rhino

Rhino Prime Incoming

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Secondary Market

Rhino Prime Incoming

Once again last night I spent most of it running around with friends in Warframe.  At the moment this seems to be the new hotness among the AggroChat podcast crew, and I guess in part I am going to ride the bubble as long as it lasts.  I know like many games this one is likely to burst at some point, when either we enter the endgame grind….  or one of us tries to do something that the game doesn’t really allow for.  However in the meantime I am enjoying my space ninja action, and spent most of last night leveling “stuff”.  Another really important thing that I discovered yesterday was the trade market.  Now Tam and Ashgar had both been talking about the deals that they had been getting in trades with players, and I never really spent much time thinking about it…  that is until I realized that I was quickly becoming the only player without a prime frame.  In many ways the prime frames are just flat out better than a normal frame, and since I had already been laboring towards trying to get a Rhino, I thought maybe I would check out the potential of just bumping that up to prime.

Within a few minutes I was able to find a Prime frame for considerably cheaper than the price of the base Rhino frame on the game store.  So I guess in truth if you are willing to spend ANY money on the game at all…  you can pick up some bargains.  I know some of our crew have picked up really nice weapons…  and managed to get some freebie mods thrown in to fill out the rest of the trade window.  So for me in particular… last night was all about farming up the rest of the components I needed to craft my Rhino Prime over night.  Unfortunately when I checked in this morning I still have a few hours left to go on the build, and then 72 hours after that before I actually get to drive my frame around.  In the meantime however… I need to sort out exactly what I want to use for weapons on my stompy mech.  I love my excalibur, but there are just times where it does not seem well suited for some activities.  Mostly I feel like I need to have a solid backup for when running around like mad and slashing things with a sword is not necessarily the best idea.

Atlas Rising

Rhino Prime Incoming

The other big activity of the night was to begin work on my Atlas frame, that I had picked up some time ago… but never spent much time working on.  For the time being I have it decked out in a Braton, those starter fist weapons, and a Lex pistol…. all pretty much for the purpose of leveling them since we were running low level content.  Early in the evening we were trying to make it through Phobos, and we ended up struggling quite a bit… so it forced us all to switch back to our “main” frames for the purpose of finishing up that planet.  However after that we shifted to doing low level defense runs which are pretty amazing for leveling stuff.  By the end of the evening Altas was hovering around 14 with the weapons I think in the 16-18 range.  The big draw right now of Atlas is the rock shield ability that I can also push forward as a ball of stone to bowl over enemies.  This was absolutely amazing for “wave clear” when the Grineer were stacked up in neat little columns.  Nothing yet has beaten the pure joy of hitting the giant “Nope!” button that is Excalibur’s Radial Blind, but this comes close.

I absolutely feel like an earthbender though, and there are several of the abilities I have yet to even play with… like the ability to summon rock golems to fight by my side.  The other takeaway of the night is just how damned awesome the Braton is.  I was looking for a good light machine gun, to give me that almost destiny  like feel… and that really does it.  I also plan on building a Latron soon, because several other members of my team have had good luck with that.  From the sounds of it… the Braton is more of an Auto Rifle in Destiny terms, and the Latron would be something more like the Scout Rifle.  Both are weapons that I really enjoy, but for vastly different purposes.  The only thing I wish this game supported was the changing of loadouts while in a mission.  Because sometimes you hit situations where your weapons are just ineffective and it would greatly improve the experience to be able to swap things up planet side.  Maybe there is a way and I just have not found it, but in any case…  because I don’t think I can do it… it makes me pick more generalized builds so that if my primary is ineffective, then my secondary will work as a backup.  Regardless… I am still very much enjoying myself and looking forward to getting to play with a Prime frame.

 

Banking and Bosses

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Busy Morning

Trying to knock out a really quick blog post, because if I don’t right now I am not entirely certain when I will get the chance.  Both my wife and I are off today for the holiday, and as a result we have tried to schedule as much as humanly possible to do today.  Largely this means finally getting in to talk to the bank about refinancing our loan.  Adulting is frustrating and horrible… and hopefully it will go smoother than I have made it out to be in my head.  In a perfect scenario we will be able to do this without much hassle.  In theory it should only really be a case of someone from the bank coming to look over the house and appraise it, and after the recent renovations that should go a hell of a lot more smoothly.  I mean we have a relatively new roof and very new siding, so the house has looked better than it has in years.  All of that said… there is still so much anxiety for me anytime you are dealing with finances and banks and such.

After that I have this feeling that we are going to run around looking at dish washers.  For whatever reason… it is suddenly a big deal to my wife that we have a non-functional dish washer.  Don’t get me wrong I understand, I hate washing the dishes but for reasons entirely different from probably hers.  When you are 6’4″ they simply do not make a sink that is comfortable to stand at, and by the time I finish washing dishes my back is killing me from stooping over the sink.  Why it is suddenly a crisis is the part that I am not quite understanding, because the thing has been dead for several years now.  All of that said…  if she wants a new dishwasher we are getting a new dishwasher.  I know she has looked at a couple of them, and I know she wants my input…  but basically whatever one she wants I am completely happy with.  I just hope this one I can actually figure out how to use…. because the last one…  every time I seemed to run a load of dishes something horrible went wrong.

Boss Farming

Banking and Bosses

It was fairly late by the time I finally filtered downstairs and got set down, and by then a bunch of my friends were in Warframe so I decided to join them.  We spent the next hour and some change farming a boss mission trying to get myself and Thalen the last pieces of the Mag Warframe that we needed.  Unfortunately…  we didn’t have much luck.  It seems that through killing planetary bosses you have a chance of getting parts to drop to a specific type of warframe.  The boss in question was at the end of Mars, and drops all three parts of the Mag frame.  I am not really sure why we cared so much about it, other than the fact that we both had all but one part… and it was the same part we were missing.  I am in that same position with Rhino, and that is a mech I am far more likely to use.  But whatever the case we were wrapped up in the moment of killing stuff for loot, and I have to say… we walked away with a bunch of awesome stuff.

If nothing else… it was a great source of the various crafting materials needed to create mechs.  There is a single piece that I am missing for a couple of helmets that I will need to track down at some point.  I also had plenty of materials to craft a bunch of weapons, including two new swords, a new bow, and a set of fists for me to use on my Rhino frame.  Right now I am really liking the moment to moment feel of this game, and it seems to be the ideal drop in and hang out type co-operative experience.  The question will be how long it takes for one of us to get super serious about the game, because this feels like the sort of game that is fun to play casually… but deeply frustrating to play seriously.  There is one mission type that I absolutely hate, and that is the sneak up and capture the target type mission.  I never can seem to get in close enough to them to keep from triggering them to make a run for the escape vessel.  Then when they start running… I am simply not fast enough to take them down before they get away.  There is one mission that I tried four or five times yesterday and never seemed to be able to finish successfully.  Other than that mild frustration… I am enjoying pretty much every other mission type I have done.