen will update accordingly to you adding Power Cores to an Excavator.

Each time an Excavator finishes drilling you will receive a reward much like the Survival and on higher-level Excavation missions such as Hieracon you can get a lot of Relics completing a lot of Excavators (100 seconds per reward theoretically without power interruptions and everything running smoothly).

Most efficient way of doing Excavation missions if you want as much Cryotics as possible, is to go to a low-level Excavation missions such as Tikal, on Earth – bring a Frost with anti-infested modded weaponry – I usually bring Ignis and Atomos with Corrosive and Blast – and then you simultaneously start 2 Excavators at once all the way up to 2’000 cryotic, and after that it gets a bit harder so you might want to stick with running only 1 Excavator at a time after that :)

Pro Tip about Reviving in missions

Remember that reviving yourself will cost affinity (experience) – so for maximum experience in missions – try to let your teammates resurrect you :)!