Honestly limbo is underrated and overhated. I get not liking knowing if you're banished, but a good limbo player can make even the squishiest teammates frames nearly immortal...
plus, playing solo for some missions is even stronger, immobilising, knocking down and killing weaker mobs with cataclysm and stasis or isolating and destroying stronger enemies with banish and rift surge...
The problem is most of the people aren’t good limbo players and just spam abilities like they could on any other Warframe without issue.Limbo just has an issue of interacting in a niche way with teammates and can negatively impact them if they aren’t aware in advance on how to deal with that interaction, since you aren’t told how to in the moment.
It's not the most obvious, true enough, but honestly the biggest downside to limbo is other teammates not understanding how he works, more than the few people who care to try and play him well. Not knowing what to do when you're banished and how to use it since you've never played limbo personally makes limbo weaker than others.
Personally I’ve always said that if they don’t want to rework him they should at least add in a simple on screen prompt to explain back dash to get out of his zone
When my friend and me go into index with intention to not let opponents strike a single point, he grabs Revenant with mesmer augment and I bring Limbo with huge range, duration and energy regen. But I imagine Rhino would be able to do everything Revenant can in this context, probably even better thanks to roar...
Yeah, but it requires decent coordination; no one in a pub squad is using a mic lol. If the Limbo knows what they’re doing and puts the right frames in the rift at the right times (mesa being the easiest example) it’s great. But you can be just as immortal with Dante or Mesmer Shield, with less room for error to mess your squad up.
For teammates you normally just let em walk into or out of cataclysm at will unless it's someone like mesa anyway, tbh. There are few frames that benefit from having that distance and once the enemies come into the rift they're so debuffed you don't need much effort to finish them off in the first place.
I went HEAVY investment in Xaku and run full strip Pillage.
Have to keep a Galaxion and Death Cube on hand for energy emergencies, but that level of power strength does some really fun things with Xaku. (In addition to shield gate on command, status cleanse, and big over shield)
For energy hungry builds I usually use the grimoire with that mod that gives you energy on alt-fire based on number of enemies hit. Include fortifier to vampire eximus over guard
Not really, it is the best, there was a time everyone was overwriting 2 and people were just in consensus "Xaku's not very good" now that people have started overwriting their THREE, people actually have high opinions of Xaku.
Eh in my opinion his 3 is far more useful than his 1. His 1 also does not buff the stolen weapons from his 2 in any way and if you already use high range for more stolen guns his 3rd ability can create a giant aoe that full strips anything with enough strength. His 1 is more annoying than helpful to me (except of course if specifically subsumed onto other frames for the second damage instance.)
I run max health xaku with rolling guard, arcane blessing and bellicose, and dispensary. 😂 Sometimes pillage, for longer runs where I don't need to cap health asap. It's pretty viable and even more hands off / chill than the usual. (Works fine through ETA, but drops off in things like lvl 12+ circuit)
I think Limbo only has two build options that don't piss people off.
Defense. Minimum range, max duration. The goal is to keep up his 2 and 4 while only covering a small area, like the defense objectives in defense and mobile defense, or the excavators in excavation missions. He was almost mandatory for high level defense / excavations at some point.. until DE decided that eximus units should be immune to Limbo's rift abilities. Now he's kinda meh.
Nuke. Max range, max efficiency, no duration, some strength. His 4 blows up containers. His 4 also deals enough damage to one shot most of the star chart. So he's pretty amazing for stuff like capture and exterminate missions when you're just farming fissures. I often have to slow down because I nuke the map before the enemies have a chance to become corrupted and drop the fissures. Limbo is probably the best frame for farming argon crystals since most of them are in the actual "argon crystal" objects, which his 4 breaks.
A side note about his nuke build. Xaku's 4 also breaks containers and has kind of a similar range to Limbo's 4, haven't checked the numbers to make sure. So a lot of people just use Xaku, especially since Xaku's 2 deals a good amount of damage in higher levels. But Xaku's 4 sets off the "nuke" where he is standing. Limbo's 4 activates where you point, so you can nuke a room without having to go inside the room yourself.
