Warframe Necramech Build Guide: Best Mods for Voidrig and Bonewidow

Necramechs are the heavy Orokin war suits you build and stomp around in after finishing the Heart of Deimos quest. There are two player versions. Voidrig is a long-range artillery platform with exalted mortars bolted to its shoulders. Bonewidow is a shield-and-sword bruiser that wades into crowds and chops them apart.

Both mechs hit like trucks once they're modded, but they want almost opposite builds. Voidrig lives on energy so it can sit in Guard Mode and erase the screen. Bonewidow lives on armor and health so it can tank through Shield Maiden and swing its giant blade. Get the kits straight, match the mods to the kit, and the rest is mostly aiming.

Necramech Stats and Base Kit Differences

The two mechs look similar, but the numbers tell a different story. Here are the max-rank (rank 30) base stats:

| Stat | Voidrig | Bonewidow | |---|---|---| | Health | 3,000 | 3,600 | | Shield | 1,000 | 600 | | Energy | 225 | 225 | | Armor | 400 | 500 | | Sprint speed | 1.0 | 1.1 |

A few things jump out. Bonewidow has way more health and a bit more armor, plus a slightly faster sprint. Voidrig leans on shields instead, with 1,000 of them at max rank. The energy pool is the same on both, which matters more than you'd think, because both exalted weapons drain energy by the second.

Now the kits.

Voidrig is the ranged one. Necraweb (ability 1) throws a canister that makes a slowing puddle, or you can pop it mid-air for a blast. Handy for kiting big targets. Storm Shroud (ability 2) is your survival button. It wraps the mech in a shield, gives you about three seconds of invincibility, and absorbs hits into extra shield health that reflects damage back. Think of it as Iron Skin with a counterattack glued on. Gravemines (ability 3) spits proximity mines in a cone. It's the weakest link in the kit, mostly good for chipping groups in tight corridors. Guard Mode (ability 4) is the whole point of Voidrig. You root in place and deploy the Arquebex, a pair of exalted mortars with the highest base area damage of any weapon in the game. Anything in front of you tends to stop existing.

Bonewidow is the melee one. Meathook (ability 1) skewers an enemy, drains their health to heal you, and you can throw them as a projectile that scales with how much health they had left. It's your pocket medic. Shield Maiden (ability 2) raises the tower shield, grants the same roughly three seconds of invincibility on cast, and soaks damage into a frontal shield buffer. With Ironbride out, that block widens from 160 degrees to 220. Firing Line (ability 3) sweeps a force beam around you and yanks enemies in, floating them for a beat so you can hack them up. Exalted Ironbride (ability 4) pulls out a massive archwing greatsword that cleaves whole packs in a single swing.

The short version: Voidrig wants to stand back and bombard. Bonewidow wants to charge in and brawl. That single difference drives just about every mod choice below.

Best Mod Setup for Voidrig

Voidrig's whole game plan is "stay alive long enough to sit in Guard Mode and dump Arquebex rounds." So the build splits into three jobs: keep energy full, keep the mech alive, and stretch Storm Shroud as far as it'll go.

Here's a solid core loadout:

• Necramech Steel Fiber: armor, which also hardens the chassis underneath Storm Shroud.
• Necramech Vitality: health, stacking with Voidrig's already chunky 3,000.
• Necramech Flow: a bigger energy pool for those long Guard Mode sessions.
• Necramech Streamline: cheaper ability casts and a lower per-second Guard Mode drain.
• Necramech Intensify: ability strength, which pumps Storm Shroud's max health and its absorb multiplier.
• Necramech Repair: a channeled self-heal. Voidrig has zero built-in healing, so this (or a Helminth ability) is the only way to top off mid-fight.
• Necramech Redirection: shields, since Voidrig's base 1,000 shields are actually worth padding.
• Necramech Thrusters: mobility, because a slow mech is a dead mech when Guard Mode is on cooldown.

That's the eight-slot baseline. From there you swap to taste. If Guard Mode keeps draining you dry, trade Redirection for Necramech Rage, which feeds you energy whenever you take health damage. If Storm Shroud keeps falling off mid-bombardment, drop Thrusters for Necramech Continuity to extend it. And if you're doing content where you barely get hit, you can shave a survival mod for Necramech Stretch, though Voidrig's abilities are short-range CC and don't really need the extra reach.

One thing that trips people up. Voidrig's ability strength does nothing for the Arquebex. The Arquebex is an exalted archgun, and its damage comes only from its own mods in the Arsenal, not from Necramech Intensify. So don't stack strength expecting your mortars to hit harder. Strength is for Storm Shroud, full stop. That's actually freeing, since it means you can run a lean strength investment and dump the rest into staying alive.

