Warframe: silly named F2P coop TPS

Yep, peer-to-peer allows for the frenetic pace of the game which feels excellent… as long as things are running smoothly. If someone starts hosting on a potato, though… watch out. There’s tradeoffs to being peer-to-peer, but I think it’s worth it overall.

PUGing in the Plains is definitely really glitchy right now. I know that’s their top priority for a hotfix right now, along with a pass on the economy balance. I’m assuming we’ll get something this week!

22.0.3 Hotfix is out.

There’s more changes and fixes than this, but this is the Reward and Economy changes.

Here’s what I was running to farm focus:

Saryn Prime:

Range is the absolute most important. I even notice a difference between 235% and 250%, which is why I have Cunning Drift installed (200%+ is all really good, though). Next I’d prioritize strength, as you really want to score kills with spores. After that, duration. Efficiency you can work around with Zenurik/orbs/pizzas.

Ignis:

Sinister Reach and Firestorm are the key ones. I don’t even really care about the damage (although Radiation or Corrosive melts Grineer at Helene up to wave 20, even with two non-damage mods), the Ignis is there to spray acid/radiation everywhere to pop spores. Firestorm will have it hit through walls easily, and sinister reach can hit most of the map from the defense objective.

I usually immediately drop a Molt and start placing spores on it and blow through Wave 1. It’ll pretty much be an instant-kill as soon as they spawn, but you want to clear the wave ASAP before picking up the Convergence orb. Wait to see if the lift is moving up or down and time your Convergence pickup accordingly. From there, it’s just kind of a mini-game of maximizing Convergence orb timers if you absolutely want to squeeze every drop of focus out of each wave. Pop your #4 on a molt full of spores in the last few seconds of your Convergence orb to knock out those lingering Nox and Eximus enemies, which have big focus payouts and often survive your spore plague.

If you’re grouped with another Saryn Prime or Banshee Prime, don’t worry too much about maximizing orbs, just make sure to have a weapon with a Lens equipped while you spam your spores. You’ll still get really good affinity/focus as long as you stay within affinity range of the other saryn/banshee.

Thanks. Believe it or not, 5 minutes after your post yesterday I went to Helene (out of curiosity, since I was already focus capped for the day) and met a Saryn Prime there who was farming focus, heh. We chatted for a bit and at the end of 20 waves he told me was at 70k with a booster. Pretty good. And the runs went really fast, even faster than with quake Banshee.

When it works, the plains teaming experience is starting to gel - DE have created something really special here.

Up till now, all the stuff we’ve been doing has been imaginary (e.g. none of us have ever seen a real Grineer galleon). But in the context of something we as players are familiar with, a natural world with hills and grass and trees and things, the warframes start to feel really real too.

And then when you have a cell of 4 Tenno against the overwhelming firepower of the Grineer, it starts to feel legendary, exhilarating. You feel like you’re this hi-tech future superhero, and all your space magic abilities and weapons and hyper-mobility start to feel real against the real-feeling background - but it’s nicely balanced because for all your abilities, there’s still only 4 of you and the Grineer just keep coming and coming and the whole thing just feels like an absolutely epic warzone.

I’ve never felt anything like it in a videogame before - in some senses of course one has experienced the same thing cushioned by some layers of abstraction, but because of the modern graphics and the attention to detail, and particularly the one-with-one’s-avatar mobility, the realism (in the sense of bringing space magic superhero ninjas to life) just makes it go to another level.

Fishing with Ivara is amazing (dashwire + prowl ftw). After the awesomeness that are Nidus and Mesa I really needed a reason to return to my real favorite frame - and Plains is the perfect excuse. It almost feels like I’m playing something like Far Cry (Primal), just hunting and fishing, occasionally I also do short incursion - I tend to do these activities after the highest level bounty to keep things more interesting.

Ho ho ho! Just got an Electrified Barrel mod from a random incursion in PoE. I’ve probably done close to 100 AW incursion without getting this thing so I’m quite happy right now!

Also, I didn’t even know it’s possible to get AW mods from PoE, lol.

