Early Thoughts on the Profit-Taker Fight

The second part of the Fortuna update has arrived and it’s a bit of a doozy. Sure, there’s a new Warframe and a new Prime Warframe and some very nice new weapons, but the main theme of the update is the Profit Taker Heist. This is the first of three vaguely raid-like sets of missions, in which you take down a massive spider creature.

The first heist involves taking down the mountain-sized Profit Taker Orb, a Corpus creation made out of a mixture of Corpus and Sentient technology. Anyone who knows a little lore about Warframe will know that Sentient technology means adaptive resistances. Fun.

The first three missions leading up to the Profit Taker Orb fight are kinda eh. The enemies scale up incredibly fast but the missions aren’t much to talk about, they just require a little coordination and, for some reason, a little fishing. Because apparently etching numbers into random robot fish is the only way to send information securely. The first-time completion of the first three missions rewards you with a Gravimag, which you can put on one of your Archwing guns, allowing you to use said guns in normal, non-Archwing missions. More on this later.

Anyway, the Profit Taker Orb fight itself consists of three parts, two thirds of which REQUIRE the use of an Archwing gun.

The first part of the fight is kinda tedious. The Profit Taker Orb has a big glowing symbol on it with a status type on it. That is the only damage type that will damage the shields. You can change it by using your Operator’s Amp on it, but you only do this once every few seconds and you need to coordinate with a team. This isn’t obvious in any way what so ever that you can change the resistances, so during the second fight I did (that we won), I was coordinating all our weapons with my brother, having Impact/Puncture/Slash, the six combined elemental statuses and Toxin and Cold on our weapons.

Once the shields are gone, you have to shoot the Orb’s legs with your Archwing gun. Once the legs are destroyed, you have to shoot the Orb’s main body.

This has to be repeated three times. During this time, you’ll be bombarded by homing missiles, massive energy walls that push you back and, if the Corpus get to level 4 alertness, a billion fucking Nullifiers and Scrambuses.

Small problem though. Your Archwing gun has limited ammo and if you don’t find the big yellow ammo boxes that occasionally drop, you have to wait 10 minutes to regain your Archwing gun once you run out of ammo. You don’t even get that much ammo in the first place. This leads to the awkward situation where you want to get rid of the trash mobs that constantly spawn and keep the Corpus at anything but max alertness, but keep enough enemies spawning that you can actually find the big yellow Heavy Ammo boxes. All the while avoiding homing missiles that WILL shred most Warframes.

Unfortunately, the combined tedium of shooting shields and having limited ammo for your heavy guns (that honestly don’t even do that much damage compared to normal weapons) has already created a very strict meta. You need a tanky frame that can also buff weapon damage and a healer. So basically it’s Eidolons all over again, except you don’t even need the Volt and the Harrow or Oberon, ALL you need is a bunch of Chroma players and a Trinity to stop them from dying.

Assuming you can kill the thing of course. When you get to the last stage of shields-legs-head, a timer starts ticking down and the mission will fail if you can’t defeat the Profit Taker in time.

Oh and of course, the mission is a bit buggy as well. The first time we ran the fight, we got the Profit Taker down to the last stage but it just fell down, invulnerable and sending out pulsing waves of energy. Did we fail? I don’t know. The thing was lying dead on the ground but still shooting. The timer for the last stage never popped up and the NPCs were of no use either. Especially Little Duck. But my ire for her is best saved for another article.

Once you defeat the Profit Taker, it will collapse and drop one massive Toroid, as well as an Archwing weapon mod if you’re lucky. There’s also a bounty reward but I’ve only ever seen relics from it.

After you get your rewards, the Profit Taker Orb explodes, downing pretty much everyone if you don’t run away in time. It’s an awesome explosion.

Unfortunately, while the three ‘setup’ bounties are alright (despite the fact they only give one reward per bounty stage!), the Profit Taker fight is mostly just shooting and damage sponges. As much as I’m not a huge fan of the Eidolon fights, they feel more interesting and less like a massive spam fest.

Because that’s what the first Orb Heist is. Missiles and knock-down spam while you shoot somewhat mindlessly at a massive target.