On Trying To Make A Super Noobie Modding Guide

It sounds like a rather ‘meta’ move to write an article discussing the writing of another article which I haven’t finished and published yet, but I feel like there’s something wrong here. Something I can’t quite comprehend. And maybe if I write an article about how I can’t write an article, I’ll get it off my chest or something and will finally be able to write said article.

Anyway, this article is about a modding guide I wanted to make. The idea was to make as simple a modding guide as possible for Warframe, so that newbies aren’t reaching Ceres and Jupiter and wondering why the fuck they can’t kill anything any more. But it turns out, it’s not an easy thing to do, writing clear and concise guides. But there is a deeper issue – Warframe is a pretty complicated game.

I don’t mean that it’s a hard game. Once you have everything set up or if you find a cheese tactic, you can theoretically go on forever. Or at least you could, up until Covert Lethality got brutally murdered and Octavia became the only real means of killing anything regardless of level. The problem is getting to the point where you have all the best mods and everything forma’d up and all that.

There’s three things you need to consider when you’re modding: the mods you have, the rank of the mods and the space you have in whatever item you’re putting mods on. It’s all very well saying “just stick Serration on your gun!” but Serration is specifically only used for Rifles, Bows and Sniper Rifles AND it is an expensive mod that takes a huge amount of credits and Endo to level up. Most new players will have like 100 Endo to their name and that Endo should probably go into a Vitality mod or something so they don’t die. And then you have to actually FIND a Serration mod to put on your weapons because the flawed one (formerly known as a damaged mod) is absolutely awful and does nothing for a new player.

So if I were to write a guide (which I have started and not finished yet), you need to not just cover which mods you should always use, but you need to cover where you obtain them (since they are all found in very different places) and which ones you need to prioritize, and THEN you need to make recommendations on how to level those mods up and where you get the resources (Endo and credits) in order to do so. And you have to do that without seeming like these recommendations are the only way to play, because what mods you use can be slightly different based on what Warframes and weapons you start off with.

But at the same time, it’s also very easy to IGNORE the modding system at first. On Earth, Venus and Mercury, most enemies die incredibly quickly even to completely unmodded weapons, and since melee weapons have been boosted significantly with the Old Blood update, you can basically ground-slam your way through most of Earth and Venus with nothing to stop you.

When you combine a very easy early game with an insanely complicated system that doesn’t always tell you what you are doing is right or not, you end up with a mess that you can’t really cleanly summarize in a nice little article. Or even a handful of shiny graphics. Because modding in Warframe is a little too complicated to display even in nice picture form.