Warframe

[Sykar]

Well, you're kind of all wrong. Borderlands has a lot of completely random drops, but uniques come in mission rewards as a definite reward and certain mobs or bosses have defined drop pools, and the way uniques and legendaries work is by including a unique part that defines what set of parts can go with them while the "random" weapons do actually act the same way, but without the unique/legendary modifiers like specific spread patterns and such.

WF would be similar when you're grinding for warframe and weapon parts, except getting one single lucky drop isn't enough and isn't followed by a crafting and resource cost. That sounds bad but in the other hand shared and defined resource pools make the items who are crafted off those resources a lot more permissive than most grinding sims. That's why the open world areas' own sets of resources are such a massive grind, you've not been passively collecting materials for the hours of your life this stole from you.

Each Warframe alone needs 4 different blueprints most of which are random drop and quite often rare materials like Oxium which new players do not have in the quantities these Warframes require. Then there is the 72 hour build time which you can speed up via platinum only. Dual Weapons and unique Warframes like Equinox need even more. Often you will need 20-40 runs for the rare blueprints which can take quite a while so the total amount of runs can get up to 120 easily just to get a full set of bps.
Regardless how you want to spin it with meaningless details, both are grind heavy to get the best gear and both are highly reliant in RNG luck. Sometimes you get shit on your first run, sometimes you run something 50, 60 or a 100 times and still got zilch. Also many uniques in Borderlands were not quest rewards but drops which also had several variants. I could also say that the Relay quests which each planet has at least one off guarantees blueprints of all kind so there is an equivalent to certain unique/rare quest rewards in Borderlands.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The only frame that requires a noteworthy amount of Oxium is Vauban Prime.

 

[Sykar]

Are we seriously getting hung up on minor details about a singular example I mention and gloss over that both games are hugely dependent on RNG to get the good stuff both needing dozens if not over a hundred runs on a single boss time and again?

 

[Lhynn]

Fucking vauban prime.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well it's more like that Vauban Prime is a MASSIVE exception when it comes to Oxium costs.

 

[Wild Slop]

Funny thing about Spaceport farming, when Sloppy's got the Army of the Dead running about I just get this paranoid cold sweat seeing all those nullifier bubbles even if many/most of them don't affect me.

I hate how the dead's nullifier bubbles look and junk up the screen. I try to avoid calling them in but the health drain demands I call them to stay alive and when I do I just have to hope to are a few with bubbles.

 

[Bliblablubb]

The only frame that requires a noteworthy amount of Oxium is Vauban Prime.

Goods news is: nobody likes him. Oxium saved.

I found the cryo stuff far more annoying to farm tho.

My biggest bump however was, ironically, polymer bundles. IIRC CatPrime needed it. Usually it's one of those common resources coming out of your ears, alas... I went a little overboard building pies for Mesa. The old glutton.
Feeling the need to farm that was a little embarassing...

 

[Wild Slop]

I liked him, last I played I found they changed his trap powers at some point. No more trip wire !?!?!?!?

I need to remember to check up on this.

 

[Lhynn]

Vauban needs a rework.

Anyone tried the new fortuna weapons?

 

[Tweed]

Wow, what is this bullshit? Vauban in my go-to for area denial when I have to deal with nullifiers. He's also the ideal choice for stopping repair drones during Ambulas sorties.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The Kitguns are okay. Or well, the Mooncatcher is pretty good after you get it going.

 

[Tweed]

Mooncatcher is a weapon of mass destruction, especially with Pax Seeker. I freaking love that gun and in some ways it's even more powerful than the Mara Detron. I just need to get a riven for it.

 

[Tweed]

Well I have to say that I'm not at all impressed by this new "event" they sprang on people in lieu of actual content. A half hour survival for crap I already have. I think that's the big problem right there, there's just nothing left to do in this game and DE seems to be catering more to incoming players than dusty old veterans.

 

[Blaine]

There was nothing left to do in Warframe when Lazing Dirk and I quit two years ago.

Listen, just be thankful you're playing this game and not Anthem.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I'd say catering to incoming players is always preferable to indulging the whims of dusty old players. In fact, I'd say it's one of the things Warframe deserves the most respect for, it's not the kind of shit where you were either there years ago or you should not be starting now. The grind endpoints are reasonable and expansion has mostly been horizontal rather than vertical. I'm okay with this, since I'm in it for the core gameplay loop and fashionframe.


