Warframe Raziels Domain

So the new update is here. Main thing I've noticed so far is excavation missions have changed. Excavators no longer spawn in tight groups with 2-4 in one area, but spawn one at a time as you progress through the map. So instead of doing 10 and then having to backtrack through an empty map to the beginning for the next one, you get about 5 each way. Seems to be some changes to excavator energy and power core spawns too, since they excavators were running out of power more than they used to.

There's also now power ups in the levels that give you a 45 second Focus gain booster.

Yeah, the excavators seem to start at 20% rather than the 60% it was before, so you need to really keep them topped up.  Also, the rewards seem to have been shuffled a bit; Triton used to give out gold fusion cores like candy, but I've only seen one over the few attempts I made yesterday.

Enjoying the Inaros quest as well, though Baro does call his currency "duckets" rather than "Due-cat", which frankly, sounds weird.

On a frame note, I managed to get my Nekros and my Oberon to 30 over the course of the week.  Nekros took a bit of getting used to, but he's really, really fun even if he's incredibly squishy.  Oberon... not so much.  I genuinely think he may be the weakest frame I've tried so far, none of his abilities seem good enough to build around and they all feel like weaker version of abilities other frames have, but with even less utility.  

I just don't see why you'd ever opt to use him when there are so many other better options available for any given scenario.

The Shadow Debt event is pretty cool.

Hunting the Acolytes reminds me of Dragon's Dogmas Ur-Dragon, a colossal online Dragon with a health pool so large that it took the community days to get him down. The Acolytes aren't quite so hardy, and they don't have some of Stalker's traits; no adaptive damage immunity, and they're fully vulnerable to all of your Warframe abilities, but they're still pretty tough if you get caught one-vs-one.

They have the abilities of various other frames, including various teleports, Exalted Blade, Hydroids tidal wave... Yeah, one-on-one, they can really hurt you. Unless you're Hysteria Valkyr, that is. She can get in their face and absolutely wrecks them, they simply can't take the punishment she can dish out, and with her sky-high armour and built-in life steal, she can soak up anything they offer in return.

The downside, of course, is that to make the most of this type of event you need to be online. A lot. There's a lot of farming required to get all the best loot, and some mods seem to be exceedingly rare; in 58 Acolyte runs, I've only gotten one Argon Scope, and not seen a single Narrow-Barrel, Maiming Strike or Nano-Applicator, though I do have a multitude of the more common drops, like Body Count, Hydraulic Crosshairs and Catalyser Link.

I finally got my hands on Inaros earlier as well, though haven't yet had a chance to give him a run out.

It's the week the void trader comes too, which is probably distracting people from gathering ducats. So when he comes with a bunch of cool stuff not as many people will be able to afford it all.

I'm confused by the point of argon scope, its pretty easy to get the soma up to like 90% crit rate, without having to piss about going for headshots. Maiming strike seems kind of pointless seeing as boosting your combo counter a little using bloodrush body count you will have 100% crit rate for melee. Nano applicator seems a bit more universally useful in theory, but then it deepends on frame to. I rather not rely on any of these situationals.

I swapped Critical Delay for Argon Scope on my Soma. 135% critical chance after a headshot seems better than an extra 50% with a slower fire rate. Also put on Bladed Rounds for extra crit damage after each kill. All I need now is Fanged Fusilade.

Bloodrush / Body count for melee is pretty much going to be a staple for any crit based melee weapon; it's just way too good to pass up, especially with Naramon focus school basically giving you infinite, spammable invisibility.

Argon Acope and Bladed rounds do make Soma hit like a truck - though the stats won't reflect it, you've essentially got a 100% chance of crit and a 30% chance of a red crit, and that's whilst doing at least 10x the base damage of the weapon per shot.  And that's fifteen rounds per second, not including multishot.  On Draco I saw red crits for 5k per shot.  At higher levels I do think you'd maybe be better off sacrificing one of the pair for elemental mods (corrosive / magnetic etc), but at anything less than Sortie level, they're an excellent pairing.

Hopefully the slash mods will hit soon - I've currently got 1.8m credits and 1200 ducat in the bank, so I'm able to get the full set without too much more time spent in the Void.

Went to 25 waves on Shadow Debt Endurance with a good team. Nekros spamming Desecrate so there was health everywhere, Trinity spamming whatever she does, Rhino spamming Stomp and Roar, and me spamming Molecular Prime. Got 11 Shadow Debt mods out it. 3 were wave rewards, so we must have got 8 from Misery even though we fought him 5 times. That's Desecrate for you. The other guys brought along shield and ammo restores as well, which was nice.

I think I have all the crit chance and crit damage mods for all types of guns now.

