Railjack is So Much Better Now Mostly
Warframe’s theme for 2020 has been fixing things and creating wars. We had a refresher update earlier on in the year that made a lot of great tweaks and removed self damage. That was followed by the start of the New War and Scarlet Spear. Now we’re getting Railjack tweaks and changes, and pretty much all of these changes have been pretty damn good.
Everything is less tanky, less hot and faster!
The bulk of the changes seem to be making the experience smoother. Most enemies are less tanky, particularly the enemies on Crew Ships and in bases. Sure, we still have the status-immune crew ship officers, but everyone else at least goes down a bit quicker. Before the changes, even low enemies on Earth took way too much of a beating before dying.
All turrets were also buffed, so they don’t overheat as much. This is awesome because damn, turrets originally overheated in seconds. With so many flying enemies buzzing around, you NEED to spam those guns. And you can actually afford to build these extra guns now because all the resource drops have been increased. Now you need to do a lot less space farming to build your fancy new guns.
The biggest buff however is that our own Railjacks move quite a bit faster, at a cost of a reduction in boost. Honestly though, this still doesn’t quite feel like enough. Unless you get a good engine, you still feel very slow. And the Sigma engines (even the MKIII ones) just don’t cut it.
It’s also a good credit farm too!
Another change is that you now actually get rewarded a ton of credits for doing Railjack missions, scaling based on level. This means we actually have a good alternative to doing the Index or fighting Profit Taker. And frankly, these missions should give good payments, especially considering Railjack’s initial costs. The only other rewards you get for Railjack are Railjack-specific items, so rewards usable elsewhere are always appreciated.
As to how good the credit rewards are? I accidentally made a million credits somewhat easily, just by doing solo Earth Proxima missions.
One of the only problems is the lack of missions still.
Seriously, we are still doing the same old missions. Kill some Crewships, maybe disable some sort of station. Or kill a commander if you are lucky. The number of Fighters you have to kill is randomized (although still close to the numbers 30, 60 and 90). But it’s still the same old stuff. I’m hoping that we get some more missions in the future. Maybe not defense missions, but a survival mission could be cool.
At least you can happily do the Anomaly whenever you want. There’s no more waiting 3 hours for an Anomaly to appear then only having a maximum of 2 attempts before you have to wait more.
Sadly though, Intrinsics still kinda suck.
For such an amazingly long grind, it’s weird how higher level Intrinsics aren’t that useful. Most of the level 8-10 skills just aren’t that good. For example, Engineering level 10 will automatically fix a fire, breach or fault on the Railjack, but it’s actually quicker to get up and do it yourself! The doubling of intrinsics required also just isn’t fun. I did the maths required and frankly, I need far, far too many intrinsics to get to level 10 in all 4 available schools. A lot of work for pretty much nothing.
But finally, it isn’t really that clear how you GET intrinsics points in the first place. Are intrinsics a resource or some kind of affinity? I’m not really sure, and it makes farming for intrinsics efficiently rather difficult.
Overall though, a step in the right direction.
Railjack no longer feels like a massive slog any more. It’s still grindy, but we’re definitely getting there. It’s just a shame this wasn’t how Railjack was on release, otherwise more people would be playing it…