Warframe Archon Hunts Guide: Weekly Missions and Loadout Preparation
How Warframe's weekly Archon Hunts work: getting access, the three missions, the Archon fight, gear picks, and what to do with your Archon Shards.
Archon Hunts are Warframe's weekly boss run. Three missions back to back, a level 150 Archon waiting at the end of the third, and one guaranteed Archon Shard for finishing the set. That shard is the real prize - it's a permanent stat boost you socket into a Warframe through the Helminth, and the guaranteed one only comes around once a week. Skip a stretch of Mondays and the collection falls behind fast.
The hunts fight back, too. No self-revives, enemies past level 130, and a boss that ignores most of your ability kit. The good news is that nearly all of it is prep work. Know the week's layout before you load in, pack gear that fits the rules, and the whole thing turns into a routine errand instead of a wall.
Unlocking Archon Hunts
The quest chain comes first
Two quests gate the door. The New War is the big one, a long cinematic story where you actually fight all three Archons as part of the plot. Veilbreaker is the short follow-up where you play Kahl-175, a Grineer soldier busting his brothers out of a Narmer camp, and that's the quest that flips the switch. Finish Veilbreaker and the Archon Hunt node opens for good. Your Codex quest tab will show you what's still missing if you're mid-chain.
Veilbreaker completion also awards the blueprint for the Helminth Archon Shard Segment, the part that lets you socket shards at all. One catch: you need the regular Helminth Segment installed in your Orbiter before it will go in, and that one is bought from Son on Deimos. The shard segment build runs 50,000 credits plus some spare resources and takes 24 hours, so kick it off the same day you finish the quest rather than letting the blueprint collect dust.
The rank 30 rule
There's a gear gate on top of the quests. Your Warframe has to be max rank, level 30. If you're Mastery Rank 30 or higher yourself, the frame also needs at least one forma polarity on it - DE's way of saying bring an invested frame, not a fresh one. So pick your loadout early and get it to 30 before Monday, not the morning of.
Where the hunt lives
Two entrances: the tracking console in Kahl's Garrison, or the star chart itself, top right corner right next to Sorties. The whole thing resets Monday at 00:00 UTC, and only the first full clear of the week pays out. Replays after that are allowed and honestly great for practicing the Archon fight, they just don't hand you a second shard or bonus roll. One more quirk worth knowing: Archon Hunts don't count as Sorties for Nightwave challenges, so you can't double-dip a weekly that way.
Reading Weekly Mission Order
One Archon, one planet
The three Archons rotate on a fixed weekly schedule, so you always know who's up before you commit to anything. Whoever it is picks the planet and tileset, and that shapes your whole week:
| Archon | Planet and tileset | Shard | Week's twist | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Boreal | Earth, Grineer Forest | Azure | Pazuul propaganda drones buff the Narmer troops | | Amar | Mars, Grineer Settlement | Crimson | Sentient fighters mixed into the enemy waves | | Nira | Jupiter, Corpus Gas City | Amber | Sentients plus Amalgam reinforcements |
The shard color is the part to plan around. Crimson feeds ability strength builds, Azure feeds tanky frames, Amber covers caster comfort stuff. Chasing a specific color for a socket project? Check the node Monday morning and you'll know whether it's your week.
The three slots
Every hunt is three missions with climbing enemy levels:
| Slot | Possible mission types | Enemy level | | --- | --- | --- | | First | Capture, Exterminate, Mobile Defense, Rescue, Sabotage, Spy | 130-135 | | Second | Defense, Disruption, Excavation, Interception, Survival | 135-140 | | Third | The Showdown, an assassination against the Archon | 145-150 |
The fine print changes how you play more than you'd expect. Rescue missions start their alarms the second you load in, so no sneaky start. Spy requires all three data vaults, not two of three. Defense runs 6 waves and your operative is Chipper, who carries a Rattleguts kitgun and will absolutely get himself shot if you ignore him. Interception is 2 rounds, Survival runs a full 10 minutes, Excavation wants 500 Cryotic, and Disruption needs 8 conduits. The planet trims the pool too - Earth has no Disruption or Survival nodes, so Boreal weeks can't roll those at all.
