Warframe, Modding and Weapons

In an effort to increase my posting, I'm going to keep hitting on Warframe a bit longer, though we are approaching the limits of experience unless you'd like an in-depth review of each weapon in the game (there are some hundred or so total, across the three main categories... at least. I myself have experience with well over a dozen at this point).

Rather than give an overview of the Excalibur (which I will), I thought I'd hit up how modding and damage works.  This is a rather complex topic, shockingly so, which is only appropriate for an MMO about shooting techno-ninjas. 

Weapons have base stats, and from what I can tell there is some effort to balance them out so that any given weapon is not, as a base, stronger or weaker than any other, though this is objectively not the case.    All weapons do damage, have rates of fire, magazine size, and crit and status chances, and we'll talk about those in turn.  For the most part, weapon damage seems to be strongly balanced against rate of fire, so that any given weapon produces roughly comparable DPS. Fast firing weapons hit weaker than slow firing weapons, etc, and two weapons of roughly equal rates of fire should hit roughly the same in terms of raw numbers, even the objectively weak starting weapons show this sort of trend line. *

However, all is not equal. Weapons, like Frames, have levels and mod slots, the higher the level the more mods you can put into the eight or so slots (all weapons have the same number), while polarities encourage or discourage certain choices. In general, a polarity slot is better than an polar-neutral slot, because it allows more powerful mods to be installed, but it can severely limit your choices if you don't have 'good' mods of that polarity.   Expanding this are 'Potatoes', officially known as Catalysts, and Forma. Potatoes can be added whenever, and buying weapons with Platinum starts them with the Potato, and should be your first choice to upgrade a piece of equipment, as they straight up double your number of mod points.  Forma is more tricky, as it resets the level (and can only be used on a maximized piece of gear) and alters the polarity of a slot to one of your choice, such as making a neutral slot polar.  Since good, leveled Mods can run well over ten Mod points (up to around 15 or so), and you have some eight slots, and a fully leveled, potatoes weapon only as 60 points, for high end play Polarity is a must, but relevelling the weapons must surely be tedious.  

Proper Modding seems to be the key to the success with a  weapon. My relative frustration with my Strun (a shotgun) is more likely due to a general lack of good Shotgun mods than a failure of the weapon itself, based on testimonials I've found online praising it (a 'starter' shotgun) as one of the best shotguns in the game.  And weapon Mods are very heavily broken down by type. All my good Rifle Mods are useless on the Shotgun, as I suspect they will by on my first Bow, despite all three weapons falling under the general category of "Primary Weapon" in the mod library. 

In order to explain how to Mod a weapon, in order to understand, it is necessary to talk Damage.

Damage can be broken into three main categories, each with subdivisions.  

There is base damage, or physical damage, which all weapons have (barring some exotic exceptions I haven't experienced yet). This consists of Impact, Puncture and Slash.  The Braton, for example, is balanced between all three types, doing a little of each (around four base, as I recall).  Among the diehards, Puncture is favored over the others, I think mostly for the 'bleed' effect it occasionally engenders, but possibly also due to enemy resistance.   That's right, even the vanilla physical damage causes status damage. 

Then you have your core elemental damage, Fire, Cold, Electricity and Poison. There are mods that provide for each of these, and a handful of weapons come with one built in.

Then you have Hybrid Elemental damage, caused by mixing two of the core elements. These include Blast (Fire+Cold), Corrosive (Poison+Electricity) and so forth.  Note that each is made up of only two elements, and with the right mods you could, in theory, get up to four hybrid elements on each weapon. The key to mixing is that the mods are read Left to Right, top to bottom, just like a book. 

Now, each elemental Mod has a percentage of damage done in elemental. This is straight bonus damage, and is calculated by the weapons' base damage (Adding the three physicals, I believe). 

