The Long, Slow Grind Towards The Next Mastery Rank

Right now, I am about halfway through the master required to reach Mastery Rank 27. If things continue as they are, it will still be a long, long trek until I actually reach MR27. Why? Because there is a lot of stuff that’s simply a pain in the ass to level up.

For most weapons, leveling things up is pretty easy. You could probably get to MR16, the maximum rank needed to obtain all weapons in the game, by simply buying weapon blueprints from the shop, building those then leveling up, alongside your normal farming of warframes and relics. Your biggest issues are weapon slots and resources early on, since you probably won’t have many weapon slots at first. Luckily the Foundry will happily store an infinite amount of items, so you can always just store unclaimed weapons in there, sell each weapon once you’ve leveled it and go from there. The tricky weapons are the clan weapons that require huge amounts of invasion-only items like Fieldrons and Mutagen Masses.

Warframes are a lite bit trickier. You can get the blueprints rather easily but the grind to get all of them is tougher. That’s why they give more mastery though. And just like everything else, you can store a Warframe in your foundry, level up the base version then swap it out for the primed version at some point. But Warframes are more of a pain in the ass to level up because you are vulnerable at first, having to unlock your abilities. When you’re leveling up a weapon or a companion, you can do so passively, but Warframes can be squishy while you’re leveling them, doubly so if you don’t have a Reactor to double your mod capacity.

Now though, most of the remaining mastery I need is Archwing stuff and K-Drives. I have two Archwings to finish leveling up – Elytron and Odonata Prime – and a ton of weapons. I have three Archwing guns and half the Archwing melee weapons to even obtain! I only have one of the four K-Drives and I bought it with Platinum. I even called it 57 Platinum.

But aside from the Archwing guns, I HAVE to level these up in specific places. Fortuna is the only place you can reasonably level up K-Drive stuff by doing races over and over or grinding around doing tricks. You can’t even passively level up K-Drives, you don’t get standing while just driving around and if you are doing other things, you will probably just use Archwing to get around anyway.

At the same time, you can’t really level Archwing gear in the open areas. There are so many enemies that have anti-aircraft missiles, and you’re forced out of Archwing when you lose a certain amount of health. You also can only use your Archwing weapons in Archwing missions, or if you have a Gravimag installed on an Archwing gun, which you can’t use at the same time as your Archwing in the Orb Vallis or the Plains of Eidolon.

That makes earning mastery for these last few things REALLY tedious. Definitely doable but definitely tedious. You have to go and dedicate time to specifically level this stuff up and that makes it no fun at all.

The only other option is to wait for more non-Archwing and non-K-Drive items to come out. But that might mean waiting a while.