The frame with an antimatter themed kit and a portal thrown in there for… some reason? I blame the Design Council for voting for that one! It’s time for Nova!
Release date: 2013-07-13
Passive: Whenever Nova is knocked down, she emits a neutron burst which knocks down and damages enemies in a 6 meter radius and 250 Blast damage.
Null Star - Creates anti-matter particles that orbit Nova and seek nearby targets.
Antimatter Drop - Launches a contained particle of antimatter that will detonate upon collision.
Wormhole - Creates a wormhole allowing instantaneous travel.
Molecular Prime - Primes all enemies in a radius with anti-matter.
Acquisition: Main blueprint can be purchased from the Market. Nova’s component blueprints can be obtained from defeating the Raptors on Naamah, Europa.
I remember when Nova released, her Molecular Prime was the best AoE ability in the game. You would press 4, all enemies would start to glow, you kill one unlucky sap and your whole screen turns bright white as everything around you turns into affinity numbers - instantly. It was glorious! Antimatter Drop was actually our first proto AoE nuke with Tigris, you could charge that thing up with silly numbers and nuke things thanks to it’s damage multiplier. I also recall DE finding out at some point that Null Star had a dmg reduction component that was never discovered and adding that to it’s ability description!
The single most important thing a new Nova player needs to know:
NEVER TAKE SLOW NOVA INTO PUBLIC DEFENSE MISSIONS
I don’t care if it’s level 250 steel path, just don’t do it. Rage quitting will ensue if you do.
The number two thing about Nova:
If there’s any poetry in your soul at all, her reduced power strength version is not “SpeedVa”. It’s **“GOVA.” **
Those important PSAs out of the way, I love Nova. She’s one of the few frames that offers flexible enough powers to be truly creative. By which I mean her Antimatter Drop, which can be combined with Wormhole to do some truly amazing things. If you’re wondering what I mean, check out DE’s trick shot competition winners: https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1189341-ultimate-portal-trickshot-contest-winners-announced/page/3/#comment-11548009
Importantly for SlowVa, range is typically very bad. That’s because for survivability, you want the Null Star particles to stay close to you, not be heading off in all directions. Also the range of her 4 scales off duration, not range! Nova’s Molecular Fission augment helps a LOT with this too. Low range does however mean you can’t really use Wormhole. This is why I have three builds for her: SlowVa, GoVa, and Travel.
Speedva really helps with the pacing of slower missions, especially the sortie Defense missions on the new Corpus Ship maps. Slowva on the other hand can be a little too much CC and some hitboxes can end up out of sync with what you see in game which can make it awkward to use.
I would recommend putting a CC ability onto nova to help with clumping up anything rushing towards you, assuming you aren’t playing with very low range. Protea’s Dispensary is another option for anyone trying to relevel weapons, and is especially useful for Archguns if you’re trying to level them on a standard tileset instead of an Archwing mission.
Wormhole is nice for capture missions and Escape Velocity if you like a little more movement speed while running around the map. For some unknown reason, teammates will only use your portal if you misplaced it and it leads into the Void.
I’ll usually use both Power Donation and Over Extended to make enemies as fast as possible, but you can play around with Transient Power Strength Buffs (Zenurik’s Hardened Wellspring/Madurai’s Sling Strength/Growing Power etc.) so that you have a range of different speeds you can play around with if you’re getting overwhelmed or if enemies have started scaling up significantly higher than what the mission initially started with.
