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Jebus anvil, I'll love having you on the team I'm using loki but will be using ash in 3:11:23:15 days time what you using?

I think I might end up getting the reset when it comes. Sure, I'll end up losing a lot of good mods (A LOT), but I wouldn't mind getting my platinum back, since I don't really use what I spent it on anyway.

It's just a shame that it resets your entire account, and not just platinum purchases. That said, it will be nice to start over with completely different frames. I almost never use Frost now, Volt is just an AoE on a stick (which Saryn is better at, and she looks more interesting anyway, so I'd like to try her... Nyx too), and although it'll suck losing Rhino after doing all that farming for him, there really isn't much to him other than pressing 2 and then killing everything.

It'd be nice to switch my weapon loadout around as well. I've basically spent the better part of the game running around with a loaded out Bronco (ALL FEAR THE HANDCANNON) and Latron. And as much as I enjoy those weapons, almost every challenge I've ever ran into has been solved with the Bronco. It'd be nice to try out something like the Akbolto or Lex. And maybe the Gorgon. That looks fun.

might I recommend you take a look at the up-coming Vauban for an alternative playstyle https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/45023-update-8-coming-soon-vauban-coming-sooner/

And he'd probably be worth buying in Platinum, what with him being obtained through the awful alert system. However, I won't consider buying him until we know more about his abilities.

definitely, I recommend watching dagnome on twitch or akamikeb on youtube as they will both be doing a round-up on Vauban ASAP

I do quite like akamikeb's videos, even though some of them are a little outdated. Never heard of Dagnome, will check him out.

I'm learning the ins and outs of the system right now- Mag was my starter, but I'd love to go for a tanky Frost if I can.

Frost is pretty cool, although I find myself not using him much if at all.

His 1 is pretty solid if you're going solo or if you have competent teammates. Just freeze something, and shoot everything around it, or have everyone melee him for a free kill. Otherwise, it's mostly a waste.

His 3 is his bread and butter, however. Godly for non-infested defense missions.

His other two skills are pretty mediocre.

Frost is more support than tank, at least in comparison to Rhino. You pick Frost to support your team with Snow Globe. His sturdiness is more of a bonus, really. Once you hit the mid-higher levels, the higher defense/health of Rhino and Frost isn't something to bank on. Rhino ends up relying on Iron Skin to do the tanking (and holy crap does he do it well), while Frost uses his durability to keep himself alive inbetween time spent supporting.

Both are really good frames, however, and despite the fact that the use of both of them is built upon the use of a single skill (seriously, you can easily play Frost with just Snowglobe and Rhino with just Iron Skin, and you wouldn't lose out on anything), the utility of those skills is so different that it does manage to make them feel quite a bit different.

I (on the other hand) have to disagree with fafnir, I'm a strong believer in using all the powers of a warframe, but that's what Loki does to you , avalanche is a decent skill wholes his other one is good for kiting or combat in hallwwats or straight areas.
Frost is your battle Mage in warframe. Pretty sad thatyou missed the extermination event last week all participates got frost PRIME! Hard luck, but IMO frost is a good warframe and can be used with a variety of weapons.

I've heard that Loki's decoy ends up becoming fairly useless at higher levels (just dies too quickly), but aside from that, as situational as his other abilities tend to be, at least they all can remain useful.

Frosts' damaging abilities scale pretty poorly, and as good as he is, all of his abilities tend to be left behind for Snowglobe. At lower levels, his abilities tend to be more useful, since the damage they do actually matters, but at higher levels, they're just not worth using.

Still, he requires more finesse than Rhino, who is essentially comprised of pressing 2 and killing everything in the room. Granted, you can do much the same with Frost's Snowglobe, but it's more tactical and team-based in its usage.

Really though, you'd be hard pressed to find a frame that has every single one of its skills actually being useful throughout the game.

Excalibur: Everything pales in comparison to Slash Dash

Loki: Decoy becomes trivial at later levels where everything kills it near-instantly

Mag: Shield polarize just is not very good. Against enemies, you might as well just shoot them, and to help allies, they might as well just hide behind cover for a few seconds. Pull is situational, but does retain its usefulness.

Volt: Shock is absolutely worthless, as is Electric Shield.

