[Skill Up] If you aren't paying attention to Warframe... - General

"but the "prime" version of the warframe i started with seems to have double the energy, 17 times the armor" Can I ask what prime you're talking about, because as far as I know that's just not true at all.

to be fair, most primes do give a pretty hefty armor boost. just look at Ash Prime for example, who was given out for free recently 65 armor for base ash vs 150 for ash prime when modded, that's 30% damage resist vs 50% damage resist "17 times the armor" is definitely an exaggeration, but when you take mods into account the tiny number increases do make a difference

Here's a few comments on the whole "vaulting" thing: 1) At first they were actually just cosmetics, now they have usually minor stat advantages (it is definitely never even remotely close to 17x), but the base frames are still totally fine. There are rare cases where a prime's stat jump is pretty significant, usually just due to power creep and an old base frame, but modding (the main way you increase the strength of your frame) is an enormously larger effect than base->prime. It's not the case for all primes but for example, one frame that's in high demand due to a rework but has been long vaulted, Ember: -Same health -25% higher shield -25% higher armor -Same energy -Same move speed In addition, primes never have any difference in the strengths of their abilities. The only sort-of exception to this is when a frame's ability does damage based on their armour, which is relatively uncommon and usually fairly insignificant. 2) The reason they vault things is to avoid crowding the drop table. This isn't the best excuse, as there's tonnes of missions they could allocate the relics too, but even some of the players get angry when that's brought up as they want the choice of what mission they use to farm the items that contain primes. I personally would prefer if they split up the drop tables, but I'm not even sure I'm in the majority on that one. 3) They actually do bring vaulted things back. The one I mentioned earlier, ember, has been on several occasions. They're doing an unvaulting soon of nyx and rhino (nyx being a lot less popular, but rhino being hugely popular). They're not gone forever, they're just extremely infrequent. 4) There's 4 founders items that were given as a reward for funding the game when it first released, they are: Excalibur prime, Lato Prime (a shitty pistol) and Skana prime (a shitty sword). Power creep has made everything but Excalibur Prime relatively undesirable for any reason other than collection, and with the release of the latest expansion (the sacrifice) there's an upgrade to Excalibur that everyone can get through playing the main story that has identical stats to the Prime with some spoiler related advantages. 5) When an item is vaulted, the relics that drop the frame don't go away. I've farmed a few primes that have been vaulted post-vaulting for friends that play less than I do just because I have a massive stash of the relics lying around in my inventory. Relics are a reward from virtually every mission you do, not just some frustrating high difficulty mission, so you'll inevitably build up quite a stock of them unless you really aggressively try and empty your stash as fast as you get it. 6) Prime warframes are of course just a straight upgrade to their base component and you're always using a warframe, but it's worth noting a lot of the best weapons don't even have primes or need to be farmed from relics, they're just obtained from the market or your clan dojo as a regular blueprint for in-game (non-cash-shop) currency. As a final note, I'd like to point out what the vaulting period of the frames is. We're not talking about a weekend event on that one day in July where you're on vacation and then get screwed out of something, we're talking about years. Nyx Prime was released on 2018/09/23 and vaulted on 2016/08/23. Similar dates for the last frame to be vaulted (Nekros) - they were released on 2016/08/23 and vaulted 2018/06/19.

You mixed up your dates for Nyx there, just pointing that out quick

Thanks, fixed it. One other thing to note about the whole "primes vs base warframes" debate is that not every warframe has a prime, they release primes roughly in the order the warframes get released but there's quite a huge time before a frame has a prime.The most popular "meta" strategy for efficient hunting of the end-game enemies that drop a hugely useful/valuable items currently contains 2 frames that have no prime (Chroma and Harrow). If base frames were just so much worse than primes this would certainly not be the case, but it's obviously fairly irrelevant there. In addition, what many (but of course people could argue endlessly about this) would consider the best general purpose tank in the game (Inaros) has no prime

The one i was thinking of was the volt prime, and i mis-remembered the values I thought i had read 15 armor vs 300 armor, but it was actually only 15 vs 100, which to be fair is still almost 7x. The reason i thought it was 300 was because i had read that energy was 300, base 150 energy vs 300 which is a doubling. I don't understand the armor mechanics in warframe or what armor actually translates to, so when seeing 15 vs 100 i just remembered it as "some rediculous advantage i won't have access to even if i grind" Anyways, thanks for the informative reply. I may look into the game more, might not just be a game suited to me to begin with though.

