Update 14 is here currently for the PS4 players, offering a massive overhaul of many missions, adjustments, and a new player experience 2.0. If you are curious of a more detailed overview of that, follow the forum notes here. A blessing is the melee combat, It has more purpose, and makes sense. Channeling its own mod for weapons, making it easier to build a weapon based on up to three mod slots as per usual. Furthermore, The sword and board, or the Silva & Aegis, being the first of its kind, was introduced which I will touch on a little bit during this coverage.
For one thing, you get a ship named the Liset. Sort of like the Firefly, but smaller, and features a Ai named Ordis. It took a small cup of water to get used to the whole user interface at first, specially if you are a veteran to Warframe already, with a gamepad, it was silky smooth to navigate to and from planets, and find missions with handy icons.
A new chain of missions named Quests have been also introduced within the games codex. These quests in general grant you access to Mirage, as well as the Kubrow. The Kubrow are used like Sentinels, however are more like tamagotchi pets. You must upkeep them, play with them, and even take them for walks (joking on the walking part). There is 4 different types of this beast breed currently.
Huras, being the stealthy type granting its master a cloak to sneak by most targets if things get frisky. Raksa being an supportive defensive type who casts Fear like ability much like Nerkos, plus revives shields to you. Sahasha being a sort of Carrier hybrid of sorts (Dig ability gains you a random item, like ammo), offering a pretty strong finisher that sometimes bootlegged most of my kills. Then finally there is Sunika, who is stealthy, helping hold down targets mostly, and doing some fairly good damage.
A new event brought into this patch is called Hive, which is a sort of extermination, related to the planet to Eris, an all infested controlled zone. With an easy easing difficultly curve to it, where someone who at least has a survival build can zerg this whole thing easily. As I gained rank, and got a better score (which is 0-48) things got more challenging, and hectic. I feel more modes like this should be kept if it’s not already. The whole time I saw a mixture of the following: Teamwork. Which is sort of rare in the other modes as it seems. While you got strict pvp modes where most folks do act like a unit, you have these open PVE based modes where others barely even realize they are in a 4 player co-op game, rushing to the exit. Where in this, I was blown away, because it was more of a team effort in the harder aspects.
A few new weapons got introduced, but one that really appealed to me was the Silva & Aegis.
A sword and shield as stated before it offers quite a bit of interesting elements as a weapon. For one point you may lob the shield around(think Captain America). Then you have your standard hack and slash moves with a few fancy maneuvers. Granted it is not as damaging as other weapons in the game, it provides some good defensive ideas. It is primitively a Fire based weapon, making it great for infected enemies, as you would guess. Its blueprint can be found via Dojos, in the Tenno Lab. It’s more balanced for being a suppression in crowd control. It’s an awesome looking weapon, if you enjoy playing the tank role in most mmorpgs, this might be nostalgia. I tinted the weapon with some lime green flames, and ran around with my new favorite character.
A charming new addition has crossed my eyes, in the name of Mirage.
She has a very fun play style that works for fast paced players. Her Abilities are: Hall of Mirrors, Sleight of Hand, Eclipse, and Prism. A personally enjoyable Warframe to run with, sporting a sort of stage presence, her move set is colorful, and fun to watch unfold on packs of enemies. She has two off set play styles where she does not flack as hard on ether side, depending on what you are aiming for. While her Prism Ability is not quite as strong after enemies hit thirty five-ish plus, it packs a punch for beginning to mid game content in the conclusion of it all. Slight of Hand was another ability I popped whenever I saw a turret near by if things got hairy in Tower Extermination. I found that enemies never really became interested in any of the lockers, so I just popped the ability when I knew a would be trap was near by. Her stats are a little low, only having a impress speed advantage over most of the Tennos in the game. If you want a example, think Loki, and Nova. Her wall running was very impressive to boot. I soon used weapons which had massive wall run, giving her an very fun arsenal. Weapon parings I could consider favorable is fast weapons, such as AK-, and for a main weapon, go with the Dread, or Paris Prime. An apparently popular weapon to use with her is the Quanta. As you can duplicate her four more times, each duplicate dealing 20% of her overall damage(Hall of Mirrors). I found tossing Prism around like a dodge ball of disco chaos was a solution that helped a lot of the time, then noticed the enemies took longer to kill then normal. I usually have the Intensify Mod equipped for such abilities to give it that extra flare in damage, but it still was not as strong. So I sat down and experimented with reasons why, as the other ability hinted to me Eclipse, her damage boost comes from light, or well lit areas. So the small and semi effective light bulb lit up in my head to use it in super well lit rooms, like in Tower missions, which is usually lit better then any Walmart I have visited. I tossed on Range, and then some Duration, which the most of Duration I applied was 45%, because if I only toss the ability out then pop it. Popping it, or canceling it out causes a sort of flash ability stunning enemies. I found this pretty effective in most capture missions as well. Over tweaking, and building her for survival. She became a running, and gunning powerhouse that offered everything I enjoy in the game. Good Crowd-Control, solid damage, a great presentation in casting spells, providing that effect she is a stage performer, like suggested in her quest. By far one of the most fun characters to play next to Nyx for me.
In closing:
Update fourteen helps the games progress of being one of the most addicting, and fun to play third person co-op games in the free to play market. Cleverly adding itself to Xbox One as of recent. So if you have the patience like many of the community members in the game, you can earn Mirage with her interesting quest chain. Or fork out the dough and buy her outright. Personally it places hours into the game just to experience said chain. One issue I do have is the time frame you wait for to build characters, consisting of three days, I understand the applied elements of realism, but all I do hear is complaints from community members about this. Lets hope they can adjust the time a little lower. Mirage is a fantastic addition to the game’s on going warframe family. Her abilities are pretty balanced to the ratio of downtime, and even cost to me. I can not wait to see what update fifteen provides for us in the future.
The scores for the update, and Mirage are:
Mirage 9.5/10.0 Update: 9.0/10.0
A big humble thank you to the Digital Extremes team for allowing me to touch down on behalf of this coverage again, and do wish to cover more of this game in its future developments.
