The Easy Way of Leveling up Archwings – 3 Reasons why Salacia is the best Archwing mission.

Archwing is a very hit-or-miss game mode. While a lot of Archwing stuff has been tied up in other game modes, the solo Archwing experience is not particularly popular. With only a handful of nodes, there is often no real reason to play Archwings more than once. However, there is a LOT of Archwing gear that needs leveling up, and if you want plenty of mastery, then leveling Archwings up becomes a bit of a chore. You can’t reliably level up on Railjack missions, since your Railjack tends to suck up all the kills and mastery. The open worlds are no good at all for Archwing because everyone seems to have anti-aircraft missiles strapped to their backs. However, not all hope is lost.

On the plus side, there is one place where Archwing affinity is slightly easier to obtain. If you want to do anything regarding leveling up Archwing gear, then there’s one node that you really should visit. And that node is Salacia, the Archwing mission on Neptune.

But why is it so good?

The only real place that gets traffic

Okay, to be fair, the node isn’t great. It’s a Mobile Defense mission. However, the mission is a bit simpler, you don’t need to pick up a data mass. Instead, you just, well, fly towards the defense targets. They activate as you get close, you protect them while the timer ticks down an that’s pretty much it. Conveniently, all the enemies fly to you so you can kill them, rather than having to chase enemies around in an Exterminate or something.

More importantly, unlike most other Archwing Nodes, Salacia actually does get people randomly playing this node. So you don’t always have to play Salacia solo, if you’re not comfortable enough. It might not get the same amount of traffic as places like Helene and Hydron, but Salacia really is the best we have. And the more people in a mission, the more enemies that spawn, meaning you get extra affinity without too much work.

Amesha makes Salacia even easier

There is however a way to make Salacia into a cakewalk. All you need is an Amesha Archwing, built from components in the Tenno Lab. The Archwing itself isn’t that cheap to build, butt even having a single Amesha on your team really does make the mission mindless.

Basically, you create a Benevolent Decoy (Amesha’s second ability) and just watch all the enemies fire at that instead of the defense target. You can also stack Benevolent Decoys on top of each other, the same way Frost does with Snow Globe. However, Benevolent Decoy is much more powerful, as it distracts enemies and heals whoever is nearby. Also, recasting Benevolent Decoy in the same spot massively increases its range AND duration! In fact, with a bit of duration, you can make Benevolent Decoy last longer than the defense target.

Easy Steel Path kills

The best thing however is that Salacia is available on the Steel Path, with increased enemy levels AND increased spawn rates. More spawns are always a good thing, because you get more affinity. This applies to Steel Path Archwing as well. Okay. sure, you can’t level up normal weapons here, but playing Salacia does mean you don’t need to buy Gravimags for ground-based Archwing.

Finally, if you are looking to do the Nightwave task to kill 1000 enemies on the Steel Path, Salacia counts for this task as well. But there’s one crucial change: Enemies in Steel Path Archwing missions don’t have the massive shield and armour buffs found on the rest of the Steel Path. Which means that this mission is actually easier than even the Steel Path missions on Earth.  With only a moderate setup and not even a handful of Forma, you can quite easily take on this mission, as long as you have your Amesha equipped.

So there we have it, three reasons why Salacia is so good. It’s simple and kinda lame, but Salacia is the only place we really have for Archwings.