Why do I feel so underpowered?

[(XBOX)Totsy30]

I've been playing for a bit. So far I have a rank 28 Volt and rank 13 Ash. My current problem is that the higher I get my rank, the weaker I feel. I don't know if this is intended, or if I am just completely oblivious to something or other. I don't completely understand if rank=level when I'm looking at a mission, because even though my Ash is rank 13, enemies that are level 8(at least I think, judging from a number next to their health) still deal a serious number on me.

I mainly fight with melee with my rank 30 Skana, and I basically just dash around mindlessly slashing away at the enemies until their all finished. I have a bad habit of not ever blocking with my sword as well, mainly because it feels like it does nothing. Every shot still does 2-4 damage to my shield so I figured that I had a better chance of just evading shots than blocking them. I do also have a rank 17 Boltor and rank 28 Kunai, which both feel very unrewarding, so I tend to not use them.

As far as mods go, I've got a half-upgraded vitality mod, and whichever mod increases shield recharge rate. On my skana I use a lightning mod and another that increases melee damage by %100. I haven't found many mods for my ranged weapons that seemed worth using, so I can't recall which, if any, are on those two weapons.

If anyone can enlighten me to any of my massive screw ups or just simply give me some tips. I donno, like is cover important? Simple stuff that may have gone over my head while leveling.

Edit: Thanks for all the answers and tips. Definitely learned a lot and will keep pushin to get better.

Edited April 8, 2016 by (XB1)Totsy30

[Pazgabear]

Cover is definitely important if you don't have mods to take the fight head on. Speaking of mods, your equipment rank is meaningless if you don't have the gear to back it up, that is to say a rank 30 Ash without mods is as strong as an unranked one with an aura and some mods installed. Also, use your skills. Ash's Shurikens bleed procs can easily deal with Corpus and Grineers alike, and Volt's Shock can give you some breathing room by stunning the enemies in front of you. For weapons, it's even worse, since they don't improve at all with ranks, so try to gather some mods for them (even damaged one) and rank them up. Get an aura too ASAP to give a boost to your warframe's mod capacity (and a nice bonus depending on the aura).

Most of all, don't be afraid to ask for help, use the wiki for basic knowledge and ask questions on Region for things you don't understand, use the Recruiting channel to gather people for missions (Even if you won't be getting many responses for low level missions, it's always worth a try)

[chaotea]

Ok, so the rundown is this.

Basically, warframe and weapon levels are no real indication of how good they are. What matters is the mods you put on. Cover isnt realy that important, but mobility is. Keep moving, and make sure you dont get surrounded. Believe it or not, most warframes arnt able to take that much damage, but the experienced players while run, slide and jump around so the enemy is constantly forced to re-target. Also, you need to be aware of which enemies are more dangerous, and take them out fast.

 

If possible, i advise getting a Rhino. I did myself and i found that in earlier missions, the Iron Skin ability can realy help improve your survivability while you learn a greater feel for the game.

 

As a final note, a level 17 boltor is the same as a level 0 boltor. You need to use mods if you want to see any improvement in your damage output.

[NeomanSeraph]

Enemy level has no relation to your frame level. Treat enemy levels as its own system, separate from your weapon/wf levels. With more experience, you can gauge how tough enemies will be when you see the level spread on the mission screen.

And it sounds like you need to add damage mods to your weapons. Unlike your warframe, weapons not increase in power as you level, they only get more mod points (your wf on the other hand gets increased stats and unlocks more powers as it levels). So you definitely need to pick up a Serration (+dmg mod for non-shotgun primary weapons) and Hornet Strike (+dmg mod for secondaries). If you have any mods which increase a weapon's slash, puncture or impact, use those. You will eventually want to only use the +dmg mods and +elemental dmg mods, but that's for later, when you get more mods and are more used to the game.

Blocking nullifies 60% of the incoming damage (for swords) and also prevents you from getting knocked down by ground slams and scorpion wires. If you're using melee, block.

Don't use cover, instead use the Parkour system. Bullet Jump and Aim Glide everywhere. There's a tutorial in your codex computer (the computer opposite of the market computer on your ship), use the Training Tab and check out the Advanced Movement section. Bullet Jump everywhere. Never not Bullet Jump. Bullet Jump is love. Bullet Jump is life.
Enemy accuracy decreases sharply when you do parkour stuff, and it helps you get around faster, so try to master it asap. Remember that double tapping shift lets you roll and you're basically invincible during the animation. You can air roll too.

Another helpful frame to grab is Rhino. Kill the Jackal for the three blueprints, and then grab the Rhino Blueprint from the market. His Iron Skin basically gives you a third line of defense along with your shields and HP, so he's a great choice if you're not used to the game or you're soloing.

Also, if you are soloing, stop. This game is balanced for 3-4 player parties and enemies will wreck you if you're alone.

