Mastery Rank revamp (Normal, Prime, Umbra, Vandal, Wraith should share the mastered status)

[Operativ]

Greetings, Tenno!

 

I would like to start a topic feedback on the Mastery Rank (MR), which is one of the progression systems in Warframe, awarding higher daily limits, caps and new weapons and riven mods to be equipped.

While being one of the few ways to progress in the game, it's a system that is composed of using practically every weapon, Warframe, companion and their variations. Some of which are permanently unavailable, such as the Founders Pack items for 225€: Excalibur Prime, Skana Prime, Lato Prime. Some other weapons are discontinued for their lack of diversity contribution or other reasons (for example, the infamous Machete).

Since their discontinuation many versions of them were released, such as the Machete Wraith, or the Lato Vandal, or even the relatively recent Excalibur Umbra, which was originally released as an exclusive in the Chinese version of Warframe.

All of these items contribute to the Mastery Rank experience individually, and the people owning discontinued items and/or exclusives will keep a permanent edge over the other players. Now, while Mastery Rank itself is not a game-breaking progression feature, such as normal 'power level' would be, it's still contributing to unnecessary grind over and over with the same weaponry and its variants, and it leaves some people with a distaste that their inner completionism cannot be achieved. It can also give an impression to part of the players, that premium or exclusive items award an advantage over the obtainables in the game (yes, Prime can be farmed, however some items are simply out of the reach for good, and I have addressed this way of thinking as well, in order to keep this post as objective as possible without containing my single, subjective opinion in it).

The suggestion here is to unify all the Mastery Rank experience by the item itself.

Leveling a Skana should already make all the Prisma, Prime and any other future versions count as "Mastered". This would reduce the artificial grind needed to reach to higher Mastery Ranks, in order to get the bonus slots, daily caps or mod energy higher, or even to access the newer and newer weaponry, such as the Gram Prime, Tiberon Prime, etcetera.

Of course with the implementation of this rework, the Mastery Rank could drop backwards, and as such the weaponry should also be reassigned to the respective Mastery Ranks after the change. In another scenario the numbers would not change at all, and players would just find themselves at a higher mastery rank with the bonus points obtained for all the sub-versions of the same item they've already mastered at past.

In the same style, leveling a Vauban Prime should already "master" the regular Vauban. There should be no reason for us, as the players, to reach back to the inferior version of something to 'progress' further.

 

This approach would also incentivise playing the latest, fresh content such as Fortuna instead of spending the extra hours, days, weeks on grinding the extra versions of something our Tenno already knows by heart (by mastering one of their variants).

As a final note, this system already exists in the form of Zaws and Kitguns along with the new Moa companions, which we can have hundreds of different variations, and we receive the experience to the Mastery Rank for leveling only one of such variations.

 

And what do you think about ways to improve the Mastery Rank system, and make the progression more fair for everybody, no matter when they've hopped into Warframe, and if they paid 225€ initially or not?

Edited November 24, 2018 by Operativ

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

Sounds like you just want an easy way to max out mastery. So no, this isn’t a good idea as some use MR as a quick judgment of what that player approximate skill and knowledge is. Letting anyone be able to shotgun to MR20+ would make this worse as we’d then have significantly more MR20+’s that have no idea WTF they’re doing.

[andrewd084]

I'm not really sure what the benefit of this would be. I'd even say that MR is in a great place the way it's currently set up. If you've got the completionist bug, it gives you plenty of stuff to do. If you don't, you're free to ignore any weapon/companion/frame that doesn't really catch your eye, and you can still reach a very useful rank.

Maybe if there were weapons that required MR20+, I'd think mastery might need a look. Because yeah, I don't want to max out three or four versions of a weapon I don't even like just to get a little bit closer to a number I don't really care about. But that's not a problem. Once you're at 16 (which is relatively easy to get, especially when normal and prime frames are counted separately), you no longer need to level up to unlock content like weapons or riven mods.

[Operativ]

1 hour ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

Sounds like you just want an easy way to max out mastery. So no, this isn’t a good idea as some use MR as a quick judgment of what that player approximate skill and knowledge is. Letting anyone be able to shotgun to MR20+ would make this worse as we’d then have significantly more MR20+’s that have no idea WTF they’re doing.

Quite on the contrary, my post suggests all the non-basic variants losing their extra Mastery Rank experience bonus, and only unlocking the 3000 / 6000 of the normal variant if this one was not obtained yet (unless no normal variant exists of the said item).

 

Mastery Rank became not so significant to the player's knowledge long ago, because a mastery rank 17 might not know all the game aspects, they might not have the primed mods at 10/10, meanwhile a lower mastery rank could. There's no hard or soft lock on the power of an individual item (Warframe, or weapon).

 

So how exactly a Hydron / Draco rinse and repeat of the exact same weapon with three variants, two of which have obsolete stats, going to benefit a player's knowledge or personal skills? It's understandable if it's two entirely different weapons, however, such as the War and the Dark Split-Sword.