Newbie trying to understand why my advancement is soooo slooooow.

[Vincent_Sacramento]

I've been playing for 85 hours, and just made Mastery Rank 5. It feels like it takes forever rank up, forever to rank up weapons, and forever to rank up companions. Like it took hours to get the original Skana to max rank, only to start over with Bo, then Gatatine, and those are just the melee weapons. I read the forums and picked up a Boltor, which is a great primary, but then I read that your best source of points to rank up is ranking up weapons. Is that true? So I started getting building new stuff, but a rank 4 pistol won't kill anything unless I go back to Venus and lower level mobs. As I move up to more difficult planets and tougher enemies, I'm depending more and more on a maxed melee weapon to clear larger and larger crowds. Excavation levels have become extremely frustrating, because excavator toughness doesn't scale. As soon as I step 15 meters from the excavator to pick us a power supply, the hoard of enemies destroy the excavator.

Okay, so I learn that I can make my Boltor powerful by adding polarity to a mod slot; sounds great. Then I learn that it will revert to unranked if I do. So this feels like I spend all my time in a slow grind to make progress only to flush it down the toilet.

So what am I doing wrong? Am I missing something important, or is this just a really newbie unfriendly game?

UPDATE: Folks shared a lot of good advice below, but clearly my biggest problem was that I had handicapped myself by selecting Solo. Groups were painless, and both my character and my stuff leveled up really quickly once I switched to World.

[Soy77]

i see you've got couple good advices from our kind members here, just want to add some of my personal takes regarding your situation:

1. warframe is a game for the long run.
85 hours is less than an infant, i'm walking towards 1.500 hours and it's absolutely nothing around here. most of the time i just think of myself as a rookie so i'll keep learning new things. so although later you will find gears and methods to max your equipment in 10 minutes, spending couple hours to do it (especially that early on the game) is perfectly normal. just try to make it fun and enjoy your time in the game, use these early hours to learn and familiarize yourself with the game instead of getting frustrated why you can't perform the way you want to.

2. i see you've learn how to forma, awesome. but what can help more is learning about good mods and maxing them. which obviously something that you've yet to access at mr5.
for example, slapping maxed main damage mod and multishot mod, generally will make any guns from absolutely useless to perfectly useable, you never have to go back and look for weaker enemies. as you gain more capacity, in goes the elements and/or critical mods.
luckily for us, the metas are pretty stale. imma share you the basic build that ALWAYS works: there are 8 mods on every weapons, right?
- first two slots: damage and multihot.
- next two slots: 2 elemental mods. toxin +cold makes viral which absolutely destroys normal starchart. notice that when combining elements, the mod position matters. there shouldn't be any other elements between the 2 you want to combine. the order is left to right, top row then bottom.
- next two slots should be your critical chance and/or critical damage.
- last two slots are usually for the "gimmicks" mods, that gives you extra explosion range or extra status procs. but since you're mr5 and shouldn't have access to those mods nor types of weapons yet, just go for more damage/multishot or elementals

3. yeah the random pubs is pretty suck. i'm one of the biggest advisor for #PlayWarframeSolo. not only it teaches you to become a better player, but it eliminates the risk of getting your gaming experience screwed by irresponsible randoms.
but it does come with its own sets of challenges. i'm loving how you managed to get through interceptions by using specters. as you continue forward, you'll only unlock more methods to do stuff. there are AoE weapons and abilites, there are warframe abilities that pits enemies against each other, strip their weapons, stun or confuse them, etc. just keep moving forward, it only gets better.

if you treat warframe with the mindset of you're good in other games, you'll probably just gonna have overly high expectations of yourself and get disappointed. i came from games with heavier mechanics as well, but very few applies in warframe. the only thing that stays useful is your ability as a gamer to process information.
yes, it's an awful game for beginners. but for gamers who manages to suck it up through the learning curves, they're in for a treat!

welcome, tenno.
and good luck, don't forget to have fun!