EDIT: Oh yeah another super helpful thing to do is to grab a Sentinel (Carrier is usually the player choice) and give it this mod: http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Guardian

That will make the Sentinel recharge your shield when it runs out. Super helpful for survivability, and players typically have tons of these thanks to the Void.

Edited April 8, 2016 by SSNeoman

[Orthelius]

27 minutes ago, (XB1)Totsy30 said:

I've been playing for a bit. So far I have a rank 28 Volt and rank 13 Ash. My current problem is that the higher I get my rank, the weaker I feel. I don't know if this is intended, or if I am just completely oblivious to something or other. I don't completely understand if rank=level when I'm looking at a mission, because even though my Ash is rank 13, enemies that are level 8(at least I think, judging from a number next to their health) still deal a serious number on me.

I mainly fight with melee with my rank 30 Skana, and I basically just dash around mindlessly slashing away at the enemies until their all finished. I have a bad habit of not ever blocking with my sword as well, mainly because it feels like it does nothing. Every shot still does 2-4 damage to my shield so I figured that I had a better chance of just evading shots than blocking them. I do also have a rank 17 Boltor and rank 28 Kunai, which both feel very unrewarding, so I tend to not use them.

As far as mods go, I've got a half-upgraded vitality mod, and whichever mod increases shield recharge rate. On my skana I use a lightning mod and another that increases melee damage by %100. I haven't found many mods for my ranged weapons that seemed worth using, so I can't recall which, if any, are on those two weapons.

If anyone can enlighten me to any of my massive screw ups or just simply give me some tips. I donno, like is cover important? Simple stuff that may have gone over my head while leveling.

The reason you feel underpowered is because you are. The main strength of Warframes and weapons comes from the power of the mods you put on them. Since you're still using the skana (which is also not a very powerful weapon in itself) I can assume that you do not have high power mods yet.

Just slow down, relax, enjoy the game. You're not supposed to be powerful yet. 

[Ambiroa]

44 minutes ago, chaotea said:

If possible, i advise getting a Rhino. I did myself and i found that in earlier missions, the Iron Skin ability can realy help improve your survivability while you learn a greater feel for the game.

I agree, even without using his skin, he enables you to try stuff out during combat and get a sense of what your frame can do, how you can use a power in which situation, etc.

[DjaAkh]

Yepp. Most likely, it's the mods. Which ones are you using and on which lvls are they?

[DrunkenStupor]

Pazgabear mostly got it covered, but I'll add some tips.

1) Learn to use your melee weapons properly. Use the slide attack (sprint+crouch+quick melee), it's more powerful than usual attack and gives you mobility, so enemies will miss more often. Use slam attack (jump, look to the ground, melee) on stronger foes (Heavy Gunners, Corpus Techs, Ancients), then aim at them while they on the ground and melee - you will perform finisher attack, which is fairly powerful. If you intend to use block, remember that different weapons have different dmg reduction (you can find exact percentage in the linked article).

2) Mods are the key. Try to maximize your Pressure Point as fast as possible, this will allow you to hit harder. Also try to find Serration mod for your primary - it will be more expensive to level than Pressure Point, but damage increase worth it. for mod farmin I recommend Apollodorus, Mercury - plenty of players there, a lot of mobs  and you can extract after 5 minutes.

3) Join a clan. Clanmates can help you with advice or assist you on hard missions.

[Xekrin]

1 hour ago, (XB1)Totsy30 said:

If anyone can enlighten me to any of my massive screw ups or just simply give me some tips. I donno, like is cover important? Simple stuff that may have gone over my head while leveling.

I, too, started out with volt, and some advice someone gave me, use your speed not just for running but to melee, it vastly increases your attack speed.  I ditched the skana fairly quickly myself and built the dual heat swords.  They are a pretty awesome weapon to start out with.  Jumping up and attacking while looking down (ground slam) is an excellent attack with this weapon.

Your main problem right now is lack of mods (as others have said) and (I'm guessing) lack of a reactor in your frame and catalyst in your weapons.  I personally did not install these until I had ranked several frames and weapons to 30 (as they cost plat and as a new player its hard to get plat unless you pay, which isn't a bad choice, I just couldn't at the time).  

I also waited until I obtained the prime version of a favored weapon/frame because they are simply superior.  You do not have to do this, of course, but I always felt it a waste to use them (commonly known as potatoes here) on frames & weapons you don't plan to keep or will replace.  

If you have not done so already, use your 50 plat that you got when you started to buy another warframe slot and a couple weapon slots.  This gives you room for options.

Check the recruiting channel, whisper people to join missions, (especially void) and get some prime parts.  You can sell them for plat or just collect and build new gear.

