Let's Talk About Simaris

[Archwizard]

With Heart of Deimos coming, many of us have been rushing to rebuild old frames that we previously sold, so that we can feed them to the Helminth wall when the update releases in order to transfer their abilities. The wall that has been tripping many of us up, however, has been the frames whose parts were one-time drops, largely through Quests or Junctions, drop methods that cannot be repeated and whose Primes cannot be substituted; DE's solution to being unable to rebuild those frames was to add them to the offerings of Cephalon Simaris.

Most of us never considered that we would necessarily need these parts ever again, so that was implemented without incident and the parts at the bottom of the inventory went largely ignored. Deimos is forcing players to re-examine this on a broad scale.

Here's a little math for you:

With the release of Protea, there are 11 different Warframe Blueprints and 15 different Warframe Component blueprints available from Cephalon Simaris.
Each Blueprint costs 100k reputation, while each component costs 50k reputation.
In order to rebuild every frame Simaris offers, it will cost players a whopping 1,850,000 Simaris reputation, slightly over a third of the cost of his entire inventory.
The maximum amount of reputation you can hold with Simaris himself is 125,000. That means you will have to cap his reputation out 14.8 times. Just to build a Titania, Chroma, Inaros or Limbo alone is 250k reputation, which means capping Simaris twice each.

This poses a number of problems:

1. As an MR26 player, I can receive a maximum 27k reputation per day. This is not enough to purchase even one part a day, and means 4 days of effort for a single blueprint. In order to reach the target 1.85 million Simaris rep, I will need to reach the daily cap every day for 68.5 days.
   I'm also aware most casual players haven't reached MR26 yet, making this significantly worse for anyone below me.
2. Presently the only three ways to build Simaris Reputation are through spending extremely rare Universal medallions; a small amount from performing scans with the Synthesis Scanner; or through capturing daily Synthesis targets. Two of those methods are a lot of work for a pittance. Your Synthesis gains are subject to the daily reputation cap, which serves to gate low MR players, but completing your daily Synthesis task usually only awards about 20k reputation, with the exact value depending both on the day's target and the mission it was captured in. I rarely ever reach the daily cap in the first place, unless I luck out and get grouped with someone who spawned an additional target. If we take the approximation of 20k reputation for a daily task, you would need to perform a daily Synthesis task every day for over 3 months.
3. By comparison to other Syndicates:
   • Each of the 6 Faction Syndicates have multiple means to reach their daily cap. Syndicate missions supplement the passive gains from wearing sigils, while Medallions can put the player above the daily cap and are guaranteed in each Syndicate mission.
   • Vox Solaris is the only other (non-PVP) Syndicate that sells Warframe parts, but the cost is a mere 5k reputation per blueprint.
   • After enough investment in Colony Syndicates, players can stockpile resources and pseudo-"medallions" to turn in to reach daily cap instantly.
     • By comparison, the grind for Simaris has stayed exactly the same since his inception.

Altogether, the grind to regain Warframes once lost is significantly more time-consuming than the original missions to collect them in the first place.
"Well maybe you shouldn't have sold them then?" Lots of players sell frames when they obtain its Prime variant in order to save on inventory slots. In several of these cases, frames like Limbo Prime and Mirage Prime were released literal years ago, so the idea of being tasked to a grind for a decision made years before repercussions were even implemented is ludicrous.
Even so, there are a handful of these frames that still haven't been primed yet - Gara, Garuda, Harrow, Octavia, Nidus, Protea, and Revenant - for whom you would still need to go through Simaris to get a second copy of to feed the Helminth unless you're willing to wait years for their Prime variants.

Now, the quick and dirty way to solve this would be as simple as reducing the cost of each frame blueprint. Knocking each part down to a cost comparable to Vox Solaris would mean the ability for many of us to repossess all of these frames in under a week, not even having to cap out twice. This may seem like a big drop, but it's worth remembering this is the second time the grind is being made for these frames, and this will still probably be more effort than those first quests.