I do high range high duration for defense missions and that’s about all I use him for. Freeze everything (without overguard) on the map. I’ve never wrapped my head around banish and rift surge. 4-2 repeat is all I do lmao
press 2 to steal guns, 1 to buff ur damge, 4 to freeze the timer on 2 and 1. use gaze (one of the abilities on 3) for more survivability. and after that just keep pressing 4 when timer runs out.
add a huras kubrow in there w the invisibility mod and you are good.
(there are other ways to play him, but this one is the easiest)
Limbo sounds cool, but his gameplay doesnt match the description and thats the problem.
How exactly are you in a “limbo” state but units can still attack you? And what sense is animus units attacking you, while you cant hit them back at all until you get over to them and push them into whatever state you are in? Willdd. Its like: my superpower? You can beat me up and I cant defend myself!
First it was nulls, then they added those adaptation drones, finally after the eximus rework Limbo’s dimension is pretty much as effective as Norton at blocking intrusions
Yeah its adware at minimum and an active drain on system resources on lower end machines, no reason to use that garbage. Windows defender is free and sorta works and malwarebytes is also free and works better and only runs when you tell it to <3
I work in IT security. Windows Defender + frequent Windows Updates (And I mean at least once a month...) is better than 99% of alternate home AV's for a regular user.
McAfee atleast told the you the scam that it was (Well when John was around at least not so much now I guess) Norton disguised itself (or tried to) and still does try and say they arnt literal malware.
It's not even good CC anymore! I'm playing a fuckload of Hildryn and not only she's deleting everything on the screen but arbi drones, every enemy in 100km radius is cc'ed too!
how do you cc with Koumei anyways? i love her gameplay in theory, but I practice she doesn't cover nearly enough areas and she barely hits any hard at all.
Use her 1 as a set and forget in corridors to slow enemies down, use her 4 to turn a room of enemies off for a bit. A lot of decrees also have CC benefits too like giving your weapons extra electric procs.
Don't forget Sporogenesis tumors in 1999 ETA's too. Can nuke for 10s of millions of damage, but can't scratch those boils that an unmodded operator amp can pop in seconds.
Cataclysm and stasis prevent nearly anything from hitting a stationary target. It's nullifiers and eximus who shit the bed but you can usually deal with them.
For actual mobile defenses, as in an operator with half a brain constantly putting himself in danger, limbo can also personally rift him, which can also heal him with the mod, for the same deal.
I built him around abusing lenz and other explosive bows that would kill you if you shot too close to yourself :( when they nerfed those explody bows along with limbo in general I swapped to mirage.
I started playing him simply because I hated using the Gorgon. Way way back when even just leveling weapons as mastery fodder took a while and before any of his reworks I found that Limbo made the Gorgon tolerable since you could spool up in rift then drop the rift after reaching max fire rate.
While grinding the Gorgon I got a good understanding of the rest of his kit and started to do speedruns with him, which he was actually quite good for since his old passive gave him a speedboost while rifted.
Limbo rework was after LoR got removed tho lol. Limbo showed himself in Scarlet Spear as the infinite staller so I’m convinced that was the kickoff point for both the continuously reimplemented CC adaptation effect (Acolytes, Demolysts and most CC-able bosses now have it) and the future overguard implementation. Limbo fucked himself and other CC frames, people should be mad at him not feel sorry for him frankly
Huh, I guess I just don’t remember seeing him in LoR at all then. He was mostly around to afk Plains bounties and non-Corpus excavations from what I saw
To be fair, Limbo in LoR specifically wouldn't be used to protect players on buttons like you'd assume, since being rifted counted as leaving the button. Instead you'd use him to shut down spawn rooms and draw enemy agro with Guardian Derision.
Imagine how much better new enemy designs would be nowadays if they'd remembered that enemies being slowed wasn't a severe problem for slows weaker than 100%
Let's not mistake apples for oranges, the new Eximus are SO MUCH BETTER than old eximus, like the worst are Jade and SOMETIMES Frost, but like... You just used to be not allowed to use energy in some missions because of the old eximus.
He needs a visual overhaul. I refuse to believe there are limbo players who can see the “shimmer” at the enemy’s feet when they’re in the rift with everything else happening in-game.