And do not worry about being underpowered right now.  Even without the top gear, this is a great game and will get better if you decide to stick with it.  Also do not worry about not contributing when you do join high level missions, you are there to get experience and learn, they can handle themselves

To be totally honest, I found a clan fairly quickly and had a few clannies who took pity and let me leech in void missions and dragged me along to missions I had no clue how to handle.  After that I started doing the same for others.  I play on PC so have idea how the Xbox community is, but I wish you the best of luck and enjoy the game.

[(XBOX)Twinna25]

For a start, get an aura mod, preferably one that gives several before polarities. Aside from the V polarity which you should aim for steel charge for the most mod slots. 

 

Also, orokin direlect runs. You want to collect corrupted mods to allow you to make different builds on warframes to improve their abilities, although these mods reduce a stat as well. However, depending on the build the abilities may be be unaffected or even improved by the reduction on rare occasions. For example, reducing range on Volt to improve duration allows more duration, but it reduces the radius other players can be away from you to receive the benefit. 

 

You also do not want to focus on health just yet on a frame like Volt, focus on shields first as Volt's armor is incredibly low, which means enemies chew through it faster than usual. Shields also benefit from the sentinel ability 'Guardian' which causes your shields to instantly regenerate once per minute when they run out, which also lets you know when to retreat for a moment if you get swarmed and allow some warning. This is a godsend on low armour frames such as trinity as well, who have high shields but are flimsy otherwise, as well as allowing other frames such as Frost to become an extremely bulky warframe. 

 

Go onto the market as well, and look through for a category labelled 'sentinel blueprints' as well. Buy the carrier blueprint and craft it. I would recommend to take off striker originally, but carrier is something that is extremely useful, as one of it's signature mods allows you to pick up any item in a twelve metre radius instead of having to walk over it. Another good mod is the guardian mod i mentioned previously, as well as the sanctuary mod which offers you an overshield while you revive somebody. I would recommend putting the rest of the avaliable mod slots into survivability mods on it, although regen should be a priority. The sentinel also has the advantage that you do not need to maintain it, and it respawns whenever you fully bleed out and revive, occasionally leading to the amusing scenario where you activitly try to die and ask people not to revive you. This also renders the shield recharge mod redundant due to the guardian mod, and the utility os increased further if you puton the animal instinct mod which then gives you the equivalent of three warframe mods(fast shield recharge, enemy radar and loot detector) spwithout using your own slots.

 

Leading back to warframes however, focus on keeping one or two slots for redirection and vitality, and the other six slots for mods that buff up your warframe. For example, on Volt i would recommend putting duration, power strength and streamline on. If you use corrupted mods as well, which i highly recommend, i would say range is a good stat to ignore, and power efficiency is still okay on him as long as you still have some. Keep in mind that is my own experience with him however, and i would say to experiment with him when you are comfortable where you are.

 

Weapons is also something you seem to be lacking in, so i am going to place a couple of suggestions for you. When you hit MR5, i would recommend making a Tonkor as it is a good weapon with decent damage and crowd control(it's a grenade launcher), but you have to learn to control it, which can be difficult at first as you often need to hit a target dead on with an often inacurrate weapon. You're on Xbox, so message me and i'll try and get you a good secondary soon called the Vaykor Marelok, which is a slow but heavy hitting pistol which has good status chance and can be modded with lethal torrent(a nightmare mod, complete a planet's nodes and you unlock bightmare missions, you get it from there) to have a respectable fire rate. Finally, i would recommend getting an Archwing if you have not already, and unlocking the plants to Uranus. When you unlock it, look for a glowing blue enemy called an Oculus(before you load up the missions however, buy some codex scanners from the market for 500 credits). This unlocks the natah quest, run through that as well as the second dream and you get an extremely good sword that also comes with it's own slot and double mod slots for free, as well as good stats for a one handed sword. 

 

Also, you should get three weapons with a name starting with Dex today, try using them for now however, as they will be an improvement over your current weapons, they will also have double the mod slots when you level it up and their own slots. Try and work through the starchart however, and try to unlock Pluto and Uranus, as pluto has a node called Heiracon which is good for fusion cores to help you level up mods, Draco on Ceres is also good to unlock as well however, as it is good to levelup mods when you have the chance. 

 

If you need any help, message the gamertag Twinna25 on Xbox, and i'll try to help you however. Or if you have any more questions.

[Omnimorph]

4 hours ago, (XB1)Totsy30 said:

I've been playing for a bit. So far I have a rank 28 Volt and rank 13 Ash. My current problem is that the higher I get my rank, the weaker I feel. I don't know if this is intended, or if I am just completely oblivious to something or other. I don't completely understand if rank=level when I'm looking at a mission, because even though my Ash is rank 13, enemies that are level 8(at least I think, judging from a number next to their health) still deal a serious number on me.

