Volatile Runners are orange humanoid Infested Corpus crewmen that sprint towards a player and explode. Since update 8.3, they can knock the player down for a few seconds. Because of this, it is recommended that players should kill them first. If a player cannot escape a Runner's blast, he/she can roll to avoid being knocked down or stunned. They can easily stunlock or cause prolonged knockdowns resulting in the players death.
If Rhino's Stomp or Vauban's bastille is used on a Volatile Runner, it can still explode during the stasis effect.
Volatile Runners will still explode when you are near them with Shade's cloaking ability activated. This can deal damage to you. Abilities such as Loki's Invisibility and Ash's Smokescreen also do not seem to consistently prevent a Runner from detonating when you are nearby. However, they will not pursue you if you run out of detonation range while invisible.
Among the light Infested, Volatile Runners are the least dangerous to Defense objectives as the shields on said objectives will often regenerate between Volatile Runner explosions and each Runner can only attack once. However, a barrage of detonations can easily block off a Tenno while Leapers and Chargers tear the objective to shreds.
When the runner's exploding animation starts, it is frozen in space and cannot move around until it explodes or dies. Sometimes it will stop before it explodes and reverse the animation, if cloaked and moving out of its range.
Currently, as of Update 11, the Runner does not deliver Knockbacks to targets when exploding, due to the lack of actual Knockback elements to make this status. Although, this may change.
Trivia
- When about to explode, observant players can see the Runners reaching for their faces as if to pinch their nose. This may be considered a Cartoon concept as one would pinch its nose and blow thus causing pressure to build in its head before exploding; classic slapstick cartoons have similar events occuring.
- Were called Runners pre-Update 12.4
