How do I get started in the meta?

[-HAKUNA-YOUR-TATAS-]

Just leaving my 2 cents here with you OP.  Something really nice about Warframe is that it can be played in many different ways, so while people can suggest having certain weapons or mods being as being the very best in game, you may find that those items aren't to your liking.  (We have a grenade launcher that is quite powerful and popular, but what if you don't like grenade launchers?, etc.)  

Also you'll be happy to know that maxing out all of your gear both mods and weapons isn't 100% necessary to have fun, but developing knowledge of game mechanics and an understanding of how to mod and play are very important.  I'm not saying to run into high difficulty missions being ill equipped, but it's not 100% necessary to be rocking fully maxed out equipment.

You'll only need to use "meta" gear if you plan to play endless survival/defense type missions for 2-3 hours or more.  Frankly most players do that once in their whole time playing, just to see if they can.  Doing that as an everyday thing...  well...  I'd be puking from all the repetitiveness.  So yeah..  the "meta" is really only necessary for that and bragging rights.

Your focus should be more on learning how to move around in the maps and learning about the enemies, while finding out what types of gear you enjoy playing the most.

Good luck and welcome to Warframe.

Edited May 9, 2016 by sushidubya

[OzoneSlayer]

Rhino prime, Boltor prime and carrier

[Djego27]

I would not worry about that much, you will see most of it later on when you play popular maps, sortis, raid or voids.

What most people consider as "meta"  also only means mostly something that is very easy to do but overly effective or something that is well explained in a guide. Then again on frames like Saryn, Ember or Frost all the guides are fairly bad and so are the 95% of that frames played by people in sorti, void or on popular maps that go after this guides. In the L100 infested MD today we had 3 frosts and 1 Ember, guess what Ember was the lowest dps(9% vs 58% of my frost). All the guides also point out the low damage of Ember at high levels, what is pin point accurate for the build, but not for the frame itself.

The guy with the Ember prime avatar did play Ember as well, that is just how big the difference can be between playing Ember right or wrong(L100 extra armor sorti grenier MD):

L100 solo Infested survival o hi:

And a low dps frame finally manages to finish the job:

[xubile]

start by shooting stug in rhino codpiece region