I mainly fight with melee with my rank 30 Skana, and I basically just dash around mindlessly slashing away at the enemies until their all finished. I have a bad habit of not ever blocking with my sword as well, mainly because it feels like it does nothing. Every shot still does 2-4 damage to my shield so I figured that I had a better chance of just evading shots than blocking them. I do also have a rank 17 Boltor and rank 28 Kunai, which both feel very unrewarding, so I tend to not use them.

As far as mods go, I've got a half-upgraded vitality mod, and whichever mod increases shield recharge rate. On my skana I use a lightning mod and another that increases melee damage by %100. I haven't found many mods for my ranged weapons that seemed worth using, so I can't recall which, if any, are on those two weapons.

If anyone can enlighten me to any of my massive screw ups or just simply give me some tips. I donno, like is cover important? Simple stuff that may have gone over my head while leveling.

Edit: Thanks for all the answers and tips. Definitely learned a lot and will keep pushin to get better.

As others have said, it's all about the mods.  Fill those mods, get those pips in (but with priorities that I'll discuss below)! 

You're at the stage where you can start doing Void stuff (lvl 1 and lvl 2 void missions) where you can get fusion cores to feed your mods.  You can also start looking at doing Vaults, so you can build up a stock of Corrupted mods, which are essential to most high level builds.  Also do Nightmare missions that give nightmare mods whenever you can (but you need to get your "tank" up to scratch to do those).  (Alternatively, you can just buy some plat and buy these kinds of mods on the player market to get a leg up - you'll still have to level them up though, and for that you need to keep doing missions to get credits and keep feeding them fusion cores, for which you need Void missions.)  Note that with feeding (fusing) mods, most efficient is fusion cores, next most efficient is the same type of mod, next more efficient is a mod of the same polarity, least efficient is a mod of another polarity.  Bear in mind that the amount of pippage you need to fill increases exponentially (i.e. filling the last pip in a mod is roughly equivalent to filling all the pips that came before), so in essence with most of the mods with lots of pips, you only really need to fill up to the last pip but one to be effective with them, then gradually fill in that last pip at leisure once the basics are sorted out.

Another point is that if you really love a frame/weapon, it's essential to double its drain capacity with a gold or silver "potato" (catalyst).  You will feel the need for extra drain capacity when you've gotten the "basic" mods filled and are starting to put pips into mods that round out your frames/weapons. 

Here's a sort of rough priority list you need to concentrate on.

For frames, you need to ensure you have all the "basic" mods, which are kind of for intermediate/good builds:-

1) Vitality, Redirection and Steel Fiber for "tank".  If a frame has high shields, make them higher with Redirection, if a frame has high health, make it higher with Vitality, if a frame has high armour, use Steel Fiber.  Frames basically divide into frames that use a combination of Redirection and Vitality, or Vitality and Steel Fiber.  These are all high priority mods to feed before feeding anything else (other than the ability mods and damage mods, which I'll come to below).

2) Then for the frame's "spank" aspect (ability/power use), you need things like Continuity to extend the Duration of powers, Intensify to up the Power Strength (usually damage), Stretch to up the Range of abilities, Streamline to make energy use more efficient for abilities (very important if you use abilities a lot) and Flow to make the energy pool bigger (less important - use only with frames that use their abilities relatively infrequently).  Think about how you use your frame's abilities, what they do, etc., and prioritize feeding the appropriate mods.

For weapons you need to prioritize first of all the relevant damage mods and "multishot" mods, then you add either crit chance and crit damage (if the weapon is already a high crit weapon) or elemental damage (if there's room left over, or if the weapon has a high status chance).  Elementals come in two flavours: dual stat, which add good elemental damage and also add extra status chance, and plain elementals which add a huge bump of elemental damage, no extra status chance, but cost a lot of drain.

1) For primaries, you need to prioritize pumping up Serration and Split Chamber asap.

2) For secondaries, you need to prioritize Hornet Strike and Barrel Diffusion.

3) For melee you need to prioritize Pressure Point and Fury (attack rate).

So that's the idea.  When you put pips into mods, put them into a balanced spread of frame tank, frame spank, and weapon damage/multishot.  Forget all the other mods (I mean don't put pips into them - by all means play around with slotting them if you have the extra drain capacity), some of them will become important later, but you need to fill up the pips in all the basic mods first to become effective at the mid-range and high level starmap stuff, and the low-to-intermediate Void stuff.

And cover can be useful - never neglect it.  Unless you're a tanky frame, there's no point standing face front to an incoming horde of troops when you can stand behind a corner and pick them off as they charge through the door, that type of thing.

Edited April 8, 2016 by Omnimorph

[chaotea]

On 08/04/2016 at 10:39 AM, Ambiroa said:

I agree, even without using his skin, he enables you to try stuff out during combat and get a sense of what your frame can do, how you can use a power in which situation, etc.

I think the skins the most important aspect. Survivability aside, the nutraliation of procs and statuses gives less to worry about and the damage mitigation helps with practicing you gun-play.