Is the normal Vectis not good? Using that mod that gives the first shot +x% damage?
Haven’t really seriously used anything but the Hek and Phox, they’re both short ranged for the Plains…
I use the regular Vectis and it’s solid.
If you want a cheap, easy-to-build Plains weapon with no falloff up to the usual 300 meters, a hybrid Lex Prime works great. Mine is built for corrosive damage, status chance, and criticals, using no extraordinary mods, and it’s sufficient even to kill the occasional Ogma.
Ammo efficiency seems really important in the Plains. Much as I love my Twin Grakatas, I can’t see them being that much use after the first fifteen minutes.
Where and how are you guys capping focus by the way? Yesterday there was a really good sortie mission up - t1 eximus stronghold on void and I got around 160k in one run (with a booster). Today however the best one is t3 mobile defense vs corpus and it nets about 30-40k max in my experience. I just don’t see myself grinding Hydron on sedna every day for this, or setting up Rage Equinox for stealth multiplier cheese.
I use a 250% range, ~170% strength Saryn Prime and farm Helene ( which I find has better results than Hydron, FWIW). Waves are splatted extremely fast and even without boosters, I’m getting 3-4k per orb consistently. I can reliably net 40k+ focus in 10-15 waves, which doesn’t take long at all with her clear speed. Double that if you’re using an Affinity booster.
It helps to have a focus on your weapon in those instances where you’re grouped with another Saryn or Banshee going full farm-mode, as the Affinity gain from teammate kills is more biased towards the weapon than warframe. So for me, it has been Saryn Prime + Ignis with focus, and just splat the whole map.
Zenurik is plenty to keep you supplied with Energy, but if you’re doing a different focus just use a pizza every now and then.
Those are pretty good gains. And if I remember correctly Helene also drops Orokin Cells which I’m really low on since I got into prime crafting. I’ll give it a try since I already have the frame crafted and I kinda wanted to try out Saryn for a while anyway. I could also use the maim Equninox but I don’t find it all that much fun to be honest. Can you post your loadout?
Fwiw, at the moment I’m using Mesa’s peacemaker (greater lens on frame, lesser on secondary) for farming. Works pretty well most of the time.
(I’d totally energy vampire Trinity you guys if I get to leech focus. <.<)
Oh yeah, I’m drowning in Orokin Cells from Helene. I’ll post my loadout when I get home this evening.
@Fishbreath, I’m more than happy to group any time. What’s your name in-game?
You can find me under OneTrueCod. (Somehow Fishbreath was taken.)
I’m enjoying everything about the Plains except for one thing: PUG-ing is very, VERY glitchy. When it goes well, it’s great fun, but I’ve only had 2 missions where nothing technical went wrong, out of maybe half a dozen tries.
I think part of the problem is that if the host player drops out, the marker goes with him - or something like that. But people do drop out of missions now and then, and if the host goes the mission re-starts and the objective marker is lost. With the old instanced missions that didn’t matter too much, and the progress up to that point was kept, but it’s quite an annoyance on the huge map if the marker disappears and the team is left without the objective.
The problem would be solved if they had dedicated servers hosting the instances, instead of them being hosted on one of the player’s comps. But they seem to be using servers only for the multiplayer hubs.
Also, you need a lot of fish oil for the Skywing - you do get a generous number of Skywing charges (50) but you need 150 fish oil (presumably it’s fuel? :) ) to build them. But I’m really feeling the need for Skywing with the open spaces. Unless you have a frame that has fast movement as speciality, bullet jumping around the vast open spaces, while fun, takes too much time and starts to wear on the fingers.
Fortunately fishing is quite good fun :)
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!
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.