Hacking is the Narmer split-screen version with multiple matching nodes at once, and ciphers are blocked for the entire hunt. If your hack reflexes are rusty, warm up in a low-level Spy first, because fumbling a vault at level 135 is kind of a pain.
Your weekly bonus gear
Same idea as Arbitration bonuses. Each week the game tags one Warframe with +300% ability strength and +500 health, and three weapons with +300% damage. The tag is random and it's different for every player in your squad, so your bonus loadout won't match your friend's. It covers variants, meaning a tag on Braton applies to Braton Prime too, and it can even land on gear you don't own yet - a tease or a shopping hint, depending on how you look at it.
Read the node before you load in. A tagged weapon you'd normally skip can suddenly out-punch your favorite gun, and a tagged frame with +500 bonus health survives mistakes it has no business surviving. Free power is free.
Surviving Archon Damage
The rule stack
Every hunt runs the same restrictions, and they're the reason a level 130 map feels meaner than Steel Path:
- Enemy health and shields are doubled, plus another 50% per squad member, up to triple in a full squad of four.
- Eximus units spawn way more often than normal.
- No self-revive. When you go down, a teammate has to pick you up. A dead player also loses reward eligibility after two minutes idle, which is why squads often just abort when someone dies early on.
- Bleedout time shrinks with every knockdown, bottoming out at 5 seconds.
- Each use of Last Gasp, the Focus self-rescue, knocks 2 seconds off its timer.
- Every Restore type, whether energy, health, or ammo, shares one 3-minute cooldown across all sizes.
- No summons. Specters, On Call Crew, and Necramechs are all greyed out. Air Support Charges still work, including the Sentry Gun and Kahl's beacon.
The takeaway is simple: dying is expensive and getting picked up is hard. Don't spread out. Stay within a dash of at least one teammate the whole run.
What each Archon throws at you
Amar runs on Heat. He slings three heat projectiles in a row, leaps with a ground slam, and charges with a knockdown hit. Later he spawns a whole pack of clones - they stand still, don't attack, and pulse knockdown rings. The real Amar shows up on Target Radar and the fakes don't, and landing a hit on the real one pops every clone and cancels his healing. His last stand is two Heat walls spinning around him while he wraps himself in a thin layer of Overguard. Break that Overguard and the walls go with it.
Boreal runs on Electricity. Expect a trident beam stream, a converging tri-beam with knockback, and static ground fields that tick damage over time. Watch for the screech: it drops a big blue orb around him that blocks all damage from outside while he slowly heals inside it. Walk into the orb and shoot him up close, or break the thin Overguard, to end it. At the very end he hides inside a blue pyramid barrier - shoot the red orbs on its corners to drop it.
Nira runs on Toxin, and this is the week your health bar matters more than your shields, because Toxin damage goes straight through shields. Her whip flings toxin at range, her gaze petrifies anyone looking at her (look away or get frozen for a few seconds), and she spins up a frontal whip shield that heals her massively - flank her or break the Overguard to cancel it. Her final move floods the arena with a Toxin field that chunks even tanky frames, so keep moving and don't camp in it.
All three share a script. Around half health there's a grab cutscene, so mash melee to escape. The Archon then retreats behind a gateway held by two Narmer Deacons, and those Deacons tether nearby allies to stay invulnerable until the tethered ones die - clear the small fry before you tunnel onto the Deacon itself. Past the gate, the Archon goes immune and summons an escort you have to kill: Amar brings Tyro Battalysts and Conculysts, Boreal brings two or three Aerolysts (invulnerable until you break the canisters on their torsos), and Nira brings Amalgams. On Nira weeks, kill her Amalgam MOA before anything else - it heals her constantly, and Silence shuts that healing off.
