More Tips for Warframe Sorties
Sorties can be daunting. In doing them, you face enemies in tougher conditions than anywhere else on the star chart. The only places where enemies only start to compare are in the furthest parts of the Void, Kuva Floods, fighting Eidolons and Sentients and maaaaaaybe tier 5 bounties on the Plains of Eidolon. But luckily, I’m here with some more tips to doing sorties.
Learn to Love Rolling
Rolling is a Warframe’s best friend. Okay, really Sentinels are with their ability to suck loot towards you, but rolling is good too. Rolling gives you damage resistance. But more importantly if you roll correctly, you can significantly reduce the damage over time you take from effects like Fire and Toxin. Rolling also makes you a smaller target, making you much harder to hit, and allows you to avoid being knocked down or grabbed by Infested Ancients or Grineer Scorpions. If it means rolling to extraction, then who cares if you look dumb, at least you’re alive.
Learn to Hack
You can’t use ciphers in Sorties, so you need to learn how to hack, and hack well. Especially since Grineer consoles can be failed in sorties (by accidentally setting then un-setting a piece three times) and both types of hackable console will give you a painful shock if you mess them up. The best way to do that? High level Spy missions. Specifically the ones inside vaults. Failing that, you can head to the Mastery Rank Practice Area in Cephalon Simaris’s room in the relays and do Mastery Test 5, which requires you to hack a set of consoles.
Shotguns are Great
If you’re lacking damage, then get yourself a shotgun. Shotguns like the Arca Plasmor, Tigris and Hek are all wonderful weapons that don’t require THAT much work to make them sortie viable. On the one hand, the small clip sizes that most shotguns have mean you’ll spend more time reloading, but when you only take one or two shots to kill important enemies, then that’s not too bad. It’s better than pumping an entire clip from a rifle into an enemy and having to reload. A shotgun blast to the head will kill most enemies, and body shots still do a lot of damage.
The only downside to shotguns is that if they are Status based (which most of them are), then you need to get 100% status chance on them. This is because status is calculated separately for each pellet fired, which isn’t a problem on the Arca Plasmor and its 3 or so shots, but is a horrific mess with a shotgun that fires a lot more. You have a 90% status chance on a weapon that fires 9 pellets, that means that in reality you’re only getting about 10% status total. Luckily, weapons like the Hek and Tigris reach 100% with ease, and riven mods can help weaker shotguns which can’t quite make it.
In fact, with a riven mod, any shotgun can instantly destroy in Sorties, since they can provide both more damage and some utility to your shotgun, and since many weaker shotguns have low dispositions, they can get good stats.
If You Can’t Do Damage, Do Something Useful
I mentioned this in the previous Tips for Sorties, but it’s always worth repeating. If you can’t kill enemies, do something that otherwise helps your team mates. Playing Trinity and providing both heals and energy is a superb way of making everything better. Harrow and Oberon are both incredibly useful support characters, and they can be a life-saver in Radiation sorties since they can both remove radiation procs and stop you from downing your entire team by accident.
Rhino’s Roar is always nice to have while also belonging to a guy who can be invulnerable for a bit, and if you have Frost, you can always use the Icy Avalanche augment, which actually gives team mates a miniature Iron Skin while briefly stunning enemies. Valkyr built for high duration is also good, as her War Cry buffs the armour and attack speed of allies, while the Valkyr can turn into an immortal angry kitty as she pleases. Mag is much more useful in Corpus sorties as her abilities’ damage types do huge damage to Corpus, while also providing shields to allies. Nidus is great as he provides ample crowd control, can heal allies and can also be built as a tank and keep enemies preoccupied.
A more tentatively useful character is Limbo, but he really depends on the situation. A Limbo keeping a Defense Operative inside the Rift and safe from harm, or keeping enemies locked in stasis during a Mobile Defense can be a godsend, but there’s a time and place for him. The trick is to pick your Warframe carefully.
Get out of the way when Procc’d by Radiation
Radiation is the worst, because whoever’s effected by it can be damaged by friendly fire. Okay, sure, if you accidentally shoot your team mate and kill them, you can revive them. But there are a lot of other things that can be harmed too. Excavation missions are the most obvious, since the excavator devices themselves die to a stiff breeze, but you can easily fail a Defense or Mobile Defense mission by accidentally killing your own objective.
When you get radiation procc’d, you need to move away from your team mates and objective. Find a corner to hide in if you have to. But the 100% best way is to just switch to your Operator and go into Void Mode for 8 seconds, which negates any and all damage. Worst case scenario, your Sentinel or Companion might die, but it could be worse.