Forma-wise, expect to drop three or four on a Voidrig you actually use. The two or three D-polarity survival mods eat capacity fast, and a Catalyst is basically mandatory. Rank it to 30, slot the Catalyst, then polarize the slots that fight your build. Most players end up polarizing for Steel Fiber and Vitality first, then matching the rest.

Best Mod Setup for Bonewidow

Bonewidow flips the priorities. Where Voidrig cares about energy, Bonewidow cares about armor and health, because Shield Maiden's shield buffer scales off both ability strength and your armor. Every point of armor you stack makes the shield thicker. That makes Necramech Steel Fiber the single most valuable mod in her build, since it pulls double duty as raw survivability and a direct buff to her main defensive ability.

Here's a strong core:

• Necramech Steel Fiber: armor. This feeds Shield Maiden directly, so it earns its slot twice over.
• Necramech Vitality: health. Bonewidow has the higher base health of the two player Necramechs at 3,600, and Vitality leans hard into that.
• Necramech Intensify: strength, for a thicker Shield Maiden, a stronger Meathook heal, and more Ironbride damage.
• Necramech Streamline: efficiency, since Ironbride drains 2.5 energy per second and you want it up a lot.
• Necramech Flow: energy pool to match the drain.
• Necramech Stretch: range. This makes Firing Line pull from farther out and gives Ironbride more reach, and both feel noticeably better with it.
• Necramech Seismic Wave: slam attack damage. With Ironbride out, your ground slams hit hard, and this cranks them.
• Necramech Thrusters: mobility, so you can actually close the gap into melee range.

Notice what's missing: Necramech Repair. Bonewidow heals herself through Meathook, so a dedicated heal mod is usually overkill. If you find yourself dying anyway, swap Thrusters or Seismic Wave for Repair and play a touch more carefully.

A couple of Bonewidow-specific notes on the build. Shield Maiden has a 10-second lockout if the shield breaks completely, which is brutal. So don't let it pop. Recast it before it runs out. Turn it off and back on while it still has health, and you skip the cooldown entirely. Also, Necramech Continuity is a fair swap for Stretch if you'd rather have longer Shield Maiden uptime and longer Firing Line ragdolls, at the cost of some reach. It's a real tradeoff, not a clear upgrade, so pick based on whether you'd rather gather enemies from farther away or hold them longer once you do.

For Forma, Bonewidow usually wants the same three to five as Voidrig. Polarize for the D-polarity survival mods first (Steel Fiber and Vitality), then match the rest of the build. A Catalyst is mandatory on anything you're taking into high-level content, same as her ranged sibling.

Archgun and Exalted Weapon Choices

Every Necramech carries a regular archgun in its arm slot, separate from the exalted weapon tied to ability 4. You'll mod both, and they serve different jobs. The arm archgun is for trash clearing and for when your exalted is on cooldown. The exalted is for deleting serious threats. Getting both right is where most of your killing power actually comes from.

Arm archguns

The Mausolon comes free with your first Necramech, and honestly it's great. Automatic explosive primary fire that builds charges on kills, and an alt-fire that unleashes a charged energy beam with a big explosion on impact. For a weapon you don't have to grind, it carries hard.

If you want to upgrade, the two popular picks are the Morgha and the Cortege. The Morgha is a two-round burst grenade launcher with a build-up alt-fire that calls in an airburst mortar, fantastic for open-world packs and Isolation Vault trash. The Cortege throws a heat beam with AoE grenades on alt-fire, good if you like stacking heat and watching armor melt. Fluctus and Corvas are fine too if you already have them leveled, but they're not worth farming just for the mech.

How you mod the arm archgun matters more than which one you pick. The archgun mod pool is small, so the core is the same everywhere:

• Rubedo-Lined Barrel (or its Primed version from Baro Ki'Teer) for flat damage.
• Dual Rounds (Primed if you have it) for multishot.
• Automatic Trigger for fire rate.
• Modified Munitions for status chance.
• Sabot Rounds for punch and projectile speed.
• Two elemental mods to build your combo, usually heat plus toxin for viral, or electric plus heat for radiation.

Cap it with the 60/60 dual-stat elementals when you can, since archguns love a viral or radiation stack against the right factions. A viral setup shreds Grineer and Corrupted, and radiation is your friend against the Corpus robotic lines.

