Warframe: What are Heat-inherit builds?

Modified Jun 12, 2024 02:00 IST

Warframe heat-inherit — Heat-inherit also works for Warframe abilities (Image via Digital Extremes)

If you have been playing Warframe for a long time, you may have heard of the term "heat-inherit." This relatively underused mechanic exemplifies the depth and complexity of Warframe's modding system. Sadly, much of the complexity is still undocumented within the game, and the mechanics that heat-inherit builds use are no exception to this norm.

In this article, we will go over everything you need to know to understand how a heat-inherit build works in Warframe.

Understanding Warframe's heat-inherit mechanic: Heat DoTs explained

Warframe's Heat DoTs have some interesting interactions (Image via Digital Extremes)

Heat is one of Warframe's four base elements. Other than some mild armor reduction, the main draw with Heat is its damage-over-time (DoT) component. A successful Heat status effect will burn the enemy for 6 seconds, dealing one tick of damage every second.

Like all DoT status effects in Warframe, Heat DoT scales from modded weapon damage. However, each instance of tick damage from the DoT also accounts for the total amount of +Heat damage on your weapon's mod setup. For clarity's sake, let's call this "bonus Heat multiplier."

For each tick damage, a Heat DoT will apply half of your modded base damage, multiplied by the total bonus Heat multiplier. This is then multiplied once again by your additional faction damage multiplier, which is how elemental DoTs double-dip into bane mods.

Now, here is the fun part. Each new Heat status effect on a target will refresh the duration of all active Heat status effects on that target.

Let us consider a target with only one active Heat status effect. A second status effect will reset the duration of the first one, as we just mentioned. On top of this, the second Heat status effect will inherit the bonus Heat multiplier and faction damage multiplier of the first instance.

In other words, all subsequent Heat procs will "inherit" some properties of the first - including, interestingly enough, its energy color.

How does a Heat-inherit setup work in Warframe?

Example of a barebone heat-inherit primer (Image via Digital Extremes)

A Heat-inherit setup comes with two separate damage sources: a Heat-inherit primer to trigger the first Heat status, and a main DPS weapon you switch to afterwards.

To build a heat-inherit primer you should juice up a weapon - usually a secondary - with Heat damage mods. A heat-inherit primer pistol should ideally have Primed Heated Charge and Scorch for a total +225% bonus to Heat damage.

For this purpose, you can use a popular primer with Secondary Encumberance to further primer targets for Gun-CO. An example of weapons that do this task well is a primer Kompressa build, with the addendum of two Heat mods.

The idea is to get the first Heat stack going with this weapon, and then use the actual DPS weapon, which should also be primarily Heat-based. Examples of this include:

Weapons like Phantasma Prime or Ignis Wraith, good at pumping out a lot of Heat procs in rapid succession.
Alternatively, this can also be a one-shot wonder like Kuva Hek as long as you can reliably proc a second Heat status.
Heat-inherit also works on Warframe abilities that deal Heat damage, such as Thermal Sunder or Inferno. In this case, the heat-inherit primer will give your ability extra damage like extra Ability Strength would.

Why use heat-inherit setups?

The main idea is getting more damage from your Heat procs without dedicating your DPS weapon's mod slots to +Heat mods. An example of this is our Incarnon Furis build, which uses a primer to get a bonus Heat multiplier without actually modding for Heat damage.

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