The Abyssal Zone is not Scary

Abyss of Dagath has been a massive update, and there’s plenty of stuff I want to write about. And I will be writing a lot about the update in the next few days. But there’s one thing bothering me. There is a new material required in order to build the new Warframe, Dagath, but th mission required to obtain it is kinda weird. It’s called the Abyssal Zone and I want to talk about it.

So, basically, the Abyssal Zone is an Exterminate with Orokin Vault-like debuffs. The mission starts off as an ordinary Exterminate mission in a slightly darkened Grineer galleon orbiting Ceres. As well as murdering Grineer, you need to collect a Defixios (one per player) and bring it to extraction. Holding a Defixios gives you a debuff and forces you into secondary or melee weapon only. NPCs scattered in the mission will show you an area where a Defixios is located on your minimap, but you can stumble into them quite easily. Once you kill everyone and deliver a Defixios to extraction, that’s it, mission is over.

However, despite what NPCs in the mission say, this mission isn’t scary in the slightest. The Grineer enemies are completely unbothered by the glowing red canisters that are scattered around the level. The friendly NPCs that pop up seem absolutely terrified, despite there being nothing scary in the mission. Sure, carrying a Defixios gives you a debuff, but the debuffs are no worse than using Dragon Keys. Oooh, so scary, having your energy drain, or your ammo deplete or whatever. For a mission that’s in the Abyssal Zone and is where you get resources for the big scary Warframe Dagath, it’s not scary! At the very least, they could have made the rooms darker or added some bloody streaks or something, like in Chains of Harrow.

In fact, the ‘scariest’ thing is when the game starts spamming Eximus enemies at you if you start taking too long. But Eximus enemies aren’t scary, they’re just annoying.

You can’t just enter the mission normally though. You need a key. Or rather, an Abyssal Beacon, bought for 5k standing from any of the six standard Syndicates. Normally I wouldn’t like this, but 5k standing isn’t that much if you already have a couple of syndicates maxed out. If you join a squad, only the host spends their beacon, but constantly rearranging the mission host isn’t worth the standing saved, and you don’t get extra Vainthorns for being in a squad. Again, it’s annoying, but it’s not scary.

What’s more annoying is how many times you need to run this mission. You get 6-8 Vainthorn (8-12 on Steel Path) per mission, and you need 182 Vainthorn for both Dagath and her weapon. I’m personally waiting for a resource booster to start properly farming for Dagath. It’s definitely not the worst farm, there are far, far worse Warframe farms out there. But it IS repetitive, and can be ignored completely once you have all the Vainthorn you need.

At least it’s easy. The enemies are level 50 so you can’t just take an unranked Warframe or unmodded weapons in and not expect to take heavy damage, but the mission is 99% normal murder. It’s no harder than missions on Sedna, although I am surprised the node was added to Ceres of all places. And it’s the standard Grineer galleon tile set so you can get through the mission quite quickly. However, considering this is supposed to be the Abyssal Zone, I expected it to be a lot scarier.