On Sortie Rewards

Now that I’m an experienced enough player to actually do Sorties, I actually enjoy doing them. Sorties are a bit of a challenge and can throw some unusual scenarios in your way, as well as occasionally catching you by surprise when you realise you don’t have a decent bow. You can also get some pretty damn useful rewards from sorties. But most of the time you don’t.

So, the current Sortie reward pool consists of an Anasa Ayatan Sculpture (worth about 3450 Endo when filled), 4000 Endo, a veiled Rifle, Shotgun, Pistol or Melee Riven Mod, 6000 Kuva, a 3-day Resource, Affinity, Credit or Resource Drop Chance Booster, an Exilus Adapter, a Forma, an Orokin Catalyst blueprint, an Orokin Reactor blueprint or a Legendary Core. All in increasing rarity, with the Forma, Orokin parts and Exilus Adapter having a 2.5% chance and the Legendary Core having an 0.18% chance to be the reward.

Out of all of those, the most desired are the Riven Mods or the Legendary Core, although Resource and Affinity boosters are also desirable. Most of the time though, you’ll get Endo or Kuva or an Anasa. You only get one reward per day, after completing all 3 missions in the daily Sortie. So if you want something good, you have to wait until tomorrow.

Of course, when you’re on a streak of 4000 Endo, 4 days in a row, you start to get annoyed and fed up with bad luck. And of course, I only ever seem to get Riven Mods when I’m nearly out of Riven Mod space, meaning I have to trade, sell or dissolve a Riven I have before I can do the sortie the next day (because the game doesn’t let you do the sortie if you’re at max capacity on your Rivens). It’s extra depressing when you get the ‘rare’ reward from a Sortie and it’s literally just a single Forma.

There’s been much talk about fixing Sortie Rewards, most of it being that we should get tokens or standing or some sort of currency for completing Sorties, which we can trade in to get the items we want. Basically, people want the system that Plague Star uses, where you get to pick what you want to buy. You can save up all your standing and get a ton of forma or just spend it on the Plague Zaw parts. The exact same thing would apply to a Sortie Standing Shop or whatever it’d be called. You save your Sortie Standing and spend it on the things you want.

Except I really don’t think this is a good idea. We’ll just end up overflowing with Riven Mods, because that’s what most people want from the Sortie and pretty much everything else will go untouched. Apart from Formas, depending on how expensive they are – that’s probably why Plague Star rarely comes back, due to cheap Formas that people normally grind for or purchase with Platinum. Rivens being very common would also affect the Warframe ‘economy’ because people spend a lot of Platinum on Riven Mods, and with them much more easily and consistently accessible via a shop. Sure, you can transmute Riven Mods but that’s still a lot of mods.

You end up with a shop full of things and only one thing ever being bought. Kinda makes Sorties like the rest of Warframe.

It’s worth trying, definitely. But before we do go into a completely new system, I have a better idea.

We just alter chances and amounts.

So, that 6000 Kuva? Make it 7500 Kuva, so you can reroll a max-rolls Riven twice. Endo? Boost that to 7500 as well. You need like 50k Endo for most Primed Mods, so it’s not like the Endo’s just sitting there. Rather than getting 1 Forma, you could get 3 Formas or perhaps 5 Forma blueprints and a similar change could be used on Exilus Adapters and Orokin Catalysts/Reactors. Riven chances could be increased a little bit as Zaw and Shotgun Rivens are insanely rare. The 3-day boosters are alright, but no one likes the Resource Drop Chance ones, so maybe… just not have them?

Either way, doesn’t take a lot to make Sortie rewards a bit better.

Although I suppose what we have now is better than how Sortie rewards used to be. The Sortie reward pool was filled up with Focus lenses, Warframe and weapon parts, and Sorties were tied to ‘seasons’ which rotated once in a blue moon. Before the reward revamp and just before I started doing Sorties, the reward pool consisted of Dera Vandal components, lenses, Fusion Cores (which were replaced by Endo) and… Nezha parts. Yep, Nezha was originally a Sortie-only Warframe.

I suppose a single, fully-build Forma is probably a better reward than a Dera Vandal part.