Damage Mods more or less come in three main flavors: Weapon Damage (Serration for Rifles, Hornet Strike for Pistols and Pressure Point for Melee), that straight up adds to all damages (Even elemental), and generally takes a lot of work to level up, but provides massive damage increases (my 3/4 maxed Serration adds 125% extra damage, for example, so should top out around 200%, Effectively tripling my rifle damage!).   Physical damage mods (Increasing one of the IPS) and Core Elemental, with rare Mods mixing two mod traits (and being stackable with different mods with the same traits). Note that Mods are exclusive by name, not by ability, so Infected Clip (Poison damage) stacks with Toxic Barrage (Er... that's the shotgun mod rather than rifle, but the principle is the same), which increases Poison and Status.  This is where the breakdown of Damage really comes into play, as a weapon with all one damage type can get a much stronger boost from fewer Mods over a more generalized weapon like the Braton. On the other hand, Enemy resistances vary wildly (willfully denying any one type of damage primacy!), making a generalized weapon very strong when the enemy is unpredictable.  Note two that many enemies have two types of damage resistances, such as shields and flesh or armor and flesh, or the same with Machinery instead of flesh... so even against a single target there isn't truly an optimal choice.

However, if you just look at damage as numbers you are missing half the point. Status chances are like a second category of critical hits, and the nature of the status you inflict is actually somewhat important when planning your modding. 

Some, like Slash and Fire add a small but noticeable DOT to the target. Others, like Radiation and puncture debuff them slightly, making them less effective. Still others  (impact and Blast) provide a small stun effect. 

Now, one thing to keep in mind is that this game plays fast. Even boss fights rarely last a few minutes and most enemies die within fractions of a second once they've been targeted.  A DoT remains useful for finishing off an enemy that survived your attack as you moved to the next guy, but a rebuff seems pretty worthless, at least on a single target. Stuns still have use as they can 'lock up' a heavy enemy unit long enough to finish the job. 

So lets talk about the Elements, which is where things get confusing for noobs like you and me (if you ain't a noob, why are you reading me? Jesus, man, I'm probably not even playing the same game as you with my slow as shit computer and utter lack of Primes!).

The way I see it, at this noobish level of play, there isn't much call to worry overly much about speccing your gear for specific mission. First, you probably won't have enough gear to really do that until several months of play, and second, the marginal gains don't really matter until you're comfortable running a thirty wave endless defense, which you won't be.  That said:

Fire works great on flesh, and less great on everything else, but it DoTs, and that's cool. Also, I've noticed that fire mods seem somewhat more common than others. I still don't have electricity for my rifles or shotguns, but I've got fire for almost everything. 

Cold slows the enemies and seems to work well against shields, but is often denigrated by some players for being generally weak.  Hey, if you're like me and playing Lag-frame, then a slower enemy is an enemy you can actually aim at!  

Electricity is also an Anti-shield element, but one that is also strong against robotic enemies, and seems to have a stun effect, which is nice, making it slightly cooler than Cold. On the other hand, I suspect Electricity Mods don't drop until the outer planets, based on my own limited collection of them. 

Poison is another good anti-flesh power, and I believe it DoTs. I can't testify to its general rarity, as I got a nice collection of rares from the Cicero Event (one for every weapon type (bows? How do you mod Bows. I will research this, as I've built one, and get back to you...), that all had Poison as their theme, so I've been using it almost my entire game now.  

If you want full value for anything other than the raw damage numbers, you need Status, of course. Just a reminder.

The hybrid Elements are

Blast (Fire+Cold), which is a strong stun effect, but is somewhat weak due to resistances.

Gas (Fire+Poison), I'd avoid this one. Not only is it much weaker via resistances than Poison alone, but it's Status is a very small AoE effect that I can't say I've ever seen work. I can see it  being useful against infested at a choke point. Naturally, due to my mods, I actually tend to have this up a lot anyway. 

Radiation (Fire+Electricity), this seems to work well on everything, but its also a debuff power, making enemies slightly less accurate. Great for AoE spam and maybe boss fights, pointless against common mobs. 

Magnetic (Electricity+Cold): unpopular due to its weakness against heavy units and bosses, but does a number on shields

Corrosive: (Electricity+poison): Very popular for two reasons: First it is very strong (having no one resistant to it, but many mobs very weak to it), and because it lowers armor value as its status (and everything hard to kill has armor...), thus is the 'go to' element to shoot for. 

