CHARdOne

Your friends are wrong about the Hind. The kuva version is a very good AR and more than capable of steel path content. You need to build it for crits with hunter munitions. Also need to get the galvanized mods. I run 1. Bane mod (or serration when I'm lazy) 2. Galvanized Chambers (split chambers ok if you don't have galvanized) 3. Galvanized Aptitude (don't run the normal version if you don't have galvanized. run the 60/60 heat mod instead) 4. Critical Delay / Point Strike 5. Vital Sense 6. Hunter Munitions (mandatory mod, if you don't have then farm it or buy it) 7. Cold mod for Viral. Toxin comes from kuva bonus... Prime Cryo is more damage, Rime Rounds more status 8. Riven. My roll is crit chance and heat, which is not a god roll by any means but it's better than your roll by a bit IMO. Speaking on the riven you could justify not rolling it for better stats. It gives you the cold you need for viral and base damage close to what serration would give you. If your kuva element is toxin like it should be then you have viral with just that and the riven you have. Remove all those other element mods and replace with better / different mods ASAP. More elemental damage is additive. Crit damage and multshot would be multiplicative. Now the base Hind was a TERRIBLE gun. Maybe your friends are thinking more about that version of the gun???

I mean all that boils down to a set of mission types. Do you want to farm doing disruption (meta best), interception, survival, excavation, defense or a bounty maybe. Say you agree disruption is the best mission type for farming relics (it is) then you just need to line up the difficulty with the tier of relic. Lith is going to be the easiest missions and axi the hardest. It's not complicated. As an aside disruption gets another added bonus in that each round you can force either the "B" or "C" reward pool as you want. Everything else listed as a drop location is just noise.

Your friend now also needs to PC link his account even though he has no other reason to do so. This trading issue is a lot like cross play toggle where as a PSN only player I would have preferred to set that to "OFF" but by doing that you broke any chance to match-make because everyone else was set to "ON". You have to run with the herd some times. What is going to happen is the set of PC traders (including linked console accts) will get larger while the console only gets smaller. The smaller it gets the less you want to be in that set... it's harder to trade with fewer people. So your friend might as well get it over with and link sooner than later.

LOL, that makes it even worse. Clearly its been a LONG time since I did one of those if I don't remember that.

No, it's a second method to get them. But I'd do 9 rounds of SP disruption before I did a tri-cap personally. Regardless if you consider the standard as doing 6x3 caps in 50 minutes that's less than 10 minutes of effort to get one transmuter. 10 minutes is what 2 rounds of disruption? Something like that. The cost/effort ratio of the two methods is way out of whack.

The 180 price is excessive. That comes down to 9 rounds in steal path (180 / 5 / 4) and I am not going to put that much effort into getting a transmuter and instead I'll continue to do what I've done for a long while which is scrap rivens into endo just to get them out of my inventory. Getting new rivens is too easy now that you can buy them from vendors and the inventory slots cap is too low to hoard them. You put all these factors together and I'm just not going to pay a premium price for a transmuter. Heck, I'm sitting on probably 30 veiled rivens of various types that I just can't be bothered to open because what's the point. No slot to keep them. Granted I'm a long time vet and this is a long time vet problem to have, but who else is a transmuter intended for if not a long time vet with too many rivens? If the things don't make sense for a player in my position I have a hard time thinking they makes sense for anyone. Maybe the riven mafia donks use them?!?!?

Your overall goal should be to get done with the New War quest and clear the star chart. You need to be progressing toward arbitrations and steel path and the New war is required. Wisp and Revenant are very solid choices for early game and scale all the way into late game. Wisp's motes in combination with breach surge is super powerful. Revenant is basically unkillable if you play him correctly. As a bonus both are current primes so they are easy to farm. Hildryn and Grendel primes are very good as well and similarly easy to farm. I also find Limbo *super* useful on an early account if you play solo. There are many mission types where you need zero interaction with enemies to complete them, spy and sabotage, etc. If you sit in the rift 100% of the time the enemies can be level 9999 and it doesn't matter. Combine with a shade sentinel for best effect. For an example I would use Limbo to solo Kuva Flood missions to farm the requiem mods needed to get into fighting Kuva Liches. Just a couple of suggestions, many other frames work great as well. Too many weapons are viable to really list off any. But that said, I like the Fulmin prime a lot. The Phantasm prime is powerful but not really to my liking. Many of the Lich / Sister weapons are good choices (kuva hind, kuva kohm, kuva tonkor and so on). For end game weapon mods, it's really the same stuff that you need to get to end game. Base damage, multishot, crit chance / damage and all of the elements in 90% and 60/60%. What I would add to that list is the galvanized mods (arbitrations) and the weapon arcanes (steel path acolytes).