About adding Orphix Venom as a RJ mission

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

TL;DR at the bottom.  The general consensus that I've seen on Xbox among pubs and people in my alliance is that this is a very boring mode.  This is not me seeking out like-minded individuals, I actually kind of appreciate the mode...  For the first couple Orphix.  After that I think it might be the most boring thing in the game.  Here's some issues surrounding this mode:

You have extremely limited loadout choices for what you'll spend most of the mission in.  Two mechs, both of which have lackluster kits.  The shield on Voidrig is functional but weak, while its exalted is extremely strong, obviously.  The healing on Bonewidow is good, the shield is also mediocre and the exalted is strong, but not Arquebex strong, which I think is fine.  Out of 8 abilities (and not even any passives.  Is that an oversight or what?) 2 are passable, 3 are good and 3, being Necraweb, Gravemines and Firing Line are so bad they're laughable.  Build diversity for both mechs is limited if you want to live and have any kind of energy economy at all.

Loadout choices for your actual frame and weapons either doesn't matter at all or there's really only 2 options.  Hildryn or a frame with Dispensary and high duration.  Pet again either doesn't matter or is a Vizier Predasite.  I heard that Vulpaphylas with a specific mod also do kind of okay, but I've never seen one in a run.  If you really want to min/max you can run a primary with Amalgam Serration and Karyst Prime for extra movement speed on your frame.  Otherwise that stuff doesn't matter either.  In the end this loadout is entirely built around supporting your mech or is just whatever you had on.  More lack of variety.  The fact that you have to have such a specific loadout to support the mechs because of an appalling lack of healing and energy economy options is just icing on the cake.

The lack of build diversity is somewhat offset by the current novelty of mechs, but it wears thin fast.  Whereas SS could let you do a full Condrix run in 20ish minutes with a half decent squad, this always takes an hour.  An hour of just an archgun (probably Fluctus.) and whichever of the two exalted weapons you have.  That's it.  An hour of just two weapons and the same exact fight over and over.  It gets very boring fast and is the primary reason why you continued to lose players on PC during an event and why Xbox recruit isn't absolutely filled with people running it.  No one in my clan has run it but me.  Other clans in my alliance are begging or even forcing members (on threat of being kicked) to run it.  The only draw of this past getting the new frame and weapon is arcanes, and I'm willing to bet actual money donated to DE's charity of choice that the arcanes (all of them.) won't be returning as available when this mission becomes part of RJ.  That aside, the fact that the gameplay is somehow more repetitive than the rest of the game and the draw is almost entirely the rewards from the mindless grind (again, acknowledging the rest of the game has this issue, this is just worse than that imo.) means that the mode itself is pointless to anyone who has or doesn't care about the rewards.  Gameplay should be enjoyable by itself and a focus on replayability for just enjoyment is really something I'd like to see worked on as a whole.  Focusing on rewards and then building a long grind around those rewards in an attempt to force people into playing rather than enticing them with fun is how games die.

Then there's the bugs.  Apart from the ever-worsening waypoints that you really need to fix, this mode doesn't have a large quantity of bugs, but the ones that are there are absolutely wild.  They can also be fixed pretty easy with just a bandaid:  Instead of having our warframes drop down and force transference, have them go into that gimped movement-only state they were in during the Entrati intro quest so that they aren't effective, but you can still move.  Why?

Every major bug I've encountered has come from myself or someone else dying as operator during the event.  If one of those Battalysts pops up on your flank and no one deals with it, it can shred through 8k Storm Shroud and full health, plus your operators health in no time flat, when they're high level.  The lack of an immunity phase/damage gate on operator upon getting pushed out of a dying mech means the operator can die before the game will even register that you are indeed hitting crouch to go into void mode.  Having your mech go down and then operator die instantly with your warframe downed inside the bubble means there's nowhere to transfer you to and the game does some extremely screwy things when this happens.  My entire squad has been host migrated and lost everything more than once immediately upon host dying in mech then op.  There's all the "can't do anything the rest of the mission" bugs that stem from this as well.  The answer is not "carefully make sure you leave your frame well outside the bubble every time."  That's not a solution to mechanical failure of the game and there being bugs.  Especially considering this happening to other players can affect you and you can't control where they leave their frame.

There's also whatever rewards you'll actually put in this mode when it hits RJ.  No one is going to run this for relics.  You could make this drop nothing but radiant Axi relics and I'd still go farm Apollo instead.  Less people than should be running a time-limited event are running it right now and Arcanes are on the table.  If you're not going to tweak how long this mission takes for a full run, the rewards need to have almost sortie tier rewards in order to be worth it imo.  If nothing is done about the time it takes to run and the grindiness of it, and the rewards aren't on point, it will be DOA.  People don't run thermia fractures unless they're hard up for diluted thermia because it's grindy, takes forever and there are no rewards past the initial first run other than what amount to Exploiter keys.  This leaves anyone needing to run it SOL.  The same thing will happen with OV in RJ if nothing is done.

TL;DR I'm not saying don't add the mode.  I'm not even saying it's bad.  It's grindy and kind of unrewarding compared to other modes (like SS.) and it takes far too long and gets very boring pretty fast but the core mechanics of it aren't bad.  Just don't leave it like it is, slap it in place with a relic drop table and expect people to be happy about it.  Please.