My First Sortie

So, after much tension, Davjo dragged me, kicking and screaming, through my first Sortie in Warframe…

“OH GOD MEDIC STOP WITH THE DAMN WARFRAME ARTICLES I AM SO SICK OF WARFRAME ARTICLES!”

Oh come on, don’t be like that. There’s over 1000 articles on this blog. Most of them are about Team Fortress 2, but nothing interesting has happened as of late. I’d do PAYDAY articles but aabicus has that covered. And no one likes it when I do Skyrim or Minecraft articles. Warframe is my game of the month and I want to talk about it.

Anyway, a Sortie is a super hard mission. They are locked to players at Mastery Rank 4and higher, and you need a level 30 Warframe to start them. The MR4 requirement though is a bit silly though, as most MR4 people don’t have the tools needed to get through a Sortie. Enemies in Sorties are level 60 and higher, can one-hit incapacitate you, and often have stupid bonuses like “Immune to Elemental Damage” or “Everyone’s a super-powered Eximus enemy”. There’s other debuffs as well, for example, everything might be slowly freezing, or friendly fire is turn on. There are three missions in a Sortie, each one harder than the other, ending with up to level 100 enemies. You need to complete them all to get a prize.

Needless to say, Sorties, despite their silly name, are fucking difficult.

Of course, my first experience in a Sortie was for 30 seconds, where I entered a room looking for my team mates who had all abandoned me, got incapacitated in one hit, then disconnected. My Volt back then was still using the MK1-Braton, one of the starter weapons.

This time round, I had my Ignis, my trusty Radiation-based Flamethrower. But really, the main reason Davjo brought me along was so I could “farm some focus”. Focus is a whole new thing you need to upgrade after doing the Second Dream quest. Basically, it’s an additional ability on top of your normal 4, which can be cast every few minutes and makes you immortal for the duration, as a ghost of your human self bursts out above you and does… stuff. Either way, the only way to rank up this stuff is to get a Focus Lens that converts 1.5% of the normal leveling up stuff you earn into Focus leveling up stuff. So you use stuff that is already at max rank to maximize Focus gains.

Apparently, survival missions with enemies who are double your max rank are good sources of Focus farming.

The map in question was full of infested, very alien enemies. It was a very tight map as well. Davjo and I were joined by two random fellows. Our job was to make a loud noise, cause a distraction and survive for 15 minutes, while “a Tenno operative steals information elsewhere on the ship.” In the mean time, the Lotus would occasionally send us life support capsules, because otherwise we’d suffocate.

I spent the next 15 minutes running around like a scared, headless chicken. It took an entire clip of 180 to kill a single enemy. Everything hurt me a lot. There were clouds of toxic gas everywhere that could down me in a second. Things went through my shields and started directly eating my health. And EVERYTHING seemed to drain my energy. What little energy I had was spent on using Speed to run away and Shock in the vague hope that it might stun something for just long enough for me to escape the ever-looming clouds of death gas.

In the end, somehow, I made it through, and even more amazingly, I took the least damage. No idea how.

The other two parts of the Sortie were kinda confusing. They were both missions where we had to get to X as soon as possible then escape, so I desperately tried to follow Davjo, and was actually a tiny but of use by using Speed a lot. Turns out, Speed with an augmented mod is quite useful as it mini-stuns everything you run past. I only fell down a handful of times, but I did struggle to keep up with Davjo, who I swear knows these maps like the back of his hand.

The maps were both also apparently filled with Cheeto dust and everything was pretty orange and foggy. But I didn’t see much of them because we had to get in and out as fast as possible before the wildlife killed us. Conveniently, I was incapacitated just as Davjo made it to the extraction point, which the game counted as a success for both of us.

In the end, I got a piece for another Warframe, Vauban. It’ll be a while before I get the other pieces…