I Still Hate K-Drives

I’m reaching that point in the Mastery climb that I’m running out of things to level up. And last on my list, aside from Kuva weapons, are K-Drives. All four of them. I hate them all so much. The grind for K-Drive affinity is almost as bad as the massive grind for Railjack affinity.

But why do I hate K-Drive so much?

There’s tons of reasons. And it’s pretty surprising because originally I looked forward to K-Drives! One of the biggest things that I thought looked cool on the big Fortuna reveal was the K-Drive.

But now that I’ve actually gotten a K-Drive, now I’ve actually used K-Drives, they’re just… ugh. They’re no fun to use.

It’s like being a pinball

What bothers me the most about K-Drives is the exact same issue I have with Archwings. You’re basically a pinball and seem to bounce off everything. Almost every rock, nook and cranny is just another vector on which you can bounce from, pinging off in a semi-random direction.

Okay, to be fair, Archwing does have the exact same issue, but that’s… almost to be expected since you’re working in 3D space, not 2D space. There’s a lot more, uh, space to not crash into things. On the ground though, you are much more likely to crash, you can be shot at more easily and stomping MOAs are everywhere. Not to mention that most of the Orb Vallis is mountainous terrain. If anything, the Plains of Eidolon make for a better skate park, simply because it’s smoother.

K-Drives also feel just as floaty as Archwing. But that doesn’t make as much sense since we’re only really floating a bit off the ground, not in midair like Archwings are.

Other things feel iffy too, but I think that is more user error. For example, whenever I jump, I either seem to go miles into the air or barely get off the ground. A charge bar would be very useful for gauging the strength of your jumps.

The Mastery grind still kinda sucks

What makes K-Drives worse is the active mastery grind for them. The only way to farm mastery for K-Drives are doing races or doing tricks. That’s it. So you actively need to go out there with all four boards and do a billion tricks and races. But doing tricks is super slow and doing races are somewhat limited and repetitive. The only efficient option is to buy K-Drive mods in advance and use affinity boosters and Smeeta Kavats to increase affinity gains.

Even obtaining the boards though is tricky. You need 20,000 Ventkids standing to buy the first basic board and components. The ONLY reason why I have three of the boards is because I bought them with Platinum. That’s also why all my K-Drives are called 54 Platinum. And despite checking every other day, I haven’t seen the Bad Baby K-Drive for sale in the Today’s Special section yet.

Archwings are still better in every way

But even when I have managed to max out my K-Drives, I won’t actually use them. No matter what, Archwings will always be better. There is no physical way that K-Drives can be faster all the time.

And until you can use weapons on K-Drives, there’s even less of a reason to use them. You’re not immortal on a K-Drive, you can easily be shot at, but you can’t shoot back.

Frankly, I can’t wait until I can safely ignore K-Drives again.

Until then though, I guess it’s more races and grinding around the Pearl for me.

Ugh, the things I do for mastery…