The Best Cyte-09 Builds In Warframe

Warframe’s 1999 update is here, bringing with it a new Warframe to earn and a handful of weapons to chase. Cyte-09 strikes from the shadows with his signature Neutralizer, an exalted sniper rifle that ricochets between targets when you land headshots. Pair that with his cloaking ability, and you become the galaxy’s deadliest sniper.

Cyte can deal some absurd damage in the right hands, and he’s surprisingly easy to play once you understand how his abilities work. In this guide, we go over how to get your hands on Cyte-09 and give an in-depth breakdown of his four abilities, passive, and give some powerful build recommendations.

How To Craft Cyte-09

Cyte-09 can be obtained from The Hex Syndicate, the faction tied to Warframe’s 1999 update. You’ll gain access to this Syndicate upon completing “The Hex” quest, which you’ll unlock by completing all previous main story quests.

Completing the quest will give you Cyte-09’s main blueprint for free. To get the rest of his components—neuroptics, chassis, and systems—you’ll need to increase your standing with The Hex. Cyte’s components may be purchased with standing once you reach Rank 2: Fresh Slice. Each component blueprint costs 20,000 standing.

Cyte-09 Blueprint

Cyte-09 Neuroptics

Cyte-09 Chassis

Cyte-09 Systems

Cyte-09 Abilities

Stats

Passive

Weak point kills increase Cyte-09’s weak point critical chance by 1%, up to 300% for the duration of the current mission.

Precision kills grant an escalating critical chance bonus while landing headshots. Each precision kill grants a 1% critical chance buff to future headshots, up to a cap of +300%. This bonus is multiplicative, similar to critical chance mods like Point Strike and Pistol Gambit. The bonus only applies to weak point hits as well, but you can make headshots easier to land with Cyte-09’s Seek ability.

This buff applies to all weak point damage, not just sniper rifles.

Seek

Plant an antenna that projects a forward wave scan. Detected enemies take increased weak point damage and become visible through walls. Weapon gain punch through.

Cyte-09 deploys an antenna that pulses out waves of energy every three seconds. Enemies caught in the pulse will be marked for five seconds, increasing all precision damage they receive. Additionally, your weapons gain an additional ten meters of punch-through against marked targets, allowing you to land headshots through entire buildings. In essence, all of your weapons behave like the Zenith.

Enemy weak points are marked with Cyte-09’s energy color when tagged by this ability. Leverage your increased punch-through to land easy headshots through walls.

To get the most out of Seek, you’ll want to spec for Ability Range and deploy your antennas near the back of a tileset. The scan radius is quite generous by default, so even a moderate 175% range configuration will let you scan through multiple rooms. Throw on some Ability Duration to extend your mark duration, and you should be able to snipe hordes of enemies from hundreds of meters away.

If you like Cyte-09 and can throw on some Forma, try to get some Ability Strength to scale the weak point damage multiplier. Weak point multipliers are fairly rare in Warframe, so scaling it as high as possible can downright trivialize boss fights and Steel Path content. You cannot modify Seek’s max antenna count or its scan angle.

Resupply

Throw two elemental ammo packs that instantly refill the active weapon’s magazine while granting the weapon an additional instance of the selected elemental damage and status effect. Hold the ability to select a different elemental damage type.

Reload clears the effect. Sniper rifles gain extra damage.

Resupply counts as a damage buff, preventing you from subsuming similar abilities (Roar, Eclipse, etc.) without overriding Resupply.

Resupply is a damage buff that instantly reloads your current weapon and loads it with elemental-infused ammo. Holding the button will bring up a selection wheel with every elemental damage type in the game, excluding Void. Selecting a damage type will then throw out a box of ammunition for you and your allies. These ammo packs are instanced, so don’t worry about stealing ammo from your team.

Cyte-09 will automatically reload his weapon and gain the damage bonus; no ammo pickup is required. For your allies, they simply need to walk over the ammo pack to gain the same buff. The elemental damage bonus lasts until you reload. Casting Resupply doesn’t count as reloading, which means if Cyte has sufficient energy and can keep casting Resupply, you can theoretically keep this buff up forever.

