The Grind, Vauban Prime, Hema, Draco, and my thoughts as a Veteran player.

[Fewshin]

It's hard to know where to start with this post seeing as I have so much to say so I'll start with the catalyst for this post. Nitian extract and my Vauban Prime Set. I have had this prime set in my inventory for a while now and for those who don't know the crafting cost,the most prohibitive costs come in the form of 20 nitian extract, 9k cryotic, and 7k oxium. As resource rich as I, an older player, can be I've found this to be the mountain I can't climb. It feels honestly bad, it's just not fun. I don't want to sit around for 80 hours at least to collect everything I need, that's just how it is. Oxium and Nitian feel bad to grind and I've grinded with 2 other people to build a ghost clan up from the ground to having nearly all the research available in the game. I say nearly because of the Hema. I know many clans around have managed to finish the research for the gun (I have no clue how moon clans managed to scrape together the materials) but for me, I don't want to sit around with 3 friends and grind ODD for an entire weekend just for a gun that honestly isn't even that great. It feels bad. 

All of these complaints so far have been things I'm sure DE has already been given a large amount of hate over and it's clear in Nekros and Valkyr Prime they learned their lesson, 20 nitian extract is not fun to gather. It seems with the Hema they've also taken something away from it as it gives a large amount of clan affinity. I think these problematic things to grind are representative of more fundamental problems with how DE manages the game as a whole. I'm sure there are going to be fellow veterans who come in here after reading the first paragraph and will say something along the lines of "The grind IS Warframe" and I completely agree, running around shooting dudes for items so you can build other items so you can pew pew harder, that's the point of the game. Take away the grind and you don't have very much. My issue lies with how the grind feels. DE's approach to keeping players like me busy is to just build really high walls for us to climb to keep us busy while they pump out new content to the point where no matter how much I grind I can only get 1 nitian every 4 hours. Things like oxium and argon are intentionally obnoxious to get and really slow down my natural progress through the game. Fortuna was also a manifestation of this where they just made up new orb vallis stuff for me to grind so I couldn't burn through the new content with my resource reserves. While in theory this is great, more grind, something to keep us all busy, it feels bad. For example, I wanted a MOA pet, I went around and I did fortuna and figured out what I wanted for my pet. To my pleasant surprise the MOA parts I needed were within the first 2 levels of standing so I get 2 standing levels and I ran around and mined the rocks and I built this MOA I wanted, I ran hydron for a while and I had my level 30 MOA ready for gilding. I was pretty excited at this point, I had spent hours getting all the rocks and catching all the fish and throwing them at the fish dude. I was very displeased to discover that the game had yet another hurdle for me to clear. Apparently you can only gild at standing level 3. I was very displeased to discover this. I gave up on my MOA pet at this point and to this day it remains un-gilded. Ultimately I feel that it comes down to an effort to reward ratio. I put in all this effort to clear the new mountains DE has built for me to climb and it's just never worth it and I just feel bad the entire time. It's just not fun or interactive when I feel like the game is working to slow me down and waste my time. 

Next is draco. Many of the older players of this game probably remember draco back when it was an interception mission on ceres. It was the hands down best spot to grind XP for your guns and frames. As I'm sure many of the older players also know, Draco is no longer a place people grind XP at, Hydron is the new spot and it's significantly inferior. When DE dropped starchart 3.0 they redid how a lot of missions worked and Draco was made a lower level survival mission. Draco was effectively killed. This, in my eyes, was DE misunderstanding the problem. Draco was a massive cheese spot and EV Trin + Banshee/Excal was really powerful and helped people level up guns and frames from zero to 30 at insane speeds. I can understand a nerf. This cheese in my eyes is more a symptom of a problem than a problem itself. If people are cheesing to rush content in a PVE game that's because it's painful to do and they want to minimize the amount of time spent experiencing that pain. That's my take on the matter and I feel that DE failed to understand why people were cheesing in the first place in such high numbers. They just removed draco and didn't fix the problem. I ran draco like a madman and that's because I needed MR to progress in the game or I needed to level up after using a forma on my gun. I've always struggled with MR in Warframe, I have over 50% of my game time in Loki + Loki Prime and I have a set arsenal of guns I use. I know exactly how I prefer to experience the game, I want to run around invis as Loki pinning dudes to a wall with my bow and as a result I don't really gain natural MR. This means that whenever DE adds new guns with higher MR requirements that I suddenly have to build a bunch of guns I don't like using and run hydron for 12 hours to get to the next MR level I need to build tiberon prime or whatever. Most players don't have problems with this I admit and that I wouldn't have this problem if I didn't play Loki all the time but I want to play Loki all the time and it feels real bad when I suddenly gotta get up and grind out levels on guns and frames I'm just going to sell. Leveling and MR just flat out suck to deal with, they're another wall that I feel the game has built to waste my time. 

