Give Everyone Vacuum Already

For the longest of times, I’ve used Carrier and his big brother Carrier Prime. While Carrier Prime looks much less like a floating nut sack, it does have more armour and is all-round tankier, having more armour than many actual Warframes. The main reason I use them is for Ammo Case, a mod that converts unused ammo into ammo I actually need. The second reason I use Carrier is for Vacuum. The reason I’m writing this article is because I finally matured Spasma, my Helminth Charger, and leveled her up to 30. It was a boring, tedious experience. For some reason, she’s changed colours and I have NO IDEA why.

Vacuum makes everyone’s lives a billion times easier. Unless you’re a new player trying to work out what the hell you’re doing or you just want to see all the nice little models for each resource, it’s preferable just to have something suck all the loot, credits, resources and mods towards you. No one really wants to run around the level picking up individual bits of loot unless they’re mods. And really, it’s just a pain in the ass unless you have Thief’s Wit, Loot Radar or Animal Instinct, which show loot on the mini-map.

Random aside, I’m pretty sure Enemy Sense, Animal Instinct and whatshername’s innate radar sense, all of which show enemies in the mini-map, stack. Looks pretty cool, like lines of red triangles marching to their deaths.

Anyway, yes, Vacuum is a great mod. But it’s only available on Sentinels, your mindless, floating companions, which have a bad habit of dying and exploding on high levels. Sentinels aren’t that hard to get – after all, you can get a Taxon by completing the Venus junction, or by purchasing it for a handful of credits in the market. The Taxon may be a newbie sentinel with a really low damage weapon (the Artax) but it comes with a Vacuum mod and anyone can easily make one and benefit from its use.

Well, anyone except people who use Kubrows and Kavats.

You see, pets don’t have the same mods as Sentinels. They don’t even have a similar mod. So you either use your dumb floating robot to suck up loot, or you pick it all up manually as your pet tries to desperately claw at anything that moves.

For something so damn necessary, it’s insane that Vacuum is restricted to Sentinels only. Really, this should be built into everyone, right?

Thing is, I can kinda see where the developers were coming from. They want the start of the game to be nice and slow, for players to take their time and look around and explore. We’ll get to the destruction and mass-slaughter later. And they don’t want to hand you everything on a silver platter, right? Well, not exactly. Considering you can get the Taxon so early, it no longer makes sense at all.

Really, the solution to this is simple. While giving everyone an innate version of Vacuum would be the easiest thing to do, it kinda feels a little cheap and a little boring. You all magically just suck things towards you, rather than building and upgrading something that does the job automatically.

Firstly, animal companions NEED their own version. I say that they should get a precept mod that puts a backpack on their backs which sucks all loot towards them, and they regurgitate health and energy they’ve collected only as you need it. That way, pets have a slight buff against Sentinels and you don’t end up wasting a 50 energy orb when you’re only 10 energy away from maximum. Or something like that. I just want to see Kubrows with cute backpacks on, carrying your hard-earned loot for you.

Secondly, everyone should get Mag’s passive. Mag may not be a great character, but she has a really good starter-character passive – whenever she bullet-jumps, she gets a mini Vacuum that sucks loot towards her. This is a perfect addition to every single Warframe in the game and it means Mag can get a real passive – like doing double damage on magnetic procs, or being immune to Scrambus enemies and magnetic HUD scramblers, or whatever.

Everyone is bullet jumping around as it is, so why not give it an extra utility?