If you want to be not impressed or otherwise upset about something regarding Warframe right now, it's a good time to feel a lot of cold sweat about Melee 3.0 because we know fuck all except that DE usually doesn't entirely understand how their game works.

 

[Blaine]

A little bird told me that Vacuum will finally be removed with Melee 3.0. You'll have to perform a combo on each and every drop in order to pick it up.

 

[Tweed]

I'd say catering to incoming players is always preferable to indulging the whims of dusty old players. In fact, I'd say it's one of the things Warframe deserves the most respect for, it's not the kind of shit where you were either there years ago or you should not be starting now. The grind endpoints are reasonable and expansion has mostly been horizontal rather than vertical. I'm okay with this, since I'm in it for the core gameplay loop and fashionframe.


If you want to be not impressed or otherwise upset about something regarding Warframe right now, it's a good time to feel a lot of cold sweat about Melee 3.0 because we know fuck all except that DE usually doesn't entirely understand how their game works.

Really? What about all those old events I'll never get to participate in?

There's a lot of player turnover because newcomers are overwhelmed by the amount of information they need to digest, if I hadn't come into the game with my brother who was already half way along I probably would have dropped the game. Meanwhile catering to new players has come at the cost of what little cohesion Warframe had. I think the game is losing its identity and now DE is just adding lots of "stuff" to the game. The newest story arcs have Tenno fighting for justice rather than maintaining the balance of power, are they mercs or are they Saturday morning cartoon superheroes? I've also found the Fortuna storyline to be rather crappy, especially since DE's Mary and Gary Stu/Sues seem to be doing all of the exciting work while we stand out in a snowy field getting knocked over every ten seconds to listen to a spider with a really irritating whisper recite bad poetry. I'd take an Eidolon any day of the week to that shitty bossfight.

The core gameplay mechanic isn't the issue here, if it was, I would have never made it past MR2 and fashionframe can only take you so far. Furthermore, using the "Radio Shack" approach to business is not advisable, if you alienate all your old customers in the hopes that new ones will take their place you're eventually going to run out of customers.

A little bird told me that Vacuum will finally be removed with Melee 3.0. You'll have to perform a combo on each and every drop in order to pick it up.

Don't you ever...don't ever say anything like that again!

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The balance thing was just a bunch of stupid bullshit, I'm glad it's finally dropped out.

But yea. Old events, that's kind of a thing there, they've basically dropped all old event exclusivity. Nowadays you can get Braton Vandals and all that jazz. The only thing you can't get is the Founder stuff. I think that's a major advantage over vast majority of MMOs and other games that follow this sort of model, since they haven't walled off shit at all.

I do agree tho, Warframe without knowing what to do is daunting, but the key difference superiority to other games of this sort is that it's something that is nowhere to impossible and it isn't broken into massive steps (with the debatable exception of Focus) but many tiny steps of constant progression. A personal case example would be STO (NWO even moreso), which features immense costs to overcome, massive timegates, and which has sealed off CRITICAL benefits to long-past events. The best example of this superiority in action is that Warframe's clan system is doable by a single person (outliers like Hema aside, and even that's just a matter of longer scale), rather than being limited solely to large groups.

 

[Blaine]

I had fucking EVERYTHING you could ever want in Warframe when I quit, barring Founder exclusives: Every frame, full stacks of the good arcanes, gold and white Yu-Gi-Oh! cards pumped up to max rank (with spares below max rank when needed to fit a build, natch), tons of vanity items, even several very nice riven mods, which were new at the time.

Riven mods, by the way, were and likely still are a great example of DE's lies. Rivens were supposedly added to make shitty old weapons viable again, but what they really ended up doing was making already-powerful weapons even more powerful while adding another asymmetrical grind to the game. Disused weapons continued to be ignored. What big-ticket items like near-perfect rivens are designed to do is to get plat moving around in the economy—from the dragon hoards of bittervets who can afford them to the lucky schmucks who roll good rivens. The schmucks then spend that plat ASAP on essentials like slots, destroying the plat and removing it from the overall economy. DE can't count plat as a profit until it is destroyed, and most everything they do serves that end one way or another.