Viral (Cold+poison): This essentially does extra damage by reducing max health, but is second place to Corrosion as machinery is slightly resistant to it. 

Now, so far we're just talking more or less right off the Wiki here, but since you're reading me that means you probably struggle with some of the insider ball (is red good or bad in the chart? Bad. How does the chart work in the game?...). 

Now, lets get back to modding. Me? I'm a simple guy, I'm all for cramming as many damage mods into a gun as I can and calling it a day. This is actually a bad idea unless you've got one hell of a mod set.  As noted, upping Status is a good thing, as it gives you those neat extra effects, though recall you are getting percentage buffs, not straight numbers. Keep that in mind, every mod is a percentage mod, so the game rewards specialization. If a weapon has a low crit chance, the most powerful crit buffs will only make it slightly less crappy. If it has a high crit chance, even a low ranked crit buff mod makes you all the more crit-spammable.  I've heard that the new pistol, the Tysis, can hit 80% status chance easily, meaning that four out of every five shots will inflict Status damage.  Imagine that with two or more Hybrid Elements!   Also, most guns have a glaring weakness or two, which can be offset with Mods. The Strun, for example, has a very low ammo capacity and a very long reload time, but each shot (if well placed.... ugh..) is beastly. While trying to offset the ammo capacity is a fools game (gaining at best two more shots at the cost of both a mod slot and lots of mod points), reducing that long load time is dead simple (again: Percentages. Slow guns gain more from reload speed than fast guns.). Magazine size is a tricky issue. Generally, guns with a great capacity don't really call for modding, but they gain the most from it, while guns with shit capacity need each shot they can get, but get so very few.  Rate of fire is almost always a good call. My brand spanking new, unranked and umodded gorgon starts with a slow but steady rate of fire, equal to anything I've got but the Grakata, but spools up to an absolute beast mode (go Seahawks! Fuck yeah!) in short order. Fire speed actually reduces the spool time... and more illustratively, even a fast firing weapon gets deadlier by shooting even faster still!. 

I've noted a few weapons absolutely lack certain traits. The Sentinel weapons, for example, cannot crit, and gain nothing by adding crit chances. I'm not sure they can do status either. As far as I can tell, they never truly run out of ammo (they do have to reload, however) so increasing total amount of ammo carried is pointless.   Curiously, I noticed that adding a new element to a weapon that already does elemental damage (such as a Heat Sword) doesn't seem to hybrid that damage. However, with the Heat Sword (and the Amphis staff), the elemental damage only comes from a specific type of attack (Ground slam), and is not listed in the base damage.  I believe if the element is listed, it will hybrid with the first element added to the weapon as if it were a mod just fine. 

My point, since I've drifted, is that pure damage misses an important part of the equation.  You can't hurt someone if you're busy reloading, so if reload times are killing you, mod your weapon to reduce reload speed, or add more magazine capacity.  If a weapon (like the Vasto and Akvasto) seems to be a crit-monger, up its crit chances for maximum killy goodness. This may seem common sense, I know, but the game doesn't tell you the Vasto is a crit weapon. It doesn't tell you that putting Impact mods on a Boltor (Puncture only) is a waste of time, and you can't see the impact of a mod from the modding screen, only from the equipment screen, so you might not be looking at it. 

Lastly, there seem to be some specialty mods that do unique things. One is making arrows explosive, which seems to be less cool than it sounds due to the high end bows losing their special cool powers when explosified, and another is penetration.  It sounds a little like "armor penetration" but that's not it.   No, penetration (actually called "Punch Through") measures how many meters of obstructions you can shoot through to hit a target, to include things like railings, boxes and dead bodies that are still falling over (or for that matter: Your asshole teammates who run right in front of you, blocking your shots). I pretty much try to keep this one on at all times for two reasons: One, I can't aim for shit thanks to lag, so hitting through cover is a godsend, and two: Certain bosses seem to have special shields that, unlike the normal shields, can be punched through. I have a crap memory, so I can never tell if that boss I'm about to go kill is the right guy, so its just easier to keep the mod on (and again: Useful). Sadly, I only have the one Metal Auger, and since my DethCube Sentinel is a better shot than I am (but also stupid), I keep Metal Auger on the dethcube to maximize its killy.  Since I'm sure its putting out twice the numbers I am in any given mission this is just good sense. However, when I do tower or derelict runs the calculation returns to my favor, as my Boltor actually kills stuff, while the poor, weak Dethcube machine gun merely annoys them. 

