[Warframe] Progress Continues

A treasure room on Lua with this really awesome rotating sculpture. A static screenshot really doesn’t do it justice to seeing it in motion.

Warframe continues to be my “gaming addiction” right now — to the point where even though FFXIV’s patch 4.2 dropped last week, and I’ve patched the game up, I still haven’t logged back in to that game yet in, well… according to Warframe’s Daily counter, I’ve been logging in there for 49 days now, and I last logged in to FFXIV when that counter said 2, so it’s now been 7 weeks since I’ve played FFXIV.  You’d think I’d be jonesing for it, but I’m actually not really missing it, so I’m not sure if I’ll keep that sub going.  We shall see, won’t we?

Saryn Prime using spores in a Survival mission — lowest overall damage, but the spores tend to get counted as “final blow” so I still had the highest kill count. Good XP too.

But anyway, in Warframe, I’ve completed the 2nd Dream quest, which unlocked the “Focus” system.  I can’t do a whole lot with it yet.  Currently I have a passive from 1 tree unlocked is all, and to unlock more I need to open up a new faction in Cetus on Earth, but to talk to them, I need to have completed the quest “The War Within” so that I can have my Operator act as an independent entity.  Since I’ve completed the Second Dream quest, I can pop it out for 10 seconds to shoot a high-damage “void beam” (great for killing Sentients on Lua) once every 3 minutes, but there’s no other control yet.

My primary focus in the game is still leveling up the various weapons to see which once I like (my favorite rifle is still Baza, favorite shotgun gun is still Sobek, I rather like the Vulkar for sniper rifle, favorite pistol is Stubba, favorite melee… varies depending on what I’m doing.  Tends to be the Sheev dagger for stealth/spy work, or the Serro polearm if I want to be a mob blender on a non-stealth frame), so I’ve been spending a lot of time using Ivara and running the Telesto extermination mission on Saturn to level them up rapidly.  Between her stealth and sleep arrow, I can usually keep a 500% xp buff going, so it usually only takes 2-3 runs to level a weapon up, at about 15 minutes per run.  This past Monday when my affinity booster was still running, I even managed to take a weapon from unranked to 30 in a single run.  That was nice!

The result of leveling all these weapons? MR 14 is mine!

Along with that I’ve been running alerts for the rare crafting materials, cosmetic mask blueprints, the occasional weapon blueprint, and mods too.  Last night I ran several missions on Lua so I could unlock the Sedna Junction on Pluto.  The objective I needed to do on Lua was to complete the “challenge rooms” to get the mod rewards that they give.  I needed 2.  The objective says 3, but it said I already had 1.  I have no idea how, as the only Lua missions I’d done were the times going there for the 2nd Dream quest, and I don’t recall doing any challenges so… whatever, I still needed 2.

An exterior shot on Lua.

I went with Ivara to the “Crossfire Exterminate” mission that I had unlocked.  Almost immediately I got scanned (in spite of my stealth) and 2 Battalyst “sentient fighters” came out — though they couldn’t see me, so they tended to attack the mobs instead, which helped move my mission objective of killing 170-ish mobs forward without me needing to do anything.  I let the 3 minute timer fill up my “transference” indicator, then used my operator’s void beam to take one out.  The other one, I just brute forced it down — even after it went “immune” to damage, it still took a little, so it just took a lot of ammo, but it eventually went down.

This glowing crack in the wall put me in mind of Dr Who, so it got a screenie.

Anyway, I got through to the end of the run and still hadn’t seen any challenge room, as I didn’t know what to look for.  Since I’d cleared all the mobs, I popped out of stealth and ran back through everywhere and finally found that there was a glowing pressure plate in one of the big rooms.  For safety I popped back into Prowl, then stepped on it and holy lasers everywhere Batman!  Good thing Ivara ignores lasers when in Prowl using the Infiltrate mod like I do…  But anyway, I still didn’t know what I was doing, so I ended up pulling up a video guide and, oh is that all for this one?  Just run down the room past all the lasers and you’re done?  Well that was easy.  Stealth Drift is mine!