Ash: Shuriken sucks, and Blade Storm is buggy.

Banshee: Silence is really only viable for solo play, and even then, mostly for screwing around.

Ember: As a whole, the character suffers against anything not-infested. Fireball definitely scales pretty badly (as does every elemental blast attack, really). Don't know too much about this frame otherwise.

Frost: Freeze relies on having teammates not shoot something, and is generally requires more coordination than it's worth, although it can have its shining moments. Ice Wave and Avalanche scale poorly at higher levels. The freeze effect can be useful, but if you really need an AoE slow, Snow Globe is usuallly the better option.

Nyx: Psychic Bolts sucks.

Rhino: Rhino Stomp and Rhino Charge aren't terrible abilities by any means (although an argument can be made for the redundancy of Radial Stomp), but when you can use that energy for Iron Skin, they can be very easily neglected.

Saryn: Actually has a decently well rounded set of abilities. Although Contagion isn't as stellar as the other options, and likely isn't worth its energy most of the time, and Molt's low durability can be a problem, she probably comes the closest to having a fully viable skill bar.

Trinity: Well of Life and Energy Vampire aren't horrible against bosses, but against pretty much everything else, the target will die far too quickly for them to be of value. What's more, Well of Life is made largely redundant due to Blessing.

Actually, loki's decoy is one of tge higher level necessities, deploy some where they can't reach and it'll last a minute affecting them as you kill them with out a struggle.
I couldn't comment on half the warframes you talked about due to lack of using them but regardless of usefullness I like bringing all skills to the battlefield.
The only thing I could contradict on your post is calling saryn and all round warframe while 1 of her abilities is a worse version of loki's decoy.

It's clearly not as good, but it does perform some utility. It has similar problems to Loki's (and even if infested can't reach it, that's only one third of the enemies you fight), but also comes with its own advantages. namely, you can cast it without having to aim it, and it doesn't interrupt your movement.

I actually prefer Saryn over Loki.

Both have a decoy of sorts. Loki's decoy lasts longer, but Saryn's molt can be activated while moving (it has no cast animation). They're comparable, but when I need a distraction immediately, I prefer Saryn.

Loki's other useful skills are invisibility and teleport. Teleport, like Mag's pull is situational; usually use it or invis to revive a downed comrade.

Saryn's useful skill is the ultimate. It deals tons of damage, and it stuns. It's a weaker form of Mag's Crush, but Mag doesn't have a decoy skill.

I run Saryn with the alternate helmet (+speed/-health) and have no trouble with mobility.

Preferences.

Nice, fafnir have you checked out vauban yet, his skills loom pretty neat

Just reset my account. Some of his skills look interesting, may end up buying him. I'm just disappointed about his ultimate. Oh look, another powerful AoE, we really could use more of those...

EDIT:

Bought him and his helmet. First thing to note: Holy crap, that helmet costs a fair amount of shielding. It also increases your energy cap by A LOT from what I've seen. It's weird getting used to being fragile as hell without my mods again, especially with my shields as low as they are (less than Loki!).

I've only used the Tesla Grenade and Stasis Field so far, but they're pretty cool. Firing the grenade is pretty awkward, but if you can land it in a decent position, it can be pretty cool. I'm kind of worried about the damage potential right now, however. It takes two shots to kill the basic Grineer in mercury unupgraded, and I don't know how well it will scale into the higher levels. I hope it does well, because it would be too cool of a skill to not get use.


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Also, his ultimate literally does nothing.

Oh, a bit of a bummer? His poster weapons were the Grakata and dual viper I think, possibly using those could account for other stuff, and then using mods for shield regen and shield capacity. Or are you just going to go on ahead and buy some other warframe?

Turns out his ultimate works, but only if you have all of his other skills equipped.

Otherwise, he's a really entertaining warframe. Tesla is a really fun skill to use at lower levels, and although I seriously doubt it, I really hope it will maintain its usability into higher levels, since it's just so fun to play with.

The jump pad is kind of buggy, and in some places (I found this to work on the Corpus planetside mission, right before the extraction point), it'll send you up to the very top of the ceiling, which is kind of funny. But I have a hard time thinking of any practical uses for the skill. It seems a lot like filler.