Exalted weapons

Voidrig's Arquebex is the headline act. It's the highest base area damage of any weapon in Warframe, and it's modded like an archgun in its own Arsenal tab. The big thing to know is that none of Voidrig's ability stats touch it. Strength, range, none of it matters to the mortars. Only the Arquebex's own mods do. It has high base crit and status, so a crit mod plus a couple 60/60 elementals push both stats toward 100% without much effort. The standard build is radiation plus viral for most content, or heat plus viral if you want a long burn ticking underneath your blasts. Aim a touch above your target, because the rounds arc and drop. Shooting straight at distance makes you miss low.

Bonewidow's Ironbride is modded as an archwing melee, also in its own tab, and it's arguably the strongest melee exalted in the game. It has about 45% base crit chance and a 3x crit multiplier, so one crit mod sends it into red crits. Stack that with archwing melee damage mods and a few elementals, and most things die in a single swing. The heavy attack flings a projectile forward that hits almost as hard as the swing itself, so heavy-attack spam is a real strategy once Ironbride is built for it. Unlike the Arquebex, Ironbride also benefits from some of Bonewidow's Necramech-side mods, which is why strength and range on the mech itself still feed her damage.

A quick note on the Profit-Taker. The Arquebex technically counts as an archgun, but the fight doesn't read it as one, so don't bring Voidrig expecting to skip the orb's shield phase. It works great on the Eidolons and just about everything else, though.

Piloting Necramechs in Open Worlds and Isolation Vaults

Knowing how to mod a mech is only half the fight. The other half is not getting it blown up, because Necramechs are slow, clumsy, and annoying to replace mid-mission. A few habits go a long way.

First, the basics of where and how. You summon a Necramech with the Necramech Deployer gear item, unlocked from the Heart of Deimos quest. You can use mechs in all three open worlds (Plains of Eidolon, Orb Vallis, Cambion Drift), in Railjack, in a growing list of normal missions, and in Isolation Vaults on Deimos. In open worlds, the usual flow is to Archwing to the fight, land, drop the mech, do the work, then pick it back up and move on. Mechs can't bullet-jump, so your movement is hover, dash, and slam. Get comfortable with the dash, because it's how you reposition when Guard Mode roots you to one spot.

Energy management is the make-or-break skill. Both exalteds drain energy per second, 5 for Guard Mode and 2.5 for Ironbride, and if you run dry mid-fight you're a slow target with no damage. Necramech Flow plus Streamline keeps the drain tolerable, and Necramech Rage turns incoming health damage into energy, which pairs nicely with the "stand there and get shot" playstyle. Energy restores from your gear wheel work too, so bind one if you're leaning on the exalteds hard.

For Voidrig, the loop is hover to a decent sightline, cast Storm Shroud, enter Guard Mode, and fire until the area is clean. Watch the energy bar. When Storm Shroud is about to fall, drop out of Guard Mode, recast Shroud, and get back in. Use Necraweb on anything big and angry to slow it before you bombard, and remember to aim the Arquebex a little high at range because the rounds arc. Don't be afraid to leave Guard Mode and use the arm archgun on spread-out trash. The Arquebex is kind of wasted on single scattered enemies, so save the energy for when things clump up.

For Bonewidow, the loop is the opposite. Charge in, cast Shield Maiden, then Firing Line to gather a pack, Meathook the toughest thing in it to heal, and swing Ironbride until the group is gone. The catch is that Shield Maiden's block only covers your front, so keep enemies in front of you. Firing Line helps a lot here by pulling them into your arc. If Shield Maiden's buffer gets low, turn it off and recast before it breaks, or you eat that 10-second lockout. Meathook can't be used while the shield is up, so weave them: drop shield, Meathook to heal, raise shield again.

Isolation Vaults deserve a specific shout. The enemy Necramechs you fight in there are tanky, and their weak points sit on their shoulders and back, not their chest. Shoot those to drop them fast. Your own mech is great for the Loid defense phase, since it can tank the swarm while your squad loots the vault. Bring a Voidrig if you want to bombard from the entrance, or a Bonewidow if you want to hold the room body to body. Either way, keep an eye on the mech's health and bail out before it pops, because a destroyed mech means a resummon cooldown you really don't want during a vault run.

One last habit worth forming. When the fight's over, dismiss the mech on purpose rather than letting it time out. It keeps the deployer ready for the next encounter, and on long open-world sessions that's the difference between a smooth run and a lot of standing around waiting on cooldowns. Treat the mech like a tool you drop for the hard part, not a permanent ride, and both Voidrig and Bonewidow will carry you through content they really shouldn't be trivializing this hard.