[Soy77]

3 hours ago, (PSN)slightconfuzzled said:

So yeah, try to have goals, multiple goals per what interests you, and try to passively accomplish them. Get through starchart, level up weapons, do new quests, unlock relics, experiment with new weapons, do Nightwave where you can, try get Archwing, try and get into a clan. Try and get some friends. I am not on PC unfortunately, but if I could, I'd gift you some Weapon and Warframe slots, for long time players its cheap, but for new players it makes a huge difference. 

Good luck! Plus ask more questions if you an unsure/confused about anything. The game kind of is unfriendly, and does sort of rely on us the Community to make up for that. Help each other and so on, so a lot of us will be eager to try help out new players since we were there too.. 

this.

once you got a firm foothold of the base game -clearing nodes, ranking up stuff, etc. it would be really great if you could just find your own thing the get lost into.

whether it's finding new rare mods, farming for a new frame, just do it on your own pace, one at a time. no matter how small or seemingly unimportant, just enjoy your time trying to get them, instead of overly obsessed about reaching the goal line.

[(PSN)slightconfuzzled]

Okay so I can see that you have already gotten a lot of advice you find helps, so I will try not give advice thats already given. 

You might already get this, but the game has a lot of different things you could be doing. Being able to overlap your goals, can really help out, and you want to find out what you enjoy about the game, and what you don't enjoy. For example, the problem of taking a weak new weapon into missions it can't handle, to level it up. You might not like it, so you don't want to invest a Catalyst or Forma, but you need to level it for mastery. Well there are some Warframe's that will get you through missions with their abilities. Do you have those Warframe's right now? Maybe not... but once you do, levelling those weapons becomes much easier, especially if you play modes that you know are popular for levelling, since you will play with others with a similar goal.

Some people mentioned Hydron and Helene, which are good places, personally I get bored there, unless its a Relic Fissure mission, which means cracking open Relics, which means getting Primed Weapons and Frames, and this is an example of what I mean about having goals and being able to complete multiple at the same time. You can also make Plat this way by selling stuff you open. Of course its easy for me to say this, as I have played for a while so have a lot of relics. My point though, is that you should try and find what you enjoy, and set some goals for yourself around that. 

Personally I think Taxon is pretty useful, especially for newer players, for its protective abilities. There is a reason you get him so early. Helios is great for scanning and can do so automatically, in my opinion, until you get into the game later, most companions are good just for Vacuum/Fetch and Animal Sense. They will extend how much loot you can pick up, and you can see enemies/items on your mini map. Picking the one that survives the best being a good choice. I am also impartial to the Sahasa Kubrow, which can dig, which can give you energy, which is really useful, but Sahasa Kubrow was the first Kubrow I made, so I got lucky. 

That also being said, I brought one of the Warframe packs that comes with Platinum for money. Then used a lot of that Platinum just to buy slots, because the idea of getting rid of stuff, sounded so unintuitive and wrong to my game sense...I like to hoard stuff, plus what if I accidentally sell the best weapon in the game? Also when I went to forums looking for advice a lot of people said getting slots was important (using your initial 50 platinum to buy slots etc) SO... if you are going the free to play route, at least at the beginning, you might have to be more selective about what to get and more ruthless in getting rid of other stuff. 

Its worth noting that if you like Boltor, Boltor Prime is currently available in Relics and you can get Telos Boltor from Hexis Syndicate eventually, so you might not want to invest too much into Boltor if in 3 weeks you might be able to get the Prime version and invest more into that. Unless of course Boltor is what is getting you through current content. 

So yeah, try to have goals, multiple goals per what interests you, and try to passively accomplish them. Get through starchart, level up weapons, do new quests, unlock relics, experiment with new weapons, do Nightwave where you can, try get Archwing, try and get into a clan. Try and get some friends. I am not on PC unfortunately, but if I could, I'd gift you some Weapon and Warframe slots, for long time players its cheap, but for new players it makes a huge difference. 

Good luck! Plus ask more questions if you an unsure/confused about anything. The game kind of is unfriendly, and does sort of rely on us the Community to make up for that. Help each other and so on, so a lot of us will be eager to try help out new players since we were there too.. 