Specters
Specters are wonderful. Since they scale to whatever mission you are playing, it’s always good to throw one out if times are hard. Warframe Specters can do a wide range of abilities (which I covered in this article here) but the real winner is the Ancient Eximus Specter. These guys give you a nice bit of damage reduction and will periodically release healing rays. Shield Osprey Specters are useful as well, since they provide shields. Other Specters are also still viable, as they provide a huge distraction and are somewhat cheap to make.
It’s also worth remembering that Specters will try to revive downed Operatives in defense and rescue missions, and they can teleport to you the same way other NPCs can.
You don’t need a bunch of Specters though. Just the Ancient Specters will do.
Abuse the Hell out of your Operator
Void Mode is amazing. It turns you both invisible and immortal to pretty much anything. There are very, very few scenarios that allow you to do that (the only two I can think of are a Rhino working with an Octavia and a Valkyr using a Huras Kubrow). While you are in Space Kid mode, your Warframe becomes immortal and you are free to do whatever it is you need to do, like hacking consoles or reviving team mates. The immortality doesn’t cover your pets, sadly, and enemies will try and attack your dogs, cats and sentinels, because they’re dicks like that. Remember though, your Warframe doesn’t get the invulnerability if they are channeling an ability, like Ember’s World on Fire.
You can also use Void Mode for Spy missions, and this is made even easier with your Void Dash and a little bit of work in the Zenurik focus tree can go a long way at extending the time you can spend invisible. Remember, you can refill your energy meter by dashing through enemies, and the force will also ragdoll them, giving you even more time to recover.
Seriously, Void Mode is amazing.
ASK FOR HELP
Please, ask for help. If you’re struggling or you’re falling behind or you’re stuck, ask your team for help and 90% of the time, they’ll help you. Or at the very least they’ll give you tips on how to improve, or weapon recommendations or whatever. Even the wild hell that is Region Chat will give you a hand.
Ask for help, and you shall receive.
a lot of this is wrong now. the game is just too hard in sorties. the enemies are bullet sponges and they one shot you at full health.. what fun that is! DE is clueless about fun but then again so are devs at ubisoft. In borderlands games none of this is true. there’s better feedback too when you fight bosses in those games. in this game nearly every enemy for a casual player at least who has a life outside of the game, is a bullet sponge. There’s even a video on youtube were in an interview about railjack, steve calls us filthy casuals (https://youtu.be/N8pabXI6N9A?t=532). This filthy casual works a high paying job that has given de 1000s of dollars weeks at a time in platinum for a friend and myself, but hey me a high paying customer is not worth the time like a freeloading hardcore no lifer. It really depresses me.
Actually, most of it is still viable. It might not be much help if you’re an MR <5 player, but MR5 players should be concentrating on finishing all the quests and unlocking more planets. Shotguns, especially the Hek (available at MR4) are very viable, hacking and rolling are still required to do sorties, Specters are still useful (especially in Defense missions), you can abuse Void Mode to no end and you should get out of the way of radiation procs. If you're having problems with enemies being bullet sponges, then perhaps you need to invest in the right mods and elements - for example, using Viral damage against Infested won't help anyone.
In fact, since I wrote that article, Sorties have become much easier since there are more, stronger weapons now. The Arca Plasmor, which unlocks at MR10 (about the time you start doing sorties regularly) will get you through pretty much any sortie mission with just a potato. Rhino is available on literally the second planet you unlock and he will easily carry through the entire star chart, as will many of the frames you unlock along the way to unlocking Sorties - Excalibur on Mars, Valkyr on Jupiter, Trinity on Pluto and Loki on Neptune.
While you're right that some of the Warframe bosses are fucking dreadful (LECH KRIL LOOKING AT YOU), there are also some great bosses like the Kela De Thayme fight and the new Thumper fights. But Warframe and Borderlands are nothing alike.
Also, you are misconstruing words there. From that clip, it seems that Steve doesn't want to make the game insanely simple, he wants to have dept, he wants people to put time into the game and not make people instantly gods the second they start playing. He then goes on to say that he wants to make the first 10 hours of gameplay better, because he understands that those first 10 hours suck.
From the sounds of it, you just sound upset that you've spent thousands on a game you're not very good at yet, and that your fault, no one else's. But don't worry, give yourself some time and you'll be able to keep up no problem.