Day of the Dead skin sale is live, and will last until November 1st. I almost wish I hadn’t seen it, RIP 400 platinum.

Uh oh. And I just made 400 plat from the market. Danger, danger!

If you’re curious about how Vectis Prime handles I recorded some footage for you, @KevinC . I mostly wanted to show the kill rate that is possible with this weapon, because of its extremely low reload speed it plays more like a battle rifle than a sniper.

Targets were from the first stage of the highest tier bounty so they’re somewhat low level but things really don’t change much in later stages. The only issue are Bombards/Napalms and other heavily armored units if they refuse to face you, since they’re basically turtles with extreme damage reduction everywhere except the face.

The Halloween color palette is available in the market for the low, low price of one credit (yes, credit). It’s great if you like reds, oranges, and greens.

That’s awesome, Bateau, thanks for making the video! Were you using a silence mod on your Vectis, or just relying on Prowl re-stealthing you, since you have to reload after every shot?

And thanks for the heads up, @Fishbreath. I looked for it in the color palette list and didn’t see it, so I totally would have missed it.

Yeah I’m using Hush or whatever the sniper version is. I use this with all alarming weapons on Ivara, it’s totally worth it. She has a passive damage bonus for headshots too which offsets the loss of a damage mod somewhat.

Also, Vectis Prime actually has two bullets in the mag! Fire rate for the gun is 1.5 per second and reload is 0.9 so it all kinda blends together if you delay the second shot a bit.

There’s a pumpkin head available for 1 credit too. I forgot how it’s called, starts with D.

Man I hope they do something about Focus soon, I’m on 4th or 5th day of capping it and it’s already wearing me down. Maybe I’ll shell out some plat and go full meta with sleep Equinox.

I took one look at the new trees and decided I’m basically never going to finish them. I unlocked the first two nodes of Zenurik, and will unlock other stuff as I can, but I’m not going to bother with a system that takes literal years of dedicated daily grinding to see in full.

Yeah, the Focus grind would be insane if the intention is to max them all out, and that seems to be how a lot of the Warframe community is approaching it (judging from /r/Warframe).

I’m choosing to look at it more like prestige/paragon/whatever levels that will always give me some progress bar to increase, no matter how long I play. My impression is that this is the intent of the system, but I could be wrong on that. As it is, I focused on grinding until I had enough for Energy Dash and now I’m good. I’ll just let it come in as it comes in. If they end up bumping up the rate later, then fantastic. If not… well, thus far there’s nothing gated for me, I’m already doing the content. So no worries. Besides, the majority of the items in the trees are far, far, from “must have” type abilities.

I do wish they’d eliminate those damn Convergence orbs, though. I get that they were placed there to deal with AFK focus farmers, but that doesn’t seem necessary as long as there’s a daily standing cap. I don’t like that in order to gain focus at any sort of decent rate, you either need to cheese stealth or play a couple specific maps with specific warframes in order to grind it out. I’m good with it taking ages to complete all the nodes, but I would like to make progress just through normal play.

I think the “fear” is that the game will focus more on the operator and if that happens then the system will become more important.

Personally I think leveling it up is far too bothersome, only “fast” way is through very specific gameplay (killing stuff that’s asleep) or through the use of Frames that can kill boatloads of stuff really quickly (mostly Banshee Prime it seems). Doing it time after time until your brain starts to bleed out of your ears. No thanks. I’ll play normally, get whatever focus I get.

Comprehensive video from Tactical Potato on how to capture (as opposed to merely kill) the Teralysts and maximize the rewards.

Another one from him showing a common method of intensive Focus farming to reach the daily cap using sleep Equinox.

Indeed. Peer-To-Peer matchmaking games really need to do some sort of network/bandwidth analysis before they pick someone on a 28kbps dialup to AOL as a host when there are others on gigabit connections to pick instead…
Had a terrible game earlier where all the enemies would basically warp around… was nearly impossible to hit anything and even had two people disconnect (to be replaced by other unfortunate victims).

The host of course had a smooth run…