The Revision and Refreshing Update Everyone Has Been Waiting For

The 139th Devstream claimed itself to be a boring update. It only had three of the normal staff and one of the developers themselves was claiming how boring it would be. Somehow though, Devstream 139 turned out to be one of the better Devstreams so far. Why? Because it contained everything that everyone has been asking for, for years.

We were given a 20-ish point list of things, an agenda of what the next mainline update will be. All of it is awesome. Bug fixes, balance changes, improved data, all sorts.

It’s almost everything players have been asking for.

Seriously, this includes a LOT of things players have been asking for all this time. Heck, things like Sentinels no longer requiring their own set of mods has been a huge request since Sentinels came out.

But pretty much all of this is wanted stuff. Excavators were always level 1, meaning they would instantly die in missions after about level 40, so those scaling with level means you can actually do high level Excavation missions more reliably. Self-Damage has always been a problem which meant you simply couldn’t use various weapons unless you were Inaros. But now self-damage is being replaced with self-stuns, flinches and knockbacks. This means you can’t die from your own explosions.

Status being more useful, shield-gating becoming a thing and vast improvements to the Lich farm are also on their way, again, more things that people have wanted for ages.

And then there’s other tweaks like how armour and multishot on shotguns work. The maths on these is a little more complicated but that’s fine. All of this is smoothing out issues we’ve had in the past.

And it’s all coming in the next mainline update.

Of course it’s not all perfect.

In the course for progress, some things are being changed. Arcanes for example. Weaker Arcanes are going to be tweaked and buffed so that people actually use them. And hopefully so people don’t roll their eyes after fighting Eidolons and getting something crap. But that means stronger Arcanes will be tweaked as well, like Arcane Energize getting a cooldown. Sounds bad, but as it stands, Arcane Energize is literally the only Arcane worth using, apart from maybe the magnetic Arcane for Eidolon hunts.

Then you have the fact that, while the changes are set in stone, the numbers aren’t. Because this is all in development, the actual numbers and stats could change at any time. What we see is temporary, and we might find that some weapons or mods or Warframe or whatever won’t be as they were on this Devstream. The whole meta is threatening to change, and we don’t know how that will feel until we get the update and play it ourselves.

Oh and Chroma will no longer be able to benefit from self-damage to power himself up. But frankly, one frame using self-damage shouldn’t mean that every other frame should suffer from self-damage too.

And then there’s the teasers of what to come.

Scarlet Spear was by far the most teased of what’s to come. Well, aside from the upcoming second Ash Deluxe skin. This operation will be the first appearance of Squad Link, which will connect Empyrean Railjack missions with on-the-ground normal Warframe missions. It’s the first part of the Sentient invasion and will feature Erra.

We were also teased the next part of the mini-cutscene quests, following on from Chimera Prologue and the Erra mini-quest, which is coming at some point apparently.

The actual content updates though will happen after the revision/changes/balance pass update.

That’s a lot of stuff coming soon.

Either way, it looks like Warframe is moving in some interesting directions. And I can’t wait!