Stasis is essentially Rhino Stomp. Although for some reason, my shooting attacks didn't register damage while enemies were in it. Might be bugged, or maybe I'm doing something wrong.

His ult is mostly just another ult. Big AoE blast. Kind of disappointed on that end, but not surprised. That said, the whole vortex aspect of it is at least kind of cool, and on a whole it's a visually satisfying skill.
It places a vortex that actually sucks enemies in, and enemies that walk into range get sucked in (players too, although they don't get hurt), but at the end of the day, it's still just a big AoE attack.

On a whole, I really like him. Compared to the other frames I've sunk a fair bit of time into, he's probably my favourite so far. Loki was cool with the utility of his skills, but I'm not a fan of how stealth works in the game.

Volt's Speed was really cool to play around with, but at the end of the day, everything he did boiled down to jumping in, casting overload, and hoping your enemies were Corpus.

Frost is a solid frame, but similar to volt, everything begins and ends with Snowglobe.

Rhino was almost offensively boring to play.

I started with Mag to switch things up (although I fear that she'll probably just be another ult-AoE-spam), and I've bought Saryn, although I haven't used either very much, and may consider getting Nyx in the future.

Also, I'm pretty annoyed with how they increased the cost of every weapon in the store, and those that didn't get a massive increase (Strun is 75,000 credits now!) got turned into blueprint only weapons. And with everything requiring massive amounts of alloy plates, I really wonder if DE just went and gave the middle finger to every potential new player. I know I was kind of pissed to find out that after I reset, everything in the shop went up in price.

And having to wait 24 hours to take mastery tests is stupid. I managed to rush myself to rank 2, but I can't take the test because I took the tutorial today. Which means I have to wait until tomorrow to take the test, and then wait another day to get the Grakata (because now it's blueprint only). It's like they take some special kind of joy in implementing frustrating features into their game.

yeah, but they did make it so some plat items now cost credits as well which is good from a F2P point of view.

Nope, they just removed the platinum cost from some items that had the option to buy it in either platinum or credits. And then drastically increased the credit price.

Of course, it all fits perfectly in line with:

An End-Goal of this is also to eventually include Platinum to Credit Bundles.

Oh god that's pretty bad.

Guild Wars 2 pulls off the in-game-money to real-world-money system rather well. It may work in Warframe.

What's really funny now is that a lot of starter weapons are now almost as hard to make, if not harder, than some of the endgame weapons. Essentially, DE wants to force new players to buy platinum if they want to progress past mercury. That, or have clan members who are willing to give them alloy plates (but with alloy plates being in a fairly limited supply, and being used in large amount for EVERYTHING, that's not optimal). And not everyone's going to have friends that already play or want to spend platinum right away.

Although I was originally planning on telling my friends about this game, I'm going to refrain from doing so, because the most recent change is ridiculously unfriendly to new players. I described it in a post I made on the official forums:

Consider the perspective of a new player who may not have clan connections or a well-rounded knowledge of the game, and no access to decent equipment.

Now, before we continue, also consider how a F2P business model works. Playing the game itself is free, and the goal of the game is to entice the player to pay for various features, generally objects of aesthetic or convenience value. Essentially, to "hook" them onto the game.



So newbie player picks up the game, has a decent amount of fun with it, and would like to play a little further, perhaps experiment with some new weapon types. They go to the market to buy a new weapon (or at least look at what's available), and they see that even the most basic weapons are incredibly out of reach for them.

Now they have three real options: The first is to inefficiently (remember, this player does not yet know all the ins and outs of the game) grind for a very long time with awful equipment in areas that they are obviously horrendously unprepared for (and then wait another 12-24+ hours to progress after that), pay real money, or simply quit the game altogether. Also keep in mind that they might not even end up liking the item in the end, and that is an incredibly frustrating thing.



Now, although both of the first two options are possible, they hardly do anything to represent a positive image of the game itself. There's no sense of reasonable progression and reward for the player enough to want them coming back. The first few hours of a game, especially a F2P one, are the most integral, since that's when you need to hook them with a sense of progression that is reasonable enough to motivate them to play further, and give them the resources and tools so that they aren't afraid to make decisions.