[(PSN)SHINOBISERPENT]

When I first started off, it felt like that for me as well. I ended up creating a new account because I found Excalibur to be bore to level up. But if you do what one of those people said and unequip all except for one weapon, that weapon will get xp much faster. Another thing I used to do was to do missions that last a long time. Endurance missions are what we call them. Find an endurance mission that gives cool rewards like an excavation and you can multitask getting xp, relics, and cryotic at the same time. It's a good deal.

[(NSW)Greybones]

8 hours ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

Some of you suggested using the scanner to learn about vulnerabilities and resistances, and I notice there are some companions that automatically scan; are they worthwhile?

In all my time I honestly haven’t gotten Helios (just never got around to it and I like acting like I’m stalking my prey for scans 😋), so I can’t say what it’s like. I’m pretty sure it’s the main go-to scanning companion, and automatic scans can be handy. It draws from the scanners you have equipped.

You’ll need access to a dojo’s Energy Lab to research/acquire his blueprint, so that’s something to keep in mind. If you already have access, I’d say go for it

If you want to play around with scanner options, I recommend visiting Simaris; he’ll have an upgrade or two if you’re willing to help him with his research

edit: Also, just as a bit of general advice, don’t be afraid to mix up the mods you’re equipping and keeping flexible with a build. You’ll find that you’ll be using equipment that you’ve tuned for tougher fights for content that simply doesn’t need such a high-powered combination (for weapon damage or Warframe survivability); in a case like that, you have freedom to swap something out to customize the fight a little more. It can be tempting to keep to one “One size fits all” build to get through things faster, but if it starts getting stale there’s a lot of ways to build 👍 

[GreenGril_N]

On 2021-09-24 at 12:00 PM, Vincent_Sacramento said:

I've been playing for 85 hours, and just made Mastery Rank 5. It feels like it takes forever rank up, forever to rank up weapons, and forever to rank up companions. Like it took hours to get the original Skana to max rank, only to start over with Bo, then Gatatine, and those are just the melee weapons. I read the forums and picked up a Boltor, which is a great primary, but then I read that your best source of points to rank up is ranking up weapons. Is that true? So I started getting building new stuff, but a rank 4 pistol won't kill anything unless I go back to Venus and lower level mobs. As I move up to more difficult planets and tougher enemies, I'm depending more and more on a maxed melee weapon to clear larger and larger crowds. Excavation levels have become extremely frustrating, because excavator toughness doesn't scale. As soon as I step 15 meters from the excavator to pick us a power supply, the hoard of enemies destroy the excavator.

Okay, so I learn that I can make my Boltor powerful by adding polarity to a mod slot; sounds great. Then I learn that it will revert to unranked if I do. So this feels like I spend all my time in a slow grind to make progress only to flush it down the toilet.

So what am I doing wrong? Am I missing something important, or is this just a really newbie unfriendly game?

I'm a new player, too. This is what I did.

1. I was curious about the Plague Star event, so I took a look. People are crazy ( 4 + 4 ), so I leveled insanely fast.

2. When you complete the "New Strange" mission, you can go through the Onslaught missions. Your frame must be rank 30, so it's a great place to level up your weapons and sidekicks.

I hope this helps.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

Frames, companions, and vehicles all give 6k mastery xp in total for hitting max rank the first time, being 200xp per rank.  Weapons of all kinds give 3k at max, with the exception being certain items go to level 40 and not 30, those have mastery xp per rank equal to every other rank.  So for a weapon that goes to 30 it's 100 mastery xp per rank equaling 3k, it is 4k total for a weapon that goes to 40.

Weapons are the bulk of your MR in total but being new you have easy access to a lot of early MR.  Every mission node first completion gives MR xp, though I can't remember how much.  Every Junction grants 1k.  Just doing a single ride along with someone willing to carry you for a couple of missions in Railjack can net you a lot of MR xp as well because every intrinsic rank is worth 1,500.  Just getting to rank 2 intrinsics in each of the categories is equal to leveling up 5 weapons to max.  Getting rank 2 in everything doesn't take long at all just from someone giving you a quick carry.