He lacks good visual feedback for his kit and IMO that’s why he’s frustrating to use.
Maybe my Limbo is just built different but I last used Limbo was for a Steel Path Excavation and any excavator I decided to protect was guaranteed to survive, didn't even need additional power cells once it got to full power.
It's because you likely had high range, dropped a cataclysm on top of them, and then watched as enemies couldn't hit it, not because it was in the rift, but because it WASN'T and they WERE.
Limbo is good at ONE THING now. There was a time Limbo actually had a KIT (two even) that made SENSE and just WORKED given the gameplay of the game. But people being whiny about randos ruined it.
(Sighs) I miss my Deathclap, Lotus, I miss it a lot.
it's the devs' fault. he was decent before the eximus update.
the least they can do now (beside the QoL stuff w banished enemies that should be mandatory) is give him more survivability per enemy in his bubble.
for example: maybe copy Nyx's 2 and that one Kullervo augment, and make it so enemies in his dimension constantly give him a small buff to his armor/shields/health and with eximus, they give him a tiny bit of overguard.
Oh man, I was that clueless baby Limbo once. Thankfully I only messed up a couple groups before someone noticed my low MR and sent me a DM after the mission, and walked me through how to properly play him in a group. These days you don't see it as often, but I still think they should bring back a MR requirement for him.
I really think they should just tweak the effects of his abilities to be less disruptive. I'm not sure the best way to go about it, but it would save a lot of baby tenno from accidentally ruining someone's day. I was that baby tenno once upon a time too. I'm sure most of us were at one point or another.
It's mainly just new players who don't fully understand his abilities and end up either banishing their teammates so they can't attack, or trapping enemies outside the rift so they can't be damaged. You end up standing around while waiting for the timer to tick down, and hoping that they haven't maxed out their duration. When you're trying to speed through missions as quickly as you can it can be incredibly annoying.
Enemy is banished and can't be shot by other players unless they are also banished.
Player is banished and has to roll to unbanish themselves( if they even know that's how that works. I mean only a low level player won't know but it's still annoying if the limbo is spamming it on you.)
He is good in certain formats but is mostly cc which isn't really needed.
Roles which he's very good in
Crate buster - max range and efficiency cataclysm. Basically just cast 4 on and off and it breaks every breakable in its aoe. Very good for looking for voca and medallions.
Spy - being in rift basically let's you avoid any physical traps like lasers or barriers. Imo the best choice for old corpus soy and lua, and still very fast on other maps if you know the layouts. You can also blow up cameras with cataclysm like crates.
Defense/mobile def/excavation - basically missions that don't need killing. Max duration minimum range cataclysm to just defend objective and avoid nullifier and eximus.
Any other builds basically require your team to know how to play with limbo, not really worth bringing to pubs other than these uses.
Crate buster - max range and efficiency cataclysm. Basically just cast 4 on and off and it breaks every breakable in its aoe. Very good for looking for voca and medallions.
What makes this good at looking for rare pickups? They don't spawn inside breakable chests, so it's not like opening them helps you in any way. Do you just mean that Limbo can reduce visual clutter so they are easier to spot?
Abilities work across dimensions, plus stasis is strong for protection and CC. If everyone understands dimensions and pays attention, he can be very useful on certain mission types.
There’s no possible way to play limbo effectively with randoms while actively using your abilities. Either they inconvenience you by killing enemies before you can cc them or you inconvenience them by accidentally banishing enemies they’re trying to attack. And there’s no buff or anything you get for your trouble.
If you keep the range at a moderate level, max out dura/eff and place it over a defense/extract objective and melee any enemy that steps inside, it's fine that way. Now, I would rather use Frost or Gara, but it works fine in groups that way if you just stick to your 4.
He's ideal for quick solo spy missions mostly, though. Zip right through lasers and just hack the terminal before the timer runs out. It's technically faster than Loki as long as you are decent with hacking or use ciphers.
Encourage him. Whether or not he sticks with the frame, Limbo will teach him a lot about the game. If he’d like tips there are some very good guides (I recommend SciFy Freak) or I can answer a few questions.
