Really, Every Operation Should Have Been Like Plague Star
Operation Orphix Venom is alright. It’s a very basic one-mission operation that’s somewhat easy to play. All you have to do is shoot little red things, then shoot an Orphix in the eye. But the cost of entry to do this mission is actually quite steep. If you want to do well, you need to have a properly modded Necramech and a properly modded Archgun. Two items that most people… don’t really use.
Despite those requirements, you can still play the event. If you don’t have a Necramech though, the event is a lot harder.
That being said, Orphix Venom still isn’t as good as Plague Star.
Operation Plague Star is considered by many to be the best Operation we’ve had. A lot of this comes from one thing: one of Plague Star’s main rewards was pre-built Forma. Forma are basically the life blood of Warframe, so getting Forma easily is always a good thing. But there was plenty that made Plague Star a great operation in other ways.
Plague Star introduced event shops.
Most events prior have you rewards in three ways: either by completing the mission itself, getting a specific score or as a random drop. The big prizes would always be for scores and mission completion. But everything else? You often just have to hope. Plague Star though brought in a vendor, who would sell you all the event goodies for a new resource. And you’d get the resource by doing the event.
In Plague Star’s case, the resource was Operation Standing. You’d actually have to rank up with a very small Syndicate. But on the plus side, you could actually get some items for free, just by ranking up.
On the other hand, Scarlet Spear makes you grind for a resource, and Orphix Venom does the same. You need to do the event to get the resource anyway, but I feel the Syndicate Standing path was better, since, well, it’s one less resource you have to worry about. Once you have the standing or resource or whatever, you can just go to the shop and buy whatever you want.
Orphix Venom does improve on this slightly by having parts drop from both the mission itself and the vendor. But the resource that Father requires, Phasic Cells, are directly tied to your score. Compared to Scarlet Spear and Plague Star, it’s a grind you can’t really speed up. Plus, the loot table for Orphix Venom is 99% relics.
More importantly, you could skip ahead.
The big difference with Plague Star and other operations was that you could always skip a stage. If you want to, you can completely skip the whole Hemocyte fight. Or you can skip half of it and only fight one. If you want, you can fight all the Hemocytes completely on your own. By using the right toxins, you can pick and choose how fast you wanted to do Plague Star’s final stage.
With all other events though? You kinda HAVE to go in for the long haul. You only ever got a plentiful amount of points in Scarlet Spear by doing more than a handful of Condrix or Murex. In Ambulas Reborn, the best way to get lots of points was to spend ages on a single Defefnse mission. And Pacifism Defect required far too long just to get a single Ignis Wraith blueprint, let alone the research.
Even with Orphix Venom, if you need points, then doing endurance missions is your best bet by far. Just doing 3 Orphix and getting out gives you almost no points at all.
Plague Star was still long and dragged on though.
That’s not to say that Plague Star was perfect. It still consisted of LOTS of waiting and LOTS of flying around. You’d have to wait 3 minutes for the mixer to finish, and you always have to do the boring drone escort. These stages are separated by most of the map. It was not uncommon to have to travel over a kilometer in-game from toxin acquisition to mixing station.
Still, the fact that parts of the mission were skippable and you had plenty of options means that, to this day, Plague Star still seems to be the preferred event. And it’s the only one people ask to return.
Although, really, that might just be because of the Forma…