Starchart vs Mastery leveling

[(XBOX)HaxYou]

I am mastery rank 6.  I just unlocked my Soma and thanks to a great 50 min. survival run, leveled it to 30 in one mission.  I have a tipedo that is amazing and can take out lvl 50s.  However I am stumped, up until now, I would get new warframes/weapons, and level them to 30, then get new warframes/weapons and start over all while doing the starchart to unlock planets/content. However I am now in Sedna/Saturn and I am noticing that I need my maxed out potato warframe with my soma and tipedo to get thru the start chart.  In Essence, i cannot level my mastery and complete my starchart at the same time.  Do i just complete the starchart then work on mastery, or visa-verse?  or am I just doing something wrong?  can I take an unranked warframe into high level missions if I keep my soma, or level an unranked gun and use a maxed out potato warframe?  Your advice would be aprecieated.

[felixsylvaris]

Play the way which is most fun for you.

If doing "hard" content have one weapon maxed. Could be primary, could be melee.

If you play in parties then could level 2 other weapon passivly from shared xp.

If you have plat You can buy Carrier Prime and potato it. Sentinel can carry a little. The other useful tools are Spectres and Xiphos turret.

Having maxed frame helps in completing starchart, but it is not required.

It is totally fine to just run starchart with maxed frame and weapon and be done with it.

Leveling could be done in choosen location which you plan to farm anyway.

[(PSN)Agent_CHAR]

7 minutes ago, (XB1)TheGoldenMedal said:

Your right but i'm saying don't focus on all your killing from your warframe abilities because weapon kills grants the xp to the weapons and warframes . So using your weapon would be better. And yea party kills xp are shared as well

Which is better is situational on what levels your stuff is and what you are trying to rank.  Anything that is already max rank doesn't get any benefit from affinity (ignoring focus for now). 

OP, I get the impression that you solo play.  You may want to consider more group play because it changes the dynamic of leveling gear due to the way shared affinity is split.  It also gives you more leeway on having less than max ranked stuff.

Also, pushing higher into the star chart is a great goal to have, but its not the be all end all.  Playing missions repeatedly on low/mid planets is all part of resource farming.  Neurodes on Earth, Neural sensors on Jupitor, and Orokin cells on Saturn.  You should be combining these resources farms with leveling stuff.

[The66Monkey]

yea that is how it is, you can usually get a few levels of new stuff by brining it to the void while you are grinding for stuff and then get the last bit of xp from star chart missions.

You can do stuff like bring a good secondary while lvl'ing a primary and vice/versa, you can also run loki and get stealth kills in most missions to lvl up new melee weapons.

[(XBOX)Clxde]

If your doing high level bring at least weapon that can kill good. Also have a survivability  mod on your warframe.  Killing with your warframe doesn't really grant you significant xp. Killing with the weapons grants a lot though . 

[Bouldershoulder]

22 minutes ago, (XB1)TheGoldenMedal said:

If your doing high level bring at least weapon that can kill good. Also have a survivability  mod on your warframe.  Killing with your warframe doesn't really grant you significant xp. Killing with the weapons grants a lot though . 

To clarify: killing with warframe - all exp goes to warframe, killing with weapons - exp is divided 50/50 between warframe and the weapon. Not using a weapon in solo game does not give it exp. In multiplayer games, unused weapons still get exp from party kills, but less, because all the exp is divided between everything you have (25/25/25/25).

[(XBOX)Clxde]

2 minutes ago, Bouldershoulder said:

To clarify: killing with warframe - all exp goes to warframe, killing with weapons - exp is divided 50/50 between warframe and the weapon. Not using a weapon in solo game does not give it exp. In multiplayer games, unused weapons still get exp from party kills, but less, because all the exp is divided between everything you have (25/25/25/25).

Your right but i'm saying don't focus on all your killing from your warframe abilities because weapon kills grants the xp to the weapons and warframes . So using your weapon would be better. And yea party kills xp are shared as well

[(XBOX)Clxde]

6 minutes ago, (PS4)Agent_CHAR said:

Which is better is situational on what levels your stuff is and what you are trying to rank.  Anything that is already max rank doesn't get any benefit from affinity (ignoring focus for now). 

OP, I get the impression that you solo play.  You may want to consider more group play because it changes the dynamic of leveling gear due to the way shared affinity is split.  It also gives you more leeway on having less than max ranked stuff.

Also, pushing higher into the star chart is a great goal to have, but its not the be all end all.  Playing missions repeatedly on low/mid planets is all part of resource farming.  Neurodes on Earth, Neural sensors on Jupitor, and Orokin cells on Saturn.  You should be combining these resources farms with leveling stuff.

Like I said killing with your weapons are more beneficial than killing with your warframe when considering gaining xp for the weapons and warframes 

[(PSN)Agent_CHAR]

1 hour ago, (XB1)TheGoldenMedal said:

Like I said killing with your weapons are more beneficial than killing with your warframe when considering gaining xp for the weapons and warframes 

And like I said, that is not always true.  You have a rank 15 warframe and a rank 30 weapon so killing with your weapon wasted 50% of the affinity.  If you had instead killed with a warframe power you'd benefit from the 100% going to the frame that you are trying to rank up.

Other combinations of frame and weapon levels are different and the point is we all need to understand how affinity is divided and shared to know what is optimal.  You can't just generalize and say "killing with a weapon is best".