Things about modding you wish your baby-Tenno self had been told

[Packetdancer]

So, I've remarked before—often in the threads where someone is lamenting the lack of Primed Sure-Footed, because "all the build guides say to use it, but I can't get it for a year"—that the vast majority of build guides out there are targeted at Steel Path builds, which is not helpful to new players.

As I've also observed in multiple threads before, I think that fact (along with the lack of much in-game guidance on modding) is one of the biggest detriments to the new player experience.

So, before I did the Bad to my hand and got it exiled into a cast until mid-February, I had been working on a guide to modding for newer Tenno, split up into easily-digestible pieces. I cannot presently work on it—because hand—but I realized I could still crowdsource some things people wish they'd known or been told about modding early on.

For me, I got misled as a baby Tenno into thinking it was more important to max everything to full, because that's what all the examples I saw and guides I read and builds I was linked said to do. When I actually sat down, thought about it, and did the math... I realized it is not only not necessary but potentially actively detrimental to max-rank things early on. Ranking a mod to 8 or 9 versus 10 will save you enough Endo to similarly rank up an entire second mod. And having two rank 8 or 9 mods will generally be more useful early on than one rank 10 and one rank 0.

I'm curious what similar things about modding folks wish they'd been told or discovered during their earliest days in the game.

[Graavarg]

I totally agree. I also think that helping new players ease into the fairly complex, math-driven Warframe universe will make the game more interesting and fun, and result in a better "retaining rate". Or simply put, more Tenno.

The focus on max-builds is, much as you say, totally understandable, very interesting (in some cases) and totally bonkers at the same time. For most players it is like Formula One, they read about the tech in the cars, they watch the races and they identify with some drivers or teams, but if they try to adopt this when picking up the kids from kindergarden or while driving to work the result will be disastrous. That level of "tech" and "modding" and the resources needed are simply out of their reach. That doesn't automatically translate into an impossibility to become a competitive motorsport driver, but trying to apply that mindset to their current situation is not very smart, neither is it effective and it can be quite counter-productive.

In my clan, where most are friends or "friends of friends", the biggest and all-pervasive problem with "starchart-level" modding has been how it relates to the damage system. understanding how you buff warframe specs and abilities is mostly a piece of cake (we are talking about fairly experienced gamers), but the differences in how different damage types affects different enemies, how this relates to crit vs status and how you encompass all this into the way you like to play is a real challenge, for everyone.

Starchart-Warframe is designed to encourage (or even force) you to get immersed in "different builds", and even if a player today can skip-jump a lot of those hoops due to sheer "power fantasy" that doesn't actually help. If you speed through the starchart with a "one size fits all"-setup you've gotten from a more experienced friend or from the internet, your lack of understanding will come back to haunt you later. Off topic: this is one of the biggest drawbacks of the current power level.

I think you idea is excellent, I think it could be immensely helpful for newer (and even some older) players, but I also think you need to include a result-driven part. Not only "you can actually get very good results by doing this" but also link that to "how do I beat the X at planet Y as a newish player". That was a common thread with our new players, clearing a planet (with the help and with advice from more experienced friends) went pretty well once they got the hang of "those enemies", but at the next planet (or expanding into other mission types) they would get into a "wtf is this"-state, when their working "previous planet"-setup suddenly didn't work all that well. By that time some of us were "at the end", so we knew one of the core things and also one of the best experiences of "Warframe the Game" really is "clearing the Starchart", so while we helped new clan members with some core "gold mods", with overcoming "Endo drought" and with farming stuff (and with a LOT of good advice 😀) we took real care to not destroy the challenges.

That clan is now almost defunct and most players have left for other games, but a sort of proof that this was "a good thing" is that they have branched out into different personal favourites, and used all the acquired knowledge to mod and buff those favourite warframes and weapons for everything in the game, instead of going for the current maxed META. This doesn't mean META was ignored, rather the opposite, all the ways of putting together META-setups have been much discussed (and META-builders and "trickers" get a lot of cred). But instead of everyone playing with "the META" they used to acquired knowledge to trim their favourites for different missions and challenges. So we have an exceptional Rhino, we have a Chroma/Monkey-main, we have Wisps, Mags, Trins, Volts, Vaubans, Equinoxes, Banshees, Niduses and Nyxes capable of any mission (just to name a few) and everyone can play high-level Nekros, Hydroid or Khora. It's the same with weaponry, everyone prefer their own favourites, even if they in some cases are "old".

