The Mod Drop Chance Booster Situation

Editor’s Note: Digital Extremes have clarified the situation with mod boosters AND have gone the extra step and made it so looting abilities stack again. That kinda makes this article pointless, but it still serves as an explanation as to why the community was annoyed in the first place.

A while back, I may have mentioned that the ability to reroll loot using various Warframe abilities was nerfed, so that the abilities no longer stack with each other, meaning only one enemy can be ‘desecrated’ at a time by any one ability. This looting nerf has remained unchanged, and it has made some things trickier, like farming Silver Grove Specters or Drekar enemies for elusive mods, or farming Mutagen Samples and Hexenon for expensive items like the Hema. Most people (at least people on forums and r/warframe) are aware of this issue and are still somewhat annoyed at it, because there are many, many items that are very hard to get.

So, of course, when Digital Extremes announce that the next Prime Access will contain a Mod Drop Chance Booster, people were very suspicious. After all, the looting ability nerf is still pretty fresh in people’s memories. Surely this Mod Drop Chance Booster is a kick in the face to everyone involved? And it feels really scummy, right? A purchase-only increased chance to get those rare mods that are hard to acquire?

Digital Extremes have been doing damage control. Right off the bat, Rebecca, the community manager (and voice of the Lotus), went around trying to clarify things. The Mod Boosters won’t be exclusive to the Atlas Prime Access bundles and they’ll be added to the rest of Warframe via Sortie Rewards and Baro Ki’Teer offerings as well. In one comment, replying to a thread discussing stupidly low drop chances for mods, Rebecca also added that “…It is a free bonus, it will be added elsewhere as a rewards, and by no accounts does it exist to set a path for reducing drop rates elsewhere (or, conversely, not increase them)…”

They went further than that. Rebecca replied to a Reddit comment about when they first considered adding these Mod Drop Chance Boosters.

Apparently the idea of adding Mod Drop Chance Boosters has been around for a while, but considering how the looting nerf still gives off raw feelings, players can’t help but think that the idea is just wrong, and a lack of real trust in the developers makes this worse. Sure, a dev said that they won’t mess around with future drop rates, but the fact that a Mod Drop Chance Booster exists might make them think about new mods in the future. After all, there are plenty of people who will spend money to help with the grind, right?

But even then, these Mod Drop Chance Boosters still feel scummy, because of how insanely rare some mods are! Rather than making mods with insanely small drop chances (for example, Condition Overload and its 0.02% drop chance from Drekar Butchers which only spawn on Uranus and one node on Earth and in pretty small numbers), the developers are saying “here, buy this booster, that’ll solve the issue!” Some of the drop chances are literally insane as well, like Vengeful Revenant, a stance mod for swords (and what Stalker uses) that drops from Conculysts, which only spawn rarely on the Lua tileset, and has a drop chance of about 0.4%. And that’s according to Warframe’s own drop chances information. Some of these mods are basically impossible to obtain unless you spend hours and hours going for them or you get EXTREMELY lucky. Or you transmute some of them, but not every mod can be obtained via transmuting and the costs can add up quickly.

At the end of the day, the Mod Drop Chance Boosters just feel scummy, even if that’s not the developers’ intentions. And frankly, even WITH a booster, the drop chances for some mods are so small that you wonder if it’ll even make a difference…