The Steel Path – It’s the Grineer…

I’m slowly making my way around the star chart. The Steel path may add 100 levels and tons of extra health and armour, but I’m getting there. The main thing holding me back is a lack of time to play, but I’ve managed to complete about a planet a day. I’m not doing amazing, but I’m not doing badly either. I struggled my way through Earth as I wasn’t quite used to the enemies yet. Then I struggled my way through Lua, mixing up my builds constantly (Steel Path doesn’t make it clear which faction is where). And then I scrambled my way through all the nearby Grineer planets.

As soon as I got to Corpus planets though? Everything was fine.

Seriously, the Grineer drag the Steel Path down.

I have had no problems with Corpus and Infested. Venus and Phobos, the two earliest Corpus planets, were actually really relaxing. I actually somehow managed to blast my way through Jupiter without any issues. Even the Ropalolyst was completely fine, aside from being its normal buggy mess.

The only issue I had was actually with the Emissary. Lephantis wasn’t that bad, it was just a bit slow (because you spend ages waiting for heads to pop up and open). But the Emissary, woowee, I don’t know what happened there. Even with everything modded with Heat or Gas, the fight took me and one other player 34 minutes.

“But Medic, it’s supposed to be HARD MODE!”

It’s not hard though. It’s just slow. Every Grineer enemy is a bullet sponge. So you strip them of their armour and then they die. Grineer don’t even hit particularly hard, outside of the special units. Sure, a Napalm or a Bombard are scary, but once you get rid of their armour, they are nothing special. In fact, once you’ve done the job of removing Grineer armour, you might as well be fighting anyone else.

The real challenge ends up being “how much corrosive and armour stripping do you have?” and “how quickly can you strip these enemies?” Almost all of the current Steel Path meta frames are frames with some sort of way to get around the Grineer’s +250% armour. The only reason why Nyx has surged in popularity is because she has a spammy auto-aim ability that, you guessed it, removes armour.

Once that armour is gone, you can just continue on as normal.

There’s still some hard content though, and that’s avoided by being tanky.

For example, Sentients on Lua. Heavens forbid one of those fuckers spawns on top of a Mobile Defense console and immediately does the disco ball attack. Even if the team of Rhinos and Inaroi survived, I witnessed a console die in literally 2 hits. Turns out, those Sentients basically spawn in as you start up the first console.

The hard mode content is definitely there, but the majority of it is just plowing through the massive amounts of Grineer armour everywhere. At the time of writing, I’m kinda dreading doing Saturn and Uranus, because I had so much fun doing the far-less-spongy missions on Jupiter. Luckily, I’ll have Neptune, Pluto and Eris after that, all non-Grineer planets. After those though, it’s back to boring old Grineer.

The best thing though is doing Junctions.

If only because I’m trying to speed-run them now. Managed 30 seconds without even trying on the Nova specter in the Europa Junction. And even if I’m not speed-running the fights using a weapon with almost no mods in them, that’s fine. Because the Warframe Specters at least have some interesting abilities to play around…