A Complete Lack of Desire to do Arbitrations

The upcoming balance update in Warframe is going to give us some new mods. While I have already talked about why I’m not a fan of those mods, the other reason I’m not a fan is because of Arbitrations. The good mods can be purchased from the Arbiters of Hexis. Thankfully, although these mods will be okay to obtain, it means doing Arbitrations. And I hate doing Arbitrations.

Now, to be fair, some things have changed. Arbitrations aren’t nearly as bad as they used to be. But I still have no desire to actually play them.

There’s a complete lack of choice.

Arbitrations happen once an hour. For that hour, you get one mission and a random warframe or weapon with a 300% buff. These are all random, but the mission type is always endless. Most of the time it’s Defense, Survival, Disruption but you do get the odd Excavation or Defection. After that hour ends, the arbitration is replaced with a new, randomly chosen one, again with randomly chosen buffs.

The random warframe/weapon buffs are per player, and you can get pretty much any weapon. The missions though are otherwise pretty standard missions, with a handful of difficulty modifiers. Defense targets are Hexis operatives, Excavators take longer to finish and life pods in Survival only give 3% life support instead of 5%. Oh, and you can’t die in these missions. If you do, your friends have to do a round of mini-Index, collecting points from dead drones to revive you.

However, once you finish the Arbitration, once you extract, you can’t do it again. You have to wait for the next one to start. If you only did a couple of rounds or waves, you might be waiting a while. But that’s assuming that the current Arbitration is one you even want to do. If it’s a shitty mission or tile set, like Defection or Lua Disruption, all you can do is wait for a better mission in an hour.

There’s even less of a choice of weapons

Okay, sure, you can use any melee weapon you want. But those little arbitration drones are little bastards. They constantly hide behind other enemies. The best way to deal with them is to use a weapon with an area of effect. But that means wasting a slot on punch-through for your weapons, or just using the same handful of weapons.

Outside of Arbitrations, even on the Steel Path, there’s much more choice, because you don’t have to worry about drones randomly making things not take damage. The drones also disrupt Warframe choices too, since the drones ignore Warframe abilities in their entirety.

The spawn rates and enemies are fucky

I don’t get why, but unless you have someone who speeds enemies up or brings them to you, the enemies just seem to trickle in. You’ll get a big puff of enemies all of a sudden, but then it turns back into a trickle.

This can be problematic, because most Vitus essence comes from dead enemies. However, if there aren’t a lot of enemies, you don’t get anything. This also causes a bit of a problem for mission types like Survival, where you need life support pods that drop from enemies. Corpus missions are particularly bad for this because Corpus prefer hanging back mostly. But you get lulls even when playing against Infested.

The only good thing Arbitrations are good for is farming Endo. However, we are kinda forced to do them, just so we can get Grendel parts and useful mods. Problem is, the drop rate on Vitus Essence isn’t really that good, and it’s easy to find yourself doing what people did to farm Steel Essence, before the Acolytes are added.

All that being said, despite Steel Path being harder than Arbitrations, it’s also… technically much easier Because there aren’t any annoying drones buzzing around.

Of course, there’s another reason why I don’t like Arbitrations. But that’s a story for another time.