On Mastery Tests
I hate Mastery Tests. You need to do one every time you level up your Mastery Rank. The tests range from anything between “do this super short obstacle course” to “kill a bunch of enemies without dying using just one weapon type” to “stealth kill all these enemies who cause you to lose a life should they even catch a glimpse of you and you’re not allowed anything but a melee weapon, no abilities either.” There’s one for every rank, from Mastery Rank 1 to Mastery Rank 25, with new mastery ranks and tests being released when there’s enough items to reach a new rank.
You see, you need to level items to level 30. Once you’ve leveled up enough items, THEN you can do your Mastery Test and get to your next rank. Sounds rather reasonable, but you don’t actually know what the test is straight away. It could be a stealth test and you’ve brought Rhino, or an agility test and you’re using Frost. It could be an Archwing test but you only have your level 4 Odonata equipped. And if you fail the test, you can’t try it again for another 24 hours.
Thing is, there IS a place where you can practice your next Mastery Test. If you visit any relay (Laruna, Kronia and Orcus on PC for example) and visit Cephalon Simaris, to the right side of the room is a path that has space for Mastery Ranks 1 through 30. You can access all previous mastery rank tests, as well as your next one required to level up. The only place it’s really mentioned though is on loading screens. Which is of no help to anyone, just like the Frost Snow Globe trick of destroying unwanted Snow Globes by casting Freeze on them.
So it turns out, you can practice the tests as often as you like. You can fail the practice tests as well. But only if you go to the relays and visit Simaris’s room, having to skip multiple long, tedious cut scenes. And if you fail the actual qualification, you still have to wait 24 hours.
On the plus side, you don’t have to do mastery rank tests straight away. You can leave them and not worry about it. Any extra mastery you get is carried over into your next level even if you don’t do the test. I didn’t complete the Mastery Rank 9 test for ages (because it was hard as fuck) and by the time I DID manage to do it, I had enough mastery to do the Mastery Rank 10 and 11 tests…
Except I couldn’t. Because whether you succeed or fail a test, you STILL have to wait 24 hours to do another test. It doesn’t matter if you successfully leveled up, you have to wait. It’s an artificial gate to stop people powering through the game.
Luckily, you reach a point where you don’t need any higher mastery levels. The highest Mastery Rank required for any weapon is currently 15 (especially since the Shrine of the Eidolon update, since a lot of weapon requirements went up quite a bit) and the highest requirement in the game is Mastery Rank 16, required for some Riven Mods. So you can do what I’ve done and sit at Mastery Rank 16, not actually caring.
Then again, I am missing out on some things. The higher your Mastery Rank, the more mod capacity you get on unranked weapons, the more Void Traces you can own for improving relics and the more standing you can obtain from all syndicates, both the standard six and special ones like Cetus and Conclave.
But I don’t care. Mastery Tests are annoying. Especially when you fuck them up. Even more so when they’re needlessly complicated, like “kill a ton of enemies before time runs out while meleeing random balls for more time.” Since when is that ever going to come up in actual Warframe gameplay?
The only issue is my brother constantly pestering me to do my Mastery Tests… It’s not like they’re an indication of skill or anything…