But I think this is a good juncture to consider... that Simaris as a reputation is also incredibly dated. His Syndicate is as old as Chroma, but to this day the rest of his inventory remains a hassle to buy out, and the Helminth simply pushes back interest in grinding for his basic stock like Simulor or Heliocor. He has no unique medallions or resources we can turn in to skip a day's grind. Despite the introduction of the Sanctuary Onslaught - which we ostensibly run for his benefit - it has zero interaction with Simaris as his own reputation.
Simaris is one of the most groanworthy Syndicates to grind, because it cannot be done passively. To leave Simaris as-is is to be implicit in inducing burnout.

In light of this, I would like to make a few proposals to DE.

The first, is that Sanctuary Onslaught itself should award reputation for Simaris. Every round completed should give an amount depending on the difficulty - say, 1k for a round of Normal Onslaught, 2.5k for a round of Elite Onslaught. If this contributes to the daily cap, you would be able to run Elite Onslaught and complete a day's reputation in under 30 minutes, comparable to modern grinds from other Syndicates with a sigil -- or choose to perform it in conjunction with Synthesis to speed the day's grind up. 
The idea is that Synthesis becomes akin to Syndicate Missions, and Onslaught running is akin to wearing a Simaris Sigil.
In addition to reputation from SO/ESO itself, perhaps mobs in the Sanctuary could also have a chance to drop "Sanctuary Medallions" to be turned in to Simaris, or the Captura Scene rewards from SO/ESO could also be replaced with Medallions and added to his Syndicate store for the cost of a single Medallion. The scenes are only useful to us once, but have an abnormally high drop-rate, which makes getting duplicates of those equal to getting absolutely nothing. (Bonus points if we can trade in extra Captura Scenes we currently have for Medallions or reputation.)
Point being, we need worthwhile options.

The second, is that the Warframe parts would still need their reputation costs to be crunched. In conjunction with the above changes, a single Warframe Blueprint should cost no more than 25k from Simaris, and a component's blueprint should cost no more than 10k ever. At those maximum values, this would drop the total cost to about 425k, which is less than a quarter of the current cost of frames through Simaris, or about two weeks' worth of work, give or take medallions. Even at those maximums, that is a very reasonable happy-medium, comparable to grinding out another Syndicate. (Which we will inevitably already be doing when Deimos drops anyway.)

Alternatively to that second point, the option to replay those quests for their original rewards is also a subject worthy of discussion; I'm somewhat surprised that isn't already an element of replaying the quests as-is, which I have assumed up until now to be a technical limitation. With this option, we could remove those costs from the tally entirely. For Chroma this would likely still mean having to go through Simaris for his components, and I'm aware some of these quests (like Mask of the Revenant and Hidden Messages) aren't actually replayable yet. Just food for thought.

[(PSN)RWalls91]

1 minute ago, Archwizard said:

With Heart of Deimos coming, many of us have been rushing to rebuild old frames that we previously sold, so that we can feed them to the Helminth wall when the update releases in order to transfer their abilities. The wall that has been tripping many of us up, however, has been the frames whose parts were one-time drops, largely through Quests or Junctions, drop methods that cannot be repeated and whose Primes cannot be substituted; DE's solution to being unable to rebuild those frames was to add them to the offerings of Cephalon Simaris.

Most of us never considered that we would necessarily need these parts ever again, so that was implemented without incident and the parts at the bottom of the inventory went largely ignored. Deimos is forcing players to re-examine this on a broad scale.

Here's a little math for you:

With the release of Protea, there are 11 different Warframe Blueprints and 15 different Warframe Component blueprints available from Cephalon Simaris.
Each Blueprint costs 100k reputation, while each component costs 50k reputation.
In order to rebuild every frame Simaris offers, it will cost players a whopping 1,850,000 Simaris reputation, slightly over a third of the cost of his entire inventory.
The maximum amount of reputation you can hold with Simaris himself is 125,000. That means you will have to cap his reputation out 14.8 times. Just to build a Titania, Chroma, Inaros or Limbo alone is 250k reputation, which means capping Simaris twice each.

