[Warframe] Plague Star Event

Saw this meteor in the plains one night. Thought it was a nice effect.

Last Thursday the Plague Star event began again and runs for 10 days, so up through this coming weekend.  It’s a single mission that you can run repeatedly in order to get faction standing with “Operational Supply” which enables you to get the Zaw parts that include the name “plague” in their title.

According to my clan chat, the 2 “grips” are equivalent to non-plague grips, but the 2 “strikes” are upgrades to their non-plague versions.  I don’t know about the stat comparison, but I know that the plague parts add toxin damage to the built zaw, so that’s a bump in damage right there.  Operational Supply also sells the Snipetron blueprint, a few cosmetic items for your operator, rare gems, Cetus Wisps, and “Exodia” items that you can add on to a weapon for additional effect.  Though from what I’ve seen in videos the additional effect makes it easy to kill oneself, so I’m not sure how useful they actually are…

I still want to know what this is and why it sometimes pops up

But anyway, to do the event you talk to Konzu and pick up the mission, then head out into the Plains of Eidolon.  The plains have their normal mob loadout, but also now have infested spawning all over the place too.  Apparently this bugs the plains out a bit, especially at night, and prevents the Vomvalyst mobs from spawning, and without those it’s rather hard to hunt Eidolons, as you can’t charge the lures that hold the big guy in place, nor get the capture which gives the Brilliant Eidolon Shard.  Quite a few people are in the forums saying that they’re taking a break from Eidolon hunts until the event is over, as a result.  For me personally, the bug I experience is that the Plains just plain crash the game for me.  During the day I’m usually okay, but at night?  Nope… I am going to crash to desktop.  The question isn’t if, but when.  I got a resource booster the other night as my login reward and tried to farm Cetus wisps.  Found quite a few, but since you only get them by finishing a mission, which in this case is loading back out to Cetus, a crash simply kills all progress.  One run I’d found 4, which the booser doubled to 8, so it was a great run, and I was actually running back to Cetus from the big lake, so I was almost there…  Almost.  But nope.  Crashed.  That was my 3rd attempt to get wisps that night, and that was when I gave up in disappointment also.  Hopefully it will be better once the event is over.  Even so, before this all bugged out, I was able to get enoguh wisps to craft my T1 Amp, then I was able to rank it up in Hydron, so it’s already rank 30.  I did manage 1 Eidolon hunt using it, and it’s definitely doing more damage than the mote, so that’s nice.

There’s a method of quickly killing lots of mobs with the Trinity frame. It involves using the Sancti Castanas weapon, using the “link” ability, augmented, and then 2 defensive mods that let Trinity avoid any self-damage from the explosion while transferring the damage to nearby mobs. This pic is an example of it in action — you can see Trinity jumping there behind the cryopod, as part of the defense involves being in the air. So she’s tossed the weapons at her feet and is jumping above them…

But anyway…  After getting the mission from Konzu, head out to the plains.  There will be a marked cave on the map that 1 party member needs to run down into to retrieve a poison.  It’s considered good form for another party member to drop a waypoint at the cave entrance after the poison is picked up to aid the 1st person in finding their way back out of the cave.  After the poison is picked up, a vault in a Grineer camp gets marked and y’all make your way over there and drop the poison in there and defend it for 3 minutes.  Most mobs get airdropped in, so if you can shoot down the transports before they drop the mobs (hello sniper rifles!) then it’s a lot easier.  While the poison is being mixed there are a couple of items that you can add to it, if you’ve built them (recipes are obtained from Operational Supply, of course) and have them equipped to your gear wheel.  I don’t recall the names, but 1 item increases the level of the final boss, and the other one lets it get summoned multiple times during the last phase.

And then she makes the weapons explode and we get this effect as the damage transfers through her link ability to mobs in the area. Kinda kewl looking, and *very* effective.

After the defense is done, a drone gets marked, so you head over to it and put the poison in it, then you have to defend the drone as it travels to “the boil” where the final fight takes place.  If you didn’t add the boss summoning item to the poison, you just kill a lot of infested, then it completes and you get 1000 Op Supply standing.  If you added level increasers you get 250 more standing for each of those added, and if you added summoning increasers then the boss spawned 4 times and you get 250 more standing for each time there, so you can get up to 3000 standing per run.  The boss is actually pretty time consuming, though, so for maximum standing farming it’s usually faster not to add anything and just get the 1000 per run, and then do a lot of runs.  Unless you have a pre-made group with the optimal Slowva, Rhino, Oberon, and Chroma.

The boss is Lephantis, just with a re-skin to look infested.  3 heads, vulnerable spots that only are vulnerable as he’s attacking.  Kill the heads, beat the boss.  What makes the group setup above optimal is:  Slowva makes him attack at 1/4 speed so the vulnerable spots stay open much longer.  Slowva also makes all the infested add swarms move much slower so you can spend more time on the boss rather than worrying about having to constantly clear the swarms.  Rhino’s Roar adds a lot of damage output to the group, plus he can Stomp and this holds the boss in place for its duration too, so if you timed it such that the vulnerable spots are open when Stomp hits, that’s 15 seconds of shooting you can do.  and any infested adds are also out of the picture for that time too, assuming the Stomp didn’t just kill them outright.  Oberon uses Renewal which gives an armor buff to the group and heals them (though doesn’t prevent a 1-shot) and puts down Hallowed Ground which damages the infested adds and prevents status effects, so the toxin clouds that the boss pumps out don’t put a dot on everyone in the group.  And finally Chroma with his Vex Armor and a sniper rifle does massive damage to the vulnerable spots, so makes the heads die quickly.

The “Hunter” mod set drops from the boss, and can be awarded at a phase transition in the mission.  The boss also drops a rock that you can use to build a statue in your dojo.  It takes 5,000 of the rocks for the statue, and after running the mission enough on Saturday (with 4 boss spawns most times) that I got pretty bored with it, I only had 34, so… that’s a lot of missions from a lot of clanmates for a statue.

Me and my Helminth Charger

I’ve also begun working on pets.  They seem to do a lot of damage, which is nice, but the loss of the “quality of life” of the Vacuum mod on a sentinel is a big deal.  And tbh, I really don’t notice damage from my companion regardless other than to occasionally be surprised when something dies before I get around to it and go “oh, my pet must have done that.”  But anyway, I got lucky on the RNG and got 1 each of the 2 kavats without getting a duplicate.  When I went to do another kubrow it had a cyst on my frame, so I was able to make a Helminth Charger.  For being an infested dog, it looks surprisingly decent.  And it looks like I’ve got 4 more kubrow types I can get.  I may end up seeing if I can just buy imprints from clanmates rather than trusting the RNG to get all the various types.  Gotta get the various types for that sweet Mastery XP, right?   But after I’ve ranked up each type of pet, I think I’ll still use sentinels.  Medi-ray and Vacuum are just too nice to give up, imo.

Happy gaming out there!