Warframe Overguard Explained – What is it

One of the newer mechanics added into Warframe is a little something called ‘Overguard’. Even veterans of the game might be a bit confused about what it actually is or what its purpose is. Worry not, we can help you understand what Overguard is and how it affects the overall gameplay.

What is Overguard in Warframe?

On the surface, Overguard is basically the health equivalent of Overshields, just with some added immunity to most status effects. With Shield Gating being even more powerful than it was first introduced, that means that frames with no shields have slowly fallen behind in terms of survivability.

To pick up the slack and create less of a power gap between health-based and shield-based frames, Overguard prevents a handful of annoyances faced in this game. You cannot be knocked down or interrupted when you have this. Those annoying Scorpion enemies that throw their harpoons at you and reel you in can’t do anything against you with Overguard either.

Upon losing all your Overguard, there’s a half-second invincibility period that allows you to react fast enough to regain it or at least get out of danger. However, don’t think that this won’t be applied to enemies.

How does Overguard affect enemies in Warframe?

Along with the Tenno benefitting from this mechanic, a handful of enemies can utilize Overguard. All ground Eximus enemies will have this buff, along with the Archon bosses, capture targets, and elite Thrax enemies in the Zariman. Affected enemies with Overguard will have health bars that have a light blue border wrapping around them. 

This forces the player in a way to deal with higher-profile targets before completely obliterating everything else in the room. Those units take a lot more firepower to take down since many gimmicks like heavy slash effects and crowd-controlling abilities are mostly nullified. 

Unlike conventional enemy armor scaling in the game, Overguard scales with level so it’s more consistent. All enemies will have the same values across the board. That means if you attack an Eximus Heavy Gunner and a Lancer Eximus, they’ll have the same Overguard points. Actual health values will still be retained, making the Heavy Gunner obviously harder to kill in this scenario.

How to get Overguard in Warframe

Most sources of Overguard are from very niche parts of the game. However, if you want to try the mechanic out and benefit from not getting crowd-controlled, here they are:

Warframe abilities that grant Overguard

• Rhino’s Iron Skin
• Kullervo’s Recompense 

Augment mods with Overguard

• Icy Avalanche – Frost
• Intrepid Stand – Styanax
• Rumbled – Atlas

Miscellaneous sources of Overguard

• Killer’s Confidence (Duviri Decree)
• Steadfast Dismount (Duviri Intrinsic)