By revamping the market such as this, DE has almost entirely gutted the entire hook of their game. It'll certainly be interesting to see how the community grows (or, as may be more likely the case considering my hypothesis, fails to do so), but it may not be interesting in a good way.

Above all, however, I feel cheated. DE advertises the optional reset, and I buy in. And then behind my back, they raise the prices on everything to neuter my new playthrough. That's dirty.

Personally, the thing I dislike the most is the lack of information. Tooltips, a more fully realized options menu (that tells you what the options actually do), and other sorts of things. Took me a half-hour to figure out I need to press 'esc' to get back to the level selection screen.

But yeah. If you're going to have really expensive in-game money items, and give options to buy them with cheaper 'real money' stuff, you need to make everything available with in-game currency. And for the love of Gork, please tell me the pre-requisites for stuff! I want that hammer. But I dont' know what I need to get it.

Honestly, this massive push to monetize everything was done so poorly that it feels like GW's marketing team (hah!) are the people advising DE.

If they had come, hat in hand, and said that development costs are expensive, and that they need to implement these changes to cover their own costs and keep the game running, I, and I'm sure the rest of the community, would be taking it a lot better. Granted, the potential new consumer base would still be completely pushed away from the game, but at least those of use who played before, and those of us who reset, could at least understand the situation.
I'd be more inclined to buy platinum if that were the case. But with the way they've done things, I really don't want to buy any more platinum, because I really don't want to support DE any further if they're going to act like this.

Also, I'm not entirely happy with the pricing structure they have in the first place. A game like League of Legends has each new champion costing around ~$9. A new frame, or even a new weapon, is in the $15-30 range (!).

With each purchase in Warframe feeling so significant, it's hard to feel good about actually spending anything. With LoL, I spent far more money than I'd care to admit,simply because dropping money to unlock things didn't feel at all painful.

It's the old trouble with 'microtransactions'- how Micro is Micro, and what level allows for that balance of "People will pay this" and "We're not making enough to recoup costs".


If Warframe wants to go F2P, they really ought to look at severe customization- going even further than simple helmets to adding other armour pieces, different particle effects, even alternate animations for powers (imagine V-dude's Stasis as fast-hardening resin polymer trap, or Volt's various lightning bolt things being bright yellow instead of blue). Those sorts of things, if they cost in the range of 1-2 dollars each, would sell tons, and they'd probably easily recoup their costs and profit, without effecting the actual gameplay, and helping to lure more people in. I know I tend to be drawn to games that allow hyper-customization, even if it's merely cosmetic.

yeah the game tried to focus on endgame and ended up making everything end game. im sure itll be fixed after all the rage ont he forums

Anvildude wrote:
Personally, the thing I dislike the most is the lack of information. Tooltips, a more fully realized options menu (that tells you what the options actually do), and other sorts of things. Took me a half-hour to figure out I need to press 'esc' to get back to the level selection screen.

But yeah. If you're going to have really expensive in-game money items, and give options to buy them with cheaper 'real money' stuff, you need to make everything available with in-game currency. And for the love of Gork, please tell me the pre-requisites for stuff! I want that hammer. But I dont' know what I need to get it.

This.

The game is just simply unfriendly, and doesn't tell you what stuff you need to make the guns and how/where to get them or what level you have to be to get those items, and just in general is an exercise in frustration with trying to grind out the upgrades. And the gameplay I've seen so far, while decent, isn't encouraging me to pony up any RL money.

Fafnir, thanks for taking one for the team! Good info, and at the same time just cementing my resolve to not ever play this, unless they massively decide to not be tripple-greedy.

So, I started crafting the Ember frame, since apparently she's now not terrible, and being a caster frame means she might actually be interesting.

That said, with a three day crafting time, I might just decide to go and play another game instead.

Good god, if there's one thing in this game that I absolutely detest, it's the awful crafting system.

So, update 8 is out, with the dojos. Crap load of weapons locked up in there, we should get building. I've already built the clan key, although I don't know if that affects everyone in the clan.

I'm fairly interested in seeing how the duel system works out...this would be the first instance of PvP I've seen so far in this game.

Also, how would I go about joining the clan (if nobody minds, that is)? My username is KvotheTheArcane.