The Most Awkward of Aimbots

So I finally managed to get my sticky hands on Mesa Prime. It cost me 170 Platinum for the blueprint and the three components. I didn’t lose out though, I had sold 180 Platinum’s worth of primed mods beforehand. To the same person. So I still profited. Three days later, after farming for some argon crystals, I had Mesa Prime built and ready to go. And with the sexy metal gunslinger in my inventory, I felt I could finally write an article about her.

I didn’t have to obtain Mesa Prime though. I could have just talked about normal Mesa. Mesa is one of the few frames I decided to buy with Platinum because, at the time, she was an awful frame to farm for. When I was a dreamy-eyed MR10-16 player, Mutalist Alad V required way more parts to make the keys for his assassination missions, and it simply wasn’t worth it. I didn’t buy Mesa for her full price though, I bought her when she was 25% off.

Still, buying Mesa Prime is actually cheaper than buying Mesa. About 50% cheaper actually. The Prime variant is hanging around at 170 Platinum right now, when buying a set from other traders. Mesa in the market is about 325 Platinum.

But these days, you can farm Mesa somewhat easily. The hardest part was getting Mutalist Alad V Assassination keys, which needed 3 Mutalist Alad V Coordinates each. But since the cost has been reduced to one coordinate per key, the farming has been cut by two thirds. You can also share keys with players, meaning, with a squad of 4, you can do 4 runs, one key per player. The fight isn’t that hard, you just have to wait for Alad V to not be immortal.

So why has it taken me so long to get to actually talking about Mesa?

Because she’s fucking boring.

Mesa is a gunslinger who does a fuckton of damage, even with mediocre builds. You put enough mods into Peacemakers, Mesa’s exalted pistols, and you can clear rooms with ease. In fact, you don’t even need to aim, because Mesa literally aims for you. You press 4 while in a safe position and then spin your mouse and spam clicks, and Mesa will shoot everything in the crotch for you automatically.

You see, Mesa is basically a gunslinging aimbot. Most Warframes with Exalted weapons at least require some form of aim. Excalibur has waves of energy coming out of his magic sword, Ivara fires multiple arrows at once, but they still have to aim. For Mesa, you just have to glance in their direction. Sure, the longer you have Peacemakers active, the more you have to focus on enemies, but you can just double-tap that 4 key and go back to almost perfect automatic aiming.

And because Mesa’s weapons are buffed by both their mods and Mesa’s mods, you can get insane amounts of strength. The only drawbacks to Peacemakers are the energy that is constantly drained and the fact you can’t move, but there’s an augment that allows Mesa to move, with NO cost apart from mod capacity!

On top of that, Mesa is one of the tankiest frames in Warframe. Because, with Shatter Shield, she can become immortal when it comes to bullets. Sure, melee and explosions can still hurt her, but they’ll hurt most frames anyway. A level 100 Bombard will kill the majority of frames unless they are tanky like Inaros or Rhino or have some way to avoid death like the Quick Thinking mod (drains energy instead of health when you have 2 health) and Mesa can use Quick Thinking if she wants to. But she already has Shatter Shield.

Mesa’s problem is that, in comparison with other room-nukers, Mesa requires very little effort and is insanely tanky as well. Octavia scales better than Mesa does but she dies to a stiff breeze and invisibility doesn’t protect you from stray bullets. A room-clearing Volt or Mag can rely on Quick Thinking, but when you’re using abilities constantly, you’ll run out of energy eventually as well.

Of course, the second you get Mesa, you’re not godlike. You have to get to rank 10 because her first and second abilities are insanely niche, almost to the point of uselessness. Not that it matters. You could also argue that Mesa needs a lot of work to make her good, since you need to forma her Peacemakers as well and she works best with fully ranked and primed mods, but you could forma any frame as much as you forma Mesa and still not be as effective as she is. Plus, by the time you get to Eris to farm Mesa, you’ll probably have most of the mods you need anyway.

The only thing stopping Mesas from flooding the Origin System was the fact that her farm was locked away on Eris. But now that Mesa Prime is here and pretty farmable via relics, there’s no escape.

Mesas. Mesas everywhere.