And that's it for basic weapon modding for dummies.  My next Warframe Post will be the Excalibur, then I might return for Modding for Frames. If you catch me calling a Mod a Card, let it be, that's what the damn things look like when you're actually using them. 

*The Mk-1 Braton is nearly identical to the Braton, only it does roughly 15% less damage in every category. The Skana is identical except weaker than the Cronus. I haven't precisely determined the exact upgrade for the Lato. I moved to the Sicarus, which did similar numbers shot-for-shot, but fired three round bursts instead of slow semi-auto, a significant, if occasionally frustrating, upgrade. I suspect the similar looking Lex might be the 'stronger Lato', but have not tested this theory yet. 

Warframe, the Rhino

The Rhino is an appallingly good 'Frame, which is sort of funny. In a lot of MMO's, at least traditional ones, the 'Tank' is usually fairly pathetic, a professional sponge and little more, and requiring a healer to actually be viable.

Warframe, while an online, multiplayer game is not a traditional MMO.

The Rhino is both incredibly tough and ALSO incredibly powerful.

Lets go over the facts: The Rhino has the second highest armor value in the game, and unlike the Valkyr (number one), the Rhino also has a great base Shield value.  I'm still pretty noobish so I don't have all the best stackable mods, and some core mods aren't maxed out yet, and I still can top 1000 shields and health on my Rhino.

Curiously, I'd say that the Rhino's 'Polarity' slots seem designed for damage output, not input. At least... with the Mods I have available to me for Auras, the Rhino sacrifices to spam extra energy, but gains if he stacks on a damage boosting Aura, like Rifle Amp.  I've heard that the Rhino also naturally hits harder with melee weapons, but I've never seen any games stats that suggest one frame is better at laying smack downs than any other.

Also: The Rhino just looks cool.  Its not terribly flashy like the Oberon, but its a solid slab of muscle and armor. It is seriously the beefiest looking Frame I've seen by no small margin, easy to spot a player using one.

However, we can't truly evaluate a Frame's performance without talking about their suite of powers, so lets talk.

The first power is Rhino Charge, which is very like the Excalibur's Slash Dash. Cheap to the point of being spammable, you run forward and hit everything. Its best used as a movement power rather than a straight attack, however... that is crossing narrow, but unjumpable chasms, passing through laser gates and so forth.  Its not quite as beefy, damage wise, as Slash Dash. However, it does have some crowd control, as it knocks its targets down.  If you can aim well, supposedly the tactic is to run ALONG an enemy, rather than right at him, so you hit him multiple times.  Whatever.  I wouldn't skip this power, but I wouldn't spend a lot of energy leveling it either. Its a utility power.

The second is Iron Skin.  I'm tempted to call this power THE reason to take a Rhino, and certainly it is the most unique, signature, power the Rhino has.  Iron Skin is basically a very beefy pool of bonus Health that has to be chipped away before you start taking damage.  I've done entire missions, hard ones with lots of enemies, without having to refresh Iron Skin.  You start with fifty energy at the start of a mission, so as soon as you land, hit 2 and activate Iron Skin. Its that damn important.

No, seriously. See: In addition to more than doubling your health, Iron Skin also makes you more or less immune to crowd control. Run through a laser gate, no problem. Ignore poison, no problem. Forget being knocked down or scorpion tethered, Iron Skin ignores it all.  I did a nightmare mode run where no one had shields, but Iron Skin was still up. Honestly? If forced to chose between Redirection (The mod that boosts your shields) and Focus (The mod that boosts your powers... which I sadly do not have), I'd take Focus. Mostly my shields go unused.  