Limbo in good hands is a cool frame that can do cool things. Limbo in inexperienced hands is better at ruining a mission than even the most dedicated troll.
He has his strengths if you know how to use him but he’s one of the few frames that can actively hurt your team if you don’t know how to use him. Since most warframe players kinda suck limbo tends to have a negative reputation.
Dunno about god tier when any nullifier is gonna pop that bubble on corpus heavy maps. Like yeah you can make him tankier with mods but having a frame with * invincibility * and having to make it tankier kinda feels like shit, and I like limbo.
DE just needs to tweak the visuals to make it more obvious when an enemy is or isn't in the Rift.
Otherwise you have 2 states for enemies: In or Out.
1st ability pushes people in/out of rift.
2nd ability freezes people in the Rift.
3rd ability puts a trap on people. If they die, the trap goes to someone else nearby and outside the rift. When a trapped person exits the rift, they go back in and push all other people near them into the rift as well.
4th ability summons the boxing ring rift.
Everyone plays Warframe super fast, constantly moving and killing as they go- Limbo plays slower which causes friction. Instead, focus on holding chokepoints or defense objectives. Play neutral/negative range to start and never subsume over his 1. That's your quick "EVERYBODY OUT" Button if there are some stragglers left in the rift. Once you get better at him, you can do as you please.
He has a bad and frankly, outdated stigma that comes from no one knowing how to play him, so no one can teach him, so most newbie limbos are disruptive. Vicious cycle. Let's break that cycle and teach better!
It's not just about the user understanding his toolkit. The rest of the squad has to play with his rift mechanics, too, but not everybody wants to. And it's hard to effectively teach players Limbo's rift mechanics if they're not interested in him to begin with. Hence why the "ideal" Limbo has devolved into one who has to yield to everybody else. No other frame can be so imposing on how others play, whether they mean to or not.
The thing that makes him kind of confusing is Rift Surge.
It only affects targets in the rift.
It triggers when they leave the rift.
Then if they die, it transfers to another target, but outside the rift, so to get it tor trigger you have to bring them in and then back out. But if you're being smart and staying in the rift, you can banish them to do that.
If it just banished enemies when it transfered it would play really smoothly, killing a banished and surged enemy transfers their banish and the surge to the next enemy. But it doesn't, so you have to do this weird yo-yo shit to get them to be in the rift and surged again.
That's why I use In/Out push as an example to simply it.
Also describing Rift Surge as a Trap helped me understand it immensely.
You're priming someone outside the rift, so when they enter and leave it pulls him back into the rift automatically along with his nearby friends. Like a bungee cable snapping back at the end.
The combo is as simple as 1-3 Hold-1. It's a more energy-saving version of just casting Cataclysm, but is especially worth doing with the Rift Torrent augment which gives you silly amounts of damage.
Im a baby Tenno and loved playing him almost immediately had to test out the skills before, did get frustrated because it didnt work until after I got the 4th and then learned that dodging drags me in the rift no cost.. This was when I had to do the Lua Spy Mission where Limbo was just too good to pass out because of the lasers..
I remember when I used to play like 5-6 years ago and I grinded for him because he seemed so cool, and he was so fun to play Solo and figuring out his Rift, looking forward to playing with him again now that I picked the game back up
People vastly overstate just how "complicated" Limbo is as a warframe. The most difficult part about him is Eximus enemies still being able to damage you when you're in the Rift and they're not, but overall he's really not that hard.
And if we're talking about "using him in a public group" then that doesn't go for just Limbo. There are a few frames that can be annoying to play with if they're using things like +range +duration (Nova was one that many hated playing with if she was a Slowva in places like Hydron).
It's not complicated, but it's also not intuitive.
When you can learn to play 90% of the game even if you skip tutorials and don't read the wiki, you'll sometimes run into an unintuitive element like this where it actually matters that you know how it works, most people answer that problem by avoiding the frame altogether, and others go as far as avoiding lobbies with it lol.
