On Trapping Enemies in Sand, Slowly Consuming Them and Replacing Them with Sand-Covered Clones

After about an eternity of holding off, I finally caved and spent 100 Ducats (pronounced DUCK-ats) and some money on the quest Sands of Inaros. This quest, the only one purchase-able from Baro Ki’Teer, is a quest in which you discover who the hell Inaros is. As you wander through an abandoned Mars community, you find a rather nice temple with gigantic statues of Inaros in it, as well as some fancy urns.

The quest is overall really good. It’s not really a standard quest, and in fact it’s actually really short in comparison with other quests. The urns that you find in repeated visits to the temple require you to fill them up with the souls of specific enemies. In my case, I needed to kill a ton of Grineer Seekers, a handful of Hyekka Masters and four Bursas. Each time I filled an urn, I’d take it to the temple on the request of Baro Ki’Teer, I’d learn a little something about his past and the place, I’d kill a protector then head off with another urn.

But the best thing about the quest is that it makes Baro Ki’Teer seem like less of a snobbish cunt who you just want to punch in the face. The first time most people meet him, it’s via a PM as he tells you which relay he’s located on every two weeks. Then you go to visit him and he’s snobbish whether you buy something or not. Then he’ll leave a remark in that snobbish voice of his and you want to punch him so damn hard.

In the Sands of Inaros quest though, you realise that he has other emotions apart from being a snobbish cunt. He feels excitement, he feels fear, he feels all sorts of things. He was brought up on stories about this Inaros bloke who would protect people and control the desert, keeping them safe from the ‘Sky Men’ and the infested, before mysteriously disappearing. The last time you go to the temple, you don’t go there because Baro Ki’Teer wants to make money, he begs you to protect the temple, claiming he “doesn’t want the Grineer to hurt Inaros!” This all seems a little odd. Then you realise that he heard his mum get gunned down by Grineer who attacked his village on Mars when he was a little boy and you end up feeling pretty bad about him.

Still, you get a neat new Warframe out of it, so while Ki’Teer goes off to explore his new emotions, you get a dusty, Egyptian-god-influenced Warframe to play with. A mummy called Inaros.

For some reason, Inaros wobbles around a lot when not using the default animation set. He wobbles all over the place like a drunkard. Sometimes he’ll do an animation that looks a bit like Soldier’s Schadenfreude taunt. He’s a weird-looking thing.

Now, Inaros isn’t like most other Warframes. Unlike everyone but Nidus, Inaros only has health. A LOT of health. He has no shields at all, but all his abilities affect his health in one way or another. It’s a novel idea, and you have to build yourself around the fact that most of the damage you take will be permanent unless you 1. put Life Strike on your melee weapon, 2. forma Inaros so you can use the regenerating health aura mod, 3. get a Furis and its life-stealing augment or 4. use his abilities on a regular basis and steal health from your hapless victims.

Inaros’s abilities are all pretty fitting for a guy who came from a sandy desert on Mars. His third ability literally turns him into a dust storm, blowing dust and sand everywhere and making people unable to see. His first ability, Desiccation, is the same thing on a smaller scale, throwing sand into enemies’ eyes and stealing a little bit of health from them in return.

His last ability, Scarab Armour, allows you to sacrifice a large amount of his health for a large amount of armour. The more health you sacrifice, the more Scarab Armour you get. Because Inaros has a lot of health, having a lot of armour is a great thing to have, since it makes you all-round more tanky. Combined with a 100% completed Scarab Armour (which costs about 3,000 health), you can have huge amounts of armour and take very little damage – as long as you don’t do anything that disrupts your abilities, like falling down holes.

But how do you regain all that health lost? Easy! You can always devour some enemies. Inaros’s second ability, Devour, literally allows you to devour enemies. Well, first Devour will trap a target in quicksand and make them flail and panic, then it will drag them towards you as you hold the button down. Hold it down even more and Inaros will basically start eating whatever he’s trapped, regaining a lot of health over time. If you kill your enemies using Devour, they turn into a sandy version of themselves and become your slave until they wither away and die. And while you use Devour to eat your victims, you’re also immortal.

That’s pretty damn cool! And also pretty terrifying. But mostly cool.