Wow, the Isolation Vault grind is a bit hideous, isn't it?

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

Isolation Vaults are really interesting mechanics, unique feeling tilesets with a good variety and sometimes almost challenging enemies.

I love the look and design. Your artists are amazing.

But, what the actual **** that grind though?

There are two archguns in there:

- Each requires 3 dropped weapon parts.

- Parts are rare and only drop from killing the 3 mechs in the 3rd Isolation Vault bounty (the one with 5/5 pips on the bounty screen).

- The wiki says they can be a mission reward, but they never are. They only drop from those three mechs. They don't appear to be affected by loot abilities.

- If Vohm/Fass switch before you do 3 vaults you get another 3/5 or 4/5 bounty with fewer mechs and no chance of these parts. 

- Loid/Otak provide a sh**ty noob trap - a boring and slow mobile defence followed by a primary school level memory puzzle that gives out Orokin Matrices and Lucent Teroglobes (I have more of both than I could ever spend).

- Oh, but sometimes you just fail the memory puzzle because someone who isn't host attempts it, or doesn't realise their amp is AoE, or all 4 switches are the same icon, or Loid/Otak disappears without showing the puzzle solution at all.

- Seriously, the Loid/Otak defence sucks so bad, is so slow (at least doubling mission duration) and for such rubbish loot, but new players fall for it, making public groups even more frustrating than they have to be. It just shouldn't even be available in the first 2 vaults.

So, 1/20 chance of each part, 3 mechs means get to 3rd vault and you have 3/20 chance of getting a part. You can reasonably expect 1 weapon part every 7 complete runs of all 3 vaults. Expect dupes and you need 6, so expect somewhere between 40 and 60 3x vault runs to get all the parts?

What the ever living fu**?

I like the basic mission, but playing it 150 odd times over about 25 hours (assuming all competent players who don't fall for the Loid/Otak noob trap, make it 50 hours for that, and assuming no Vohm/Fass transitions that reset progress, add another 10 hours on that)

I'm about 12 hours in, I have 1 weapon part (total) and I still don't have all the Necramech mods.

Suggestions:

- If you're going to have Loid/Otak give it good loot, and make it something other than Mobile Defence.

- Once players have reached a vault tier once just let them pick that tier (so all 3 would be available from Gomaitru in the Necralisk) and only get matchmade with other players on that tier.

- Picking new missions from the Gomaitru's out in Deimos should just be the same or higher level, so you can just do 5/5 missions and nothing but if you want.

- Put all the mods and all the parts in Otak's shop in the Necralisk. Make each one 70k rep if you want. I have thousands of Orokin Matrices, burning my MR30 rate cap every day I'll never get through them.

[(PSN)Agent_CHAR]

Your post is so full of incorrect information it is kind of ridiculous.  For instance the vome/fass cycle is not connected to the vaults in any way now, that changed in the Arcana update.  Second, the broken weapon parts only come from the mission rewards.  They never drop from the mechs.

Also, DE has addressed a good portion of how grindy this is in the update that PC has now but consoles don't.  The ability to do only the vault you want, reworked drop tables, etc.  Be patient.  Your best option is to just stop running vaults right now and wait until we get that update.  If you continue to run them then you are accepting that you are wasting a lot of time to grind.

Lastly it sounds like a lot of your issues are your PUG groups suck and that's expected of PUG groups.  If you can't solo the vaults then there isn't much to say other than deal with it or use recruiting chat.

[Serafim_94]

The vaults are untied from worm cycle, and only require to be completed once to access the next one. You can spam-chain vault 3 as much as you want.

And yes, weapon parts do come from bounty reward tables. I've personally got them from there.

 

Edit: ok, wait. Did consoles not get Deimos Arcana updates yet?

[(PSN)Quantaminum]

7 minutes ago, Serafim_94 said:

Edit: ok, wait. Did consoles not get Deimos Arcana updates yet?

