Rushing Warframes Is Kinda Lame
So apparently Dante is a lot of fun. Dante in this case being the new Warframe released in Dante Unbound, the most recent Warframe update. The archivist Warframe has an exalted book and a ton of cool features, including some ghostly owls and the ability to create vast, vast amounts of Overguard, which is basically overshields except way better. Honestly, Overguard pisses all over overshields and frames that rely on overshields, but that’s not the topic of this article. Today, I want to talk about Warframe build times, while I patiently wait for Dante to finish cooking in my foundry.
Building a Warframe takes ages. Like, three and a half days. Literally three and a half days. Technically it takes ever so slightly longer, if you include the time to log in, claim the Warframe components and then click on the Warframe blueprint itself to build the actual Warframe. The components all take 12 hours to build, but the Warframe takes 3 days to be made. An agonizingly long time. Especially when all your friends have already got the new Warframe and are screaming at you telling you how good it is.
The thing is, you can rush all this. For a small fee, you can instantly finish pretty much any item in the foundry and skip the waiting time. But it’s kinda expensive to do so. Each component costs 25 Platinum to rush and the Warframe itself costs 50 Platinum to rush. So you’re looking at 125 Platinum to instantly get a Warframe after you’ve farmed all the parts. Sure, the Platinum cost does slowly drop over the course of the build time, but not by much. By the time the rush price becomes reasonable, you might as well just wait for it to finish.
I’ve only ever rushed one Warframe, and that was Nezha Prime. And that wasn’t because I particularly liked Nezha, it was because I was trying to reach True Master as soon as possible. I ended up fucking that up anyway because I failed the Mastery Test the first time round (thanks to getting stuck in a loop of respawns – it’s actually nearly failed multiple MR tests for me in the past) but otherwise I would have had to wait 3 days rather than 1 day. Was it worth it? Yeah, probably. Fun fact, my W key actually broke WHILE I was doing the MR30 test for the second time, but I managed to finish it with 50% life support remaining.
The alternative is to just buy the Warframe with Platinum from the market, but, well, they’re pretty expensive too. Most Warframes cost over 300 Platinum. The only real exceptions are the starter frames, which cost 75 Platinum each. But they’re only cheap because they’re starter Warframes. And considering how easy the starter Warframes are to obtain, that 75 Platinum is kinda only just worth it. That being said, if you rush a starter Warframe, then flat out spending Platinum from the market is actually cheaper, since it also comes with an Orokin Reactor.
Honestly, I don’t mind the 12 hour wait for components. It’s the three long days to build a Warframe proper. Everything else in Warframe, from weapons to pets to ships, takes at most 24 hours to build. So why do Warframes take 3 days? Why not two days? I mean, I get it, they want Platinum, they want us to buy Platinum to rush things and spend money, but 3 days is just so damn long. Really, it’s the only mobile-game-micro-transaction downside holding Warframe back these days. They’ve reduced craft times in the past, I don’t see why they can’t do the same here.
In the meantime though, I’m still just going to wait. There’s a reason why I’m sitting on a mountain of credits, Platinum and Endo, and it’s because I’m patient.