[Warframe] Trying Something Different

The “star map”

I’ve been in maintenance mode on FFXIV for a while, and obviously not posting about it.  A friend has been playing Warframe for a while, and I saw some promo for it somewhere and decided that since he’d said it’s fun that I’d look at buying it.  Only to find it’s completely F2P with a store, so no cost to download and start up.  So that was nice.

Screenshots are F6 in this game. This was the 1st time I finally found the right button, hence the poor shot composition 😉 This is my Frost Prime frame, using default colors.

The 1st time I logged in, it opened up in a small window the same size as the launcher, and I didn’t see a way to change that in-game, so it got to the point where I needed to pick one of 3 frames, but I simply exited out.  Complained to my friend about it, and he said there’s a little gear icon in the launcher window where you can set it to full-screen before launching.  He also told me to pick Excalibur as my starting frame, saying “It’s overpowered from the get-go, while the other 2 take time to become powerful.”

Loki in default colors. Since he’s “the sneaky ninja” frame, I’ve actually colored him completely black now, but I don’t have a screenie of that.

Even so, I let it sit for a week or so until I had to burn out my “use it or lose it” vacation time at the end of the year when I decided to fire it up again.  I found the setting to make the thing play full screen and launched it.  Picked Excalibur, and then started running through the story missions.  they were pretty fun, it looks nice and it responsive.  I liked how the wild dogs in some of the missions were a 3rd party “force” that could attack your enemies as well as you, instead of simply making it “me against the world.”

An attempt at an action shot. All my attempts tend to have a lot of blurring like this. Such is life, no?

I didn’t get real far on the 1st planet (Earth, of course) before noticing that their promotion for “Prime Access” that was tied in to Twitch Prime said that you could simply do a 30-day free trial of Twitch Prime and cancel it, but still get the “Prime Access” pack in Warframe for it, so I decided to sign up for Twitch Prime…. only to find that since I’m an Amazon Prime member that Twitch is included, so… linked up those accounts, and suddenly found myself the owner of the Frost Prime frame, the Soma Prime rifle, and the Scindo Prime heavy axe.  And of course I started playing with those….

This is the Trinity frame. She’s a healer, so I colored her completely white so I’d remember easier. Why white is associated with healing, I dunno, but there it is.  The Sentinel companion is called “Carrier” and is in its default colors.

I’ve played a bit more since those days and I’ve maxed out Frost Prime, as well as several other frames.  Frost is an amazing tank, especially on Defense and Excavation-type missions with his “Snow Globe” power.  It’s essentially a giant invulnerability bubble that you sit in that protects you from enemy fire, and if they close in to melee range it slows them down a ton, so you have all the time in the world to react to them.  Further enhancing it with the “Chilling Globes” mod makes it so that it’s got a 50% change to freeze an enemy entering it for 8 seconds also, giving one that much more time to deal.  Very powerful ability.  It does have a health pool that depletes as enemies shoot at you, but it’s a very large health pool and it can be refreshed at any time anyway, so at least at the level where I’m still operating, it’s essentially an invulnerability bubble.

Another blurry attempt at an action shot

I’ve also maxed out Loki, Trinity, Ember, and Excalibur, and am currently working on Mag.  From the missions I’ve run, I’ve managed to get a blueprint set for the Oberon frame, so that’s currently building (1 day down, 2 to go) and I bought a Saryn Prime blueprint set from another player.  I’ve got one component made now, but I need to do missions on Jupiter and keep an eye out for the “alert” missions that reward the material called “Nitain” to build the other 2 pieces, so that will be a little longer yet.

An example of “a build” — in this case for the “Nami Solo” machete. Cyclone Kraken is the stance that allows it to do combos for bonus damage. Berserker increases attack speed by up to 75%. Drifting Contact allows your combo counter to last 13 seconds instead of 3, allowing for a comb to essentially last a full defense phase. Blood Rush gives a large critical % chance increase, multiplied by your combo counter, so these work together nicely. Fever Strike and North Wind combine to make the “viral” damage type, which is good vs “Infested” enemies. Volcanic edge adds heat damage and increases the overall status proc chance. Pressure Point is a flat 120% damage increase and Organ Shatter is a 90% critical damage multiplier. All together, that makes this a slicing/dicing/ high crit/high status machine. Now to finish leveling up Blood Rush for the full 165% crit chance increase…..

I’ve also leveled up a lot of weapons.  Primary and Melee weapons level very quickly, while Secondary weapons take longer.  Not due to any XP need, but simply due to the fact that primary weapons do more damage so you tend to use them on purpose, melee weapons are generally good for slicing and dicing your way out of a pickle, and secondary weapons don’t really get used much unless you’re using them for the sake of using them.  Since XP is awarded to the weapon used to make a kill, the more commonly used Primary and Melee weapons therefore level faster.  Just how it is.

Another example of a build, this time for Rifle. I’ve got all the cards I want for it, but I need to level them up quite a ways still. And I’ll need to use “forma” on the more expensive ones to reduce their cost so I can actually afford the space to level the cards up.

As a result of this focus on leveling the weapons and frames up, I’ve made it to Mastery Rank 7, so a good bunch of the frames and weapons are unlocked for me, which then leads to the vicious circle of raising the rank again which unlocks more gear, and so on.  Sounds like a video game, doesn’t it?

Yet another blurred action shot. This one’s using the Mag frame with a Sybaris rifle on her back, while wielding the Nami Skyla dual sword weapon. It’s hard to tell, but she’s also got a Kraken pistol on her right hip there too.

It really doesn’t take very long to level a frame or weapon up, even so — not even the secondaries.  So really the game is more focused toward the mods that you can pick up and then how you use them in your frame and weapons.  The game’s been around for several years now, so there’s a lot of maturity in the advice community and when people ask for “best builds” they can be referred to builds created years ago.  There are a couple of mods that seem common to all warframe builds — Flow and Continuity especially, as they give a larger energy pool for your frame powers to use, and add duration to your powers, respectively.  Since you pick frames for their powers… the ability to use more powers from Flow, and have the powers last longer from Continuity makes a lot of sense, no?

This is a fist weapon that I don’t recall the exact name of, but it sounded Greek to me.  Enkylodias?  Something like that.  The base color is actually a typical steel/metal gray, but I recolored it to be a bit flashier.  You may note that my sentinel companion called “Carrier” is now red and black also.

It’s similar for weapons.  All melee weapons will have Pressure Point for the 120% straight-up damage increase.  All rifles will use Serration (damage increase) and Split Chamber (multishot).  And so on.  There actually seem to be 4-5 “standard” mods used in every build, so only 3-4 mods are really able to be different, depending on the weapon.  And different base stats are why you’d want those last mods to be different.  Some weapons have a high “status” chance to do bonus elemental damage, others have high critical chance, so you’d want to boost that instead.  Some are low for both status and crit, but have a high base damage, so you simply want to buff the primary damage type.  It all depends on the weapon, really, and that’s why even with the similar “base” of mods for each weapon there’s still so much variety in use.  Different people like to do things different ways.  Works nicely, IMO.

So anyway, I’ve rambled enough.  Happy gaming out there!