Nope. We are still missing quite a lot of QoL features and tweaks that happened from 29.5.6 to 29.6.3.

[Serafim_94]

Только что, (PSN)Quantaminum сказал:

Nope. We are still missing quite a lot of QoL features and tweaks that happened from 29.5.6 to 29.6.3.

Oh geez. I apologize then - pre-arcana grind indeed sucked massive balls. Just don't do it -_-

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

1 hour ago, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

For instance the vome/fass cycle is not connected to the vaults in any way now, that changed in the Arcana update. 

It hasn't, or it has changed, in that it doesn't bug out completely on cycle, but it still locks you out of the subsequent vaults when it happens.

Maybe this is an Xbox bug? On cycle change all the iso vault bounties reset to 3/5.

1 hour ago, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

Second, the broken weapon parts only come from the mission rewards.  They never drop from the mechs

I think it's the other way round, but OK, still only 3rd vault and now only one chance per run instead of 3 - that's worse, not better.

1 hour ago, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

Also, DE has addressed a good portion of how grindy this is in the update that PC has now but consoles don't.  The ability to do only the vault you want, reworked drop tables, etc

Great, I'm sure we'll see that some day. Meanwhile these drop tables are hot garbage.

1 hour ago, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

Be patient.  Your best option is to just stop running vaults right now and wait until we get that update

Yeah, because there's nothing else coming in the next update. Crazy of me to want to play the content from the current update.

1 hour ago, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

Lastly it sounds like a lot of your issues are your PUG groups suck and that's expected of PUG groups. 

Yes, in a game that's designed for public groups a mission with deliberate traps for new players is a sh**ty move. Everything about the mission for new players tells them progress is a slow mobile defence, while progress is actually getting out and quickly starting the next mission.

That's bad mission design, pure and simple.

1 hour ago, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

If you can't solo the vaults then there isn't much to say other than deal with it or use recruiting chat

I can, plus many hours with my clan speedrunning this. That's not my point.

You shouldn't be penalised for leaving the mission open for public players, and I don't mind carrying new players and helping them through these quests, but so many times I've had to explain Loid/Otak is a trap that I just end up playing solo.

In a game that's all about co-op that's poor design.

1 hour ago, Serafim_94 said:

Edit: ok, wait. Did consoles not get Deimos Arcana updates yet?

We got bits of it. We didn't get Orphix Venom over Christmas, but we did get buggy Bonewidow running around as just the 🌽 most of the time with XP reset on every host migration.

It's not quite as bad as Empyrean I suppose.

[(PSN)Agent_CHAR]

9 minutes ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

I think it's the other way round, but OK, still only 3rd vault and now only one chance per run instead of 3 - that's worse, not better.

I made no comment as to better or worse.  The fact is the weapon parts are mission rewards.  And you get two of those, one for beating the mechs and a second bonus one for opening the vault.

 

9 minutes ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

Yeah, because there's nothing else coming in the next update. Crazy of me to want to play the content from the current update.

This is the life of a warframe console player.  PC gets fixes that we wait for.  DE isn't going to change something they've done for seven years just because you suddenly thinks it's BS.

 

10 minutes ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

Everything about the mission for new players tells them progress is a slow mobile defence, while progress is actually getting out and quickly starting the next mission.

That's bad mission design, pure and simple.

It's on you, the MR 30 who knows what they are doing, to educate your nooby squad mates.  If you don't want them to open the 1st and 2nd vault then say so in chat.  I don't know why you are blaming mission design for your lack of communication.

[DoomFruit]

8 hours ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

It hasn't, or it has changed, in that it doesn't bug out completely on cycle, but it still locks you out of the subsequent vaults when it happens.

Maybe this is an Xbox bug? On cycle change all the iso vault bounties reset to 3/5.

No, that was on PC as well. The patch notes might say that vault resets were disconnected from wyrm cycles, but they're lying. I distinctly remember trying a vault (needed another receiver to build a morgha) and not seeing 3 mechs on the third one.

