The Long, Tedious Grind Towards Using Archwing Guns on Ground Missions

Arch-guns, Archwing Guns are pretty cool. They’re massive, heavy weapons that you summon from your ship and use to murder all your enemies. These weapons were originally only really usable in the vast wastes of space, where the lack of gravity means they are light enough to use.

But with a Gravimag and an Orokin Catalyst installed you can use these Archwing Guns in any mission. Sort of.

There’s a long, tedious animation you have to sit through first. While some enemies will drop items that will reset the 5 minute cooldown between deployments and refill your limited Arch-gun, you are slowed down and you drop like a dead weight while aim-gliding. But at least you get to melt enemies in lead.

But the path towards actually obtaining a good Arch-Gun and an Archgun Deployer to be able use said gun in ground missions is a long and tedious task.

The first thing you have to do is complete the Archwing quest. Which isn’t too hard and is required to go further than Ceres and Jupiter. It’s a quest aimed at newer players as well. Unfortunately, the stock Arch-Gun, the Imperator, is basically a massive pea shooter. You might be happy to ignore that for a bit, since there are other Arch-Guns, but you’ll have to pick up a better Archwing gun at some point because the Imperator is just overall not very good.

Luckily, the Grattler is available without having to do any Syndicate stuff, and is a good gun. The Larkspur is also a good gun but you can’t actually build it until you have access to Profit Taker.

After that, you need to head to Fortuna and start levelling things up. Before you can even get close to deploying your Arch-Guns in normal atmospheres with gravity and stuff like that, you need to get to max rank (Old Mate) with Solaris United.

Which, unless you’ve only been playing for a month, is definitely doable and doesn’t take that long. The easiest and fastest way to max out Solaris United is to speak to Ticker and buy Debt Bonds off him, then farm Exploiter Orb for the vast, vast amount of materials she drops. You can then sell the gem drops back to Solaris United for a good bit of standing per day – one Zodian or Thyst will give you 1000 standing, 4-5 of them give almost the same standing as a level 40-60 bounty.

Okay, sure, you are gated by your daily standing caps, but if you’ve been playing for a while or are of an MR above 19, then it shouldn’t take you that long to max out Solaris United. I mean, if a guy who is MR0 and only has 1000 standing a day can do it, then you should be able to as well.

Once you have maxed out Solaris United though, all you need to do is do the first three stages of the Profit Taker heist. You don’t even need to fight Profit Taker herself. You do the three prior bounties and once you’ve done the third one, you’ll be sent an Archgun Deployer via your inbox, as well as a Gravimag to put on one Arch-Gun.

As soon as you get your stuff, you throw the Archgun Deployer in your gear wheel then go to the Vehicles section of your Arsenal and pick an Arch-Gun to put your Gravimag on. I’d recommend the Larkspur because it’s an all-round badass gun (and you’ll have some of the ingredients already if you completed the Profit Taker Heist), while the Grattler has the nasty habit of accidentally killing you. The Fluctus is a lot of fun as well with its insane (and nerfed for atmospheric usage) punch-through. The Imperator Vandal is a step up from the stock Arch-Gun and is now much easier to get… although you do have to wait for a Fomorian to attack. You have to have an Orokin Catalyst installed on your Arch-Gun though before you can put a Gravimag on it. Why? Who knows?

Once you’ve done all that, you’re free to summon your massive gun in normal missions!

It’s not really a difficult process, especially since you can completely ignore Vox Solaris once you have the Deployer, but it’s not the most interesting process either. You just need to be patient with that Solaris United standing.