Warframe: silly named F2P coop TPS

The main issue with the game is the lack of proper matchmaking. Unless you play with friends (or with a clan), it’s no fun at all.

I haven’t found that to be the case, in both Star Map or Void I’ve found 90% of PUGs to be friendly and competent. There are the occasional asshats, but it comes with the territory, most players are fine.

Key is always to start up conversation in Squad chat - e.g. in a Void mission, get a sense of what the key holder wants, etc., get people talking a bit. Then everyone feels like everyone else is a human being, plus you get a sense early on of who’s an asshat, or who’s 11 years old and an idiot (or who’s 11 years old and a smart player, for that matter), so you can compensate for it.

There’s a bit of an art to nursing a PUG along - I learnt it long ago leading PUGs in CoH. Always take the initiative, get people chatting and expressing themselves, getting things off their chests, etc. It’s a bit more tricky with a non-tab-targeting combat system, you can’t exactly be voluble; but some chat is still possible, and you’d be surprised at how often people open up and play more cohesively once a bit of friendly context is established.

I’m not playing void missions though, I’m like mid-game and there’s nobody else on those planets I need to finish. If they had proper matchmaking there would be an “Match me on a planet I haven’t done with someone else also wanting to be matched on a planet they haven’t done.”

Instead I’m trying to host on a planet and just waiting forever with nobody showing up like an idiot.

And, as someone else said, early game everybody else just run like rabbits rushing through the map, which seriously hampers the fun.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a pain, both the beginning when there are teams, but there’s rushing, and in the middle when teams are sparse. Alerts always have teams though, and the endgame is worth persevering for, very busy, PUGs galore. Give me a shout in-game (Omnimorph) and if you want to run through a few things we can team up. I still have some maps on the middle planets I need to clear up.

On PC I’m actually playing with friends (and still early game as we’re only managing to get together once in a blue moon), which means I’m playing solo on Xbox. Or played to be more correct, since I haven’t played in awhile.

Not sure if you guys have a guild and dojo, but my friends and I made a dojo and put a bunch of money into it when they were still playing. Would hate to waste the facilities (esp since some was real money ;) )

If anyone wants to use it just let me know, I can invite and promote privs to use and upgrade. (on PC fwiw)

New patch now… and they broke my GMAG.
Was thinking about buying the new prime, but figured with the GMAG change I should instead ‘farm it’.

Wonder how patches like that affect their income and if they gather some statistical data on it. I.e. one ‘good patch’ and people spend money, ‘bad patch’ and people do not spend money as much…

No doubt they can pull up a historical revenue graph and compare it to patch release dates.

I doubt GMAG nerf will cause a noticeable dip though. It’s not a catastrophic change in the context of the game as a whole, and the dedicated farmers will adapt.

I have had this game sitting on my desktop for awhile now. Played the intro 5 months ago, got to my ship and said to myself… “wait, what just happened?” I stopped there but never removed from my computer. Just finished Witcher 3 so thought I would give this a serious try.

Now I am a bit addicted. I love the gameplay. I love the frenetic pace; the feeling that I am always a few bad moves from being in serious trouble, more often than not racing towards the extraction with alarms sounding all around.

I seem to not really be very good. I am tooling around Mercury right now with a few Mars and Venus missions thrown in and the suggested level range is not matching up. This is for two reasons: 1) I am old and slow. 2) I am noticing that there seems to be an undocumented Mod grind at the beginning. I just do not have enough damage mods so I will be working on finding those and fusion cores.

I Picked Excalibur as my Frame at the beginning and have crafted the sword Cronus and bought the Branton. I think my frame is level 15 and the new weapons are around level 8 now. My starting pistol is such garbage that I will need to upgrade that very soon. So I am still quite the beginner but am really enjoying myself.

'tis one of the best games around at the moment, and one of the best implementations of f2p.

The main thing to understand is that mods are where it’s at - and fusing (upgrading) mods. After a while you’ll get the hang of the “drain” system (mod costs). Roughly, what you want to aim for in the interim is:-

  1. for the Warframe: Streamline, Flow, Intensify, Continuity and Stretch for the abilities (energy efficiency, big energy pool, power strength, duration, range). You’ll see the effect of those mods on the percentages at the left pane in the Arsenal -> Upgrades page for your Warframe. For tank, you want Redirection (bigger shields) and Vitality (bigger health pool). If your frame also has high armor already, you also want Steel Fiber (e.g. Valkyr has almost no shields, big health pool and high armor, so for her you’d want to min-max Vitality and Steel Fiber). Another important “tanking” mod is Quick Thinking, which uses your energy pool as temp hp, but that’s a rarer mod that comes later and is more useful in higher level content where you can be one-shotted by mobs.

Later on, you also start getting into the “corrupted” mods for the Warframes, which give a big boost to one thing with a fairly heavy cost to another. e.g. Fleeting Expertise bumps Efficiency much better than Streamline, at a severe cost to Duration - note that the efficiency cap is +75%, or 175%, so you only need 4/5 FE and 4/5 Streamline to hit that, or 3/5 FE and 5/5 Streamline for +70% with least Duration hit. Other mods like this are Overextended (+Range -Power), Narrow Minded (+Duration -Range), Transient Fortitude (+Power -Duration) and Blind Rage (+Power -Efficiency).