The third Power is Roar. I can't report well on Roar, because I'm a dirty noob who likes to kill shit instead of buffing, but people swear by this. Roar increases all friendly (including self) Frames to do moar damage.  I think it starts at +50% and goes to double, but I won't swear to it.  Look: This is a great power, no lie. I just don't use it. Besides, all dem power playa's running around don't seem to need it, though I can see its value in an Endless Defense once mobs start getting beefy.  If you're looking to grind, telling a potential group that you have a Rhino with a leveled Roar might get you laid, dunno.  The advantages for them is that they won't be constantly having to res you,  and you can make them tougher if you're not a spaz.

Finally we have Rhino Stomp, a power so cool that it can actually contend with Iron Skin for 'signature Move'. Its your Ultimate, and like a lot of Ultimates, its a bad-ass AoE damage dealing machine.  That factor alone keeps Iron Skin in first place for the win, as IS is unique while Stomp is merely... another cool 'kill every motherfucker in the room' sort of thing.  Stomp hits like a truck, once you've leveled  it (and you HAVE leveled it, right?), dishing out 1200 points of damage before buff mods (Like Focus...grrr...) to everything around you.  Unlike Radial Javalin (the Excalibur's Ultimate), Rhino Stomp will hit EVERYTHING around you, and to a pretty good distance. Also, unlike a few AoE killers, Stomp also knocks them off their feet and slows time. That's right, you stomp so damn hard, that Time Itself is stunned!   This means you can clean up a few really hard targets while they slowly drift to the ground in the aura of your awesome.

Look, just about every Ultimate is a killer, with the exception of the Nyx's Absorb (which is a killer on a long ass timer, meaning someone, maybe your own Sentinel, will probably have killed most of the potential targets before it goes off) and probably a few others I haven't seen yet.  Rhino Stomp is BETTER than Radial Javalin by any measure, for the same energy cost, and comparable with the Oberon's Ultimate (umm... Retribution? Gah... research! Where's my Intern?). Actually, I'm not entirely sure the Oberon's Ultimate hits as many targets (making it possibly more like Radial Javalin with cooler FX).

Now for the downside. The Rhino is NOT a caster Frame. You've got piddling energy (I think it caps at 150 without mod boosting, vs the Nyx's 300), and as noted earlier your Aura polarity doesn't support the Energy Siphon Aura. You can still equip it (and if you've got a potato on your Rhino you can afford the loss of mod slots this entails. Or Forma... changing the polarity). However, there are lots of options for energy gain in game, and if you run with a caster frame in your party you'll still get the aura benefit, making this a poor choice, I think.  Just realize that in Solo Play, you'll probably need your energy for Iron Skin, if you don't want to spam Team Energy doohickies... the lack of which cost me a solo Derelict run.

Thats... a pretty lame weakness, really.  Remember: Warframe is a shooter with cool bits tacked on.  Bring a good gun, a big axe and bring the pain the old fashioned way and you'll hardly notice how energy starved you are.

That said: It does mean that the Rhino has to pick his power use more carefully.  Casting Roar might mean skipping a vital stomp, using Rhino Charge might mean not having the energy to recast Iron Skin.  On the other hand, with overlapping energy siphon auras from friends, you can suddenly go a little nuts. I've done defense missions where my relative invulnerability let me stake out entry points and Stomp whole oncoming waves to death, and subsequently netted me the highest kill total of the run... something my lack of accuracy normally prohibits.

Before I close out I want to point out that the Armor of the Rhino makes every bit of the Rhino that much tougher. Even early on, before I could put many Mods on my Frame, and when I hadn't yet leveled my Iron Skin I noticed how much tougher the Rhino was than my Excalibur.  The Rhino is simply tough, it can't be stressed enough. This is the frame for you if you like running into the teeth of the enemy and laughing at his pathetic attempts to hurt you.

Wait? Did I say running?

Er....

Make that leisurely strolling.  All that beef is hard to move. In public games, I regularly missed out on the credit rewards for missions simply because I couldn't keep up with the other players and the mission ended while I was still racing to the extraction point.  Supposedly this also hurts in the free running, but I never found the Rhino to be that much less agile.  Maybe a little shorter on the jumping than the Nyx, but thats it.