So ultimately I get to my point and perhaps a few proposals. DE's objective is clearly to make grind hills for us to climb which is fine in theory. Running around and shooting dudes in Warframe is a fun and smooth experience and any reason for me to run around and shoot dudes is pretty compelling. I feel that DE has failed to understand what makes a grind feel good and hasn't balanced the effort to reward ratio well at all. It often feels like DE is just trying to slow me down and waste my time. That said the opposite is also a problem, going through all the new content day 1 would also be pretty bad but the grind is just too miserable. This has been a lot of me complaining though, so I'm here to offer some solutions after an extensive amount of thought. First, I propose making nitian extract the rare drop on Lua. Lua doesn't have its own drop table and I feel like Lua would be a good space for DE to place a lot of the materials people are having the hardest time with. If I were to make a drop table wish list for Lua it would be Mutagen Samples, Salvage, Oxium, and Nitian Extract. That said, Lua is locked behind a lot of story quests so the idea that Nitian Extract appears in alerts for them is a solid one I feel. This could be paired with a lot more user friendly changes to make more difficult materials easier to acquire. This however removes a lot of grind content, removes a lot of hours separating players from the content vacuum. It removes a lot of boring and painful hours though but I understand that people need something to do which leads me into my next proposal, Seasons. Warframe has a lot of content and adds a lot of cool guns that years ago would've been really potent but just don't see use these days. I feel like adding something like Diablo 3's seasons would keep things fresh especially if they used it as an opportunity to highlight newer weapons (or older weapons) by restricting the item and frame pool. For example a season could include only guns released after the second dream or whatever so everyone is forced to use the newer stuff and get creative. I feel like this would also be a more organic way for DE to reintroduce vaulted content by making vaulted frames come back as season exclusives. I feel like this would also be friendlier to newer players as everyone starting on a blank slate would be good for a group of players regardless of skill level to run everything from the start as opposed to older players just taxiing newer players through all the content. That said I do think there are things to take issue with in seasons such as them making non-seasonal content obsolete which I agree would be undesirable. I think the solution is to not release brand new content into seasons and to make them a vacuum chamber, a specially crafted experience with a well thought out frame and weapon pool. Then when the season ends everything gets moved over to your main account. 

I think that's everything for my great airing of grievances, hopefully my complaining was helpful in some way and I look forward to reading what people have to say on the matter even if you disagree. 

Edited December 27, 2018 by Fewshin
wording

[Shalath]

Speaking as a non-vet (been playing a couple of years but not accumulated much more than 500 hours) I didn't find Booben Prime a pain at all, I simply planned ahead. Whenever I saw a Nitain alert I simply did it even if I didn't need it as I knew I would someday. I started my Oxium grind a couple of days before they nerfed Galatea and I was feeling the pain a bit farming at IO but the recent changes to Oxium Osprey spawns have made passive accumulation of Oxium fairly painless. I'm sitting on 3.5k which has piled up over about 3 months without me even thinking about it and endless Corpus defence is pretty close to what Galatea was now in terms of Oxium rewards. Cryotic is ridiculously easy to get, just take a Maim Equinox to Augustus on Mars (there are a couple of spots you can easily protect 2 extractors at once) and it will pile up fast. I got 18k over 2 days without farming too hard compared to some of the mod farms I have done (looking at you Derelict Vault and Augur Secrets).

On Hema I totally agree, that decision was very cruel. I'm the only one in my ghost clan even thinking about Hema anymore and I'm pretty sure I can navigate the Derelict blindfold now.

F2P games are all about grind walls to stop you burning through content as you point out and yes sometimes DE get the balance wrong but they aren't the only game to do so by far. I can't think of an MMO I have played where a good portion of the community don't complain abut grind if I am honest.

[Wyrmius_Prime]

The thing that made Draco good was the fact that it was an open map with hardly anything to block Excalibur's line of sight to the enemies. Since the Draco days, multiple damage dealing Warframes like Saryn have been buffed. You can replicate the same exact farm but with different damage dealer on literally any Interception map, as long as the ability used to deal damage isn't limited by LoS requirement. Why isn't this as popular as Draco? Because majority of the players in this game are like a herd of sheep, and the YouTubers are the shepherds. No YouTuber has done a video about ''modern day'' Interception farming so it isn't popular. Also regular Onslaught is way faster than Hydron too. People tend to stick with the safe alternative without experimenting at all. They'll move to a different location once somebody else tells them to.

Edited December 27, 2018 by Wyrmius_Prime

[Jiminez_Burial]

The only real issue I have with your suggestions is the idea of seasons.  You explain that you know exactly how you want to experience the game (Loki + Bow) but then recommend introducing something that restricts what gear a person could use at any given time.  How would you feel if in a season, Loki and the Bows were locked?  Wouldn't that exacerbate the issues you have with how the game 'forces' you into using weapons you dislike in order to progress?

Edited December 27, 2018 by Starfreak911

[Misgenesis]

Hema is arguably one of the best weapons in the game, its like no one bothered to actually forma it.

