I Don’t Know How To Mod Any More

In my absence from playing Warframe regularly, something has happened. It seems that my weapons are weaker than they used to be. Or, rather, they don’t go as far as they used to. Over the years, enemy balance hasn’t changed that much, but there is more and more content that starts at higher levels and there are more enemies that can ignore you. Eximus in particular are immune to most forms of crowd control, and are harder to bring down. As for me though, I haven’t really reacted to these changes, and am still using the same old gear.

Now, I do know the modding basics, stuff such as elemental damage mods are way better than standard damage mods. Modding for Puncture and Impact are basically pointless, while modding for slash does work, but only really if you go for Hunter Munitions and back it up with elemental damage. I also know that flat damage mods don’t play nicely with each other, and there’s no reason to stack Serration and Heavy Caliber for example. But it seems that I may be missing a few things. And no, it’s not Forma. My best weapons have Forma in them, like any normal Warframe player should.

One thing that has run away from me is melee, which is now a bit different. The meta is more focused on doing heavy attacks rather than just spamming melee, and some melee weapons have gone out of favour. Maiming Strike and whip weapons like the Atterax are long dead, to the point that whip attack combos are unfinished. After that, I went into Zaws with Exodia Contagion, which was also meta for a bit. It did eventually get nerfed, however, I never really moved on. But with melee 3.0 (or rather, 2.9, since whips are still broken), I never really caught on with heavy attacks. The other new meta is Glaives and Secondaries, the one time you can use a melee and a secondary at the same time. This was supposed to expand to all one-handed weapons, or at least to one-handed swords, but that never arrived and I just never liked using Glaives. Now, I’ve basically fallen out of the meta, and I kinda just stick to spamming melee, as ineffective as it can be sometimes. Still, I’m missing a few things.

The other things I missed were Incarnon weapons. These weapons evolve over time and change forms after completing something simple, like getting head shots. I missed Incarnons the first time round, as they were released with the Zariman update, and never got around to, well, buying them. We got Incarnon addons for many common weapons with Duviri and the Steel Path Circuit, but since you need to kill Orowyrms to unlock them, I never bothered. I found Duviri too unstable for my laptop, and didn’t want to risk freezes and crashes.

Well, it turns out, I am missing a few more things, literally. I’m missing out on Galvanized mods, Archon mods and Archon Shards (although they’re more for Warframes) and a bunch of new Arcanes. The Galvanized mods in particular give massive buffs to weapon damage, even if they are initially weaker than their normal variants. Yet I never got around to farming these mods.

On the flip side, at least they’re not 100% required for the type of gameplay I’m currently into. As long as I can do most of the game’s content, I’m fine. While I don’t have an easy one-shot-kill weapon for Archon hunts, and I can’t really do endurance on Steel Path, I think I’m okay. And no matter what, I can at least do normal Warframe content. But still, I should start farming for these missing mods and arcanes. I have some catching up to do.