What Could A Mastery Rank 30 Test Even Be?

The other day I mentioned how I had reached Mastery Rank 28, almost completely by surprise. In that article, I briefly discussed I was curious what the MR29 and MR30 tests would be, but there’s a bit more to it than that. After all, a Mastery Rank test generally involves testing a specific skill and using the right tools for the job. You can do almost any test using a plain old Excalibur, using (often a well Forma’d) Braton, Lato and Skana, but as your arsenal increases, there are better ways to do tests. A handful of these tests also use the Operator, but most of the time it’s testing your game knowledge.

The test for MR28, despite being a bit weird and only ever actually used in a handful of places, did somewhat make sense. Throwing canisters at Exploiter Orb and doing Emissary Zealot assassinations are the sort of things a high level player should be able to do pretty well. The only real issue with the MR28 test is remembering how to throw the canisters properly because those things can be a bit… finicky. Also I frankly forgot they existed, having not done Exploiter Orb since March 2019, where I was grinding the mission with a friend to get the Shocking Step Ephemera.

Based on the tests we already have, I assume that the MR29 test will be somewhat similar, taking things from various events or content released in late 2019 and early 2020 and making a test out of those. We might have to fight a digital Kuva Lich and quickly find out the right combination, or we might need to silently do a spy vault based on newer tile sets like Jupiter. Or we might find ourselves in a holographic Plains, fighting a holographic Eidolon. Heck, we might even get a Railjack test where we fight some enemies and pilot a ship through an obstacle course. It probably won’t be a long test though, because these tests are always pretty short, often no more than 5-7 minutes long. Heck, the MR28 test only took about 3 minutes.

Mastery Rank 30 though? That’s a whole different event. MR30 is the last test that we know of, the last notch and the last unobtainable achievement finally unlocked. Surely the MR30 test will be something special, won’t it?

It has to be. It’s the biggest milestone there is. Reaching MR30 would give you the rank of Grand Master. So theoretically the test should encompass everything you have learned playing Warframe, from killing enemies to parkour and mobility to hacking and puzzles to various boss mechanics to using your Operator. A MR30 test would make you use all those skills in a single, somewhat short mission. You might have to sneak in, kill some enemies, hack some terminals, go through an obstacle course, capture some moving control points, kill more enemies, kill a big bad by throwing canisters at it then free a hostage and get them to safety.

Heck, the MR30 test might involve doing every single other Mastery Rank test in one go! With some checkpoints here and there, because that would be about an hour’s worth of missions and gameplay that can be easy to mess up and can only be attempted once per day when qualifying for the rank.

Or the MR30 test will be really easy. A stupidly easy test done for tradition’s sake.

There IS another question though. What happens AFTER MR30? Do we just go to MR31? Or do we reset back to 1? Will we even HAVE mastery tests after 30? There IS a hidden section with extra MR test areas within Cephalon Simaris’s room, but are they placeholders or will they get a use one day?

We don’t know. And we won’t know for a while, because you need a lot of new items to get to MR29 and MR30…