New player onboarding quests.

[The-Marksman-Hedgehog]

I had a lovely discussion with a fellow Tenno in a defence mission while helping out a newer player today, and they insisted I post the idea I presented up as a topic on the forum. 

New players in Warframe are often headless chickens the moment that Vor's Prize ends, with only a cursory understanding of modding, mastery, crafting weapons, if they even picked anything up from the tutorial at all.
This often shifts the burden of teaching newer players on to existing community members who pick up the scattered new players on Q&A chat, or on youtubers who produce content that only an interested handful will actually seek out. 

My suggestion would be to add a new cinematic questline that takes place after Vor's prize, and is specifically dedicated to teaching newer players how to craft and mod their weapons, and also establishing the universe and its lore a bit more firmly, considering it takes quite a while to get a deep dive in to the details of Warframe. 

My own personal take on the questline would go something like this;

The Lotus contacts you about a seemingly routine mission once the player reaches Venus, smash and grab, go in to a Corpus base, locate today's McGuffin, get out. 
Once you arrive, you play the mission as normal, low level corpus enemies stand in your way, then, you reach a secluded mountainous area, it's quiet, too quiet. 
Then, surprise!, new Corpus proxy!, and it's a mean-un!

It takes your Warframe by surprise, and knocks you in to some environmental hazard that carries you far away from your mission's destination, and separates you from your weapons. (coolant steam?, sewage pipe, air current? I dunno!)

The quest picks up with your now unarmed Warframe in a ship graveyard, with signals in and out being jammed by the new proxy, Ordis and the Lotus are unable to locate you for the time being, but they are still able to contact you, they disclose that the graveyard houses a number of old war wrecks, amongst them?

An orbiter, crashed, but not entirely non-functional. Entering it would serve to show the player that the orbiter is a larger space craft that their landing craft is docked to, something I think that needs more emphasis!

The quest would then take the player around the graveyard, where they'd be able to find lore about the Corpus and perhaps the old war, as well as;
1: A weapon blueprint.
2: Materials to make the weapon in question.

(Possible gag where the weapon crafts unusually fast, gets spat out of the foundry at alarming velocity)

Once the player has the weapon, they'd encounter the proxy again.
The proxy would be too tanky to kill with the weapon without any mods, but it'd be repelled once it was down enough health to go and self-repair or some such excuse. 

After the encounter, the player would then find a set of variants of some basic weapon mods, they'd be less powerful in the primary stat that the mod provides, but have a useful secondary effect to the point where an older player might even Hmm about using them.
I think variants would be more suited to this purpose then vanilla versions of the mods, as they could be made to cost less capacity, but have similar overall power, making them easier for new players to build around, and raising the power floor so that new players aren't outclassed as hard as they currently are.

It may also be a good idea to have the proxy return a couple more times as the player finds each mod, to illustrate that mods work multiplicatively with each other.

Once the player defeats the proxy, the jamming signal is dissipated, and Ordis can send the lander to pick them up, with their shiny new gun, mods, and lore knowledge in tow.