This is, in my opinion, because everyone had access to what you are proposing, "knowledge and support for the advancing player". It allowed them to learn, to test and to make their own decisions about how they liked to play based on understanding (instead of Youtube 🙂), and to "power" the warframes and weapons they liked and tinker forth different builds for different challenges. And they all still like Warframe, despite this being more of "fond memories" as they hardly play anymore (but that is due to a feeling of general "meaninglessness", especially concerning the options for "voice-channel co-op Warframe", which have been and still is our "thing", in other games). 

So your idea is basically brilliant. 😉

[(PSN)slightconfuzzled]

The advice about ranking up Mods, or specifically, not ranking to max is really solid, and something I would also tell myself. Its also something I still hold to, and depending on the Mods in question, I may also have a range of the same Mod, set to different ranks. The reasons you covered, but also I personally like to play many many different builds, Warframes, and weapons, but I don't always necessarily want to have to invest so many resources into them all to have everything fit. I'd also tell my new self the following. 

A. Play style can very much dictate how and why you might want to Mod. I know you (past me), want to try and turn everything into a tank with Health, Armour and Shield Mods, and that you are excited about your new Warframes, and play Warframe as a solo cover shooter survival horror, but many Warframes you think suck at the moment, are really good if you Mod them differently, take advantage of the Warframe movement and agility, take off all your survival mods, and use your abilities more. Which also may be tough, because I know you (past me) don't have Arcane Energise or Zenurik maxed out, but keep that in mind. Also, you can have multiple play styles as well, sometimes you might want to be lazy and immobile and line up shots slowly, and there are Warframes and Mods that will accommodate that too. Keep that in mind when taking on others build suggestions and advice. Some of the Warframes and weapons you think are weak, end up as your favourites and powerhouses. 

B. Warframe has a lot of hidden mechanics, and interactions. Its okay to use the Wikia, especially to try and understand certain mechanics and interactions. Try to find out why Corrosive, and then Viral and Slash are so popular, why Blast is unpopular. Why even simple rolling can be useful for mitigating damage. Still do your own testing and experimenting, but just like in science, it can be good to see the collaborative efforts of others who have compiled such info, to then explore and understand yourself so you can make more informed decisions. Especially around hidden or vague descriptions, mechanics, interactions. Learning what weapons may force procc and so on. This in turn may influence how you mod. Some elemental combinations are way more important than necessarily just trying to stack more damage. Raw damage, status damage, Crit damage are all different, and you want to understand how and why, to Mod as relevant. 

[Steeldragonz]

That there would be 2 more systems after the initial Skill tree system that i started playing the game on and because of the way 2.0 to 3.0 happened i would never need to think about endo EVER

[Xzorn]

17 minutes ago, Steeldragonz said:

That there would be 2 more systems after the initial Skill tree system that i started playing the game on and because of the way 2.0 to 3.0 happened i would never need to think about endo EVER

 

LoL. Amen on this.

Then - "Dang, I got three R5's. That was a good run!"

Now - "When did I get another 100k Endo??"

I still remember spending hours farming for a Vitality mod back in the day. Rage too.

[Aruquae]

Don’t buy the 40p Volt skin… you will never use him after and that plat would’ve been better on slots

[Steeldragonz]

35 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

 

LoL. Amen on this.

Then - "Dang, I got three R5's. That was a good run!"

Now - "When did I get another 100k Endo??"

I still remember spending hours farming for a Vitality mod back in the day. Rage too.

LMAO right, i still have screenshots somewhere of the old systems haha. 

 

Edit: i have one friend who swears at me because i have never had to think about Endo, and he has had to go out and earn more and more for the mods he wants haha

Edited January 19 by Steeldragonz
ancdote added

[Aldain]

For me it would probably be telling myself the importance of crit multipliers on weapons that have solid crit rates.

I was cleaning out my older weapons for slot space (been switching over to prime variants lately) and I found several older weapons I haven't touched in...holy crap almost 3-4 years at this point, the amount of times I had a boost to crit rate but not crit damage modded in was painful in retrospect.

I don't know if anyone else made that mistake in the past or not, maybe I'm just stupid, but back when I was a wee Tenno I mostly just dumped damage mods in like crazy (which to be fair, probably works up to non-SP level 100 still from what I've seen) and having learned what little I have comparatively has caused a massive spike in my damage output compared to my early days.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Yea definitely don't need to max mods. 