Nitain Extract Reactor Sabotage Caches (0.67%, 1%, 2%)  Orokin Sabotage Caches (1.01%, 2%)  Exterminate Caches (1.29% (Lua), 2% (Kuva Fortress))

Your problem with MR goes against what the game is built upon so i really dont know what to say.

[Fewshin]

8 hours ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

The thing that made Draco good was the fact that it was an open map with hardly anything to block Excalibur's line of sight to the enemies. Since the Draco days, multiple damage dealing Warframes like Saryn have been buffed. You can replicate the same exact farm but with different damage dealer on literally any Interception map, as long as the ability used to deal damage isn't limited by LoS requirement. Why isn't this as popular as Draco? Because majority of the players in this game are like a herd of sheep, and the YouTubers are the shepherds. No YouTuber has done a video about ''modern day'' Interception farming so it isn't popular. Also regular Onslaught is way faster than Hydron too. People tend to stick with the safe alternative without experimenting at all. They'll move to a different location once somebody else tells them to.

I'd argue a lack of popularity for these alternatives makes them undesirable grind spots. If I can't reliably find four people to run it with me things get harder especially when I have to level a frame and can't spam 4 or whatever. 

 

8 hours ago, Starfreak911 said:

The only real issue I have with your suggestions is the idea of seasons.  You explain that you know exactly how you want to experience the game (Loki + Bow) but then recommend introducing something that restricts what gear a person could use at any given time.  How would you feel if in a season, Loki and the Bows were locked?  Wouldn't that exacerbate the issues you have with how the game 'forces' you into using weapons you dislike in order to progress?

It could for sure, it may not be a suggestion for me personally but I feel like it'd be a way for DE to add new content for people to complete without making that content intentionally difficult to deal with. Maybe some seasons would be for me and some wouldn't, I think that's a valid point. 
 

 

5 hours ago, Misgenesis said:

Your problem with MR goes against what the game is built upon so i really dont know what to say.

 I don't think the game is built on the idea that I have to sit around leveling the MK-1 Braton or whatever in order to access more content. I think games like these are built around shooting dudes so they drop things that will help you shoot them harder so I feel being forced to downgrade so I can progress seems counter intuitive. Of course I could be missing the point. 

[(PSN)teacup775]

9 hours ago, Fewshin said:

ings like oxium and argon are intentionally obnoxious to get and really slow down my natural progress through the game.

Get into syndicates. Over time the missions will add the resources you are looking for. All the other perks from syndicates (relic packs from directly earned standing and from medialions)make them more than worth it.

However, 7k oxium is 4 dedicated 20 wave farms on io, cryotic similar on earth, and nitain is a matter of doing the alerts as they come up. Hema is a pita to get, tho.

 

10 minutes ago, Fewshin said:

I don't think the game is built on the idea that I have to sit around leveling the MK-1 Braton or whatever in order to access more content. I think games like these are built around shooting dudes so they drop things that will help you shoot them harder so I feel being forced to downgrade so I can progress seems counter intuitive. Of course I could be missing the point. 

Unfortunatel, that is the down side of mr ranking.

on the bright side, a max serration etc will prolly make even the worst mr fodder work well in hydron.

on the down side, mr leveling atm is the most souless and indifferent activities in the game. i’d have loved to have the option of doing tests like found in the mr qualifiers as a means to rank up gear and thus mastery. gee something that actually was “mastering” a frame or weapon what a concept.

Edited December 27, 2018 by (PS4)teacup775

[AmandaRekonwith]

So don't play Loki all the time. Problem solved.

I'm nearly mastery rank 23, and only recently built the regular Loki for the MR.
Still don't have prime.
I've leeched every spy mission I've ever had to do.

Why try to make Loki be a DPS, when he's only good for spy missions?

Sorry, you're not playing Deus Ex.
You can't simply play Loki all the time and expect to 'beat the game'. That's not how this works.
That's not how any of this works.

Edited December 28, 2018 by AmandaRekonwith

[(XBOX)Erudite Prime]

Part of the issue is that there's no point in really using a gun until it's max level. If you try to take it to a mission that counts for something, you're going to be underperforming. There is no reason to not grind a mission like Hydron and get it max level ASAP, because then you can actually put mods on the thing and see if it's any good. 

[(XBOX)Erudite Prime]

14 hours ago, Misgenesis said:

Hema is arguably one of the best weapons in the game

I have 5 Forma in it and a pretty good Riven too. It's very far from the best. 

[Wyrmius_Prime]

9 hours ago, Fewshin said:

I'd argue a lack of popularity for these alternatives makes them undesirable grind spots. If I can't reliably find four people to run it with me things get harder especially when I have to level a frame and can't spam 4 or whatever.

Draco needed a setup of at least 3 maxed frames to be good as well: excal, trinity and a buffer. If you didn't have that, it was just as ''slow'' as Hydron currently is. Otherwise you were leeching.