8 hours ago, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

It's on you, the MR 30 who knows what they are doing, to educate your nooby squad mates.  If you don't want them to open the 1st and 2nd vault then say so in chat.  I don't know why you are blaming mission design for your lack of communication.

This is the devs' job - why are you trying to make the players do it? There is no excuse for poor mission design and lack of documentation or communication in a game as large as this.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

On 2021-01-05 at 10:36 PM, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

This is the life of a warframe console player.

It wasn't. In late 2019 we were up to same day on some updates, and generally console was 1-2 weeks behind PC.

Now it's 6-8 weeks, which is f-ing rediculous.

On 2021-01-05 at 10:36 PM, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

It's on you, the MR 30 who knows what they are doing

It really shouldn't be. There is a huge amount of stuff in this game. I'm more than happy to help newer players, and I'm the admin in my clan that players often ask for help with fine tuning builds, best riven rolls and the like. I'm happy to help with the many, many bits of complex nuance in this game.

Loid/Otak is a straight-up new player trap. This isn't optimisation for farming or anything like that, this isn't a maxing kuva or steel path tokens situation. There's a mission everyone can do, the NPC narration suggests there's something more you should do, but if you actually do it you waste time and get pathetic rewards. That's just rubbish mission design, before you get on to the basic fact that mobile defence is just waiting for boring timers to expire.

I'm happy to help players, I shouldn't have to just to get them (and me) to the one tier of mission that has the actual chance of dropping the rewards.

On 2021-01-06 at 7:04 AM, DoomFruit said:

There is no excuse for poor mission design and lack of documentation or communication in a game as large as this.

Exactly! Well put.

[(PSN)Agent_CHAR]

3 minutes ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

It wasn't. In late 2019 we were up to same day on some updates, and generally console was 1-2 weeks behind PC.

Now it's 6-8 weeks, which is f-ing rediculous.

It is, I've been playing this game since 2014.  Two more recent "experiments" with simultaneous releases (RJ and Deimos) in which console players got screwed by the timing doesn't erase 8 years of history.

5 minutes ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

the NPC narration suggests there's something more you should do, but if you actually do it you waste time and get pathetic rewards. That's just rubbish mission design

The fact the rewards do not justify the time is NOT a mission design problem.  In the T3 vault you do the exact same mission and suddenly want to do the loid section and it's all good.  This is no different than a sabotage mission with caches in them where finding the caches is pointless but new players still do them.  Are sabotage missions poorly designed?

And you'd have a lot more of valid point if DE didn't already recognize that making players do T1 and T2 bounties all the time was a bad idea and change it so that we don't.  Why are you complaining about something that has already been changed????

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

On 2021-01-15 at 7:39 PM, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

Why are you complaining about something that has already been changed????

Because it hasn't. They've just started dev on these changes for console, we don't even have anything in cert yet, so probably looking at the 26th at the earliest.

And when we do it's Orphix Venom time so honestly I think only a tiny fraction of the console players will be trying to crack the vaults.

On 2021-01-15 at 7:39 PM, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

DE didn't already recognize that making players do T1 and T2 bounties all the time was a bad idea

Yes, I saw that in the projected release notes, it will be a huge improvement, though it looks like the overall chance of getting the parts is going down slightly which is guess is to drive us to buy them instead.

On 2021-01-15 at 7:39 PM, (PSN)Agent_CHAR said:

The fact the rewards do not justify the time is NOT a mission design problem

It does when not doing the thing you're told to and doing something else gets you more rewards. Maybe I'd agree if the dialogue made it clear that you could hang around in these upper levels and low level loot or dig deeper, but new players didn't even know that you could get a deeper vault from alt mothers.

So glad they've tried to fix, I look forward to trying it after Orphix Venom (assuming we get it, it will be over for weeks on PC by the time we have the update), but that doesn't change that DE should know better than to build new player traps into their already brick wall of accessibility game.