Only one damage type can be applied via Resupply at a time. These bonuses apply per weapon, however. You can apply different damage types for each weapon to diversify your damage types.

Your only real means of scaling Resupply is through Ability Strength, increasing the damage of the second damage instance from each shot. Strength has no bearing on this second hit’s status chance, but it does affect its overall damage. This bonus is doubled if you have a snipe rifle, giving Resupply excellent synergy with Cyte’s ultimate.

Evade

Jump backwards and become invisible for a short duration. Weak point kills extend Evade’s duration and heal Cyte-09.

This ability can be subsumed with the Helminth system.

When used on other Warframes, Evade’s maximum duration is capped at 25 seconds, regardless of your Ability Duration stat.

Cyte-09 dashes backward and turns invisible, making him virtually impossible to target. The invisibility duration is ten seconds by default, but landing precision kills will extend the duration of Evade and partially heal you. If you can keep chaining headshot kills, you’ll remain in Evade indefinitely.

The only stat you need to spec for here is Ability Duration, as it affects the duration extension from precision kills and Evade’s maximum duration at any given moment. Use Seek to make headshot kills easier to land, and you should have no issues keeping Evade active throughout an entire mission.

Neutralize

Summon the Neutralizer, Cyte-09’s exalted sniper rifle. Bullets ricochet off weak pionts to seek out other nearby weak points.

Alt-fire lobs a cold grenade that completely freezes enemies.

Neutralizer is Cyte’s signature sniper rifle. While active, your primary weapon is replaced with an exalted sniper with a grenade launcher alt-fire. Your primary fire behaves like a traditional sniper, generating combo as you land consecutive hits on targets. Combo multiplies your damage output, so try to get this number as high as possible. Additionally, precision hits will ricochet the bullet to four nearby targets, each receiving 20% less damage. Pair this with Seek to make the ricochet ignore line of sight.

Zooming in while ADS increases your critical damage. Stick to x4 zoom for a free 60% critical damage bonus.

Your alt-fire lobs a grenade at your reticle, detonating on impact. Enemies in the blast radius are afflicted with x10 Cold status, instantly freezing them. This only works against non-boss units—Acolytes and Liches can’t be debuffed with Cold status. The damage on this alt-fire is fairly low, but it can be modded to easily demolish low-level Star Chart content and easier Steel Path missions.

Ability Strength increases the base damage of Neutralizer, acting as a multiplicative damage source like Serration or Vex Armor. Strength stacks additively with those values, so if you plan on making a high Strength build, you can forgo modding Neutralizer for base damage. Range affects how far your bullets can ricochet on precision hits, and Efficiency determines how much energy is drained per shot fired.

Neutralizer doesn’t count as a channeled ability, which means you can benefit from passive sources of energy regeneration while it’s active. This includes Zenurik’s Wellspring ability, Energy Nexus, and Energy Siphon.

Cyte-09 Builds

Today, we’ll be looking at three builds for Cyte-09 that leverage his excellent exalted weapon and unique ammo mechanic. Cyte is a Warframe that has easy access to invisibility, so you can be fairly lenient with survivability tools. We’ll be using Rolling Guard on most configurations as a panic button, but feel free to mod him for HP, Shields, or Shield-Gating instead.

For Focus schools, you’ll want to go with Zenurik. Wellspring’s energy regeneration works while Neutralizer is active, which is highly unusual for an exalted weapon. You can stack other sources of energy regeneration to fix Cyte’s resource economy, giving you room to build for negative Ability Efficiency or to spam Neutralizer’s alt-fire.

There aren’t many issues with Cyte’s kit, so we won’t recommend you subsume over any of his abilities, save for our alt-fire build tailored for spamming abilities. You might want to replace Seek with a crowd control or armor strip tool, but this isn’t needed for most content.

Cyte-09 greatly benefits from Crimson Shards, notably Ability Strength and Duration. If you like the gameplay loop of casting Resupply instead of reloading, consider an Amber Shard specced for cast speed.

Hybrid Archon Shards are also a solid option, as Cyte can swap between all elemental damage types with his second ability.

