WARFRAME: THE GATHERING STORM - CORPUS THEMED EXPANSION: New Operations, new enemies, loads of new Corpus lore, new Operator gear, new Starchart location and tileset, and much more!

[HugintheCrow]

Imgur machine broke.

 

For any artwork I've linked you, head to: https://www.deviantart.com/huginthecrowda/gallery/

 

[DrMegavolt]

Re-yoinked the ol' Silverback from your DA, for my personal future reference:

 

Nevermind, seems DeviantArt image links dont like me either.

Edited November 25, 2018 by DrMegavolt

[DrMegavolt]

Long awaited, but finally here! PART 2:

 

Operation: Scourge of the Rails

In the vast reaches of space, between the many worlds of Origin, live the Freebooters, a hodgepodge alliance of traders, privateers, smugglers, and scavengers who roam the Solar Rails beyond the control of the great empires. Long have they gone largely ignored, but now the Corpus have instituted a crackdown on any unauthorized travelers in their space, putting the Freebooters in a sticky situation. They have gathered and called upon the Tenno for aid, to keep their ships free from the clutches of the unscrupulous Corpus Sheriffs. 

This Operation introduces quite a few new elements, including a new Mission Type, a new social zone, a new kind of Bounties, and a new Faction with its own Standing. Upon the launch of the Operation, players will receive a distress call from Larissa Dex,and ex-Corpus Rail Agent and the Freebooters' representative, calling them to meet at Forsaken Harbor, a space station cobbled together from various scavenged wrecks, out in the Asteroid Belt. This is the new social space. Here, players can both trade as at Maroo's Bazaar, and also interact with various Freebooters NPCs - chief among these of course is Capt. Dex herself. Capt. Dex will hand out a whole new kind of Bounties - Starchart Bounties, which have multiple stages, but, in a manner akin to Sorties, take place across multiple Starchart Nodes, and have special rewards for each step. These Bounties also introduce three new mission types on a new Tileset: Ketch Rescue, Ketch Defense, and Ketch Recovery. All of these take place on the new Freebooter Ketch tileset (which is visually a cobb-job ship interior made of Grineer, Corpus, and other tech), and always appear as Starchart Bounty stages. Ketch Rescue is reminiscent of Defection but without the air poison mechanic, rather tasking you with guiding the crew of a Ketch to an escape shuttle before the Corpus destroy it. Ketch Defense is a simple, wave-based but non-Endless mode where, based on the difficulty level, players must survive a number of waves of enemies while protecting multiple separate objectives around the map, being somewhat like a hybrid of Defense and Interception in that respect. Ketch Recovery is an entirely new mode, requiring the player to board a captured Ketch with two Freebooter Operatives, reactivate several systems around the ship, and defeat a few minibosses, in order to steal it back from its capturers.

How does this Operation progress?

Each planet involved in the Operation, which is every Corpus-controlled planet, has an Invasion Progress Bar-like system, representing how tight Corpus Rail Security is there. The goal of the Operation is to perform Operation Starchart Bounties on that planet to reduce Corpus control and allow the Freebooters to keep operating there. The Corpus have continuous progress, modified by other factors, while players have to keep pushing back to ensure the Corpus do not fully fill their progress bar, as if they do, that planet becomes "secured" and is no longer part of the Operation. The goal is to have as few planets secured by the Corpus by the end of the Operation.

New enemies!

This Operation introduces four new Corpus enemies:

• Opticor-toting and heavily armored Siege Crewmen, who wear powered Corpus exo-armor that gives them both tough armor and shields, as well as a total immunity to knockback, stagger, and ragdolling.
• Corpus Sheriffs, special variants of Corpus Techs who instead wield a Vectra (see Corpus Reinforcements 1) and can deploy multiple Attack Drones.
• Corpus Hunters, acrobatic enemies with all the mobility powers of a Tenno, and equipped with an Arca Sciso and a Falcor.
• Silverback Proxies:

Spoiler

Designed by my associate HuginTheCrow, these heavily-armored bulky Corpus robotics are built to take a hit and hit harder. Equipped with a Gravitic Repulsion Field, they are entirely immune to melee weapons, and will forcibly repel any hostiles who get near them. Mounted to their spine is a heavy Plasma Mortar, which hurls volleys of explosive globules of plasma in a fashion akin to Robocraft's Plasma Cannons. These do significant AoE damage, but can be dodged. Other than that, Silverbacks can charge unwary players, ragdolling them across the room, and are also equipped with two forward-facing defensive plasma rifles under their foreward shoulder armor, equivalent to the main guns used by Bursa Proxies. These enemies are rare, and until the Operation is over, only spawn as minibosses during Ketch Recovery and Ketch Defense missions. Afterward, they continue to exist there, but additionally replace Bursas in the highest-level Corpus missions as the reinforcement enemy.