This poses a number of problems:

1. As an MR26 player, I can receive a maximum 27k reputation per day. This is not enough to purchase even one part a day, and means 4 days of effort for a single blueprint. In order to reach the target 1.85 million Simaris rep, I will need to reach the daily cap every day for 68.5 days.
   I'm also aware most casual players haven't reached MR26 yet, making this significantly worse for anyone below me.
2. Presently the only three ways to build Simaris Reputation are through spending extremely rare Universal medallions; a small amount from performing scans with the Synthesis Scanner; or through capturing daily Synthesis targets. Two of those methods are a lot of work for a pittance. Your Synthesis gains are subject to the daily reputation cap, which serves to gate low MR players, but completing your daily Synthesis task usually only awards about 20k reputation, with the exact value depending both on the day's target and the mission it was captured in. I rarely ever reach the daily cap in the first place, unless I luck out and get grouped with someone who spawned an additional target. If we take the approximation of 20k reputation for a daily task, you would need to perform a daily Synthesis task every day for over 3 months.
3. By comparison to other Syndicates:
   • Each of the 6 Faction Syndicates have multiple means to reach their daily cap. Syndicate missions supplement the passive gains from wearing sigils, while Medallions can put the player above the daily cap and are guaranteed in each Syndicate mission.
   • Vox Solaris is the only other (non-PVP) Syndicate that sells Warframe parts, but the cost is a mere 5k reputation per blueprint.
   • After enough investment in Colony Syndicates, players can stockpile resources and pseudo-"medallions" to turn in to reach daily cap instantly.
     • By comparison, the grind for Simaris has stayed exactly the same since his inception.

Altogether, the grind to regain Warframes once lost is significantly more time-consuming than the original missions to collect them in the first place.
"Well maybe you shouldn't have sold them then?" Lots of players sell frames when they obtain its Prime variant in order to save on inventory slots. In several of these cases, frames like Limbo Prime and Mirage Prime were released literal years ago, so the idea of being tasked to a grind for a decision made years before repercussions were even implemented is ludicrous.
Even so, there are a handful of these frames that still haven't been primed yet - Gara, Garuda, Harrow, Octavia, Nidus, Protea, and Revenant - for whom you would still need to go through Simaris to get a second copy of to feed the Helminth unless you're willing to wait years for their Prime variants.

Now, the quick and dirty way to solve this would be as simple as reducing the cost of each frame blueprint. Knocking each part down to a cost comparable to Vox Solaris would mean the ability for many of us to repossess all of these frames in under a week, not even having to cap out twice. This may seem like a big drop, but it's worth remembering this is the second time the grind is being made for these frames, and this will still probably be more effort than those first quests.

But I think this is a good juncture to consider... that Simaris as a reputation is also incredibly dated. His Syndicate is as old as Chroma, but to this day the rest of his inventory remains a hassle to buy out, and the Helminth simply pushes back interest in grinding for his basic stock like Simulor or Heliocor. He has no unique medallions or resources we can turn in to skip a day's grind. Despite the introduction of the Sanctuary Onslaught - which we ostensibly run for his benefit - it has zero interaction with Simaris as his own reputation.
Simaris is one of the most groanworthy Syndicates to grind, because it cannot be done passively. To leave Simaris as-is is to be implicit in inducing burnout.

In light of this, I would like to make a few proposals to DE.

The first, is that Sanctuary Onslaught itself should award reputation for Simaris. Every round completed should give an amount depending on the difficulty - say, 1k for a round of Normal Onslaught, 2.5k for a round of Elite Onslaught. If this contributes to the daily cap, you would be able to run Elite Onslaught and complete a day's reputation in under 30 minutes, comparable to modern grinds from other Syndicates with a sigil -- or choose to perform it in conjunction with Synthesis to speed the day's grind up. 
The idea is that Synthesis becomes akin to Syndicate Missions, and Onslaught running is akin to wearing a Simaris Sigil.
In addition to reputation from SO/ESO itself, perhaps mobs in the Sanctuary could also have a chance to drop "Sanctuary Medallions" to be turned in to Simaris, or the Captura Scene rewards from SO/ESO could also be replaced with Medallions and added to his Syndicate store for the cost of a single Medallion. The scenes are only useful to us once, but have an abnormally high drop-rate, which makes getting duplicates of those equal to getting absolutely nothing. (Bonus points if we can trade in extra Captura Scenes we currently have for Medallions or reputation.)
Point being, we need worthwhile options.

