On Grinding Ventkids Standing

Being Mastery Rank 30 has left me with a few realizations. There are things I never got around to doing, mostly because they were boring and/or tedious. After all, I haven’t touched Conclave at all, because I have no interest in PvP. But Ventkids on the other hand, they’re a simple Syndicate, right? I may have ignored them since they came out, but they’re… a thing. And, after leveling up the new infested K-Drive, I realised that maybe I could max them out.

Well, I could, but it’d be boring.

Two options: Races or Tricks.

There are only two ways to increase Ventkids standing. You can either pop tons of cool tricks as you drive around on your K-Drive or do races. The real answer though is that doing races is far superior. Sure, you can spend ages grinding around the Pearl, but you can only get a maximum of 3000 points per combo. And it’s much, much easier to fuck up a combo by landing at the wrong angle.

Good grinding spots exist for doing tricks. The Pearl is marked on the map and easily cleared of enemies. It’s mostly a circular rail which you can grind around for a long time without too much difficulty. There are also sections of rails that you can grind around quite nicely. Just behind Fortuna, there’s a large lake with pipes that are great for grinding on.

But really, you need to get that combo up and keep it going. That’s not easy when you are easily penalized for repeating tricks with a Copy Kavat. So not only do you have to combo, but you need to do lots of different tricks for maximum scores.

Frankly, it’s just easier to do races.

Races are, well, alright, I guess.

It all depends on which races you do. The longer ones give more standing, but take longer to do, obviously. They also take longer to get back to the start. But at the same time, some of the shorter ones are tedious as well. Many of the shorter races are through tiny caves, so you can’t pick up that much speed.

The races I dislike the most though are the ones that require grinding. I’m just not very good at those. But it’s so easy to be accidentally be flung off your board, and it takes SO LONG to get back up. If you fuck up at the start of a race, there’s just no real way to recover. The worst offenders are the races that run through the twisted Orokin tree root areas. Between being cramped and hard to balance on and requiring you to grind on roots for maximum speed, these races are just a massive pain in the ass.

Puffin’ Pastures is my second favourite race.

This race is pretty straight forward and doesn’t require any particularly long jumps or anything. Really, there’s only three awkward bits in the entire race. You can easily finish Puffin’ Pastures with a good 40-50 seconds left on the clock with just a basic board. There’s also no grinding required, just a couple of small hops. Really, the only awkward spot is literally the second ring, because it’s just past a small ledge you need to hop over. Everything else, except the second to last ring, can be driven through while grounded.

Corpus do spawn quite a lot on this path but they’re easy to avoid. The race is also pretty close to Fortuna and pretty easy to Archwing back to the start.

If Puffin’ Pastures isn’t available, then I’ll do Fortuna’s Folley or occasionally Dog Line. Dog Line requires no grinding and is mostly a twisting path of a race that can be done pretty quickly. Fortuna’s Folley lands you close to Fortuna and, although it does have grinding, the grinding is optional.

My favourite race though is Roky’s Roll. Roky’s Roll sends you down through a deep cave, along the remains of an Orokin road and then blasts you out of the exit. I used this race to level up four of the five K-Drives during a double affinity weekend. It’s actually the one often seen on Dev Streams, a longer race but pretty straight forward, showing off the cave systems. But I haven’t seen this race in like 2 weeks so I haven’t been able to do it.

Cambion Drift races are the worst.

I absolutely hate these races. Not because they’re harder than the Orb Vallis ones. Okay, they’re a bit harder, but it’s the landscape that’s to blame. The Orb Vallis is rocky but you can at least see where you’re going. Although you can and will bump into little rocks and stuff that stick out of the ground, they are mostly avoidable. Deimos on the other hand is filled with annoying vines and ledges and things to get caught on. It’s absolutely miserable, because the rougher terrain wasn’t really made for skateboarding in mind.

Really, the only places that work for K-Drives are across the ‘endocrine’ gooey red rivers. But none of the races actually go along those rivers.

Is it worth the grind overall?

Nah. It’s not worth it. Especially since I already have all the boards mastered. Turns out, it’s easier to just farm 52-54 platinum and buy the boards outright. The only ones I have actually built are the first board the Ventkids offer and the Infested one that Grandmother gives you. And even then, because I didn’t want to spend ages fishing for the new parts I needed, I ended up using the cheap Ventkids parts for the Infested board.

And, frankly, the Ventkids want way too much standing for what they offer. Even the crappy base K-Drive parts cost 5,000 standing each, which is a day or more’s worth of standing for the average player.