Mods and tricks that keep you standing
Adaptation and Rolling Guard carry hunts. Rolling Guard's status cleanse is gold against Amar's Heat procs and Nira's Toxin, and Quick Thinking is a solid third pick on squishier frames. Umbral Vitality and Umbral Fiber each add +11% Tau resistance, which quietly adds up against the Sentient lasers floating around every fight. Primed Sure Footed eats most of the knockdown spam these bosses love. On the Focus side, Vazarin's Mending Soul gets downed allies up faster, and that matters a lot once bleedout shrinks toward 5 seconds.
Two habit notes. Shoot Battalysts the moment you spot them - their omnidirectional lasers delete operatives and squishy frames from weird angles, usually before you see where it came from. And on Earth weeks, kill the Pazuul propaganda drones when they show up. They're the things buffing the orange-glow troops, and leaving them up makes every fight drag.
Selecting Weapons and Frames
Why the gun does the heavy lifting
So what actually kills an Archon? Honest weapon damage, mostly. Archons are immune to most Warframe abilities, their armor can't be stripped (Corrosive Projection does literally nothing, so leave it home), and they cap status effects at four, so status-stacking builds fall off hard. That rules out a lot of the usual endgame cheese in one sweep.
Damage attenuation is the other wall. It caps how much damage the boss can take per second and per hit. The big rework in Update 40 (October 2025) made those caps scale with the boss's health pool and gave every player their own damage budget instead of a shared one, so strong builds feel much better than they used to and a teammate's beam no longer eats your numbers. Even so, one huge hit keeps more of its value than a spray of small ones, and a hard per-hit cap means no one-shot gimmicks.
The practical version: aim for heads, run Primary Deadhead or Secondary Deadhead, and bring something that fires slow and hits like a truck. Fully evolved Incarnon weapons are the officially recommended pick, and community favorites all follow the same logic - Kuva Hek (its alt fire lands all four shells as one damage instance), Phenmor, Laetum, Felarx, or a charged Glaive Prime throw. For elements, Slash and Toxin hurt Narmer troops and the Archon itself, while Cold and Radiation handle the Sentient escort. They don't share weaknesses, so a swap mid-fight is worth packing. Magnetic, for the record, is a dead slot here.
Frames that earn their keep
Three archetypes cover the bases:
- Doesn't die. Revenant is the community favorite for a reason - Mesmer Skin soaks the grab, the charges, and Nira's floor garbage. Rhino with Iron Skin and Nezha with Warding Halo are the classics, with Gara, Gauss, Citrine, and Inaros as health-and-armor walls.
- Keeps everyone else alive. Wisp's motes carry entire runs, and the haste mote speeds up the two lead-in missions as a bonus. Trinity, Oberon (Renewal heals straight through Nira's Toxin), Dante's Overguard, Styanax, Hildryn, Garuda, Khora, and Protea all fit the bill.
- Makes the guns bigger. Chroma's Vex Armor and Rhino's Roar multiply weapon damage, which is exactly the lever attenuation leaves you. Saryn's Venom Dose and Toxic Lash, Oberon's Smite Infusion (all of these Helminth-able), or Madurai's Void Strike for the opening burst round out the options.
Cross-check the weekly tag before you finalize. A tagged frame that's also a good Archon pick is free power. A tagged frame that folds instantly is still a liability even at +300% ability strength, so use judgment there.
Squad size math
Enemy health climbs 50% per squad member, from double base up to triple max. Four players means triple-health enemies but four sets of hands to revive you, while a duo means softer enemies and only one person who can pick you up. Plenty of experienced players run duos or trios for speed once they know the fights, since fewer players also means less health to chew through. For a first clear, taking the full squad is the safer call. Your call after that.
Claiming and Using Rewards
The weekly payout
The first full clear each week pays out two things: your guaranteed Archon Shard (Crimson from Amar, Amber from Nira, Azure from Boreal) and one roll on the bonus table. Replays pay neither.
