Introduction

It’s that time of year and Warframe has decided to bring back an old Halloween event called “Hallowed Nightmares.” The headline rewards you can receive from the event are the Day of the Dead skin for the Dread and an Orokin Reactor, so it’s worth an hour of your time. This is not a particularly difficult event, but it has some unique game mechanics which we’ll cover in a moment. Anybody can participate, including new players, so you should give it a go! To get started, open your Star Chart and click on the Halloween event tab as shown below.

Mission Mechanics

Unarmed

You spawn with no weapons equipped at the beginning of the mission. This is intended and there is, as far as we’re aware, no way to bring any weapons into the mission. However, Digital Extremes hasn’t left you empty handed… Well okay, maybe they have, but you can finish the mission easily without weapons so don’t stress!

Warframe Modications

Your shield and HP are set to 100 / 100 regardless of which Warframe you use for the first mission. For the second mission, your shield and health is reduced further to 50. This includes Warframes that otherwise have no shields such as Inaros and Nidus. Your Warframe’s level and mods cannot modify this health and shield value either. Additionally, all Warframes begin the mission with their abilities disabled.

However, your choice of Warframe and mod setup is not meaningless. Any passive effects remain active during a mission and abilities that don’t cost energy can still be used. As a result, certain Warframes are better to use than others thanks to their passives. These missions can be completed with ANY unmodded Warframe without difficulty, but some loadouts can make the event easier than others.

Warframe Choices

Nekros

The best Warframe, in our opinion, is Nekros. First, his passive allows him to heal anytime a nearby enemy is killed which is exceptionally useful given the low overall health pools on these missions. Secondly, he is able to activate Desecrate if you have the Despoil augment equipped. While you won’t want to leave this active all the time since it drains health (especially in the second mission), you can use it occasionally to spawn health orbs for both yourself and teammates.

Limbo

Limbo is known to do Limbo things, AKA cheese, and this mission type is no different. Once you enter the Rift by rolling, there are no attacks that can hit you aside from the Jack O’Naut’s toxin cloud (we’ll discuss that later). That means all those pesky Ancient Disruptors and hordes of Infestation have no impact on you whatsoever. The only time you’ll have to leave the Rift is to hack terminals and interact with Power Cells, but otherwise you can stay mostly safe the entire mission.

Inaros

Inaros has an interesting passive that enables him to revive when he enters bleedout state by siphoning the life of nearby enemies. This passive is best used during Solo play as it will enable you to continue your mission without using your 4 revives (which can go quickly if you are inexperienced). We don’t recommend Inaros for Online play as often the inability to crawl during bleedout state is aggravating to teammates when you die in a toxic cloud.

Mod Choices

We’re not going to go into much detail here since almost all mods don’t matter, but it’s worth noting that passive effects still work during the mission. As such, equipping an aura mod like Rejuvenation can greatly improve your survival. In addition, you should consider equipping Coaction Drift to your Warframe to boost the strength of auras for the whole squad. Other passive bonus mods work as well such as Rush for increasing Sprint speed, so feel free to equip them if you desire.

Mission Guide

Roughly midway into traveling towards the mission waypoint, you’ll encounter a door you cannot open. Before you can proceed, you must power the door by finding two power cells and inserting them on both sides of the door. The only way to get these power cells is to hack terminals in the room by the door. If you’re struggling to find them, there is a small icon on the mini-map which denotes their location.

The terminal features a typical Grineer hacking console. It’s worth bringing some cyphers for this mission as Ancient Disruptors can push or drag you away from the terminal which interrupts your hacking. Once you’ve hacked two terminals and insert the power cells at the door, you’ll be allowed to proceed to the “big boss.”

Jack O’Naut

If you enter the boss fight unprepared, this big fella can seem fairly daunting at first. However, he’s not so bad once you understand how to properly kill him. All the battle boils down to is luring the Jack O’Naut (Juggernaut) into environmental hazards that will damage him until he dies. It’s really that simple. Scattered throughout the room, you’ll find pumpkin-themed explosive barrels as seen in the image below.

You can destroy these explosive barrels by punching them. The explosion will not harm you, so don’t stress about self damage. As you might guess, the goal is to destroy the barrels while the Jack O’Naut is nearby. However, you do NOT need to wait until the Jack O’Naut is immediately next to the explosives. This is because destroying these barrels produces a ring of fire that lasts a few seconds (roughly between 5 – 10).

If the Jack O’Naut enters that ring of fire, he will be inflicted with a Heat status effect and start taking damage. However, he’ll only take damage while inside the ring of fire. That means even if he’s on fire while OUTSIDE the ring of fire, he won’t take damage. You’ll want to stay close to the ring of the fire to act as bait for the Jack O’Naut. You can lure him easily in Solo by HIDING from his line of sight which will trigger him to run towards you, at which point you can reveal yourself once he’s in the ring of fire.

In short, you repeat this process of setting the Jack O’Naut on fire until he dies and that’s it! However, we feel there is one specific attack you should absolutely be aware of: The Toxic Clouds. As you might expect, these clouds proc toxin which deals damage directly to your health. Since you have low health in this mission, you’ll die nearly 100% of the time if you walk into the cloud even for a second. Be cautious and watch for the Jack O’Naut shooting out pumpkins from its back which will explode to produce the clouds seen below:

Time Attack Mission

Once you finished the first two missions (which are identical except the level of enemies and your shield/health), you’ll unlock the timed version of the mission. In order to receive an Orokin Reactor, you must complete the mission with a Score of 666 or higher. Your Score starts at 1000 and ticks down 1 score per second, meaning you have 5 minutes and 34 seconds to complete the mission. If you aren’t fast enough, you can still complete the mission but you won’t be awarded the Orokin Reactor.

This time attack mission is just a matter of practice and shouldn’t be too difficult if you understand the mission as we described it above. The two main variables on speed are the behavior of Jack O’Naut during the final fight and your parkour speed. If you are slow at parkour, you should play with your matchmaking set to Online so that faster players can power the door while you catch up. However, if you are fast at parkour, you might want to consider playing with matchmaking set to Solo.

As of right now, many players don’t know how to kill the Jack O’Naut and, as a result, aren’t baiting it properly to explosive barrels and fire rings. This will slow your mission speed considerably. One way to counteract this is to waypoint the explosive barrel or ring of fire you’d like to lure the Jack O’Naut to so your teammates are on same page.

There is a second unknown when playing with others too: The Jack O’Naut’s dash attack. In Solo, he tends not to use the attack often which can slow down the mission since the dash attack is easy to bait into fire rings. However, his dash attack is extremely buggy and can result in him getting permanently stuck as shown below. Play with others at your own risk for this mission!

Day of the Dead Dread Skin

You can obtain arguably the best reward from this event by completing the second mission. While the Dread skin is purely cosmetic, it’s a serious competitor in the world of Fashion Frame which we all know is paramount. You can see the default skin and the Halloween event skin in the A/B comparison pictures below.

We hope our guide helped you with this Halloween event. While the rewards may not be spectacular, it’s a fun little event that you can do quickly so you might as well pick yourself up a unique skin for one of the coolest weapons in-game. If you have any tips or recommendations for the event, feel free to leave them in the comments below!

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