I definitely don't think Warframe is for everyone, I honestly don't know if I could say any game was. I agree with a lot of the things Skyward was saying - an unfortunate side effect of producing so much content is that a lot of things that are really neat end up not being developed as much as they should (the most commonly beefed with example probably being the space fighting gamemode Archwing, which is still relatively boring and bland compared to the really well tuned ground-based gameplay). Fair play on the volt prime thing - 15 vs 100 armour is almost 7x, and does equate to about 5x increase in damage reduction, but with most frames 100-and-under it's not even worth modding for armour, your goal is to keep moving and evade. As one final note - just because it's only tradeable with other players doesn't mean it's technically out of bounds for you without paying money. You can earn cash shop currency by playing, and use that to buy from the players. I haven't bought plat in a long time, I mostly get it from other players by trading things I get by playing. I know that still means someone is paying money somewhere, but it doesn't necessarily have to be you.

I've never played Warframe but the world and gameplay look like something I'd love But there's just no room in my life for an F2P grind. If the gameplay was designed around a single purchase with possible expansion packs I'd definitely be in.

So the glaring issues this game has is the constant grind, the various mechanics which have to be learned, and how hard it is for anyone new to get into the game. However, anyone who can overcome or overlook those hurdles will find that Warframe is entirely unique in how it plays and how much freedom players have to build and play the way they want. The experience is way better if you’re the type of player who like to constantly test and experiment with different play styles and equipment. There are so many different characters, abilities and weapons at your disposal that figuring out what works (or how silly you can make it) can be rewarding.

For rhino and calibro and ember, sure. For everyone after not so much, and I'm p sure rhino actually got a retroactive armor upgrade. With Stand United and Arcane Guardian, Scratchypants has a ceiling of 3300 armor and 1300 health for about 20K EHP with Warcry active With the same set up Scratchypants Prime with Warcry has a ceiling of almost 4600 armor and 1500 health, which comes to almost 25K EHP, that's a pretty damn big difference, and she also has 150% more energy.

Funny coincidence, I stopped playing both games even though I really liked them.

I booted up this game a few months ago and had no idea wtf was going on so dropped it immediately.

Eh, I played the game too off and on with a group of friends. Recently watched the MandaloreGaming video on it and was reminded of it.

Not to sound rude but that just sounds lazy.

I mean it's definitely a little overwhelming. And if you're jumping into Warframe also expecting some sort of story or plot, you're just met with a bunch of weird looking aliens and completely silent cyber ninjas. I can kind of understand.

The Vor's Prize quest actually does a great work of setting you up with some starting lore and plot, though it's mostly done through in-orbiter dialogue and exposition. I'd love if they actually had you do more than just activate components though, maybe force you to go through the market and buy a 1 credit blueprint to progress the quest, or perhaps look at the codex for a "clue" to the next mission. As it is, the quest runs you through a series of representative missions and then just leaves you to continue exploring a bit too quickly. And I must say that the silent cyber ninja thing makes the change after the Second Dream quest way more powerful. I'm personally a big fan of the lore faucet that is the Operator, the off-hand statements about the factions is a really interesting way to reveal such things.

i mean a game like subnautica uses the same rule set and its regarded as a massive success. game throws you into it head first and you're expected to figure everything out yourself.

Which is like any MMO, get better mods, farm for crafting materials, build better weapons, and head to higher level areas. The more complicated stuff is late game and the only questionable stuff is loot table zones which most people will help you if you ask in chat or join a clan. I really don't see how its complicated since it was pretty straight forward. Like if you think its bad now, before the quest lines/relays, you had absolutely no guidance/story/progression to follow.