The shard comes out normal 80% of the time and Tauforged 20% of the time, with bad-luck protection on top: every normal shard of a given color bumps that color's next Tauforged odds by 20%, and the counter resets when a Tauforged finally lands. It's tracked separately per color, and over the long run it works out to roughly a 40% Tauforged rate. Not bad for showing up.
The bonus roll table:
| Bonus reward | Chance | | --- | --- | | Ayatan Anasa Sculpture | 28% | | 8,000 Endo | 12.1% | | 12,000 Kuva | 12% | | Melee Riven Mod | 8.14% | | Pistol Riven Mod | 7.61% | | Rifle Riven Mod | 6.79% | | Affinity, Mod Drop, or Resource Drop Booster (3 days) | 3.27% each | | Orokin Catalyst Blueprint | 2.5% | | Orokin Reactor Blueprint | 2.5% | | Exilus Warframe Adapter | 2.5% | | 3x Forma | 2.5% | | Kitgun Riven Mod | 2% | | Zaw Riven Mod | 2% | | Shotgun Riven Mod | 1.36% | | Legendary Core | 0.18% |
The Endo and Kuva amounts are double what Sorties pay, and Forma lands three at a time. Most weeks you'll pull the Anasa, which is the big four-socket Ayatan sculpture - not exciting, but it banks a lot of Endo once you fill it with stars.
Socketing shards at the Helminth
With the Helminth Archon Shard Segment installed, every Warframe gets five shard slots. Each shard grants one of five buffs for its color, and you pick the buff when you socket it. Tauforged versions give 1.5x the listed numbers. A taste of each hunt color:
| Shard | Buff menu (normal / Tauforged) | | --- | --- | | Crimson | +10% / +15% Ability Strength, +10% / +15% Ability Duration, +25% / +37.5% Melee Crit Damage, +25% / +37.5% Primary Status Chance, +25% / +37.5% Secondary Crit Chance | | Amber | +30% / +45% Energy on spawn, +100% / +150% Health Orb effectiveness, +50% / +75% Energy Orb effectiveness, +25% / +37.5% Casting Speed, +15% / +22.5% Parkour Velocity | | Azure | +150 / +225 Health, +150 / +225 Shields, +50 / +75 Energy Max, +150 / +225 Armor, +5 / +7.5 Health regen per second |
Easy starting points: Crimson ability strength on buffers and nukers, Azure health on frames that tank with raw HP, Amber casting speed on anything with slow, clunky casts. Changed your mind later? Shards pop back out at the Helminth for secretions - Crimson costs Oxides, Amber costs Bile, Azure costs Synthetics - and Tauforged shards charge more to remove. Once socketed, the slots show up right in the Arsenal screen for that frame, so tweaking is painless.
Fusion and the other faucets
At Cavia Rank 2 (Researcher) you can buy the Helminth Coalescent Segment blueprint for 30,000 standing, and that opens two recipes. Coalescent Fusion turns two primary-color shards into a new color - Crimson plus Amber makes Topaz, Crimson plus Azure makes Violet, Amber plus Azure makes Emerald - for 50 Stela. Ascent Fusion turns three shards of one color into a single Tauforged for 100 Stela. Both are permanent, and the game makes you type CONFIRM before it commits, so you can't fat-finger a fusion.
A few other shard sources are worth knowing. Bird 3 at Cavia (Rank 5, Illuminate) sells one shard per week for 30,000 standing, with the color rotating weekly. Netracells and Deep Archimedea drop shards as common loot with rare Tauforged rolls, so the hunt is no longer your only faucet - it's just the only guaranteed one.
That Ascent recipe is the quiet winner for hoarders, and it makes a nice closing thought: three spare Azures sitting in your inventory are one Tauforged Azure waiting at the Helminth, which is 225 bonus health instead of 150 on whichever frame you favor. Run the hunt every Monday, bank the duplicates, and every so often the Helminth turns your spares into the good stuff.