Rhino is one of the toughest Warframes around and since he’s unlocked early in the story, he’s a great choice for a survivable Frame that can get you through a lot of the plot before you really start to struggle. For Steel Path and other advanced content, he also has a hard as nails build that creates a loop of Overguard buffing until he’s pretty much untouchable by anything that doesn’t negate armor.
In the early game, Rhino’s armor is the core of his survivability. The ability you will probably find yourself relying on most throughout the game is Iron Skin, a powerful reinforcement that gives you a big chunk of armor for a set time, briefly makes you invulnerable, and the armor value plus any damage taken during the period of invulnerability is added as Overguard.
Making Overguard work for you
Overguard is a powerful defensive element that not only reduces the damage applied to shields and health but also provides resistance to crowd control effects like stagger or knockdown. Overguard does not decay and is only removed by nullifiers, and even if you have existing Overguard, additional Overguard is added onto the total rather than replacing it.
Early on, it makes sense to buff Rhino’s armor with Steel Fiber and his energy efficiency with Streamline so he can recast Iron Skin when it runs out. As you reach higher levels, even Rhino’s chunky armour doesn’t stand up to the job. Pick up the Iron Shrapnel augment mod as early as possible so you can keep recasting Iron Skin and adding more Overguard to the stack.
For a more advanced Rhino build, the Parasitic Armor Helminth ability provides some great options. To gain this, you’ll need to have subsumed, imbued and invigorated your way to metamorphosis level 11. Parasitic Armor allows Rhino to turn all of his shields into armor with sufficient ability strength, so move away from armor as the focus and instead, increase ability strength and shields as much as possible.
This has the added bonus that ability intensity also improves Rhino’s Roar, which is a very strong damage buff that scales well with other damage buffs and gives you and your squad some punchy damage to bring into higher level content.
The piece de resistance is Arcane Tanker, which applies 1200 armor to Rhino for a minute when you equip your archgun in mission. By summoning your archgun, then kicking off Parasitic Armor and Iron Skin, Rhino immediately gets a big chunk of Overguard and you can recast it with Iron Shrapnel whenever you have the energy. This build requires 2 Forma and an Orokin Reactor.
- Steel Fiber or Umbral Fiber
- Intensify or Umbral Intensify
- Augur Accord
- Augur Secrets
- Boreal’s Hatred
- Primed Vigor
- Iron Shrapnel
- Transient Fortitude
- Arcane Tanker
- Arcane Guardian
In terms of an aura mod, Growing Power is useful in a squad to gain extra ability strength when someone in the squad deals a status effect with a weapon, and it has the bonus that it has the right aura polarity for Rhino’s aura slot. But aura is a lot less vital to this build and you can choose something that works for your squad.