 

[ominumi]

Me thinking an Impact mod will make my weapon deal high damage. /facepalm 

Trying to figure out a way to get both Heat and Cold on a weapon without getting blast.

Wasting endo on broken mods.

Going out of my way to make a status weapon get higher crit chance then wondering why the crit can only go to 20%.

Edited January 19 by ominumi

[Joezone619]

That blast damage is worthless. I used to mod for blast damage all the time, then one day i looked up damage types and saw how pointless it is, and had to forma half my weapons. XD

[Dryu259]

I started when you fused mods instead of using endo. I wish I had known early on that you could fuse mods. Either the game doesn't tell you or I somehow missed it but for a while I was using base rank mods and struggling to kill level 20 enemies.  I thought higher rank mods had to drop until one day I started messing with the mods and realized you could fuse them. That made things a lot easier. 

[Aruquae]

35 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

Yea definitely don't need to max mods. 

 

This is so relatable… and it hurts

”I leveled my weapons, it’ll be fine”

[SneakyErvin]

1. Knowing the damage stats (IPS etc) better. Would spare me from modding for blast and S#&$ early on thinking it does something it doesnt due to the name and so on. I dont know why but for a while I had the idea that blast damage resulted in small AoE splash damage when the status occured. Since I just couldnt believe slash damage was so S#&$ty as it was and still is. Something called Blast having a small AoE just made sense in my head, and still does.

2. Not maxing mods too quickly. Mostly important with corrupted mods though.

3. Not listening to what other people say regarding certain frames and how to mod them. In short ignore those that imply you must stack otherworldly amounts of strength on Rhino, Chroma and other buff frames and similar. You will still survive what the game throws at you and 1HK pretty much everything you face even if you stop at only a fraction of the strength investment.

• The only time I worry about adding a specific amount of strength and not less is if I wanna reach a threshold, like 100% strip or a guaranteed status. Those are generally low to mid investments, often ending up at it reached with +100% strength (or far less if you are Garuda). And on frames that require several times more, like Hildryn, I simply ignore it and go for stats that achieves it in two casts instead.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

Configs. I didn't know about them at first because i was too busy learning polarities and such and didnt know what the ABC was for. After a while of resetting builds from scratch i learned about configs and was like "this is so much easier omg!" 

[Tiltskillet]

I would have researched where to get Serration and Hornet Strike and worked to get them.  Those were somewhat more rare then, and I remember struggling through most of the Star Chart, especially against bosses, with what was then called a "damaged" Serration, which gave something like +50% damage.  I  finally got the real version while working on Eris.

I actually got Condition Overload before it, back when it was super-duper rare and much, much more powerful at the top end than now.  Not that I had the mods, weapons, or knowledge to leverage it, let alone remotely approach the  "top end" until a lot later.

[TARINunit9]

3 hours ago, Joezone619 said:

That blast damage is worthless. I used to mod for blast damage all the time, then one day i looked up damage types and saw how pointless it is, and had to forma half my weapons. XD

They didn't even make the Murmur enemies weak to it. It would have been a perfect opportunity, "their bodies are made of rock so blast them apart with TNT." Instead they gave them a weakness to Radiation and Electric, which is already the weakness of Bombards and Robots respectively

[MutoManiac]

That Hunter Munitions should be one of the first mods to get and actually use. 😝

[(PSN)AyinDygra]

Dear past me:

Mods are the actual "gear" that you're farming. Your power will grow as you can accommodate higher ranked mods. This is the main reason you'll care about Mastery Rank past 16. Once you hit 30, you won't care what rank you are anymore, since it's really a meaningless stat in the bigger picture. That collection of mods that you have leveled to each different pip, so you can equip them as you rank up the weapons... yeah, it was useful until you hit MR30. (your posts over the years, appealing to have DE change the pip system to allow people to freely change a mod's pip to unlocked levels, to fit them into gear, especially as you add forma to weapons and frames, only to have your entire mod build dismantled automatically, because they no longer fit in the unranked weapon, will fall on deaf ears.)

The weapons are platforms to direct and channel the power of the mods. Weapons, themselves, are rarely significant upgrades in power. That Orthos Prime... you'll still be using that at Legendary Rank 2, 7 years later. You'll have a Zaw and a few other weapons, but good ol' Orthos still earns its weapon slot, because it's the MODS that give the weapons their strength. The biggest difference between weapons will be Critical Hit Chance, and Status Chance; these mainly determine which cookie-cutter set of mods you'll be using, with the main wiggle room being which status effects you use, based on the faction you're fighting, but even then, you probably won't switch out just for the faction.