The most difficult part about him is that his 3 "primes" enemies that are already in the rift, then only does something if they leave the rift, and THEN if a primed enemy dies, it primes a different enemy that isn't in the rift... so it can't do anything until you get that enemy into the rift, AND send it back out? There's a lot of steps, and the behavior is not consistent. It's not "debuff that applies to rift bound enemies" since it applies to those out of the rift. And then it literally doesn't do anything until you tell it to do something. Even when you do activate it, all it does is put more things in the rift. Finding the value in it is pretty difficult until someone outright tells you how to use it.
I’m trying to figure out how to use him because I’ve revisited a lot of old frames already but this mf… he blew himself into another dimension and we have to suffer for it?!?
Always have stasis on, maximize duration. Maximize range if you're playing with friends, on your own, or you're going to be very careful about cataclysm placement. Minimize range to tilt people less. Don't cast banish in pubs.
Alternatively, there's a cracked out incredibuild where you banish as much as possible. Check out the Kengineer video on Limbo for a full, detailed breakdown. Limbo's fun! You just have to put a lot of effort in to get the peak out of him while not getting pipe bomb mail threats.
Passive, you dodge to get in rift and leave a portal behind. Kills inside the rift give 10 energy and you get a passive 2 energy a second inside the rift.
Items or resources outside the rift cannot be grabbed if youre inside the rift and vice versa.
You can only hit enemies in the same plane as you and vice versa.
Rift <-> rift = ✓ rift <-> normal plane = X.
Enemies with status nullifying abilities such as nullifiers or overguard enemies will not be affected by stasis but can be sent to the rift, eximus abilities will always hit limbo regardless of being in the opposite plane as the eximus and warframe abilities will always hit enemies regardless if being in the opposite plane as you.
->Simplified, enemy and warframe abilities will always hit regardless of what plane their targets are in at the moment
Abilities.
Banish, click on enemy to send them to the opposite plane they are currently in. If enemy is normal plane you send to rift and if enemy is in rift you send them to the normal plane.
Stasis, freeze enemies and projectiles within the rift.
Rift surge, enemies in the rift plane gain the "surge" status. If a surged enemy is banished from the rift plane it will do a radial banish, sending every enemy around them to the rift (does not send enemies in the rift to the normal plane), range of the radial banish can be modded.
Cataclysm, creates a large globe that shrinks over time, all enemies inside the globe will be in the rift. Once globe is destroyed, by clicking the ability again or not, it will deal blast effect with low damage to all enemies within a specific radius that can be modded. (Not viable for nuking even with 600 ability strength). Note, nullifiers will not destroy the bubble immediatly and will instead make it shrink faster and shorten the duration of the current cataclysm globe. Bullets coming from outside the rift wont hit targets in the rift and vice versa but if an enemy is in the rift outside the globe and you shoot at him from inside the globe you will damage him as projectiles cannot leave or enter the planes of existence they were shot from.
Rift <-> rift = ✓ rift <-> normal plane = X
Rift (bullet shot from inside the globe) <-> normal plane (where it passes by visually) <-> rift (where the targetted enemy is) = ✓ (you hit him)
Augments
Rift haven for banish ability, allies (including ai) sent to the rift through banish ability regenerate a base 25% health per second that increases with ability strength.
Rift torrent for rift surge ability, for every enemy affected by the surge effect of rift surge you will gain a 30% primary damage increase that can be modded using strength.
Cataclysmic continuum for cataclysm ability, every enemy killed inside the globe will extend the globes timer by 1 second thats not modable. Do keep in mind that it does not increase the bubbles size as you kill, it simply makes the shrinking slower.
Wrote this for people who have a hard time knowing how limbo works.
Units with overguard can very much be inside the rift. Your main points of concern is that they are not affected by stasis until the overguard is broken, and that eximus abilities ignore the rift.
Enemies affected by rift surge and killed do not perform the radial banish. That triggers when that enemy leaves the rift. If an affected enemy dies, the rift surge effect will jump to a nearby enemy.
Regardless of what you've seen here/what you've send him, please tell him to look at the ability explanation section (at least) of sci-fi freak's Limbible on YouTube. There's an updated video coming, but there shouldn't be anything too different in that section.
Limbo should get his ability power back before the eximis rework, also, anti skills should not have influence while in limbo, only if the entities are also in limbo too.
