Warframe is a game of discovery. And grinding. Thankfully the discovery part fun far outweighs any negative part of the grinding. Also, the grinding is fluid and ALSO fun so it’s in a pretty big win / win spot.
My third Warframe finished building (took three days) and it is the often recommended and easy to get for a new player – Rhino. The Rhino is a tanky, in your face frame with abilities that are best used up close and personal. The first is charge which propels you forward sending enemies flying away. It is very satisfying to charge an enemy and ram him into a wall and view the inkblot style blood spatter left on the wall as the body slides down, crumpled. Is that a caterpillar? No, an angel? A can of food? It’s it’s own fun mini-game. Psychology with a Rhino! The fun part of that ability is that if you chain it – each successful hit does more damage and impact. You can really rag doll the hell out of groups of enemies and also does decent boss damage. His second ability hardens his armor making him near invulnerable for a time period. His third increases damage by all friendly units within range for thirty seconds in a multiplicative way by 50%, and the fourth is a massive floor stomp that does a nice turn of damage as well as lowering damage by the baddies and other status effects. In short, he is like the hulk, just less green and more intelligent.
Well, I guess he can be as green if you want.
On the advice of fellow blogger and all around nice-guy Jeromai I bought the limited time Hallowe’en color pack (basically free, 1 credit) since we are in that holiday time period. I used a nice, bright red to color my Rhino away from the black and whites I have been using for my other frames.
Then I saw the fun “random colors” button so I hit it. Several times. Here are the fun results only using the base color palette, Shadow, and Hallowe’en (Gallery opens when you click for easy viewing!)
That was fun. Of course, I ended up with the black on black on grey on grey one. Again. Ugh, I need more color in my life. Also note that the Syandana (which is Warframe for “cape”) doesn’t automatically change colors with the rest of your items. It is easy enough to fix afterwards if you want it to match just by going to the Syandana (cape.. why make up a new name for this?) and clicking “copy main warframe colors”. You can also do this with your weapons, which I did here.
The Soma Prime is a gold weapon (as you see it in default form on the top left) and using ‘copy Warframe colors’ made it black and subtle red, with the nice green LED glows that match my frame. It’s an amazing system that you can play with for hours – or just hit random and not be as boring as I am. Colors are just the tip of the iceberg for customization for Warframe and after spending time with it I am already wondering how this is not the standard for many games – or at least the price of entry. It’s amazing.
With seemingly endless items to farm and build and a still hidden away story I am trying to discover – AND a full, new open world expansion (The Plains of Eidolon) to play at some point after I have visited and unlocked every planet I keep expecting to still hit that point where things become more repetitive and well, boring. Fortunately Warframe keeps giving me little surprises. I know the repetitive part is on the horizon somewhere but WF is doing a good job of pushing back that reality.
For example I thought I had explored all of the ‘types’ of missions but found another new one just the other night. A typical ‘rescue’ mission is to get to a prison area, hack jail cells, find the target, and extract them safely. I had commented in the past that I thought it was a nice feature that you can give up your secondary weapon to the prisoner and they will help you fight. I joined a mission on Europa which was to save squads of people, not just one. The twist was there were waypoints that required being kept powered up. When you started the squad moving they would go to the first waypoint and ‘rest’ there until you told them to move to the next one, and the next, until finally they would depart on the ship. Aside from keeping these gather areas powered up you had to escort the squad safely between them and to their final destination. Instinctively as a random group of 4 we all took a leg as our responsibility. Squad to C, C to B, B to A, and A to ship. As with most missions in Warframe that have ‘waves’ they start pretty easy and increase in difficulty. The game let’s you leave in set intervals (normally 5) but the longer you push and harder it gets – and the bigger the rewards. The group worked well for the first 10 squads we saved, at which point the far more experienced players in the group mentioned that we should push for 16. It was so hard. So fun. squad members (the NPCs) were getting picked off. It was getting impossible to solo the legs, so you had to have two move the group forward. The enemies became stronger and more numerous and we even had Warframes go down. This was a glimpse for me into a more meta-game – this mission would be easier with the right kind of Warframes with the right kind of build outs. I don’t have too many options there yet but it was a peek into a deeper and more nuanced and challenging option for end game players. The good part is that if the early going gets rough you can just end the round at the set intervals and everyone still gets their rewards and gets to go home.
The second pleasant surprise is that there are more and different kinds of Mods as you move planets. At the beginning I felt like I had seen them all and would get stacks of +40% health and +20% shields. (Mods are great because you can improve that +40% health to +240% health (for example) AND you can use that single mod in ALL of your Warframes. I love that they are not single use and are free to interchange anytime, anywhere.). On the newest planet I started getting more interesting mods, +STATUS, more specific to different situations and you could see how you could build very specific build outs with frames and mods – and then very specific team compositions – that will make farming and mission completion more efficient and enjoyable.
I do not know how much longer there will be new discoveries and newness – but I welcome and enjoy it. Especially after how shallow many games are these days (Destiny 2, Overwatch, etc.)
Have you done the Survival mission on Mercury? I did it with 2 others and lasted 28 minutes. Hundreds of enemies, though we found a nice choke point. I think I ended up with over 20 mods. Still no Thief’s Wit.
Anyhow, after that mission I started looking at the mods. It’s impressive. Something like 60 mods per item type. There’s got to be more than 1000.
I have Thief’s Wit and have used it when needing to find specific items to get through the next jump gate. I love those longer missions, really ramps things up.
A great thing about Warframe so far, honestly, is that they don’t deny inventory space or limits on minor items. Yes they do on Frames and Weapons, but they don’t limit credits, mods, etc. (Looking at you, Destiny 2). I kept waiting to see when I would have to make hard choices on Mods but I read of people having thousands and thousands of them. Cool beans.
Just checked and I currently have 286 mods and 140 duplicates. My duplicate pattern so far is to keep 2 of each only, just in case I need to slot options into new frames that can’t hold the ones I have maxxed out. I don’t know best practices here =)
The longest mission I did was extraction – I don’t know if there is an end to that one or if you can keep going. I didn’t grab the time but it took up most of one play session. It got very wild near the end. Died twice I think.