The second, is that the Warframe parts would still need their reputation costs to be crunched. In conjunction with the above changes, a single Warframe Blueprint should cost no more than 25k from Simaris, and a component's blueprint should cost no more than 10k ever. At those maximum values, this would drop the total cost to about 425k, which is less than a quarter of the current cost of frames through Simaris, or about two weeks' worth of work, give or take medallions. Even at those maximums, that is a very reasonable happy-medium, comparable to grinding out another Syndicate. (Which we will inevitably already be doing when Deimos drops anyway.)

Alternatively to that second point, the option to replay those quests for their original rewards is also a subject worthy of discussion; I'm somewhat surprised that isn't already an element of replaying the quests as-is, which I have assumed up until now to be a technical limitation. With this option, we could remove those costs from the tally entirely. For Chroma this would likely still mean having to go through Simaris for his components, and I'm aware some of these quests (like Mask of the Revenant and Hidden Messages) aren't actually replayable yet. Just food for thought.

Pablo already announced that the cost of all the blueprints and parts in simaris offerings will be halved on the release of heart of deimos.

[Archwizard]

6 minutes ago, (PS4)RWalls91 said:

Pablo already announced that the cost of all the blueprints and parts in simaris offerings will be halved on the release of heart of deimos.

Alright. So let's re-examine that math. Simple as halving all the listed values, right?

925,000 reputation to get all 26 parts. That means capping 7.4 times, which would still take someone of my MR around 35 days to do, and doesn't touch on how much of a pain in itself Simaris is to grind in the first place, and how the inability for Synthesis to reach the cap on its own raises that by nearly 50%.

That's a bandage, but not a full solution. I stand by my conclusion.

[Drachnyn]

You can max your daily standing in like 8 minutes if you stealth scan enemies in sedna or kuva fortress exterminate. The only reason to do the simaris daily afterwards is to use the completion reward to go slightly over your daily cap.

There is also the argument of how long do we want a grind to take? Do we just want it to be finished in a day and possibly complain there's nothing to do right afterwards? Consuming the frames alone will take 44 days if you cant consume multiple at once and it didnt look like you could on the dev build. Just from that you will have plenty of time to get the parts from simaris.

[(PSN)RWalls91]

1 minute ago, Archwizard said:

Alright. So let's re-examine that math. Simple as halving all the listed values, right?

925,000 reputation to get all 26 parts. That means capping 7.4 times, which would still take someone of my MR around 35 days to do, and doesn't touch on how much of a pain in itself Simaris is to grind in the first place, and how the inability for Synthesis to reach the cap on its own raises that by nearly 50%.

That's a bandage, but not a full solution. I stand by my conclusion.

I wasn't arguing against your post or your math, just letting you know.

As for simaris standing though, you can use ivara on steel path plains of eidolon, takes about 15 mins to max daily standing, and I'm MR29. I can also do a capture to add extra standing, such as yesterday I got 37500 standing to simaris. Yes it's a grind a lot of players didn't expect and for some players who haven't kept some of the quest frames it is still a grind, but you can at least make it easier on yourself if you know what you're doing.

[(PSN)RWalls91]

4 minutes ago, Drachnyn said:

You can max your daily standing in like 8 minutes if you stealth scan enemies in sedna or kuva fortress exterminate. The only reason to do the simaris daily afterwards is to use the completion reward to go slightly over your daily cap.

There is also the argument of how long do we want a grind to take? Do we just want it to be finished in a day and possibly complain there's nothing to do right afterwards? Consuming the frames alone will take 44 days if you cant consume multiple at once and it didnt look like you could on the dev build. Just from that you will have plenty of time to get the parts from simaris.