 

 

Rewards:

I'm not sure what all the rewards would be, but for sure if at least two planets are not Secured by the end of the Operation, all participating players will earn their very own Vectra. After the Operation, this weapon can subsequently only be obtained from the Dojo Energy Lab.

The Aftermath:

Once the Operation is over, Forsaken Harbor will continue to exist, Starchart Bounties will now have a regular Bounty Rotation like Cetus and Fortuna, and all planets that were not Secured during the Operation will continue to be able to spawn Ketch missions as stages of Starchart Bounties. 

The Freebooters as a Faction

The Freebooters have their own Standing meter, and multiple related NPCs. Standing can primarily be gained via Starchart Bounties, but also through a few new mechanics: Buckethead, another Forsaken Harbor NPC, will sell you a Gear Item called a Salvage Probe, which can be used in Archwing and Free Roam missions in a similar fashion to the Scanner feature of the Tranq Rifle, to search for Salvage Deposits. Once one is found, the player can tag it, and have to defend it from enemies for 60 seconds to teleport it out, gaining Standing and significant amounts of appropriate Starchart materials upon succeeding. You can also buy rare Starchart materials from him for Standing. Yet a third Freebooter NPC, Jaiak One-Eye will trade Standing for a whole range of new Kitgun parts, which do mix and match with Fortuna ones. I don't have stats for them, but I'll list them below:

• Splatter Chamber: Charge-fire, launches a mini-homing missile. Fast charge time. One shot per mag. Deals Blast damage.
• Boomstick Chamber: Quad-barreled hand shotgun. Fires two barrels per trigger pull. Short range, high damage, low reload speed. Deals Slash damage.
• Dealbreaker Chamber: Fires in three-round bursts. Medium-high damage, high accuracy. Deals Puncture damage.
• Longarm Chamber: Fires a flash-beam of Radiation and Puncture damage with unlimited range and 20 meters punchthrough. Medium-high damage, low RoF.
• Haymaker Chamber: Fires explosive energy bolts that deal Blast damage and cause ludicrous knockback radially from their impact point. Medium damage, low RoF, meh accuracy.
• Stormlord Grip: A unique and powerful Kitgun Grip that has +Damage and +RoF, in exchange for --Beam Range and -Accuracy.
• Zapper Grip: ++Beam Range, +Damage, --RoF.
• Berserker Grip: +++Damage, --RoF, --Beam Range, -Accuracy

Another Freebooter NPC, The Representative is the public face of a secretive consortium of tech-hunters, who will accept Orokin Nav Coordinates in trade for Standing. Orokin Nav Coordinates can be acquired through Starchart Bounties as a rare reward. In addition, The Representative will allow you to buy certain unique and special items directly for Standing, including blueprints for unique Orokin-era Corpus weapons, such as the Mara Tetra, Mara Sonicor, and Mara Obex, the components of which can be acquired from Starchart Bounties.

 

Animo 2.0:

After Operation: Ambulas Reborn, everyone thought that the super-advanced AI war machine Animo was dead and gone. They were sorely mistaken. As seen in my earlier post, a Corpus Agent by the name of Vaskiir Kelos discovered a subsystem in Pluto's planetary comms grid housed a full backup of Animo, seemingly created by the AI itself as a way to cheat its own death. Since then, AnyoCorp was able to acquire the rights to the software, and, in conjunction with its burgeoning development of Sentient-based technology, ahs resurrected the Animo Processor, creating multiple copies of the Animo software to power such revolutionary war machines as their titanic Orbmother spider-mechs and coordinate their swarms of Raknoid subordinate units. How does this affect the player? Well, some new dialogue will begin to appear in Vox Solaris conversations hinting at this, and players who do Orb Heists or kill Raknoids will sometimes acquire an item called an Animo Code Fragment. These don't do anything yet, but will become important in Parts 4, 5, and 6.

 

TO BE CONTINUED... IN A FEW DAYS 😄

[HugintheCrow]

Near, far, wherever you are
I believe that the heart does go on...