Hi folks. I‘ve just returned from a week-long trip to Hong Kong, which was awesome!
A few weeks prior I‘ve made my usual late-summer return to Warframe. I’m still going to finish my new character’s The Secret World playthrough, however the game’s fifth zone, City of the Sun God, has once again proven to be kind of a killjoy. I actually quite like the overarching story there, but everything’s just so bleak and samey, and it’s also one of the more annoying to traverse zones. But, again, I’ll definitely pick it back up and finish it.
Anyway, for now it’s Warframe again.
It had been almost a year since I played this with any seriousness, so of course I’ve missed some new content releases, the biggest of which most likely being the Sanctum Anatomica on Deimos. Not only do the story missions leading up to Warframe 1999 – the highly anticipated expansion due to release towards the end of the year – take place there, there’s also a bunch of new missions and another faction to raise standing with on offer.
I gotta say, the expansion looks extremely juicy so far. Great aesthetics, new enemy types, fricking motorcycles!! I’ll definitely do my best to be well prepared for its release.
Fortunately doing so doesn’t feel like a chore in the slightest, quite the contrary. Much to my delight there’s an obvious parallel to the Angels of the Zariman content to be found here, in that this new tileset also sports hidden collectibles that can be exchanged for said faction standing or used as crafting materials. So, yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of scavenger hunting once more.
Just as great, if not better, is the new, alternative way to farm Archon Shards that the Sanctum provides.
Archon Shards are yet another, and most importantly additional, path to pimp your favourite warframes, so getting some of these is definitely advisable.
However, they initially could only be acquired by doing the weekly “Archon Hunt”, and while these baddies became – like any form of PvE-content in MMOs – a solved problem relatively quickly I struggled quite a lot with them at the time, and random teammates weren’t much of a help either more often than not. Since the shards are, at the end of the day, more nice to have than must have I gave up on them for the time being.
Well, now you can also do a mission type called Netracells in the Sanctum, up to five times per week even, that has a chance to reward an archon shard at the end.
We can also unlock a new upgrade to the Helminth now, which allows three archon shards of lesser quality to be combined into one of the upper tier. Alternatively two shards of different colors can be fused into a completely new type (red and blue results in purple, for example) which provide a different array of bonuses. Great stuff.
I’ve also been busy getting my hands on a few new weapons. The catalyst for that was the Kuva Lich with whom I still had unfinished business with, and who somehow seemed to have gotten a whole lot tankier during my absence. Turns out DE gave them damage attenuation at some point, a system that’s meant to, well, make boss type enemies harder to kill.
So I did some research on which weapons are considered strong nowadays, and my findings always boiled down to two options: Incarnon weapons and (some) Tenet weapons.
The latter are acquired by vanquishing Sisters of Parvos, the Corpus variant of Kuva Liches. Since I’d just gotten rid of my last Lich (albeit with some difficulty) I decided to go for the Tenet Tetra and the Tenet Arca Plasmor next.
I’d built the original Arca Plasmor as soon as I’d reached the required mastery rank back in the day, and used it for quite a while to good effect. I never liked the Tetra, but hoped the Tenet variant would feel better to me. It doesn’t, unfortunately, so I’m not using that one. The Tenet AP is pretty good, but not exactly a game-changer either.
Incarnon weapons were, funnily enough, part of the Angels of the Zariman update. I completely ignored them at the time, but due to my extensive Voidplume-hunting last year I now had all the standing and most of the required materials already sorted. And boy, these things really are something else!
What’s special about them is that they can be morphed into a higher form while playing, and that they have a little passive tree, as seen above, which lets you choose from a range of additional bonuses.
There are five OG Incarnons that aren’t based on any existing weapon, two of which, the Phenmor rifle and the Laetum pistol, are said to rank among the strongest weapons in the game right now, an assessment I can now wholeheartedly confirm. Once morphed they absolutely shred!
The drawback is that they’re only ok in their basic form, and to morph them you need to land a certain number of headshots first. Which wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t so many enemy types that have no fricking heads! I mean, of course they all have a “head” hitbox somewhere (at least I assume they do), but in quite a few cases it’s pretty hard to guess where that might be. Hell, some Murmur enemies are just crawling arms and such.
But, again, these weapons kick so much ass once morphed that it’s worth the hassle. I killed my latest Sister of Parvos with the Phenmor, and she literally melted in seconds.
By now it’s also possible to upgrade a selection of older weapons into Incarnons. Some of those look very desirable, unfortunately the materials needed for the upgrade process are earned by playing Duviri, Warframe’s take on roguelite content, which I’m not a big fan of.
I initially didn’t like the Zariman stuff either though, so maybe I’ll just give it another shot…
Mailvaltar 