So that's it. The Rhino in a nutshell.  Hands down this is my favorite Warframe so far, just like the Boltor is my favorite gun so far (though the Wraith Twin Vipers are a fun sidearm!). Given my lag, however, I'm not going to review guns in depth, as I can't give them the fairness they deserve.  I'd just automatically favor things with a good sized magazine and high rate of fire as that's about the only way I hit anything.

Warframe, the Nyx

So I've been playing Warframe quite a bit lately. I'm laggy as hell due to my cheap POS computer and my cheap POS internet connection, but that doesn't mean I can't tell you a bit about the game.

Warframe is a MMO shooter, in a sort of vaguely distopic future. Warframes are the powered armor worn by one faction, the Tenno, which is what you are. There are about twenty odd 'Frames, and you can pick one of three at the start.  Each warframe has its own attributes, abilities and play styles... with me so far? Good.

That brings me to the Nyx.  Its not one of the starting three, so officially it is an upgrade, though that's a sort of odd way of looking at it.  Supposedly the Nyx is hard to get, as you farm it from Infestation bosses, but given the number of advance players, even in random groups you can get the Nyx in a few hours as soon as an Infestation on a world you've unlocked (Mars, for example, seems to come up often, and with good computer you could, in theory solo your way to Mars, maybe only grouping for boss runs).  To get it you'd need a minimum of three Phorid kills (Phorid being the boss...), more if the RNG hates you. You'll also need a fair amount of Credits (easy enough to farm from the infestation missions), and some other crafting parts. If you were like me, you won't have everything you need when you first get the parts, but the really rare stuff is buyable with platinum for roughtly a dollar's worth of real money, so pretty cheap. Optionally, you keep playing with other people (do you have three friends? THen you can pretty much do everything in Warframe without ever playing with a stranger. Still, you might want to join a clan for the research and to trade mods...)

Now, actually making the Nyx will take about three and a half days. 12 hours for each component (this can be done simultaniously), and three hours to assemble them into the Nyx itself.

Note that the Nyx is not the ultimate Warframe of Doom or anything, its just the first one I ever talk about, which is why I'm talking so much about what happens in game to get there. The 'Ultimate' Warframes would be Prime war frames, though the Rhino (another easy, non-starter) is one of the most popular.

Once you have your Nyx you'll need to level it for a bit, like you do your starter frame, before you can unlock it. I'll assume you've learned about mods, leveling mods and so forth by this point.

The Nyx is an unusual frame. She's light (Frames have genders, which is an odd choice instead of letting players pick a gender and having two similar designs for each), with very little armor, but played properly she's anything but fragile. I've noticed that she also has fairly low health, but decent shields. She's a caster, which means you'll want to focus on your powers rather than run and gun play, and she's fast and nimble, for the Parkour in game.

However: For a caster, the Nyx only really has a couple of powers you really want to focus on. Of the four powers every frame has, two of the Nyx's are somewhat... lackluster.  Psychic Bolts seems like a good killer power, but while it can do some damage, and doesn't require aiming, the bolts tend to miss more than they hit. Absorb is... promblematic.  Its your 'Ultimate' power, but it's damage output is weak, and the timing sucks. I'd recommend not leveling either power until you've played with them and determined if you want to use the mod-space for something so... awkward.

Absorb DOES have one good feature, in that it renders you immune to damage for as long as its is active, which can be 15 seconds or so with some ease. That doesn't sound like a lot of time, but its more than enough time to get your shields back up and for friends to catch up to you if you're getting swarmed, and when it 'bursts' it does kill weaker enemies.  Just don't expect to get much use out of it in random games except defense missions, as the rest of the party will have long since left you behind.

Your bread and butter is Chaos.  Chaos stuns every enemy around you, then turns them on each other.  Unlike most powers in the game, it doesn't lose any power at the higher levels, and provided you aren't farming XP or worried overly much about killing every mob, its great.  Generally you spam it against large groups, and if no one interferes, half of them will be killed off by their fellows, and the survivors will be weakened.

