The waverider, the other water themed frame, beaten by a random Grineer henchman in her own lore entry - Yareli!
Release date: 2021-07-06
Passive: Everflowing with the seas, whenever Yareli moves for at least 1.5 seconds, she gains the Critical Flow buff that increases Critical Chance on her secondary Weapon by 200%.
Sea Snares - Form three water globules that seek out enemies and expand on contact, simultaneously damaging and immobilizing their victims.
Merulina - Summon Merulina, a rideable creature of the waves, and the inspiration for K-Driving. Merulina protects Yareli by absorbing a large portion of incoming damage.
Aquablades - Tear through foes with a trio of orbiting aquatic blades.
Riptide - Drag enemies into a crushing maelstrom and then blow them away in a watery burst. Each enemy trapped in the vortex increases the burst’s Damage.
Acquisition: Main blueprint is acquired by completing The Waverider quest. Component blueprints are acquired through Research inside the Ventkids’ Bash Lab within the Clan Dojo.
Yareli my beloved. The frame that got me super into Warframe after dabbling casually on and off since 2015.
Along with Zephyr, I’d say she has a pretty safe shot at being the best Secondary Surge abuser, which has all kinds of monsters like the Lex, Grimoire, Epitaph, Gammacor, Tenet Plinx, Zylok Prime… and hopefully the Catchmoon once they unbug Cannonade on it :^) #MoonMeta #BringingItBack
More in-depth comments from an enthusiast of Warframe’s bestest mollusc frame (Hydroids don’t @ me):
Sea Snares applies Damage Vulnerability, which applies at both steps of status calculations, meaning Yareli has some fantastic Blast setups. Unfortunately, as Sea Snares do not reliably target into Riptide, you would have to prepare Snares before Riptide; but honestly shooting a radial or punchthrough Blast into a Riptide kills everything anyway.
Merulina is Merulina, not much more to say. Pablo finally capitulated and let us play on foot… but a small part of me is a bit sad. Loyal Merulina opens highly accessible shield gating options such as Primed Redirection + Pillage or Condemn, and more reliable health tanking options such as massively stacking EHP Azures and Eclipse. (Or I guess Null Star if you want to nuke your range and run double augments?)
Aquablades is the most disposable ability for a helminth slot, although it can deal fair slash ticks with Surging Blades. Surging Blades was bugged for ages from release and didn’t accrue damage on enemies in Riptide, so I never used it extensively. I also think that Slash is generally a weaker value proposition after the Jade Shadows armour cap, given Yareli’s easy access to massive Heat and Electric dots through their respective primed element mods. On the flipside, this is crazy powerful for new players who pick up Yareli as a dojo frame for clearing the star chart.
Riptide, boy, what a journey this ult has been on. Will suction enemies over a decent range and leave a small persistent hazard. The suction range shrinks down rapidly, which can leave enemies behind if they get caught on things. Hold-casting for an instant detonation will knock down enemies in a wide radius. Fantastic for blocking a choke point in a tile’s navmesh and shooting radial status effects into. Still quite functional as a nuke, and moreso now that we have Precision Intensify to play with. Loyal Merulina hugely facilitates this playstyle by making it easier to use armour strip helminths.
Yareli really went from rags to riches since her release! Changes to her 4 and her new augment, Loyal Merulina, contributed the most to making her into a really good generalist frame. That augment alone just does so much for her. No longer are you bound to the clunky K-drive movement, but on top of that you also get 5 sec of invincibility whenever you cast this ability. And you can recast it as often as you want! It also lets you use subsumes on her 3, before it was very clunky to do so as you couldn’t use them while riding Merulina. On top of all that, it even shoots out Sea Snares for you! She’s up there now with the likes of Nezha, Rhino, Revenant, etc. as a solid good-at-everything kind of frame. She’s got the damage buffs, grouping abilities that act as a low level nuke and a very solid survivability ability. Give this frame a go again if you only remember her release state!
Invincible build. Not mine - found it on YT or Overframe.
Armed with a Kuva Nukor running Cascadia Flare. Great weapon as-is, but add in the Furax w/ Amalgam Furax Body Count to boost your fire rate. It’s a “stat stick” of sorts.
Merulina Guardian also boosts fire rate for your secondary. With such high fire rate the Nukor turns into a rapid-fire microwave capable of doing enough damage to nuke just about anything on the regular star chart and all of SP. The build is great is for solo Netracells, too. You do need to practice just tapping the fire button and not holding it, as ammo becomes a real concern (I use Carrier to mitigate this, but I still run out.)
What trips me up are the persistent Yareli-specific bugs that randomly lock out weapons and entering/exiting spoiler mode. It seems like every major update has fixes for her (they just fixed her not getting affinity while using Merulina) but there’s still more. I’m hoping they can wrap it all up by the time her Prime releases.
I know she got better but between the clunky merulina, many abilities being CC in a game filled with overguard enemies nowadays and her style, I was never too interested in dumping any forma in her.
Also, I know Merulina adds DR but it does so by redirecting it from Yareli into Merulina’s HP, and its defenses are not affected by adaptation or other sources of DR, right? Doesn’t this mean you will get practically instantly dismounted in any high level mission?
Merulina works the same way Rhino’s Iron Skin and Nezha’s Warding Halo work, during the 4sec invincibility period after casting all damage you take adds to it’s HP pool. Even with no HP absorbed, getting an extra 10-15k effective HP (depending on power strength) for 25 energy with a guaranteed 4sec of invulnerability is nothing to sneeze at! As always, the best defense is not getting hit, and not being bound to clunky K-drive controls thanks to Royal Merulina helps a lot with that.
A while ago Merulina gained a scaling mechanic like Warding Halo, so the “well it’s only good for shield gating” isn’t true anymore. Loyal Merulina is still relatively squishy, although you can do silly things like standing in jade lights and activating Merulina for the tail end where all the damage is.
I’ve been a big fan of Yareli for a while now and her recent augment made me pick her up again. I often overlook secondaries and use them for priming or arcanes like secondary dexterity for combo duration on Kullervo but she got me out of that habit.
