MR29

Mastery Rank 29 became available for all players alongside the Deadlock Protocol. For ages, really, since the Railjack update, most players couldn’t reach MR29. The reason was simple: only Founding players had enough items to reach the amount of mastery needed for MR29. Everyone else was left with a 6,000 standing gap between MR28 and MR29, with no items to master.

The Deadlock Protocol fixed that.

We actually got a pretty good amount of mastery with this update. 6,000 for Protea herself, 6,000 for a MOA and 15,000 for assorted weapons. But really, to reach MR29, we only needed 6,000 standing. Which I got with the new Xoris and the new Sentinel gun. Mainly because everything else was locked away behind long grinds.

Actually didn’t take too long to level them up either. The new Sentinel gun could just be stuck on pretty much any Sentinel or MOA and level up on its own. Meanwhile, the Xoris has usefulness when it comes to farming all the other new weapons. It also has a pretty nice gimmick in the form of an infinite combo meter.

Vaguely related, I keep on reading Xoris as “χωρίς” (hoh-RIIS) which means “without”. It’s quite fitting. Because you can’t finish the quest without it.

The MR29 Test wasn’t too bad.

As for the actual Mastery Rank test itself? It wasn’t too difficult. All you have to do is kill enemies before time runs out, and you get added time for each enemy you kill. However, you only get 15 seconds, and the enemies spike in difficulty after every ten kills. You also have to fight enemies of every faction, including Heavy Gunners and Toxin Ancients.

But with a good, strong weapon or two, it’s pretty easy. I used my beloved normal Volt, who has been freshly forma’d and leveled up. The exact same Volt I used for my MR1 test. For this test however, I used the Kuva Bramma, Pyrana Prime and Redeemer Prime. And a bunch of ammo pads, because it turned out I had over 400 of them and you don’t get your companion.

Really, the only difficulty is running out of ammo… and finding enemies. There’s pillars scattered around the small map, and enemies tend to hide behind them.

I completed the test on my first try, after watching a quick video to see what the test was. Wasn’t that bad at all. Thank heavens for the Redeemer though, as it finished off the handful of enemies that my Pyrana and Bramma weren’t insta-killing.

I’m actually ahead of the curve now.

What’s amazing though is that I am actually on track to get MR30 as close to as soon as possible. Okay, sure, we need a TON of items to actually get to MR30. But since I’ve leveled up literally everything except for the new content, I don’t need to worry about pain in the ass things. I no longer have a big wall of K-Drives and Intrinsics to master. I’ve done all of that!

So, really, it should be smooth sailing from here on. Unless we get a whole new Intrinsics grind…

Onward, to MR30!

It’s going to be a long, long grind towards Mastery Rank 30. But that doesn’t bother me, because I never thought I’d get this far.

The question is, what happens after MR30? Who knows?