The Difficulties in Farming Endo

When the new clan affinity system came out, all clans could built an altar and level up their clan. Back then, I was a more fledgling member of my clan, but we had quite a bit of affinity. With everything added up, we were clan level 9. And the altar we’d built would give us endo for reaching that level.

From it, I got 45,000 endo. I had never felt richer when it came to the vital mod-upgrading shiny stuff. But the more I thought about it, even back then, the more I realized that farming endo is tough.

Early Game is rough

Early on, you don’t have many mods. But you also don’t have much endo to put in those mods. This is often why most newbies shove as many mods on their items as possible, because there’s no endo to rank things up. Sure, getting a max rank Pressure Point for melee is pretty easy, but doing the same for Serration and Hornet Strike, as well as Vitality and Redirection, is very hard. Sacrifices have to be made.

At least you can dissolve duplicate mods. But you get very little from them.

To make matters worse, there’s only really one source of endo that can easily be reached. Maroo offers a weekly treasure hunt that grants you one Ayatan sculpture. It generally involves running a parkour course inside an Orokin ship or Orokin derelict. But the sculpture you get is random and each one has varying value.

Mid-Game is also slow

That slow trickle takes its time to become meaningful. Sure, as you travel across planets, the endo rewards increase. You start off with little bundles of 15 endo and get more the higher difficulties you face. But it’s not really enough to properly start leveling things up and players tend to only do the essentials first. Heck, it’s recommended to just level many mods to rank 8 and not bother with ranks 9 and 10 until later on.

There are a few good places to farm endo at a mid-level. The type of farm you normally see in recruiting chat is arena mode on Sedna. Normally, those nodes on Sedna are just there to farm points, so you can fight Kela De Thayme. But with a strong setup, you can easily farm endo by using Nekros’s Desecrate and a Nidus grouping enemies together.

Outside of that though, Sorties are the only place where you get a good chunk of endo at once. While an Ayatan Anasa Sculpture or 4000 Endo does seem lame to a veteran, every little helps to the person just trying to max out their Serration mod.

Most of the endo farms are end-game content

The best endo farms are hard to reach. Arbitrations can give plenty of endo, as well as Ayatan sculptures. Other good places to farm are the Steel Path, with its constant boosts to drops, and Railjack. Railjack in particular is a pretty good all-rounder place where you can level things up, farm endo and get credits all at once, just not as efficiently as focusing on one specific thing.

But all of these places require getting quite far into Warframe. Arbitrations and Steel Path require completing every node on the star chart. While Railjack has been made way, way easier to access, it’s hard to get in to. And, ironically, you need more endo to power up your Railjack now.

A vicious circle?

We end up with some sort of paradox here though. To successfully reach Arbitrations and Steel Path, you need strong mods and thus lots of endo. But you lack the means to get endo in the first place. And you need a LOT of endo. Sure, it only costs about 10k endo to max out a Vitality mod, but that’s just one mod out of eight.

I suppose though, endo is better than the old version of fusion for mods. You used to directly fuse mods together, and with awfully high costs. The current system is cheaper and doesn’t require multiple duplicate mods. Plus, once you have a mod maxed, you don’t need to rank it up again.

Still, there’s always room for improvement. And we don’t even particularly need much improvement here. Just some easier to access endo for lower level players.