Meanwhile, it just added yet more power creep, as is also the case with most everything DE does. Boi, I tell you what though, my Quanta Vandal with the stupidly OP riven I rolled up myself was a joy to use, even after the first round of nerfs. That thing was an absolute rape beam.

The last coveted thing I obtained in Warfarm was the Dex Sybaris. I'd wanted that shit the entire time I'd been playing. Event items got a lot easier to obtain during the last six months or so I was playing, which is a very good thing and I'm glad they haven't changed that. You newfags should count yourselves lucky.

 

[Tweed]

The balance thing was just a bunch of stupid bullshit, I'm glad it's finally dropped out.

But yea. Old events, that's kind of a thing there, they've basically dropped all old event exclusivity. Nowadays you can get Braton Vandals and all that jazz. The only thing you can't get is the Founder stuff. I think that's a major advantage over vast majority of MMOs and other games that follow this sort of model, since they haven't walled off shit at all.

I'm not saying the balance thing was good, I'm saying it was part of an identity that's fading away into nothing. DE had already thrown the space ninja thing in the trash long before I got here and the only side anyone picked was whoever was handing out catalysts that day, but now there doesn't seem to be anything to replace it with other than generic superhero crap. The Fortuna plotline so far seems to be more about showing off the NPCs while we do all the same old boring bitchwork and fight for justice. I feel like they're having more fun than we are at this point.

Doing the events at this point is less about getting crap we already have and more about taking part of the story that they used to tell through said events. It's not AAA writing, but I would like to play along. I think the open world meme lets them be a lot lazier about rolling out content and frankly Orb Vallis isn't all that impressive, it's pretty, but it's static.

The last coveted thing I obtained in Warfarm was the Dex Sybaris. I'd wanted that shit the entire time I'd been playing. Event items got a lot easier to obtain during the last six months or so I was playing, which is a very good thing and I'm glad they haven't changed that. You newfags should count yourselves lucky.

Have that, never use it, just no point. The whole system is really still a grindy mess, just a different flavor. I don't know how many ESOs I had to do before I finally got my last Braton Vandal part and it's not like I'll ever use that gun for anything either, just mastery fodder and something to add to the collection. Hell, at this point DE really should give us weapon displays.

And rivens really are a disaster, but they keep us coming back for more in the hopes we can get the magical roll that makes our gun of motherfucking death even deadlier. The Catchmoon kitgun had replaced almost every other weapon in my arsenal and when I finally got a riven for it that boosted range and damage it really DID replace every other weapon in my arsenal, there's just no point in using any other weapon except to screw around.

EDIT: Oh and DE's solution to rivens that make powerful guns too powerful is to make the affinity on them so bad that you can never get enough stats to matter, Tigris and Atterax rivens are completely worthless.

 

[Blaine]

Can't complain too much, though. After all, Rivens did bring us this incredible spectacle:

 

[rusty_shackleford]

There's no reason to use any weapon other than the ignis wraith, prove me wrong. The only exception is if you're nuking then switch to a supra vandal with an Entropy Burst.

Never understood why it wasn't more popular, does insane damage when built properly.
How many other weapons even let you gas enemies to death?

 

[Blaine]

After the buff and model update, the Ingis was one of the very best weapons in the game.

Even the non-Vandal Supra was technically top-tier, but it kicks like a mule and is p. inaccurate. I always loved it, but there were plenty of other bullet hoses that handled slightly better and/or slightly outperformed it.

 

[Tweed]

Ignis Wraith is a great weapon, but it's just not one I use unless I'm playing Saryn. As for the Supra Vandal I fucking love that gun, I used to use it all the damn time, but now I mostly take it for energy reduction. Plus Vandal weapons are all awesome even if they suck because they have great metallic skins that look good in gold.

People scream about the meta, but when you play a game that's nothing but grind you tend to start using the most efficient methods to finish a mission as fast as you possibly can. It's no joke that I find the Catchmoon as the most powerful gun in the game right now except for certain sortie conditions or bosses, I used to use the Mara Detron and I haven't touched that gun since I got the Catchmoon.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Even the non-Vandal Supra was technically top-tier, but it kicks like a mule and is p. inaccurate. I always loved it, but there were plenty of other bullet hoses that handled slightly better and/or slightly outperformed it.

Supra Vandal's mod gives back energy though, which is nice if you don't have a pocket trinity on a nuke frame. Especially one with high base energy e.g., Volt Prime.