Warframes, on the other hand, do offer significant changes in how you play, outside of mods, so mod builds vary greatly between how players use the frames - especially once you have certain arcanes. Don't bother with watching online build guides... those people don't play Warframe like you do, and you're better off customizing your frames to how you play. Seek the wiki, and figure out which stats are most beneficial to how you play and use their abilities.

 

[Tiltskillet]

1 hour ago, MutoManiac said:

That Hunter Munitions should be one of the first mods to get and actually use. 😝

I'm a little skeptical of that.  But the game has changed a great deal since I was trying to complete the Star Chart, so maybe I shouldn't be.

[UnstarPrime]

I really appreciate when build guides have both "new player" and "advanced" builds, especially if they have a bit of discussion about what mods you might want to slot out to get slightly different results depending on your preferences or situation.  LeyzarGamingViews and Brozime both tend to take this approach, so I recommend their YouTube content, especially for players who learn better from multimedia presentations rather than the written word.  Not sure if that in any way fits into your project, though!

 

14 hours ago, Packetdancer said:

I realized it is not only not necessary but potentially actively detrimental to max-rank things early on. Ranking a mod to 8 or 9 versus 10 will save you enough Endo to similarly rank up an entire second mod. And having two rank 8 or 9 mods will generally be more useful early on than one rank 10 and one rank 0.

I think this idea of "don't max-rank too fast" stems from the same principles that lead to the idea of "diversify your mods" that we tend to use when weapon modding.  Because it's all about having a specific amount of "points" you can spend, and how you can best allocate those points to maximize your returns.

And to maximize returns, you want to think about squares.  Because when it comes to maximizing the area of a rectangle, the closer your rectangle is to being a square, the more optimal the area will be.

Like, let's say you have 6 meters to spend on both height and width, and you want to make a rectangle.  If you go big on height with 5 and small on width for 1, you get an area of 5.  4 and 2 will get you 8.  But 3 and 3 will get you that optimal result, 9.  And the same is true for any other amount of meters you can jam into a rectangle: if you want the biggest area, you always want the square.  Or if you have more numbers that multiply, you want the cube, the tesseract, etc.  But the basic principle is to keep all your multipliers as equal as possible to optimize your returns.

And that's why you want to level your mods up at similar rates rather than going all-in on one.  And it's the same reason you want to diversify your mods by including roughly comparable amounts of:

• +Damage
• +Elemental Damage
• +Multishot
• +Crit Chance
• +Crit Damage

I probably didn't do the best job of explaining this, but understanding it has been foundational to my being better at modding.  So if you can communicate that to your readers, I think that would help them out.

[UnstarPrime]

 

15 hours ago, Packetdancer said:

I'm curious what similar things about modding folks wish they'd been told or discovered during their earliest days in the game.

I wish I had been told that most of the time it's less about the weapon and more about the mods.  I remember running into walls where I couldn't do enough damage, and my gut reaction from other games was to get "better weapons".  But that's not really how Warframe works before you've maxed all your mods.  It probably would have been more impactful if I had spent time collecting some of those fundamental mods and boosting them up.

That said, I guess I eventually got here, and part of that is probably because while I was farming "better weapons" I was also accruing resources to boost my mods and builds.  So not a terrible direction to go in, but probably not optimal.

 

Also, this is kind of tangential to modding, but I feel like it's worth bringing up because when players are modding, they're trying to solve a problem.  But modding might not be the best way to solve that problem!  For example, if my problem is that I'm having trouble surviving, one of the places I might immediately run to as a new player is modding, and thinking I should raise my Redirection and my Vitality as high as possible to give me that extra durability.  But what it's easy to not know about is that enemy accuracy is reduced when the player is moving, and that the faster you move the more accuracy the enemies lose.  And a player who doesn't know about this mechanic doesn't have the ability to engage with it as a potential solution, even if it might suit their needs and their preferred play style.

[Hypernaut1]

That YouTuber builds are often only good for demonstrating power for a YouTube video and not practical for actual play.

How do they get away with recommending all of these horribly inefficient builds and be labeled as experts? 

[Merkranire]

I got mislead into thinking that efficiency is the only thing that mattered and that there were things like mods that got superglued into place, admittedly by myself at the start but I certainly wasn’t convinced otherwise until I forced myself to take a step back and reconsider what I’m doing

Edited January 20 by Merkranire