So somehow, by some dint of strange and unknowable fate, my beloved Valkyr, a Frame I have put so many hours into that out of my top three most-played Frames in the entire game she's two of them finally got a rework. Valkyr, the poster child of Frames with one gimmick that salvaged them enough to give them a niche to exist in, finally got pulled back up to snuff with everyone else.
To say I never though I'd see the day would be a fucking understatement. When I heard Valkyr was getting a rework, like at all? Well, I thought they were gonna make Warcry recastable and call it good. But I was nonetheless ecstatic because YES my girl would finally be seeing some kind of love. When I found out that it was a full-blown revamp to her kit and a massive numerical buff to boot, I was over the fucking moon. Naturally, there was a hint of skepticism, but Pablo made Inaros good without piledriving everything that made him fun or original into the sub-basement, so I had faith. I mean, Valkyr doesn't even have anything making her fun or original! We can only go up from here, right? Right?
Turns out, yeah, we really can only go up from here! Seeing the rework be played around with on-stream as well as TheKengineer's showcase of it gave me heart that this rework, while numerically kind of just Okay, would probably be a pretty significant uplift to making Valkyr a frame that I actually enjoy playing, instead of just a giant blob of EHP that occasionally uses Wrathful Advance. With today's release of Update 39: Isleweaver , I finally got to get hands on with the rework, and as someone who is QUITE thoroughly credentialed when it comes to this specific Frame, I can say jumping with joy that this shit slaps.
Before we get into why the entire Warframe community are a bunch of whiny whinging douchebags, let's first break down everything that was actually in the rework, starting with:
While Valkyr hasn't lost her old passive, rendering her immune to hard landings, her new passive is uh. A bit of an improvement.
This new passive arguably picks up the slack for some changes to Valkyr's 4 (more on that later, though I will say that I didn't personally feel there was much slack in need of picking up), but perhaps more importantly it gives her a nice little numerical kick in the ass which really does a surprising amount for her.
The passive grants Valkyr a new gauge, which fills as she attacks, kills, and performs finishers with melee. It grants her up to +300% bonus to her melee damage, which dovetails nicely enough with her overall favourability towards melee. When going above 150% damage bonus however (i.e over 50% full), it makes a SHOCKINGLY strange metalpipe.wav sound to let you know it's crossed the threshold. While above this threshold, if Valkyr dies, she just. Doesn't. Instead, she regains her HP, and becomes invincible for five seconds, often long enough for her to just build her meter all the way back up. This means even with the most dogshit build known to man, you'll still probably get by well enough if you just slap enough sillies. Overall, a pretty solid passive. In fact, I would say it's one of the best in the game. It's better than Voruna's 4th Passive since it has no cooldown, is better than...whatever the fuck Garuda has going on after they ruined her original insanely cool passive, all while not really asking much of anything from her. Valkyr's passive is a certified tax evader of an ability.
Truth be told, if there was one ability that I felt desperately warranted a rework, it was Ripline. In fact, even after hearing about the rest of the rework, Ripline continued to be the aspect that excited me most. Pre-rework, while it was an okay ability, and certainly had a certain coolness factor to it, it just kinda. Sucked ass? Like there's no deeper criticism I can put out here, it just didn't do much of anything, making it a waste of energy in just about any and every situation.
Post rework, Ripline has been changed to not only one of the most HILARIOUSLY overkill traversal tools in the entire game (75 meters base range??? Fucking excuse me?? I'm sorry Mr. Alonso I was unfamiliar with your game), but also a really nifty grouping tool, pulling in enemies in a 9m radius from the target and causing Valkyr to immediately perform a melee attack. While the range is a tad anemic compared to something like Nidus's Larva or Gyre's Coil Horizon (both Helminth abilities), it also doubles as a traversal tool and, perhaps more importantly, is so damn cheap that a Valkyr with a max rank Arcane Battery (an Arcane she can max out with trivial ease) is absolutely not going to feel any sort of squeeze on her energy pool of over 1200 even using it multiple times.
But the most apparently useful aspect of the reworked Ripline, though also the one that I've seen absolutely no one bring up, is how rapidly it builds up her Rage Meter for her passive. With the right weapon and some luck with enemy density, you can shoot from 0% to 150% in a single cast, which is fucking obscene , but I'm most certainly not complaining.
Overall, as someone who regularly found myself subsuming Pull onto Valkyr out of a desperate desire to have some kind of a grouping tool, I'm overjoyed that she has one natively, and better yet, one that lets her Spider-Man swing across the map with the power of this game's goofy ass physics engine. No complaints.
Warcry was already one of Valkyr's most coveted and powerful abilities, for its significant armour and attack speed boosts. Nonetheless, it's seen some love, mostly in the QoL department. I won't spend too much time on this, but to run down the list real quick:
Overall, not much to say here, it's an uplift across the board in all the ways that matter without really altering what made the ability good to begin with.
Paralysis is the ability that has gotten the most changes by a country mile, leaving it in an almost unrecognizable form from its original dogshit self. Gone is the self-damage and the...actually that was pretty much all this ability had . It now costs 15 Energy instead of 5 Energy and half your shields, and it now actually does something instead of doing fuckall. Namely, it applies a slow effect (the one from Warcry got shifted here), and far more notably, a damage vulnerability to melee damage (this is the dovetail I mentioned when talking about the Passive). From my highly (un)scientific testing, while the slow effect is mostly just Kinda Nice, the damage vulnerability combined with her passive amplifies her talons from Really Fucking Good to Scientific Notation. While the Ripline rework is what made me happiest, this rework is definitely what changed things in the biggest way.