Desecrate Nekros is lots of fun to play as.; I tried to do another 15 wave run, and we failed after four waves. My Nekros had more kills, and more damage than the next two combined, but they had tried to bring low level frames in to a level 35-50 endurance mission. I wasn't best pleased!

Did you guys see that Vauban Prime is coming shortly?  Still haven't managed to get vanilla Vauban, so will likely be worth farming that pretty quickly.

I definitely want Vauban Prime.

I'm very nearly MR12 now, so have been experimenting a bit with some new weapons to try and finally close that gap. Most of them have been a bit 'meh', and I couldn't wait to get rid of them and never use them again;Mutalist Cernos is just... awful, Torid is... meh.

But I did stumble across a couple of gems.

Firstly, Lesion. Yes, it's a new melee weapon, but it functions pretty much the same as Orthos Prime. It has lower crit chance, but counters with higher base damage and much higher status chance so in high-level endless missions, it can still shred level 100+ enemies providing you're specced with the correct elemental mods. I'm not quite sure if it has the same range as Orthos, but regardless it's a very effective alternative.

Secondly, another melee weapon, Dual Ichor. I used them ages ago, and found them quite 'meh', thinking they were only mastery fodder. Fair to say that was before I really understood the weapon. It's got a 25% crit chance, 25% status chance and does toxic damage as a base. This can be easily buffed to 50% crit, 50% status so the toxic damage will utterly murder corpus, you can add electricity mods to make it corrosive and melt Grineer and it's really, really fast. The range isn't great, but it kills things very quickly and is a lot of fun.

I've got the Glaive to try next, (vanilla not Prime) so will report back once I've had a play with that.

dual ichor is supposedly one of the best melee weapons in the game i still haven't used mine.

Yeah, they're fantastic.  As I said, the range is pretty short - and there's just no room in my build for Prime Reach - but everything else is good enough that it really doesn't matter.  If I was trying to decide between my favourite weapons in the game, they'd definitely be up there.  (Other favourites, in no particular order; Nikana Prime, War, Broken War, Scindo Prime).

One thing that wouldn't get close to that list, is the Glaive.  It's slow and deals half-decent slash damage but it feels quite cumbersome and I don't understand the point of a throwing melee weapon in a game with guns.  If I need to hit something at range, I'll switch to my primary or secondary.  

Finally hit MR12 yesterday, so have Sancti Tigris and Synoid Simulor ready for testing over the next couple of days.  Not sure how I feel about Sancti - regular Tigris hit like a truck but the slightly weird firing mechanism and low magazine count never seemed the friendliest thing when dealing with large hordes, even if the damagae output was obscene.

I admit, I may have been wrong to write off Sancti. The upgrades over the original Tigris are relatively small - near 20% increase in base damage, quicker reload, extra pellet count, slight increase in critical chance (though there's a reduction in crit damage to balance that) and the Syndicate proc. Individually, these don't seem like much, but when you put them all on to the same weapon and the result is ridiculous.

Yes, the duplex firing system is still a little weird but the reduction in reload time (even though it's only half a second or less) seems to make the weapon much more usable, and the increase in base damage is magnified hugely when modded accordingly. What's even better is that it's relatively simple to have massive slash damage and two elements, so you've got the ability to have damage to health (slash proc), damage to armour (corrosive) and knockdown (blast) all at the same time. I've been running void missions for the last few days, trying to build my Ducat up again, and it will one-shot everything under level 70, and that's with only one forma and a rank 5 Primed Point blank. I could still get another 60% damage increase with that mod alone. To boot, the Syndicate Proc not only deals AoE corrosive damage, it also heals 25% of your health and seems to occur every thirty seconds.

I'm also running Seeking Fury on it, which further reduces the reload time and adds punch through. This means you can point it a cluster of enemies and they'll all die. I thought Tigris was obscene, but Sancti Tigris is on an entirely different level.

Fair to say I like it a lot.

Well, Vauban Prime is out there, and I do want it, but holy fuck the build requirements. Each piece needs 5 Nitain, including the blueprint, so that's 20 Nitain in total. And the chassis requires 14'000 Oxium. Yeah, FOURTEEN THOUSAND OXIUM. Oxium. That stuff I've maybe found 2000 of in my entire time playing the game.

I've still got regular Vauban built but unranked to try out before I bother with the newest Prime. I've got a reasonable stock of Oxium and Nitain, but not enough to meet those requirements. I guess that's one way to drive people towards paying for Prime Access though, isn't it?

Before the release I was sort of considering Prime Access, just because I really wanted Vauban Prime. But this has really put me off. It's put me off the whole game really. Which is odd because it's a definite goal to work towards that I actually want, but getting there would be a slog through shit. One of the parts drops from Survival, which is the worst mode in the game. In a random team everyone just runs around, you get enough kills that you never have to worry about life support, and you just have to wait for the clock to tick down. It's a 20 minute 20-sided dice roll. At least in Defense there's sort of an objective that forces people to sort of work together, even though the Void defense map is crap.

