Six months ago, I complained that thanks to Saya's Vigil being required to unlock Venus, brand new players have now met a sentient long before Natah, which strips away some of the mystery. If someone asks "What's an eidolon anyway?" or even just pays attention to the ingame lore, the question of "what the hell were the Orokin scared of?" evaporates and the dramatic tension of Natah is gone.

Now, Heart of Deimos is required to unlock Ceres. Which is long before you get access to Stolen Dreams. So now when Maroo says "Oh, the Orokin? They're all dead and nobody knows shit about them", the player has gotta respond "Actually, I met a whole family of Orokin last week. They're on Deimos, the planet you yourself frequently visit to look for Ayatans."

In other weird starchart progression changes, we now have the fact that you don't have to fight Lech Kril at Mars. But you do have to fight him and Vor at Ceres. So when Lotus says "your two biggest enemies have teamed up", "uhhhhh, what enemy? Who the hell is Lech Kril? This boss is so confusing, how do I damage him? I'm unfamiliar with the concept of his frost armour because I didn't get his lore on Mars."

The new player experience is getting weirder and weirder and I'm having to work overtime to smooth over the cracks for my friends. I have a friend who's newly getting into Warframe, and since I can no longer rely on Stolen Dreams to introduce the Orokin prior to Heart of Deimos, I made sure to tell them about the mysterious ancient orokin to appropriately tease the lore. But I'm sure they'll still have absolutely no context for what they're experiencing when they do the quest. Warframe is getting more confusing.

Her name is Emma Martello and she also voices Master Teasonai and Rell. Fantastic performances on all three. Especially Rell, that quest is great.

I was reading Warframe reddit threads about opinions on the setup of Cavia standing, and I saw an opinion that was taken as a given that I disagree with. People said that it's easier to max daily standing with Necralisk and Z****** than with Cetus and Fortuna, because the token system lets you bank a week's worth of standing in one go and then cash in the standing limit of tokens day by day.

The point I want to make isn't applicable to Cavia, but on that one technical point, I disagree. It's easier to max standing with Cetus than with Necralisk. Now, I say this being at rank 4 with Necralisk and rank 3 with Ostrons, but that's only because I like the infested better than the grineer (And I had to get a necramech for New War). In terms of ease, Cetus wins.

Today I put on a podcast, went out to the plains at night, and maxed my daily standing in 20 minutes. I did so through conservation. The place was crawling with vasca kavats and other animals. It was easy. I didn't have to pause my podcast to look through menus, I didn't have to wait for dialogue, I didn't have to run out timers with extractors or Latrox. I just shot two dozen animals and went home. Also, that's even with it being harder than normal because my right click is on the fritz.

Conservation is as easy on the drift as it is on the plains. Easier, actually, because infested tend to get close and personal real quick and then stop spawning, while Grineer are constantly patrolling and shooting you from a distance. But on Deimos, conservation doesn't reward standing directly. You have to trade tags in to Son, and you can only get so many tags at once. After that, you have to wait. You can't just bang out all your standing in one go, you get a slow drip feed of standing tokens. On Deimos, it's more efficient to just run missions for Mother. But in Cetus, you can mostly ignore the bad guys and get your daily standing done inside half an hour.

I understand what they do mechanically. But what ARE they? They're clearly rings attached to the strike of the zaw with weird special properties. Are they some kind of powerful technology? A mystical focus? How on earth do they affect damage and crit chance? How do rings attached to a sword make it swing faster?

My partner is playing through The Deadlock Protocol right now in preparation for playing the new update content, and I'm watching. And Eudico called Nef Anyo a narcissist. For those who aren't plugged into disability discourse, "narcissist" is a slur for people living with NPD, or narcissistic personality disorder. It's a crippling disability caused by having been abused as a child. I understand Granum calling Nef a slur, because Granum sucks. And there's a cool dramatic irony in there that if Nef is a person living with NPD, it's obviously Granum's fault for being a deadbeat dad. Granum is insulting himself by using a slur, and that's good writing. But Eudico using a slur is bad writing. It took both me and my partner right out of the story and made us feel disappointed that even the worker's solidarity faction in warframe can't avoid using mental health terms as insults. If anyone should be avoiding that behaviour, it's Solaris United. It's depressing.

Anyone else having trouble with finding synthesis targets? Lately I look around in my synthesis scanner and most of the trails leading to the target are missing. It's fine at the beginning of the mission but as time goes on they start disappearing. I look in places I remember seeing a trail before and it's gone.