A Complete Lack of Mesa Prime

You know what? I was going to do one of my weird ability breakdowns and warframe review articles because there’s quite a few frames that I’ve missed, the most obvious one being Mesa. Mesa is a hugely popular gunslinger-based Warframe who very recently got a Prime upgrade. Mesa Prime looks amazing and comes with a bunch of very nice weapons, the Akjagara Prime and the Redeemer Prime, all coated in that lovely Orokin gold. I had planned to write a nice little article about how cool both Mesa and Mesa Prime were, then show off some nice fashionframe for Mesa Prime.

That was the plan. But there’s currently a large problem with it.

I still don’t have Mesa Prime.

This sounds like a little bit of a surprise when you think about it. I’m a MR26 player, I have almost everything else in the game, but I don’t have the newest Warframe? Well, I have Baruuk, I have Garuda, I managed to get Chroma Prime somewhat quickly… heck, I even managed to get Khora’s components within two weeks of her release, and the grind for Khora is the worst. Sure, it took me ages to get Nidus but that was because I wasn’t really farming as hard as I could.

Mesa Prime’s farm is relatively simple. Like all Prime frames (apart from Excalibur), she comes from Relics. You’ve got your blueprint, neuroptics, chassis and systems, all scattered inside relics across the solar system. Mesa’s parts aren’t that bad, just like Chroma you have two rare parts, an uncommon part and a common part.

The thing is though, after weeks of doing fissure missions, I don’t even have the common and uncommon parts! I have exactly ZERO Mesa Prime parts! I mean, even when I struggled a bit with Limbo Prime, I still had most of his parts, it was the Axi part I was missing. But here I am with no Mesa parts at all. Not even the rare part in Meso relics, which I use all the time.

I should clarify that I am often opening relics. Lately it’s what I do. I wait for a nice Capture or Exterminate (occasionally Rescue or Sabotage depending on the map) and open as many relics as possible until the fissure expires. If I have clan mates around, I might do a marathon survival, but lately no one’s been online, so it’s mostly been Captures and Exterminates. Assuming that the average capture or exterminate takes about 3 minutes, plus an extra minute for loading, picking relics and faffing around, I can open a relic every four minutes, or about 20 relics per fissure, which normally lasts anywhere between 1 and 2 hours.

Let’s get this straight: I open a fuckton of relics.

Of course, there are ways I can remedy this complete lack of Mesa Prime, the most obvious being to buy the Mesa Prime Access set. Which I’m not going to do because it’s way too fucking expensive. I could buy a lot of other games with the money they want for Prime Access. And I don’t like Mesa THAT much to spend that much money. It’s hard enough getting me to spend money on Tennogen, let alone Prime Access packs.

The other option is to trade for her. Which is very doable. According to Warframe.Market, the main website in which you sell stuff, a Mesa Prime set costs about 160 platinum and will only drop as her relics become more and more common. It sounds like a lot, but that’s only the cost of 4 Zephyr Prime sets or Mirage Prime sets, or one and a half Chroma Prime sets. That’s totally doable.

In fact, I got a Vulkar riven the other day and I have an unopened Melee Riven. I could sell those and easily be on my way to obtaining Mesa Prime.

But it kinda feels weird. Almost like I haven’t earned her. I mean, sure, I did earn her, I just traded for her instead of getting her in relics. But it’s still weird.

In the mean time, I guess it’s back to opening relics. Thank heavens for being MR26 and having up to 1400 void traces available at any moment…

Actually, you know what? Fuck it, I’m going to buy her with some of my hard-earned platinum.