And even if I just trade for the parts, waiting for 20 fucking Nitain alerts and farming oxium for days on end just isn't something I want to do. I might be done with Warframe, other than logging in to breed my kubrows.

I've not really touched it for the last week. I've logged in to collect my daily rewards, check on my Kubrow, but that's been about it.

There's nothing I really want from the game at the moment, so I think I'll be taking a break for a while.

There's nothing intersting to do and farming Vauban doesn't seem like fun to me

The Oxium requirements for Vauban Prime have been halved, so it now only takes 7000 Oxium not 14000.

I say "only".

I'm up to 113 days played, and the vast majority of those days I've actively played the game as well, not just logged in, claimed my daily reward and then logged out, and I've got around 4000 Oxium. Essentially, what is happening is that anyone who has been playing less than three or four months minimumhas no way or obtaining and building the new Prime.

One of two things is likely to happen; people really want Vauban Prime, so they'll pay sixty quid to have it, or they don't want it enough to pay sixty quid for it and they'll just stop playing altogether. Given that throwing sixty quid at a free-to-play game is ridiculous, I'd wager the majority of people will simply do the latter.

As I said above, I'm going to take a break from the game for a while. I feel a little burned out on it, and I've got other titles I can play at the moment.

I'd wait till i got double resource booster and do an interception. Hopefully this makes vauan cheap plat wise so i can just buy him.

Anyone know what the vendor might have next time?

His recent stock was Primed Heated Charge, Prisma Vandal and Primed Pistol Mutation. I didn't bother with any of them. Not sure what followed that rotation on PC, but I've got enough plat to buy what I want and not worry about ducats for a while.

They added Valkyr Prime, which I was talking with moose about the other day.

It has 700 armor which is 100 more than normal valkyr and 150 base power with a max of 225, compared to Valkyr who is 100 and 150.

I am a little tempted to reinstall. I'll see though. Not sure if there's more to the update.

Apparently the void has changed:
Void Fissures & Relics:

After years of new content releases and updated items to collect, there is a certain irony in calling the Void the “void”. Until Specters of the Rail, getting specific Prime parts was a repetitive and regimented process. Each Tower mission has a corresponding key and reward table, and if you want one of those rewards, you need to stock up on the appropriate key and repeat the same mission until you accomplish your goal. That all changes with the introduction of Relics. Instead of running the same mission repeatedly, Relics allow you to dynamically acquire the rewards you want by playing Fissure missions that appear on any planet, and there will always be Void Fissures active. Collecting cool rewards is a fundamental aspect of Warframe, and this new Void system is designed to make it more fun and immersive - with Void Fissures ripping into the very fabric of the Origin System!

There is not just one 'Void Fissure', Void Fissures can occur again and again as the Void's corrupting energy tears through the Solar System. Fissures spawn dynamically throughout the level near groups of enemies. The Fissure will corrupt any nearby enemies immediately after spawning. This buffs the enemy, and resets their health/shields. It will also spawn a couple Orokin units along with them, some being Eximus after a certain amount of Fissures. Fissures despawn after a period of time.

The corrupted and newly spawned Orokin units have a chance to drop Reactant, which are auto pickups. Once you collect enough, you qualify for the Void Relic reward, and one of your weapons or your Warframe will be buffed for a short period of time based on Era of Void Relic brought. You will be given a random amount of Void Trace as well after collecting enough Reactant. Fissures will continue to spawn throughout the mission.

As a result of this change:

• Syndicate Void Key Pack has changed to Relic Pack.
• Void Key Pack from the Market and Daily Tribute has changed to Relic Pack.
• As for our good friend Baro, his sales/prices will be monitored closely to take new economy into account in terms of Ducat acquisition.
• Access to the Derelicts is remaining the same.
• Your Equipped Relic information will now be shown in the Squad info dropdown box (where Equipped Dragon keys appears).

I read up a bit more now there's new pets some ugy ass cats, sentinels give you ammo and store it from the mission as it drops.

There was another new warframe called Titania at some point. There's more mods that augment frames and make them more team friendly.

If anyone is thinking of downloading it let me know and i'll download it to I dont really wanna play solo ever again.

Oh yeah and archwing now flys like a spaceship and they added new mission types, syndicates have got new crap theres obviously new weapons etc too. Te coolest thing I heard was a new weapon which if you block with it it blinds the enemies when you let go of block.

Haven't played it properly for months, still sitting on mountains of platinum as well.  I did pick it up briefly a couple of months ago just to try the new UI and everything had changed so radically it felt like a completely different game.