The Braton and the Soma
When I started Warframe and was given a choice of my first starter weapons, I decided to go for the MK1-Paris, the Lato and the MK1-Bo. A bow, a bog-standard pistol and a long, pointy stick. I could have alternatively chosen the MK1-Braton, the Kunai or the Skana. While the Kunai and the simple sword-like Skana are rather ninja-y, the MK1-Braton is an automatic rifle, about as nonsensical as the (admittedly boring and horrible) Lato or a flamethrower like the Ignis when it comes to ninja weaponry.
That being said, the MK1-Paris eventually just wasn’t cutting it any more. The more missions I did, the more enemies I fought in larger and larger groups. I needed a weapon with a higher firing rate and a magazine larger than one. That’s not to say that the Paris and the other bows in Warframe are bad, but there’s a time and a place for them. Missions on Ceres are not such a place. I ended up buying an MK1-Braton for 15,000 credits on the market place – all MK1 weapons are purchasable and don’t require you to buy a blueprint and build them yourself.
The MK1-Braton did its job. Average clip size. Average damage. Average everything. For a starter weapon, it’s perfectly good and has a nice, round set of stats meaning it works no matter your target. Alright but boring. But eventually I wanted a better rifle that had a larger clip size and a larger ammo capacity and so on. I considered buying the normal, non-MK1 Braton, but it was pretty much the same except with slightly different damage stats. In the end, I went with the Soma, which everyone had told me was absolutely amazing.
The Soma though wasn’t as good as everyone said it was. It was more of a light machine gun than an assault rifle, requiring a bit of spin-up time before unleashing hell, but I couldn’t work out how everyone thought it was so good. Even when I leveled the Soma up to 30, I still felt confused. I then learned that I’d need a ton of forma and mods in order to make the Soma as good as everyone made it out to be.
Then I decided to go back to the Braton. But I received a lovely gift of some Prime Parts, and I decided to go for the Braton Prime. Surely it had to be better than the MK1-Braton? Of course it was. Beautiful a gold and white weapon with, I dunno, a bit more accuracy I think? Still, prime weapons are always slightly better than their normal counterparts.
But again, I stumbled across the same issue. The Braton Prime did its job but was otherwise really boring to use. I ended up going back to my Ignis and other primaries while I worked out what to do.
In the mean time, I managed to get the parts for the Soma Prime. When everyone told me the Soma was amazing, what they really meant was that the Soma Prime was amazing. Amusingly, I had all the parts of the Soma apart from the blueprint, which I obtained not long after the Soma Prime’s relics stopped dropping. Still a pain, but not as bad as getting Frost or Ember Prime… Plus, the Soma Prime looked cool, a gold lump of curvy metal with a really nice magazine. I thought I wanted it.
So I made my Soma Prime and… well, it turns out I need to put forma in everything. And get some hard-to-find mods. And so on and so forth. The amount of effort I needed to make my Soma Prime as powerful as everyone suggested was simply too much for me.
That’s not to say that the Braton and the Soma aren’t powerful. They’re very good. And with the right dedication, mods and forma, they can both be amazing weapons. The Soma Prime in particular can be turned into a Slash-damage critical hit monster. The Braton is still good and has its own little niche in PvP. But they’re otherwise rather boring weapons. They’re assault rifles. And why would I want to use an assault rifle when I could use a huge variety of other weapons, from the aforementioned Paris, to less traditional rifles like the Boltor, to zany weapons like the Flux Rifle and the Synapse, to the actually-grenade-launcher weapons like the Simulor, Ogris, the Penta and the Tonkor, to whatever the heck the Javelok is.
Or I can use the Ignis as always…