Prestige Nightwave Levels Are So Boring

Nightwave seems cool at first. You do things, get points and get rewards. At level 30, you get something REALLY cool. After that though? Well… you get prestige levels. These prestige levels reward 15 Nightwave credits for each one you reach and that’s about it. Actually, sometimes you don’t even get the credits. In previous Nightwaves, people have hit Prestige levels 60, 90 and 120 and ended up stuck.

But the rewards for even getting that far are pretty damn mediocre. Why do people keep on going after hitting level 30, and how can we make it better?

All you get are Nightwave credits.

You don’t even get a good number of Nightwave credits. For each level, you get 15 Nightwave credits. To buy anything though, you need at least 20 credits. With a total of 7 daily tasks, 2 elite tasks and 5 normal tasks, you can get 60 Nightwave credits a week. That seems alright on the surface, but, well, you can’t buy that much with 60 credits.

The Nightwave shop at least has things to purchase though. We have a rotating shop of helmets, which are only really meant to be bought once, various mods that also rotate in and out of stock, some cosmetic items and some Mastery fodder. The biggest consumers of Nightwave credits are Kuva, Orokin Catalysts and Orokin Reactors, at 50 and 75 credits respectively.

The various aura mods are good purchases for newbies. However, the problem here though is that, aside from the Nightwave credits you get early on, you need to complete the whole 30 previous levels to really start getting more credits.

The shop is easily bought out though.

Veteran players though will quickly stop enjoying the Nightwave store. Once you have all the mods, helmets and weapons, there’s not much else to buy. Intermission 3 did have a few trinkets for sale, as well as a way to fight Nihil again. But everything else is the same old looping stock. Helmets are one-off purchases, most of the augment mods are skip-able and the weapons available aren’t that useful. Aura mods are worth picking up, but the majority of shop items, you’ll only ever buy once. And honestly, even then, you’ll probably only buy extras of useful aura mods like Corrosive Projection and Steel Charge, to give to people later.

Nitain IS a vital purchase, but you only need so much of it. I have 200 unused Nitain sitting in my inventory right now, enough to build every Nitain-using item in the game, with extras to spare. But it hasn’t really been used in any recent crafting recipes for… well, ages. Newer crafting recipes tend to rely on open world resources instead.

The Nightwave-themed gear also isn’t particularly interesting. Fighting Nihil is only there for people who missed his unique sword, or for a Riven, if you already have it. You can’t buy a second Oubliette and the floofs are torn and tattered, making them less desirable too.

Really though, most of your Nightwave credits will just end up going towards Kuva. The Orokin Reactors and Catalysts are expensive for what they are. 75 credits is a week and a half of work, you’re better off waiting for invasions or getting them from sorties.

There could be other, more interesting rewards.

Thing is, there’s nothing stopping us from getting different rewards past level 30. They don’t have to all just be credits.

In fact, I find it strange that we DON’T get different rewards! In the first 30 levels, you get better rewards as you reach the milestones of 10. 20 and 30, with better-than-average rewards every 5 levels. Why can’t we have something similar for prestige levels? Rather than just credits, we could get a Forma blueprint every 10 levels, maybe a rarer forma at every 30 levels. Heck, why not shove additional Orokin Reactors and Catalysts in there too?

Alternatively, you could just have the whole thing loop, from 1 to 30. After all, this Intermission is a catch-up from previous Nightwaves. Anyone who played the months-long Glassmaker Intermission probably has a good chunk of the existing rewards. But I’m certain pretty much everyone would happily get duplicates for a second chance at an Umbral Forma, 30 levels later.

For now though, I’ve just stopped bothering.

At first, I tried to do every single Nightwave task. But the more I play, the more I ask myself why I’m doing this. All I’m going to do is waste the Nightwave credits on Kuva. Even then though, there’s easier ways to get Kuva if I really need it.