  1. for Primary weapons, first priorities are Serration and Split Chamber. Then, if your weapon has 15% or more crit rating, you want Point Strike and Vital Sense (crit rating and multiplier). Then you want to fill out the “elemental” damage mods to taste, and there are mixed elemental/status mods to use if your weapon also has decent status (20% or above). The Shotgun has its own set of equivalents (in place of Serration, Point Blank, instead of Split Chamber, Hell’s Chamber, and so on).

  2. for Secondary weapons, you want Hornet Strike and the equivalent “multishot” mod to Split Chamber (forget its name). Thereafter, again, same min-maxing principle as with primary weapon: bump what the thing is already good at.

  3. for melee, Pressure Point is the damage mod, and Fury is probably the closest equivalent to the “multishot” mods (it ups attack rate). Thereafter, again, same min-maxing principle.

Potato all the things you’re using at first (i.e. you need an Orokin reactor, gold potato, in the frame, and an Orokin catalyst, silver potato, in the weapons), that will double the mod capacity. But then once you’re in the saddle with your first few frames and a few weapons, you’ll become more discriminating, and only potato things you love using/are actually powerful, and start to “forma” them (further increase mod capacity, resetting the weapon to 0, and building it up again with that higher mod capacity).

In parallel with this, play the market. Once you start getting Void Tower keys, start playing those missions solo a bit, and join in with T1D (Tower 1 Defence) missions when they come up in recruitment. They’re not too hard, readily available, usually allow all comers (when tagged with “xp run”) and can give a big boost to whatever frame/weapon you’re levelling up. The more Void missions you do, the more Prime parts and better mods you start to accumulate, the more you can be self-sustaining by selling those bits and pieces enough to keep you in slots for new weapons and frames, and to pay for potatoes if you can’t make them at the time (plus also of course accumulating and building Prime frames and weapons for yourself). Also you’ll be able to afford to buy the occasional rarer mod if you can’t be bothered farming for it (e.g. Fleeting Expertise is usually one of the first corrupted mods to get, and it’s usually readily available on the player market for 10-20pl).

The game is great fun solo, but it’s even more fun in teams. At the moment “coptering” is a thing to give little speed boosts to keep up with the team (crouch-jump-quick melee) but that’s soon going to go.

Good luck, Tenno!

Just a heads-up to old players who might be thinking of returning: Update 17 is coming in the next few days. It’s going to be a major update with a total revamp of the Parkour system, as well as some other goodies like underwater tilesets for Archwing, a shotgun buff, and a few other bits and pieces. But the main thing is the movement system. It’s going to be so different that DE have introduced a UI greeting and tutorial for it.

I watched some clips of the new movement/parkour system from the last devstream, I thought it looked really good. I’ll probably jump in when U17 releases (along with the first 4-5 hotfixes that are sure to follow that day :)).

U17 is now out! It’s a hefty 1.5G download.

List of all the things here.

I just downloaded this and played for the first time last night. Feels fun so far with a complete Destiny vibe to it. If I start reading this thread at the beginning, is any new player info still relatively pertinent? I picked ‘Volt’ as my frame.

The game has changed quite a lot over the last few years (it really is effectively still in a kind of open beta state, with core systems occasionally being revamped, and major nerfs and buffs ongoing), so only the latter third of the pages here will probably be relevant (anything in 2015). And if you’re interested in builds and stuff, and google for WF related stuff, or on youtube, google with “2015”, anything before that will be so out of date it will be pretty much irrelevant.

Got it, thanks! I’ll probably just play through and see how it goes, then if I run into a wall I can check online for hints.

Hey! Don’t you mean Destiny has a Warframe vibe? :)

I wouldn’t bother reading the earlier info. If you’re on PC and just played it last night for the first, be aware there are big changes today!

Ahh, I’m actually on PS4 - from what I just googled, looks like I don’t have to worry about update 17 anytime soon after all.

I downloaded this for my Xbone a couple weeks ago, but I have yet to try it. Then today, I noticed in the ‘deals’ section of the Xbone dashboard you can buy various in-game currency packs. Some cost north of $100. Yeah, I’m skeptical of getting into any game where it’s even possible to spend that kind of cash. Sounds like it fixes some of the problems with Destiny, but replaces them with the potential for ongoing money sinks?

Why? Path of Exile has $1000 packages but there’s almost nothing you can buy on that game outside of cosmetics.

Warframe has a pretty decent F2P model, IMO. They are some small items you may want to buy here and there, but only if you’re playing the game heavily, and those things are accessible through in-game means. There are larger ticket items you can buy (like a new warframe or gun), but as the game revolves around working towards and building these items, you’re really just short circuiting the game experience, which doesn’t appeal to me.

I guess all I’m trying to say is that this isn’t a predatory F2P game. When I tried out the game I really enjoyed it and was playing it a ton, so I “bought” it at the $40 price point. That money lasted me for a long, long time of heavy play.