Mind control is a cheap version of Chaos, single target. Its got one advantage over Chaos, and that's that the controlled mob will not attack you if you stray too close.  If you're energy starved (and you should be running Energy Siphon Aura for the extra mod space and the lovely, lovely energy it gives you), Mind Control can help you eliminate a hard target by making every enemy on the map see it as an enemy (and likewise, it will be attacking them back. I've used it on Corrupted Heavy Gunners in Tower 2 runs and just waited for energy to come back as mobs died taking down the gunner...).  If you're laggy, like me, then Mind Control is hard to aim and get off, though using the third mouse button can simplify things.

Curiously, with the exception of a rather nasty No-sheilds Nightmare run, the Nyx has proven somewhat more durable than my Rhino, despite being absolutely starved for Mod space in comparison. The rhino 'tanks' damage by, well, taking damage, but the Nyx tanks damage by making enemies turn on each other.

However: Never, ever, expect to see high kill and damage numbers at the end of the mission. You get no credit for the damage done by Chaos, and you lack a good spammable 'kill everything' power that almost every other warframe gets.   Trying to use Absorb for this role will disappoint you, and it seems to invite other players to abuse your aggro by coming over and AoEing the mobs you want to pop while you're waiting for Absorb to explode.  This can be especially frustrating if you're trying to collect thirty kills for a mini-mission for the bonus XP, but good weapons can offset it.

I don't see too many Nyx's running around, so it seems to me a lot of players undervalue it because of the low damage output and its relative numeric fragility.  On the other hand, I did a Mobile Defense with a second Nyx player, and with creative positioning and alternating our powers we more or less kept everyone else alive by just owning the Mobs, not that they were at huge risk.  

I suspect the Nyx shines in the Freerunning 'rank test', due to her speed and mobility, but I cannot attest to that due, in no small part, to my lag. I can't even quite run up stairs without occasionally spazzing out and falling off the map, much less handle multiple wall-runs at different angles in a row.  I may take that test on a friend's computer when it is due, just in case.  I have noticed that compared to the chunky Rhino, she does feel more nimble, almost too nimble for my machine.  While I am not constantly way behind the other players, sometimes I get left behind because I am so responsive that I wind up being unable to traverse an obstacle due to the fact that I overshoot and bounce off.

On that note, I've noticed that a number of 'wall run' paths in Warframe seem to deliberately run you into tight corners when you land, while a few others seem to force you to roll to a landing on a tiny ledge and overshoot.  For a game that want you to Freerun as much as you can, this seems an odd way to reward you.


Now: Simple advice for 'grinding' experience, or affinity as they call it.  Most people will tell you to run Defense or Survival runs, which are both good with a good, tight knit group.  The problem with Survival runs, aside from people wanting to leave as soon as possible (Ditto Defense), is that the map is big enough  and spread out enough that the high end players tend to roam off and kill solo, too far for you to gain experience from their kills.  Some defense missions seem to have this issue to. THis costs you both experience and loot drops.

Mobile Defense, however, tends to force the party to stay grouped in a single area and seems to send a similar number of mobs as several waves of Defense. I've done mobile defense runs and gotten 30+ mod drops and several midrange levels on multiple items of equipment, and the rest of the party can't really get selfish and wander off with the kills, going solo.  Well, a little on some maps, but not as bad as defense.  You're pretty much garaunteed a good six to ten minutes of hard farming on a Mobile Defense, compared to the less concentrated five minutes on Survival, or the five smallish waves in 'Endless' Defense.  For experience farming, try to find a group outside of any of the special events (Infestation, Invasions or Alerts), as anyone doing one of those is bound to do the bare minimum for credit for the mission and move on, while someone doing a Defense or Survival outside of an Event is likely to go for as long as they can, or at least 15 minutes on Survival (for the tower key), and twenty to thirty waves on Defense, which is concentrated awesome.  I've never seen a party handle more than forty waves, due to the sheer mass of health the Mobs have at that point, but from the patch notes I guess some groups regularly run to the Hundred Waves or more. Wether they'd be willing to do that with one underpowered Frame (since you are farming XP you are explicitly NOT maxed out, duh) is another question.