Exactly, it's not meant to be done overnight, and you won't probably want to subsume all frames unless you want the abilities of all the frames unlocked. I doubt anyone will use every ability from every frame on another frame. If you don't for arguments sake desperately want gara's ability, you can wait 9 months for the prime and free up the warframe slot.

[Archwizard]

15 minutes ago, Drachnyn said:

Do we just want it to be finished in a day and possibly complain there's nothing to do right afterwards?

So the grind for every frame in the game, including those from Simaris, is meant to be included in Heart of Deimos? We're already getting a new open-world map alongside Helminth, which from past experience means 1-2 new reputations (including the Entrati) that will take a month on their own as a high MR player.

I said nothing in the OP about having it done overnight, and even listed some sample values of a reasonable time dump that would still take weeks. And as you said, Helminth is innately time-gated, so even if you could get copies of every frame by the time Deimos drops, it would still take time to get the full value from them all.

But going back to the OP: This is about Simaris, and his time gate.

[(PSN)RWalls91]

6 minutes ago, Archwizard said:

So the grind for the frames themselves is included in Heart of Deimos? We're already getting a new open-world map alongside Helminth, which from past experience means 1-2 new reputations (including the Entrati) that will take a month on their own as a high MR player.

I said nothing about having it done overnight, and even listed some sample values of a reasonable time dump.

In one week they are releasing a dev workshop of the transferable abilities, and how those abilities will be changed when the warframe is subsumed. At that point you can decide if you even want any of the quest warframes abilities, and if the simaris farm is worth it.

For me I think Harrow will give condemn, so I will get the blueprint for him, and his parts are available outside of simaris.

15 mins a day is not gonna kill me, I do it once my kid goes for a nap. And once the new update comes out won't I be scanning enemies and new objects anyway?

Edit: Yes as a parent I'm not worried about the grind. And i should note I've already farmed for and bought Garuda's blueprint from Simaris, thought might as well get a head start.

[Archwizard]

6 minutes ago, (PS4)RWalls91 said:

15 mins a day is not gonna kill me, I do it once my kid goes for a nap.

For a month. After the update drops.

[Drachnyn]

vor 10 Minuten schrieb Archwizard:

So the grind for every frame in the game, including those from Simaris, is meant to be included in Heart of Deimos? We're already getting a new open-world map alongside Helminth, which from past experience means 1-2 new reputations (including the Entrati) that will take a month on their own as a high MR player.

I said nothing in the OP about having it done overnight, and even listed some sample values of a reasonable time dump that would still take weeks. And as you said, Helminth is innately time-gated, so even if you could get copies of every frame by the time Deimos drops, it would still take time to get the full value from them all.

But going back to the OP: This is about Simaris, and his time gate.

Fair point but part of all this is also that we are seeing a big unforseen change right now. New people will be able to go through the game knowing helminth exists. That way instead of selling their base frames and then having to buy them back at simaris, they can just feed them to helminth right there. The three most expensive frames to buy back from simaris are chroma, inaros and titania. All of them have a prime already.

Mirage, Limbo and Atlas also have prime variants already.

[(PSN)RWalls91]

Just now, Archwizard said:

For a month. After the update drops.

Or start now and grab some stuff early? But as I said you aren't going to need it all unless you want every single ability. You can wait for some of the primes as  gara and Octavia I believe come after nezha. 15 mins a day on a nice chill mission, no threat of dying or challenge? Have a cup of coffee while you do it. Blast on some music!

Besides it takes 24 hours to subsume a warframe. If you insist on farming and subsuming them all, you could likely skip a day or two if 15 minutes is such an ordeal.

[Archwizard]

3 minutes ago, Drachnyn said:

Fair point but part of all this is also that we are seeing a big unforseen change right now. New people will be able to go through the game knowing helminth exists. That way instead of selling their base frames and then having to buy them back at simaris, they can just feed them to helminth right there. The three most expensive frames to buy back from simaris are chroma, inaros and titania. All of them have a prime already.

Mirage, Limbo and Atlas also have prime variants already.

Which I already mentioned in the OP.

