Mastery Rank 27

I said I wouldn’t push myself to get to Mastery Rank 27. I said I wouldn’t. I told myself I was quite happy getting to Mastery Rank 26 and that I’ll climb to the next rank when we can unlock Mastery Ranks 28-30. But no, I didn’t listen to me. I went and pushed for MR27, the rank of Gold Sage. And fucking hell, I am both pleased and pissed off at myself.

I’m pissed off with myself because I did too much grinding over the last few days. After getting TWO 31-hour Affinity Boosters in a row, I realised that maybe it was time to finish the last few things I needed. Looking at my profile, I only needed a handful of weapons, right? Nope. I needed to touch the dreaded items that are Archwings, Archwing Guns and Archwing Melees. Archwing Guns are fine. For the small fee of 20-40 Platinum to buy a Gravimag and stick an Orokin Catalyst on an Archwing Gun (assuming you don’t have a ton of potatoes like me), I can bring an Archwing Gun to normal missions and slowly level it up there. Archwings and Melees though? There’s only one option.

Salacia.

Salacia is the only place you can reliably level up Archwing gear. It’s a mobile defense mission and it’s the easiest of the high level Archwing missions. You stand near an object you have to defend and shoot things. And because everyone is close together, you don’t loose your team mate affinity bonuses, unlike in Interception missions. Luckily, it only took about 7 runs to level up my two remaining Archwings and one melee weapon. Then it was back to normal farming.

Normally, most people go to Hydron, a Grineer defense map on Sedna, to level things up. I personally go to Helene on Saturn, because it means I can get Plastids and Orokin Cells at the same time. So after spending way too long on Salacia, I spent way too long on Helene.

I didn’t even have to level up that much. Stradavar Prime, Korrudo, Dual Kamas Prime and Redeemer Prime, plus two Amps (the T5 and T7 Fortuna Amps) and one Archwing Gun, the Corvas. Sadly, you can only level up weapons while in Operator mode, so the normal weapons had to be leveled up separately. Doubly so for the three melee weapons I just mentioned.

The last weapon I leveled up though (and is actually 3 levels off level 30) is the Redeemer Prime. Which is a really nice weapon. But because you get somewhat uneven mastery from doing star chart missions, doing junctions and quests and things like that, I finished my last Helene mission and realised I could do the MR27 test straight away.

So that was what I did.

And man, did that test make me anxious.

It’s not even a hard test. It’s basically Index except you can also pick up some points that spawn randomly on the map and some enemies are worth more than others. Oh, and you have to press your Use key to actually deposit the points.

Thing is, I wanted to take this test using Volt, rather than cheesing it in any way. I had intended to use Magus Repair to be able to heal myself against high level enemies but it turns out that 1. I could use health pads and 2. Magus Repair never got equipped for some reason even though I went and swapped out Magus Lockdown for it. That Magus Repair would have come in handy though because I was getting a LOT of slash procs. I wanted to bring my own slash procs with the Atterax, but the wide open map and all the ledges and respawn pits meant that spinning to win wasn’t a good idea. Hence why I brought my trusty Supra Vandal and Pyrana Prime.

But what terrified me the most was that, with a minute and a half left (I’d been taking it slow and hadn’t realised those blue orbs also gave points and weren’t energy orbs) and needing 25 points left, I got stuck in a respawn loop.

I was sliding off an edge, respawning while still sliding and then immediately sliding off the same edge again. It took me 30 seconds to rectify this, and I only managed it by Void-Dashing away, which immediately brought Volt to a stand still.

I did it though. With 48 seconds to spare. Because I’m awesome.

I now look forward to my 1000 extra standing per day and having 27 capacity on all unranked items.

What I am NOT looking forward to is the small collection of items I still need to level up. Archwing Guns and Melee weapons and… K-Drives…

Ugh. It’s going to be a long, long time until I (or anyone else for that matter) reach MR28…