The trusty Warframe lander, or landing craft, is an iconic part of the game. From last-minute rescues in story cutscenes to the dancing landers across the loading screen, these little ships get us where we need to go. If you activate an air support charge during a mission, you’ll get to use one of the special abilities that comes through unlocking the different landers, though can use it with any lander model you own.
Sadly, some of these are more valuable than others, so we’re here today to rank the currently available lander air support abilities from worst to best.
7. Carpet Bomb – Scimitar
This ability sends out a line of explosions that deal impact damage between the player and the air support charge. It’s fiddly to place and the damage is underwhelming against anything but the very weakest enemies. This was one of the earliest landing craft introduced, and it shows. It’s a shame, because visually-speaking it’s one of the best: it has a gorgeous manta ray design, but it’s also frustratingly hard to get parts for. Definitely not worth it right now, unless you’re a collector.
6. Sentry Gun – Xiphos
A fixed turret is a great idea for an air support ability, but sadly this sentry gun very quickly falls behind in damage and durability, and will survive so little time that it’s barely worth getting out of the box. While you can buff its damage output with Roar, this lander is only worth getting if you like its aesthetics, and then you should definitely replace its ability.
5. Dreamers – Nightwave
It breaks my heart to put this so low, because I love Nora Nightwave, but this lander is pretty middle of the road. With Dreamers, Nora unleashes a 10-meter-wide wave of sleep and deals a very small amount of damage. While this only lasts 20 seconds, you can target enemies with finishers in that time, but you would probably get more out of Rest & Rage instead. This is one of my absolute favorite landers in terms of look, though.
4. Med-Tower – Mantis
The Med-Tower is the top of the middling options for me, as it provides a tower that sends out an area burst of healing and can be used 25 times. While the healing itself isn’t much, it can be useful in specific circumstances and provides an ongoing benefit. The Mantis is also a very pretty ship, so keep an eye out for the parts if you like its look.
3. Override – Liset
The Liset is the starting lander, so it’s lucky that it also has the strongest ability of the older ships. Override stops alarms and lockdowns across the entire map instantly, and on top of that it pauses the countdowns on Rescue and Spy missions. It can be a real Hail Mary if you are bad at Spy and Rescue missions, as I am, but it does outlive its usefulness as you get better at the game.
2. Kahl Beacon – Skaut
Who doesn’t love Kahl-175 and his underdog buddies? With the Skaut lander ability, you can bring them along for the ride! While they might only stick around for five minutes, bringing in support from this ragtag band is both fun and rewarding. You can augment them with Roar or Wisp’s reservoirs and they scale with the mission’s starting level. They’re generally a great bunch of lads.
1. Orokin Eye – Parallax
At the top of the list, Orokin Eye removes the busywork from collectibles, statues and syndicate medallions, as it highlights certain rare resources within a 150-meter radius. Unlike the Golden Instinct Helminth ability, the markers from Orokin Eye persist until all players have interacted with them or they have been removed from the map. The only tragedies of this fantastic ability are that it doesn’t recharge fast enough and that it doesn’t highlight resource caches.
An extra tip when using air support abilities is that you’ll want to level up the Engineering Intrinsic on your Railjack to level 2, which reduces the cooldown for your air support charges from 10 minutes to 5. Particularly important for endless missions!