Hysteria has definitely been the most controversial change so far, though not necessarily the most sweeping or influential one. Fundamentally, Hysteria is still the same as it always was. Press 4, become unkillable, wreck shit with Talons. Where this new version of the ability differs is in its decision to totally dispense with Hysteria's old self-damage mechanic, as well as to remove the invulnerability this ability used to grant. In exchange, it now triples the armour bonus from Warcry, which may as well be invulnerability, grants status immunity, and most importantly of all, DOESN'T COST ALL OF YOUR FUCKING ENERGY EVERY SECOND. I seriously cannot stress enough how much of a relief it is to FINALLY be able to build Valkyr for something other than constantly trying to compensate for Hysteria's absurd ramping energy cost. While it's no longer permanent invulnerability, what it is is an ability I can use for reasonable lengths of time without half my build being Efficiency and the other half Duration.
If you read all that and you have >90% of your graymatter intact and uneaten by worms unlike a certain US senator, then you're probably wondering why people are so up in arms about this whole thing. It really does seem like a very competent, well-rounded rework that retains the Frame's unique identity, core playstyles and mechanics, and keystone capabilities while also refreshing them to have a more full kit and the capabilities they need to be competitive in the game's current era. Not much different in that regard from other reworks, like Inaros, Hydroid, or Nyx.
Well, the reason why people are mad is quite simple.
The forums are currently chock-full of people complaining incessantly about this rework, with such complaints as saying it "takes away her only unique identity" (the identity of being called Worse Revenant?), that her playstyle is now "even lazier" (this complaint will be getting its own blog post in the near future), or, my personal favourite, that it no longer requires any skill to mod her. None of these are complaints you can reasonably have if you've spent a significant amount of time with the Frame, for the simple reason that every single one of these things is a flaw , one that grates incessantly on your every doomed attempt to try to have fun with this poorly-designed clusterfuck of a Frame. Her unique identity was that her high base armour was worthless to mod for because you'd be spending all your time in Hysteria anyway. Her playstyle was an RSI from doing only slide attacks because that was the only attack in her Godawful Stance that had a damage multiplier (something that has been fixed in this latest rework by giving her actual damage multipliers for the rest of her stance as well as smoother, less halting animation). Modding her was not only utterly braindead, but also abrasively miserable because every investment had to go towards sustaining Hysteria's obscene energy cost or increasing Ability Strength to boost Hysteria's base damage. Because she only had one ability, you were only allowed to build around one ability. I can't even say alternative approaches were non-viable because there simply weren't alternative approaches.
To be clear, I'm not saying that every single person complaining about the Valkyr rework is a poseur. Some of them have played even more Valkyr then I have, by a long shot. But that's precisely why they end up having a completely fucking bonkers take on the rework, because they've been dealing with her bullshit idiosyncracies for over a decade now, and thus have developed such a subtle, reflexive adaptation to how much she sucks that they can't even comprehend the idea that maybe some of us don't like to pay 15 Energy per second for Shitty Mesmer Skin. It's a kind of thinking that anyone who's been in the Warframe community for a great length of time becomes intimately familiar with, and I have confidence that this rework won't really see any kind of rollback because I know DE's community team is even more familiar with it than I am, having encountered it at many times over the years. The most recent example of it is the controversy during the Focus rework in Angels of the Zariman, specifically surrounding the removal of Void Dash in favour of Void Sling, which people complained was a downgrade due to it not being quite as fast for dashing across the Plains of Eidolon, completely ignoring the fact that Void Sling was far more usable for traversing the indoors areas that made up 90% of the game's content. The most notorious example though, by far, would be the response to the removal of Coptering with the introduction of Warframe's modern parkour system, the one that would permit it to catch the eyes of 10 million+ registered losers. While Warframe's current movement system is certainly a key aspect of the game's appeal and identity to us now, at the time much of the playerbase maligned the decision, oftentimes with many of the same complaints as leveled against the Valkyr Rework (removing unique identity, reducing the amount of skill needed, making the game more easy and "brainless).
At the end of the day, the Warframe community is many things, but original isn't even top 10. We've been rehashing these same idiotic complaints for ten years, and if the game doesn't get deleted in 2031 then we'll be rehashing them for ten more. In a week or two most of these complaints will have blown over as the Godforsaken little whiners realize that actually having a grouping tool and a passive that actually fucking does something is, ultimately, preferable to whatever precious little sense of "unique identity" they may have been clinging onto for reasons beyond my ken, and this whole thing will fade into the annals of mediocre Warframe history alongside Coptering, Void Sling, Void Strike, AoE Nerfs, and countless other instances of the Warframe community being a bunch of insufferable self-aggrandizing chuuni dickheads for no Goddamn reason. That's actually why I'm writing this entire blogpost. Because years down the line, when we're complaining about...I dunno, Gara Heirloom and Oberon Rework, I wanna have this little thinkpiece on the record so I have at least one contemporary source for what it was like all the way back in the halcyon days of 2025 when the butlers were gay and the spiders were fuckable.