As far as your concerns with your incredibly limited power levels when ranking something up for the first time or re-ranking something, there's a handful of ways around it.  The first, ironically is higher MR.  Your starting mod capacity for any gear is based on your MR.  At MR30 and above you have all of your mod capacity available as soon as you pull the item out of your foundry.  Getting higher MR will make ranking things up a lot easier, so it's good to focus on getting all the easy MR out of the way that you can to get as much starting mod capacity as possible.  

The second way I'd recommend is to passively level things.  Keep reliable gear on 1 or 2 weapon slots and then always have something ranking up in the third slot.  If you're playing with others the XP from their kills will rank your gear up without you having to use it.  It will not rank up if you are solo and not using it except from xp given from objective completion.  Always keep your foundry moving and building, even if you have to leave all of it sitting in there once it's done.  It won't go anywhere and you can have as much stacked up as you want.  Always level something passively.

As for going back and having to level new things in lower level content, it's probably intended and honestly a good thing.  Every planet drops different resources and mods.  Some of the mods you're no doubt looking for drop from early low level missions, like Continuity can drop from the low level Earth defense mission Lith.  Leveling in these places has the added benefit of also helping you stockpile resources and get mods you need.  I spent a huge amount of time leveling in lower level defense and survival missions and was never hurting for certain resources like so many new players do when they get rushed to Hydron and do all their leveling there.  

Also, make sure you're in a good clan willing to help you learn modding, or ask here on the forums for help with builds if you feel like you're struggling in content that you think you're leveled for, like those excavations.

[Vincent_Sacramento]

Wow, so much good information!

I switched from "solo" to "world" and immediately saw the benefit. In a few missions I had 5,000 Endo, a ton of new mods, and the melee weapon I had just used forma on back up to 20. I also got invited into a Clan.

I did the ghouls mission in Eidolon several times. In some groups where high ranking folks completed steps before I could cross the map, but I was able to make myself useful in the protection steps. The reward was the my stuff ranked up quickly, and sometimes I would get 300 endo before I even got to the action. My ability to navigate quickly on K Drive hover board improved markedly. I'm happy to report that nobody gave me any grief over it. In some groups folks were my rank and lower, and I found those very satisfying. But clearly I need to learn to fly in open areas.

A member of my new clan suggested that I ditch the Taxon companion and get a Carrier. As lame as it sounds, I take advantage of the Taxon visible beam as a target spotter in the chaos of group play, where teammates and their pets fly like show in a blizzard (if there was friendly fire damage in this game I'd be a menace to my own team). Any suggestions? Some of you suggested using the scanner to learn about vulnerabilities and resistances, and I notice there are some companions that automatically scan; are they worthwhile? I have a max rank Sunika Kubrow, and he was fun to play with solo and actually took out enemies, something the Taxon/Artax rarely does.

Thanks again for sharing your wisdom, it has made a huge difference in how I see the game.

 

[(NSW)Mbek]

2 hours ago, Butterfly85 said:

If you're ok at doing spy missions, as in cracking the vaults without triggering alarms, they can help level stuff up reasonably fast if you're playing solo.

I'm running solo on a MR4 alt account at the moment. I use this to get some fast levels into new gear so I can put skme mods on. 

Just do the Earth spy mission, the xp you get from that should get you going. If you want to really crank things up, go in with a single weapon equipped and itll gain all the xp if your warframe is maxed

This, Spy is great for solo leveling weapons that's struggling to kill stuff or you don't like using, especially if you have a frame that can cheese the mission, like Ivara (the safest choice) or Wukong (for fastest clears) or any frame with invisibility.

[(NSW)Greybones]

5 hours ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

It seems like I should have a different builds for Infected, Corpus, and Grineer because their vulnerabilities differ; do most folks do that?

Resistances can make a big difference in damage, but expect to mod for different resistences across primary, secondary, and melee.

Within the different factions are units that are resistant to one element and weak to another, but they’ll have friends who aren’t weak to the same element, so expect some switching of equipment mid-mission to deal with different enemies.