This glowy figure pointed me toward the Octavia tone puzzle thingie.

Going on the assumption that the challenge rooms are randomly assigned on each run, I re-ran the same mission.  Killed the Sentients, cleared out all the mobs, but again, hadn’t seen anything that looked like a challenge room, so… back through everywhere again poking around.  Found 2 of the 3 caches, and one big room seemed to have a challenge where I’d hit a console and the 8 pressure plates on various platforms around the room would play a song for me that I eventually was able to memorize a tone sequence then go stand on the pressure plates in the right order and I found that is wasn’t the challenge room, but I got the blueprint for the Octavia warframe Chassis, so that was nice.

This is what a farming Banshee can do in a low-level defense mission. Yes, 89% of all damage done! The Resonating Quake mod makes the quake power do a lot of damage and cover the *entire* map. It’s insane, really. I can see why they’re re-working it.

I kept looking and finally found that in a room that had been full of laser plates that I’d shot out, though it still somehow was randomly shooting lasers anyway there was a switch high on the wall that I could shoot that made a pillar rise a few feet in the middle of the room.  And looking up from there… ok, that looks like the end point portal for a challenge room.  But what’s the challenge, and could it have to do with these odd hallways around this room?

I found the pressure plates to open the weird halls.  1st hall is full of death orbs doing knockdown shock waves.  I shot those out, and kept getting reset, but eventually got them all and was able to run through the hall fast enough that I didn’t get reset, and that let me shoot a switch at the end of that hall.  The other hall was more interesting.  The ground is covered in ice, making my sprints and slides not work well, but when I’d try to just bullet jump pillars would pop up out of the floor in the way.  Nothing to shoot, just a matter of learning when and where to jump and slide to avoid the ice and the pillars.  It took me a *lot* of tries, but I eventually got it.  After this the pillar in the middle of the laser room went up almost all the way to the ceiling, so I was able to climb it and then jump through the portal.  Speed Drift is now mine!

Mission rewards screen from the 2nd Lua run. Got my special mod and Octavia Chassis!

And thus, the Sedna junction said I could do it now, if only I’d run the prior missions on Pluto, so that was the next item of business.  There was a spy mission, and I forgot to set myself to solo for it, so I ended up running it using Ivara (the queen of spies!) with someone in an Excalibur frame.  I headed for A, he for B.  I succeeded in mine, he failed in his.  But this is a standard mission, so only 1 needs to be done to succeed.  I then did C also, so we got 2 of the 3, so that wasn’t bad.  Then there was a mobile defense mission to do, so I swapped to Frost Prime and wanted that to be public.  Only 1 person joined on that one — a Saryn Prime who didn’t know who to spread spores.  Ugh!  But anyway, finished that up easily enough with the Snowglobe power of Frost, which unlocked the Sedna Junction!

Mars looks pretty good out the window, but that is *not* Phobos, in spite of me running a mission on a ship that’s supposed to be in Phobos orbit at the time of this shot. I guess in the far future we’ve moved a much larger moon in for Mars to have and renamed it Phobos perhaps?

Popped in there on Ivara again, since Prowl works so well on being able to kill the guardian specters.  Hit the X to start the battle and died instantly to a sniper rifle shot from the specter!  Okay, let’s try that again…  Hit the X to start and immediately rolled to the right.  Shot missed!  Hit Prowl, then took it out with my Baza while it couldn’t see me.

Can anyone with more knowledge about the game than me tell me what these “points” I was awarded at the top of the reward list are? This was after running an Excavation mission, if that makes a difference.

Sedna is unlocked!  Which means The War Within is now available!  And that’s going to be my goal for this week — finishing that up so I can unlock my operator fully.  Should be fun!

Happy gaming out there!