Farming Ivara was disappointing
If you know anything about Digital Extreme’s Free 2 Play hit, Warframe, then you might know that the game itself is largely centered around serving the true many-faced god: RNGesus. RNGesus is the god of random chance, and Warframe is a looter-shooter where acquiring new gear is entirely based on random chance.
I started playing the game a few months ago and have racked up 179 hours of in-game play (not steam hours). That certainly doesn’t make me an expert, at all, but I feel I’ve had a decent sample of the early gameplay.
For a while now, I had my sights set on the Ivara Warframe, who for an early player is not the easiest to acquire. The parts to construct the frame only drop from the oft-dreaded spy missions which require stealth and hacking ( a sort of puzzle minigame).
After not meeting with much success for the last two bits to build her, I decided to pause that objective and farm another stealthy frame, Loki, to make it easier to get Ivara.
The problem is, Loki is awesome. Probably one of the most fun stealth frames in the game. In fact, there is a movement inside of Warframe called “The Loki Master Race” because there are seriously very few negatives about the frame. In fact, almost any mission type becomes trivially easy with a 0 Forma Loki.
Forma is a way in Warframe to make the frame more powerful. To give you an idea, my Mag frame (I love Maggie, she’s awesome) has 3 Forma just to be useable. Not to mention having some expensive mods.
My Loki? I kind of passed out on my keyboard after building him, then woke up with 4 million credits, Ivara blueprints, and 3 Sortie Missions finished.
I hate Loki, because Loki just takes over your play experience. All other frames seem horrendously underpowered and poorly designed next to Loki. With even a mediocre build, Loki is basically perma invisible. With a halfway decent melee weapon, you can just go invis, and use your melee to slice unalerted enemies to pieces. Even high-level enemies, they just stand there, confused.
Ivara is the opposite of Loki. Her invisibility is conspicuously trash. You can’t run while invisible, you can’t fire your weapon (unless you have a suppressor which is a wasted slot), you can’t do spin or slide attacks.
Not only that, but Ivara has two types of invisibility, both of which suck. She also has a convoluted “Arrow” menu (with the choices of Sleep Arrow, Dashwire Arrow, Cloak Arrow and Noise Arrow). The problem is, most of Warframe is a “horde shooter”, that is normally you’re blasting your way through hordes of enemies. So futzing with the arrow menu is pointless, and the noise arrow is about as stupid an ability as you can imagine.
Because everything in Warframe is based on percentages, completing a level as fast as possible is almost always the better course of action. Many people just blast through spy missions, crashing through laser alarms, and hacking the consoles as fast as possible. The reason for this is that most rewards have such a small chance of dropping, you’re probably going to have to repeat this mission 10, 20, or up to 70 times for a guaranteed drop.
Ivara is supposed to be a Huntress and Sneaky Spy — me likey — but in reality she’s just crap for it. So far. There are some high level mods for Ivara (like the ability to pass through lasers) that make her a bit better. But who cares? Just take Loki.
The Sleep Arrow is an interesting power, putting your enemies to sleep gets you a stealth kill bonus. But those stealth kill bonuses begin to stack, allowing you to get up to 500% more XP. Awesome — except Equinox also has a sleep ability, and it’s way better. There’s even a specific configuration for Equinox that players have lovingly named: Sleepquinox.
It peeves me off. I totally fell in love with Ivara, but I was really let down to see how horrible her powers are to start off.
I am going to keep trying to use Ivara, because I think she’s one of the coolest looking Warframes, and she has great “character”. I also prefer Bows, even though in Warframe Bows basically suck — a lot. But that doesn’t change the fact that I was really let down. Farming Loki was easy, and he was easy to build. But farming and then building Ivara was not. I was totally underwhelmed.