I’d recommend taking a Scanner and doing some scans on enemies to study them; scan them enough times and the Codex will be filled out with information on what you’re fighting, including their resistances as indicated by a bunch of + and - . Even without fully scanning an enemy, I’m pretty sure that the scanner will give a little readout on the right side of the screen with those same + and - , and that can help determine what to use

[(PSN)Apoleon_amarr]

Dont be scared to coop, the worst that can happen is that some guy will fonish the mission in 40 seconds to show off, there are more toxic interactions but i wont spoil it for you

[bad4youLT]

5 hours ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

So what am I doing wrong? Am I missing something important, or is this just a really newbie unfriendly game?

Were would be a lot to unpack , explaining this game is no easy task , best right now I could offer you is to watch some sort of guide . 

So Il just leave this here .

 

 

[Butterfly85]

If you're ok at doing spy missions, as in cracking the vaults without triggering alarms, they can help level stuff up reasonably fast if you're playing solo.

I'm running solo on a MR4 alt account at the moment. I use this to get some fast levels into new gear so I can put skme mods on. 

Just do the Earth spy mission, the xp you get from that should get you going. If you want to really crank things up, go in with a single weapon equipped and itll gain all the xp if your warframe is maxed

[quxier]

2 hours ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

It seems like I should have a different builds for Infected, Corpus, and Grineer because their vulnerabilities differ; do most folks do that?

Sometimes enemies are immune to certain statuses so you may switch to different status (for example Deimos is immune to Viral so I pick corrosive).

[GrayArchon]

For levelling weapons and warframes, it's common to use Helene on Saturn or Hydron on Sedna, in public squads. The small defence map and affinity sharing from allies makes it easy to gain affinity (XP). You can even see DE mention this in today's Dev Workshop about upcoming Forma changes. However, this can get very boring, so don't feel like you have to do this all the time. It's just one of the more efficient methods. Other good missions are Dark Sector defence and survival missions (there are 2-3 Dark Sector missions on every planet) because they give high credit rewards and offer affinity boosts for a particular item (such as Wahiba on Mars, which gives +10% to all affinity gained by pistols).

2 hours ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

But I developed a STRONG dislike of party PvE play in World of Warcraft, where just about every group was full of people on their 427th run. It was easier to kick me from the group than to explain "the boss will insta-kill you unless you stand in that circle"

Thankfully there's no kick function in Warframe. The worst that will happen is an annoyed player will just leave (which can trigger a host migration, which isn't fun). Playing with groups makes levelling much easier; however, you can potentially have less fun. The differential between new and experienced players is massive. If you enter a mission with three MR30 players, they will very likely blow through the entire map before you see a single enemy, which isn't very fun for you. If you experience this, just remember that you can switch back to solo for as long as you want.

2 hours ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

I'm reasonably confident about my ability to create a good build with what I've got. I've played Borderlands 3 and Division 1 and 2, so I can do the math about crit and status conditions.

That will probably get you a long way, especially if you're checking the wiki to make sure you know exactly what each status does and how the damage multipliers interact.

2 hours ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

It seems like I should have a different builds for Infected, Corpus, and Grineer because their vulnerabilities differ; do most folks do that?

You certainly can do this, and you may see good results, but in my experience most people don't do this outside the highest level content because it's inconvenient to switch your mods in between each mission. It's up to you if you want to or not.

[Vincent_Sacramento]

Thank you all for the tips, I appreciate the time you took to respond.

It was clear early on that some content is really not designed for solo (when I starting building Specters the interception missions went from impossible to trivial). But I developed a STRONG dislike of party PvE play in World of Warcraft, where just about every group was full of people on their 427th run. It was easier to kick me from the group than to explain "the boss will insta-kill you unless you stand in that circle", and God forbid if you wanted to take a moment to stop and smell the roses, or even heal before the next encounter. Still, I'll give it a try, maybe the culture is better in Warframe.

I'm reasonably confident about my ability to create a good build with what I've got. I've played Borderlands 3 and Division 1 and 2, so I can do the math about crit and status conditions. It seems like I should have a different builds for Infected, Corpus, and Grineer because their vulnerabilities differ; do most folks do that?

Thanks again for the tips and encouragement.

[D3adPix3ls]

If you just want to rank up a weapon, unequip everything else besides the weapon that you want to rank up and go to Helene Saturn (in group mode). It usually only takes about two 10 round games to fully rank up a weapon. If you have an affinity blessing or booster it will go even faster. 

