Overview: The bard, Octavia conducts her fellow frames, orchestrating a symphony of destruction with her own percussive flair. Unlock her blueprint via the Octavia’s Anthem quest, pick up her neuroptics in Orokin Derelict Survival missions, systems in Lua exterminate caches and chassis in Lua musical puzzle rooms – and yes, that is a bit of a pain to get.

Prime: Octavia Prime relics can drop from mission rewards and syndicate relic packs. She comes with higher shields and energy capacity.

Special: Casting any power will grant you and your team 1 energy per second for 30 seconds. Needless to say, this is a very useful passive. In addition, you can customise your own personal soundtrack used in Octavia’s powers.

Pros: Great damage and crowd control abilities, can provide a slew of buffs for teammates, can customise your music – if you’re like me, check out the Warframe forums and YouTube for pre-made tunes by people who actually understand music!

Cons: Mediocre innate defences, abilities are set and forget, visually very noisy. Note, you can actually mute allied Octavia music in your settings if you get sick of it.

Powers: Launch a percussive trap with Mallet (1) that lasts for 20 seconds, absorbing enemy fire and dealing it back with a damage multiplier in a small radius. It’s simple but fairly effective, try to place it in choke-points. You can also try out the Partitioned Mallet augment, allowing you to have two Mallets (1) with a reduced range.

Resonator (2) deploys a destructive ball, charming nearby enemies, pacifying and attracting them as it rolls around while dealing small amounts of blast damage. The Resonator (2) will seek out enemies, and the charm radius will increase in size as more targets are affected. Finally, Resonator (2) can pick up Mallet (1) and swap the pacify effect for a taunt, causing foes to attack the carried Mallet (1) and dealing extreme damage to the attracted enemies. Resonator (2) automatically seeks targets, but you can manually control it with the Conductor augment, causing the ball to follow your aiming reticle.

Metronome (3) generates an aura around Octavia that boosts friendly armour and allows certain actions to provide buffs, if performed in time with the music. Concentric rings will be displayed on the ground around Octavia and performing the following actions a few times will grant a buff to the performing player.

• Jump to gain movement speed
• Crouch to gain invisibility
• Shoot to gain bonus multishot
• Melee to gain bonus melee damage

Amp (4) places a device that boosts allied weapon damage in an area, based on the sound levels in the are of effect. Gunfire, melee, footsteps, alarms and powers can all boost the damage multiplier provided, and any Mallet (1) in the zone will double in range and damage.

Opinion: Octavia is strong – really strong. Scaling damage, invisibility, squad-wide buffs and crowd control, packaged with passive energy restoration make this a very powerful choice in any mission – strange then, that you so rarely see her. In reality, many players find her dull to use – she feels overpowered, creates enough visual effects to risk a headache and Metronome (3) is the only power that has a skill component. She’s a potent frame (and her quest is pretty interesting) but if you’re looking for interaction, I wouldn’t recommend her.