The Helminth System – Too Expensive to Experiment

So I finally got my Helminth component from Son, and I finally got the bastard installed. At first, I was actually pretty excited. There were all sorts of cool combinations to be had. But now that I have the Helminth ready to go in my ship, I realise it’s all just… a chore. And yet more grind. But not the fun sort of grind.

The Entrati grind and the segment costs are fine.

Getting to rank 3 is pretty easy with the Entrati, as is obtaining the segment. Sure, you need to do a ton of conservation, but it’s definitely doable. The more tedious task is catching the various animals needed: you need 1 Medjay Predasite and 5 Common Avichea to level up to rank 3, and 15 Purple Velocipod tags to build the segment itself. 15k Entrati standing is fine, but that difficulty is more based on your Mastery Rank than anything else. Anyone over MR15 will find it much easier.

MR8 players can’t really use the system.

Even if an MR8 player takes the 2-weeks-ish to get all the stuff needed to build the segment, the feeding costs are very, very high. The amount required just for subsuming basic frames is too high for a MR8 player. So I suppose all those worries about MR8 players accidentally killing their precious Excalibur just aren’t happening.

It’s pretty expensive, even for veterans.

Okay, some of the common shit that everyone has, the amounts are pretty fine. Some resources actually seem pretty low. But the Railjack resource costs are through the absolute roof. I am rank 10 in all Intrinsics and I don’t even have enough Fresnels to feed Helminth once. The other resources aren’t too bad, but they’re still expensive. Especially the semi-rare items. Huge amounts of Oxium and Cryotic are required. Unless you treat the Helminth like a very long project, even older players might run out of a few things.

That’s not really the problem though. The problem is waiting for ages for Helminth to want to eat things again. Because Helminth will only accept the stuff we have tons of for so long. Everything about the Helminth system is a waiting game and it’s not a fun one. Worse, I feel like it actively punishes you for wanting to push things along.

There’s a difference between stopping people from getting everything in one day and doing things at some sort of natural pace. Combined with the costs and Helminth being a fussy eater, the whole system becomes a pain.

You can’t feasibly experiment.

Subsuming being expensive isn’t too much of an issue, since you’re only doing it once. You could argue that it takes too long (especially when paired with the time to farm and build a frame) but since you can only do one at a time, you have the time to farm your next frames. But combine subsuming with the costs to infuse an ability and the prices add up really quickly.

For example, you can subsume Rhino for the Roar ability, and that costs a ton of resources. But then adding Roar to ANY Warframe also costs a ton of resources for each frame you put it on. If I want to experiment between putting Warcry and Roar on Baruuk, then I have to swallow the huge costs. But we have these huge costs on EVERY subsumed ability, even the crap ones!

It’s simply too expensive to see whether Mag’s Pull or Loki’s Decoy are any good on Limbo. If you want to experiment, you’re actually better off waiting until someone with more resources does the experimentation for you.

The costs means everyone will just do the meta thing.

At the end of the day, when you can’t reliably experiment, everyone just ends up doing the same thing. There’s no desire to spend resources on weird combinations when the easy path is right there. Heck, why should one even bother subsuming, for example, a Loki when the farm for someone like Rhino or Valkyr is easier and their subsume-able abilities are more useful?

Forget the problem with things being strong being preferred. People will always pick the stronger abilities. But when you throw in high costs as well, there’s literally NO reason to waste your resources on something mediocre. Even if you just want to experiment.

And for a system that was meant for experimentation and trying wacky builds, huge resource costs just don’t feel right…