[Drachnyn]

vor 2 Minuten schrieb Archwizard:

Which I already mentioned in the OP.

Ah yes you did, missed that part.

[(XBOX)Rez090]

38 minutes ago, Drachnyn said:

The only reason to do the simaris daily afterwards is to use the completion reward to go slightly over your daily cap.

Why do people keep spreading this bit of misinformation? The reward from Simaris' daily has nothing to do with the standing cap, it never has. The extra standing does not use any of your daily standing.

[Yamazuki]

There's always the option to trade for plat and buying the Warframes from the market, if having them all in a single day only to then wait through the time gate associated with subsuming is what you want to do. 

 

[Xaero]

Well, uncapping Simaris standing wouldn't hurt IMO.

[sunderthefirmament]

15 minutes ago, (XB1)Rez090 said:

Why do people keep spreading this bit of misinformation? The reward from Simaris' daily has nothing to do with the standing cap, it never has. The extra standing does not use any of your daily standing.

That's the point that user was making.  Drachnyn was saying that Simaris' daily does go over the cap, which is the only reason to do it.

[(XBOX)Rez090]

4 minutes ago, sunderthefirmament said:

That's the point that user was making.  Drachnyn was saying that Simaris' daily does go over the cap, which is the only reason to do it.

Except that isn't how it works at all, the daily reward has never impacted the cap, only the scan targets.

[sunderthefirmament]

Just now, (XB1)Rez090 said:

Except that isn't how it works at all, the daily reward has never impacted the cap, only the scan targets.

Yes, correct.  We're saying the same thing, as is Drachnyn.

 

The daily reward you get for finishing the scans GOES OVER the cap.  That's the best benefit for it, as scanning randos in a Steel Path mission is often faster.

[Drachnyn]

vor 1 Stunde schrieb (XB1)Rez090:

Except that isn't how it works at all, the daily reward has never impacted the cap, only the scan targets.

it's 5 to 10k standing outside of the daily cap per day. So if you did your daily cap (through stealth scans for example) and then do the simaris daily, you get to go slightly over your regular daily cap with the completion reward. We mean the same thing. It's not part of the daily cap, so therefore it lets you go over your daily cap.

[(XBOX)Rez090]

1 hour ago, Drachnyn said:

So if you did your daily cap (through stealth scans for example) and then do the simaris daily

This part makes no sense the way you are trying to explain it, why does it sound like this is trying to say you can do simaris target scans after just stealth scanning regular things?

[Drachnyn]

vor 53 Minuten schrieb (XB1)Rez090:

This part makes no sense the way you are trying to explain it, why does it sound like this is trying to say you can do simaris target scans after just stealth scanning regular things?

Sure, do it the other way around. I didnt say that you cant do that, I was just giving an example of how I usually do it.

[SapphirePixie]

7 hours ago, Archwizard said:

Alright. So let's re-examine that math. Simple as halving all the listed values, right?

925,000 reputation to get all 26 parts. That means capping 7.4 times, which would still take someone of my MR around 35 days to do, and doesn't touch on how much of a pain in itself Simaris is to grind in the first place, and how the inability for Synthesis to reach the cap on its own raises that by nearly 50%.

That's a bandage, but not a full solution. I stand by my conclusion.

It will take 24 hours to subsume a Warframe.

There are 43 Warframes in game currently. (44 on Heart of Deimos release). 11 are effected by Simaris. 43 (current number) minus 11 is 32.

You can make it work the suggestions prior to this response as there are a minimum of 32 days you can farm Simaris standing for the Blueprints and parts before you would need to start using the the ones effected by him. 

[nerfinator6]

Just do your daily synthesis targets and do the rest while you're at it, only 10-20 minutes to max out for the day, plus the bonus you get from simaris. Even if it's going to be halved when HoD releases, that's still ~2 weeks before it comes out, so may as well get the cheaper parts now.

[selig_fay]

I think people forget that we will have a limit on how many frames we can feed until we reach rank 10. If we reach the rank within 1-2 months, I think that simeris will cover your needs if you give him a little time every day.