Starter Build

This zero Forma build is focused on buffing Cyte’s exalted sniper as much as possible. We start by equipping Umbral Intensify and Transient Fortitude to scale the Neutralizer’s base damage and our elemental bullets provided by Resupply. We then run (Primed) Continuity and Augur Message to counter the loss in Ability Duration.

We want Neutralizer to ricochet as far as possible, so we run Stretch and Augur Reach to make it hit targets up to 17.5 meters away. This also greatly extends the scan range of Seek, allowing you to cover most of a given tileset with a single antenna.

To finish the build, we use Energy Nexus for passive energy regeneration and Vitality for a small HP buffer if we take stray AoE damage while Evade is active. If you own it, feel free to use Rolling Guard instead.

As for Neutralizer, we’re using a generic critical build. Serration stacks additively with our Ability Strength, Galvanized Chamber gives us a ton of multishot, and we use two elemental mods for elemental damage. In the above example, we use Rime Rounds and Thermite Rounds to make Blast, an element that’s good in virtually every scenario. Feel free to change the element to better suit the content you’re playing.

The standout mod here is Sharpshooter, an Arbitration mod that grants +15 energy whenever you land a precision kill with a sniper rifle. Surprisingly, this works with Neutralizer. So long as you land headshots, you shouldn’t have issues with energy sustain.

If you own it, we highly recommend using Arcane Momentum with Cyte-09. Critical hits with sniper rifles will grant +150% reload speed for a short duration. We always crit with Neutralizer, so this is a free reload speed buff for our exalted weapon.

Endgame Sniper Build

We haven’t made any major changes to this variant of Cyte’s sniper build, but we invested a hefty sum of Forma to fit some stronger endgame mods. We run Transient Fortitude and Umbral Intensity to scale our Strength, Primed Continuity and Augur Message for more Ability Duration, and Stretch and Augur Reach for more Range.

Since we can regenerate our energy while using Neutralizer, we can run Energy Siphon in the aura slot. For the exilus slot, we recommend Primed Sure Footed to become immune to knockback and stagger effects. If you don’t own this mod, use Handspring instead. Finally, we use Rolling Guard as a panic button for when Evade drops.

Neutralizer has a few more mods in place this time. Primed Cryo Rounds replaces Rime Rounds, giving us a substantial boost to our elemental damage. Vigilante Armaments is also used to increase our multishot, although feel free to use Vile Acceleration instead if you can handle the sniper’s recoil. Everything else remains the same as before.

Cryo Launcher Build

This is a fun way to use Cyte’s exalted sniper, morphing it into a rocket launcher that’s excellent at crowd control. You can pair this with a headshot-focused secondary like the Knell to pump out some absurd DPS. Condition Overload melee weapons work great here, too, although you’ll need to land headshots with your secondary to keep Evade up.

Neutralizer’s alt-fire is quite expensive to spam, so we’ll be speccing more for Efficiency and energy regeneration here. We run Fleeting Expertise (R4) to half all energy costs. We then use Energy Nexus, Energy Siphon, and the Zenurik Focus school to regenerate a ton of energy per second. Primed Flow ensures we have a fairly large energy reserve to work with.

All of this energy is multiplied by Nourish, which also gives your weapons Viral damage for free. You can then use Resupply for another damage type to benefit from three damage types at once. Viral won’t apply to your cryo grenades, but your Resupply buff will. Transient Fortitude and Umbral Intensify help scale Nourish and Resupply’s damage, and Rolling Guard gives you a way to become immune when Evade drops.

Duration does take a hit from Fleeting Expertise and Transient Fortitude, so we need to use Narrow Minded to keep our Duration positive. This does mean Neutralizer’s primary fire can’t reliably ricochet anymore, but the AoE coverage from your cryo grenades will more than make up for this. Prime your targets, swap to your secondary, and clear them out.

You need Primed Sure Footed to prevent staggers from Neutralizer’s alt-fire. If you don’t own Primed Sure Footed, be mindful of your positioning.

For our weapon build, we equip Primed Firestorm to drastically increase our AoE coverage. Critical Delay can take the place of Point Strike to further boost our critical stats. Vile Acceleration allows you to spam your alt-fire with reckless abandon. You can’t proc modded status ailments with your alt-fire, so use your remaining mod slots to buff your Neutralizer’s primary fire.