[MqToasty]

Having played most of the game solo until well after I cleared the Star Chart, here are a few suggestions:

1. Keep (at least) 2 sets of equipment.  The first set set should be your "strongest" set.  Any Warframe, Primary, Secondary and Melee that you feel you can kill the fastest with.  This will be the set you rely on when pushing new Star Chart nodes and tackling harder content.  The second set will be your MR leveling equipment.  Put your unleveled Warframes, weapons and companions here.  Create two different Loadouts so you can quickly swap between them.

Eventually, you will want more as different frames and loadouts will be better against different types of missions, but this is good enough for now.  As well, as you gather more Loadout slots you can have hybrid loadouts with maybe an unleveled weapon or two and slowly raise your MR with these.

2. Focus on the goals on the Left-most tab in your Star Chart.  Finish Quests as they come up -- they give you good stuff.  Your first big goal in the first half of the game is to open up (complete) all nodes on the Star Chart.  While working this goal, your other big goal is to collect as many different mods as you can so you can create strong builds.  These will all take time, so there is no need to rush.

3. Playing with others will probably make the game trivial half the time as most people just speedrun missions, which means you may not learn what you need to in order to master it.  So...  YMMV.  That said, however, there are some pieces of content (Void Relic cracking, for example) that really only makes sense to play with others because of the amount and quality of loot you can get.  I would experiment with both to see what you like/dislike.

There is a ton of content in this game, so again, I would suggest taking your time with it.  Come back to these forums if you get stuck or need help with anything and we will try our best to help.  Good luck, and have fun!

[chaotea]

You also get xp for compleating planet nodes. So you can take maxed rank stuff against uncompleated levels and not feel like your wasting time doing it.

[AlyxisPrime]

Modding your equipment can be somewhat of a steep learning curve in this game and things not modded 'correctly' will struggle to kill and therefore struggle to rank up.  The easiest way to rank up equipment is to run with public squads because of shared affinity.  If you really want to do that fast, some popular spots are dark sector defense/survival and Sanctuary Onslaught.  The latter requires you to have done The New Strange quest first.

That being said, you might want to take some time either with another player or an online guide to learn how to effectively mod your gear.  While it isn't essential at lower levels, you will need to get comfortable polarizing your equipment with forma.  Right now it seems a hassle to get back to max rank, but once you get the hang of it, it will barely inconvenience you.

[quxier]

8 minutes ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

read that your best source of points to rank up is ranking up weapons

Weapons are 3k per maxed (in most cases).

Frames, companions are 6k (in most cases).

However you will have much more weapons. Weapons's slots are cheaper (12plat for 2x weapon slots VS  20 for frame slots).

 

9 minutes ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

So what am I doing wrong? Am I missing something important, or is this just a really newbie unfriendly game?

You should play with other people. Other people could "carry" you so you can get new frames that can help you. For example Frost could help you with Excavations/(mobile)Defense.

Playing solo is bad experience if you don't have stuffs. I'm like 25 and I still have horrible experience because I'm playing solo (e.g. Railjack)

.

13 minutes ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

Okay, so I learn that I can make my Boltor powerful by adding polarity to a mod slot; sounds great. Then I learn that it will revert to unranked if I do. So this feels like I spend all my time in a slow grind to make progress only to flush it down the toilet.

That's how they earn money. To be honest after some time Forma'ing a frame or weapon and leveling it again is very easy.

I guess your Mastery Rank (MR) so you can put some mods. I'm ~25 so after forma I can put 26 (afair) points. I can double it via Reactor/Catalyst (not cheap for people that started but there are ways to obtain them without paying single Cent).

18 minutes ago, Vincent_Sacramento said:

So I started getting building new stuff, but a rank 4 pistol won't kill anything unless I go back to Venus and lower level mobs. As I move up to more difficult planets and tougher enemies, I'm depending more and more on a maxed melee weapon to clear larger and larger crowds.

Sadly that's how this game rules. Bigger level = enemy has more "health".  Without mods that increase your damage or stuffs that replenish your ammo you will probably use melee more than guns.