The real gate is how you die, not how hard they hit
Every guide to Arbitrations leads with enemy level 60-80 and the drone ability shield. Those matter, but they are not what makes players fail. What makes players fail is a single rule change that invalidates half the survival tools they have been relying on for hundreds of hours.
In a normal mission, reaching zero health puts you into bleedout. You have a timer, you can crawl, and you can spend a self-revive. A large part of Warframe’s defensive design is built on that phase: it is the window where Sacrifice, Inaros’ Undying passive, Sevagoth’s Tombstone and Unairu’s Last Gasp all do their work.
Arbitrations remove the phase. Health reaching zero is death, immediately, with no bleedout and no self-revive. Anything whose trigger condition is “when you enter bleedout” now has no condition to fire on.
That gives you a clean test for any defensive option you are considering:
Does it prevent you from reaching zero health, or does it rescue you after you get there?
Only the first kind works here. The wiki’s own list makes the split explicit. Adaptive Mutation (Nidus), Five Levels of Immortality (Wukong), Negation Armor (Inaros), Savior Decoy (Loki), Phoenix Renewal (Oberon), Venari Bodyguard (Khora), Temporal Anchor (Protea), Grave Spirit (Dagath), Well of Life (Trinity), Arcane Escapist and Emergence Savior all keep functioning, because none of them rely on entering bleedout. Sacrifice, Undying, Tombstone and Last Gasp do not, because all four do.
Getting back up: Resurgence Tokens
Death is not permanent, it is just expensive. When you die, a Revive Tower appears at the spot with a waypoint, and Arbitration Shield Drones begin dropping Resurgence Tokens on death.
Tokens work like Index points. Picking one up applies a stacking Resurgence Burden debuff that lowers your maximum health and shields and drains energy continuously, so the carrier is progressively weakened while collecting. Five tokens revive one dead player, and they do not have to be carried by the same Warframe. What matters is that Warframes holding a combined total of five bring them to the tower at the same time.
Two practical consequences follow. First, the player who dies is not the one who fixes it, so the squad has to decide who collects before anyone goes down. Second, if a token carrier dies, the tokens are lost, which means the worst outcome is everyone dying one at a time while trying to rescue each other.
Entry requirements most players miss
You need access to Pluto and the Eris Junction task “Equip a Focus Lens” to unlock Arbitrations at all. Entering also requires a Rank 30 Warframe, or a Mastery Rank 30 account whose Warframe has been polarized at least once.
Only endless mission types are eligible: Alchemy, Defection, Defense, Disruption, Excavation, Infested Salvage, Interception, Mirror Defense, Survival and Conjunction Survival, Void Cascade, Void Flood, Void Armageddon. Exactly one Arbitration alert exists at any moment and it changes node hourly, which is why checking the Operation window before you commit matters. Defense, Excavation, Disruption, Interception and Survival come up most often; Alchemy, Void Cascade, Void Flood and Void Armageddon are rare.
Rotations are AABBCCCC, and that changes the math
Normal endless missions run AABC and repeat. Arbitrations run AABB and then stay on C forever. The fifth rotation onward is all C rewards, which is the reason long runs pay so much better than short ones rather than tapering off.
Every completed rotation pays one Vitus Essence. Mission completion also pays 50,000 credits. Excavation is the exception to watch: rewards come every two completed digs, not every one, so an excavation Arbitration is worth roughly half the essence per unit of time.
Destroyed Arbitration Drones have a 6 percent chance to drop Vitus Essence, and dropped essence despawns after five minutes. If you see the pickup marker blinking, that is the despawn warning, not a UI glitch.
One note that decides whether you should keep playing after a death: rotation rewards are added directly to your inventory as they are earned. A dead player can abort and keep every rotation reward already collected. Standard loot picked up during the run is lost. So dying does not retroactively waste the run, it only costs you the drops on the floor.
What actually kills you
Not the enemy level. Grenades. They announce themselves with a beeping sound and a red marker, and they punch through Warframes that survive everything else in the mission. The second most common cause is standing outside revive range while the squad is elsewhere.
Build accordingly: Adaptation, Quick Thinking and Rolling Guard cover most of the gap, and a healer or a high-survivability frame covers the rest. Bring a weapon that works without abilities, because drones shield enemies from Warframe powers while they live. Shooting the drone first is faster than shooting the enemies twice.
Spending Vitus Essence
The Arbitration representative sits in the Hexis Enclave of any Relay and sells the Galvanized mod series, arbitration rotation rewards, Archgun Rivens and cosmetics, all priced in Vitus Essence. Galvanized mods are the priority for most players, since several of them are direct upgrades to base damage mods once their on-kill condition is met.
Read the arcanes guide for which survivability arcane to pair with a token run, and the mods guide for what to slot around Galvanized mods. If you have not cleared the chart yet, the Steel Path guide is the next step up, and damage types explains why your weapon damage may be doing less than the numbers suggest.