But the game actually has that now? A few years ago this would be more valid but the game has an actual hand-holding tutorial on how to play at the beginning now that follows up into two more quests showing you how to play most of the basic mission types. Warframe definitely has a lot of complexity but very little of it is in the basic gameplay. There's objective markers, a map, and space mom tells you exactly what you need to do even if you've been playing for 3000 hours. I can understand if a person is overwhelmed trying to figure out what an Eidolon is or how to do some of the parts of the quest or why their build is bad and they're dying constantly to harder enemies, but if you can't figure out the basic game something is definitely wrong

I honestly don't mind the grind in Warframe but there are many area where DE doesn't deserve the praise they got tbh. Especially when they're banning players for receiving illegal plats even if they didn't know about it, and all the half-assed decisions/updates they keep putting out.

Warframe is very newbie unfriendly and it's even unfriendly to those who've taken a break for whatever reason. I got back into it awhile back after a year long break and pretty much felt overwhelmed on what I should do because so many new things had been added. My friend jumped in to play after an even longer amount of time and had zero idea of what to do. So I had to give him a rough idea of what he should do. Barring that, the grinding is what kills me. It's absolutely frustrating to have to do x, y, z in order to unlock the relays to progress. The earlier relays weren't bad. "Kill the big boss, craft x mastery level weapon, unlock x area on the planet". No big deal. I finally up when I hit Pluto. "Go to Lua and do this special puzzle room that may or may not spawn so you can get the mod that's the reward". Between trying to get the puzzle room to spawn and one that I could solo, I ended up grinding a particular map close to 30 times because I needed three of the mod that dropped to complete the unlock. Next "unlock"? Reach wave 10 on the survival map. At that point, I just threw my hat into the ring and uninstalled the game. Because there was no way I'd be able to do that by myself. I really want to like the game. I love the fast paced gameplay, the story is awesome, but the never ending grind is what kills me. It reaches a point where it's just not fun.

I'm a relatively new player, and what I do like about the game is the sense of exploration and discovery. There's so much weird shit and odd mechanics in the game that it's kind of awe-inspiring to learn about. When you jump in with some high-level people and they're doing things that you've never seen before, it makes you want to delve deeper into the game and learn more about it. I haven't had a game that feels like this deep online world since World of Warcraft (probably my fault for not checking out any other F2P online games).

I really don't understand the appeal of the grind in Warframe. It just kills whatever enthusiasm I have for any part of the game when unlocking anything just takes so fucking long. Last time I tried getting back into it, I decided I was sick of only playing Rhino Prime all the time, so I tried unlocking Nidus. Did the quest, yay, you got the main blueprint, congratulations. But that's not enough to build him, now you have to do this one specific mission that takes 15-20 minutes each time over and over again until each part drops. The good news, each part has a 15% drop rate, the bad news, there's no way to earn them otherwise and items don't get removed from the drop tables once you've got them. After many hours over many days of doing this one fucking mission over and over again, I ended up with about 4 copies each of two of the parts and none of the third. I just wanted to play a new frame and explore new options and maybe have fun, but no, DE didn't design a game that allows you to do that, they designed a game that puts you at the mercy of the random number god with no way to mitigate it. All it fucking needs is something like a system where you can turn 3 blueprints of one type into another type, or a currency you build up over runs so you can eventually buy the pieces that don't drop, but no, DE prefers saying Fuck You to the player. Needless to say, I quit again pretty soon.

While I enjoy Warframe and putting 1425 hours into it, I understand that it has its flaws that deter people away like the grind and time investment that I see mentioned a lot online and in this thread as well as some of my friends have said. While MMO's that tend to be grindy and time invested like Warframe, they at least have different aspects people can focus on instead of constantly grinding for the best gear like you do in them as well as Warframe. For example, with World of Warcraft there's Role Playing, Pet Battling, Transmog contests, Player versus Player and Raiding as big aspects while being different. Warframe's generally just about the grind to get the best weapons/warframes/mods and increasing your Mastery Rank to achieve those items. That's not to say there aren't subjects that I enjoy about Warframe. As mentioned the combat is fun and surprisingly good for a F2P game. I've enjoyed so far learning about the lore of the game and how the art is different to most scifi games. The soundtrack for Warframe recently has been top tier and the major updates they do keep surprising me in what they release. Overall the prodcution value and content for it is pretty well done for most F2P games that don't put much effort in.

I don't actually know why I have 323 hours in this and keep playing it every few weeks its k