On the Hell Hole that is the Sortie

Sorties are daily mini-quests that are super hard. They feature three super hard missions, with enemies ranging from level 50 to level 100. Each mission generally has an extra modifier, like enemies having stronger armour, fires exploding all around the mission, half health or shields, hugely decreased mobility or, if you’re lucky, weapon restrictions, such as Shotgun, Secondary, Sniper or Bow only. I’ve mentioned them before, and only done a handful of them because of their difficulty.

Of course, being super hard, I generally avoided them. Despite my love for my Ignis and my Volt, they are simply not strong enough. Most things, especially in the second and third missions, will kill you in one or two hits. Meanwhile, it takes an entire clip for my Ignis to kill one enemy. I have other weapons which do more damage, one of which will have an article to itself once I’ve modded it properly, but even my strong weapons hardly make a dent. A change in requirements to access Sorties is another reason – used to be Mastery Rank 4 and a level 30 Warframe required, now you need to complete the War Within as well. And we all know how I got on there.

There’s a lot that I don’t understand about Sorties. Particularly why they’re called that. It’s weird, because the term Sortie doesn’t really fit with anything else in the game, naming-wise. Names are either plain English or based off Asian/Greek/Latin roots.

What I also don’t understand is how everything deals so much damage, while my stuff does nothing. There’s a thing called armour scaling, which means enemies have damage reduction on their health. This is particularly bad with the Grineer as most units have more armour than their Corpus counterparts. Of course you’ve also got to fiddle around with damage types, both Impact/Puncture/Slash and elemental damage in order to find the best way to actually do some damage. But that damage reduction can increase almost infinitely meaning at some point, you can’t damage anything at all.

The main thing I don’t get is how other people do them so easily. As in genuinely easily. Speeding through them as fast as they can. Well, within reason, because many missions have a timer on them. Ten minutes for survival missions, ten waves of enemies in defense missions, all three data vaults for spy missions, and so on. Even super fast exterminate and capture missions are tedious since there’s often about 300 enemies that need killing and capture targets have so much health they are hard to take down.

It turns out the most common way is to just ‘cheese’ your way through and take the most overpowered weapons imaginable. You got your Tigris Primes, your Soma Primes, your Synoid Simulors and all the super powerful stuff, being used by Warframes set up to keep everyone else down. This isn’t a place for a pretty little Volt, Primed or otherwise. Sorties are for people with multiple formas in everything, people with Rhinos and Chromas who never stop using their tank abilities, Novas who cause everything around to slow down to a crawl and Frosts who cast their spells non-stop.

But really though, you don’t kill things in Sorties. Not normally. If you can’t kill them in one or two hits, you keep them away so you can do your job and get out, or make yourself as unkillable as they are. Even WITH all those cheesy tactics, it’s still not E Prime/ E Gate Exterminate levels of easy. Care has to be taken, especially in the last missions.

After all that though, you’d expect the rewards to be good, right?

Kinda.

While there is plenty of nice loot to be had, especially for non-high-MR players, it’s wholly random what you get, from 4000 endo, to a pretty sculpture that can be sold for endo, to blueprints for Orokin Reactors/Catalysts and Eximus adapters and new (but randomized) Riven mods. After a lot of effort and hard work, many might find disappointed to get something they already have lots of, while never managing to get the super rare loot.

In the mean time, I’m going to avoid Sorties. They’re just too hard. Despite the fact I got a pretty good reward from my last sortie…