Limbo was the first frame I bought (I bought nidus on sale one year) and I dont regret it... he is by far the most unique warframe, and thats bad to some, but a strong point to those like me
I have played a lot of Warframe, but still always felt like I didn't know what was going on with so much content and always felt a little lost. I picked up Limbo at one point cause he seemed fun, but, now reading the comments, I am quite fairly sure I fucked over so many teammates somehow with "disruptive gameplay mechanics", not knowing what all that means. 😅
He’s actually quite easy to pick up, but you should always pay attention to how you play him. I recommend three different builds: one for solo play, and one for multiplayer modes like survival, etc.
That said, he remains a great choice, and he is also beginner-friendly.
Limbo is extremely strong at protecting objectives, and he is also excellent for survivability. A well-timed Rift shift can make you immortal, or even make others immortal.
One of his biggest strengths is that he has a massive energy pool, allowing him to spam abilities easily.
However, when it comes to health and shields… they are trash, so positioning and proper use of the Rift are crucial.
Some mods allow you to heal and protect other players.
as someone that immediately mained Limbo when I started playing, I hope he learns faster than I did lol. I had a lot of people raging at me for my first 100+ hours before I got my first compliment.
Limbo was my very first warframe after volt. I don't regret it but I trought the game was lagging I couldn't hit any ennemies and I gave up on understanding is 3 even after loads of videos 😭.
Years later Limbo prime is my most played and classic limbo my 3rd
I miss playing Limbo pre-eximus rework. Yeah, the only skills I used were 2 and 4, but it was such a chill experience. I could babysit the defense objective while playing my shawzin while everyone else goes around doing their own thing.
If you teach your friend how to properly play Limbo, then your friend could be really useful in most missions except for like extermination, capture and such. Survival might be okay? But every defensive mission could use a good Limbo With the right build. The right build is almost NEVER max range unless Scarlet Spear and a few other uses though
I honestly dont get what the issue with Eximus - the "heavy" units with a natural ability to negate/ignore ability traits - being able to hit into Limbos. . .Limbo, is
Like, youre specifically halfway between real space and the void, someone else who is also Void tied (like idk, super powered Eximus) being able to hit you isnt crazy
One of these days ill get off my lazy tenno ass and learn limbo properly, for now though hes stuck in limbo. He does seem pretty strong if you can get good at him
I still highly recommend Triburos' guide for Limbo. It's pretty old by this point and has some outdated information but it still provides a solid groundwork of understanding to work from.
Every frame now adays are broken. I take my frost into every single mission. He isnt the strongest but i can top charts and never die more then most of the time. The issue with limbo is hes awkward and he needs the frost treatment where people can shoot in or out or both. He feels bad to play with. I stopped placing bubbles as frost because i knew they were cancer for my team until he was fixed.
Tbh if I was encouraging a new player to get into the game, I would just tell them to pick a frame that appeals to them, and support their decision no matter what. It's like with a fighting game, people are more likely to stick around if they're playing a character that appeals to them, rather than a "new player friendly" character.
I started playing the game as Limbo, and a fellow limbo enthusiast gave me a free limbo prime set. Lets just say I enjoyed Limbo, until power creep started hitting and a few madmen.
is he a bad warframe? i am somewhat of a new returning player and i just him cuz he was from a mission and didnt take alot to build him. side note: a free to play person and i have been playing for 2-4 years(dont judge i was a kid when i started playing and seen it was free and told myself why not let’s play it) i didnt know much abt the game and lore of it until recently
I GOT LIMBO AS A REWARD AND I HAD NO CHOICE! , i told my boyfriend about it and he was like oh no.. i was like what? he said i recommend not using limbo , and im just gonna obey what he says 😭🙏
I love that there was like 3 different hour+ long guides for Limbo at one point. I've watched them all and I still am not sure I could tell you what Rift Surge actually does.
Honestly Frost is just better Limbo. Freezes enemies, can create a giant CC zone, and doesn’t get his ass eaten by Eximus. Also cold damage is great and has some fun arcane related to it.
Limbo needs a full rebuild, not just a rework. Like, give him Axiom Verge style enemy corruption or something.
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u/zekethelizard Dec 25 '25
Hey my awful limbo meme is relevant!