Rest in Peace, Oberon Parts for Credits

The one time I’m busy and preoccupied with other stuff, a Warframe update hits. This one has been worked on for a while, and is basically completely and utterly reworking Railjack. Not only do we get the Corpus stuff we were originally teased with, but we’re getting a lot of “QOL” stuff too. However, the thing I want to address is another, related change in the Railjack Refitted update.

Oberon parts no longer drop from Eximus Enemies.

This is a pretty mind-blowing change. For someone old like me, it’s going to be insane, no longer having a cache of Oberon parts to trade in. While a 0.3% drop chance from Eximus enemies for any one Oberon part seems like a lot… Well we kill a lot of enemies. So many in fact that it’s common to wrack up huge numbers of Oberon blueprints.

For a new player, Oberon is was a great early frame to get. You’d stumble across the pieces by accident while doing other things. Sure, his blueprint is a bit expensive, but any newbie could easily trip over all three parts and start building. And with healing, armour strip and a support kit, Oberon is viable pretty much anywhere.

But this is no longer the case.

A very easy to access frame has suddenly disappeared.

Oberon parts are now part of Railjack. Specifically, according to the patch notes, Oberon parts have been moved.

… Oberon Component Blueprints can be found in Grineer Railjack Point of Interest and Skirmish Bonus reward tables…

So, to get Oberon, you need to do do Railjack missions. That requires at least having an Archwing. Okay, sure, you only need to get to Mars and do the Archwing quest. It’s not that far, and most new players can probably get to the point that they can access Railjack. But a newbie would have to specifically farm Oberon now, rather than getting a new frame by chance.

On the plus side, Earth Proxima is pretty easy to access. However, Oberon parts drop in all tables across all Grineer Railjack missions. Which means that, on Veil and Saturn Proxima, we’re going to get Oberon parts in the place of drops we potentially want. It seems that Oberon parts drop in caches (at a 10% chance – much higher than anything else) all the way up to Veil Proxima. So, instead of Oberon parts being an added bonus to any normal mission, Oberon parts will now be in the way of potential cache rewards.

“But Medic, what about Ash?”

Ash is also now a member of the Railjack squad. But Ash always dropped from a pain in the ass enemy: the Manic. Specifically, wild ones. meaning you couldn’t farm for him in Tyl Regor’s fight. You fight far fewer Manic than most enemies in general, so Ash getting a proper farm doesn’t seem so bad. But Ash was never really considered a newbie frame. If anything, he’s a more ninja-y version of Loki and Ivara.

Oberon’s benefits to new players were great. A simple, easy to play frame with useful abilities, that you can get almost by accident. I’ve had random newbies, asking me what frames to get, realize that they already have all three Oberon parts.

This isn’t going to happen any more.

Seems weird to single these frames out.

But neither Warframe really… fit with Railjack. Why these two frames? We have a bunch of dojo-based frames that could have gone into Railjack. An alternate way to obtain Zephyr, the flying Warframe, would have been really good. We’re also putting Nyx and Valkyr Prime permanently in Railjack-obtained relics. So it’s not like there’s a lack of rewards. Oberon in particular was fine how he was.

It’s probably a good thing I already had Oberon built on my little MR3 account, because I doubt the average MR3 could really get into Railjack, at least enough to reliably obtain the frame. And the little bonus of Oberon parts in missions for Veterans, selling them for credits, is now a thing in the past.

Oh well, guess I’ll just sell my extra Harrow parts now.