Warframe: Sisters of Parvos update shakes things up for the better

In the weeks leading up to Warframe’s Sisters of Parvos update, there was a bit of a divide within the community due to the upcoming balance changes and changes to the late game grinding methods. Rebecca Ford and Pablo Alonso from the Digital Extremes team went over these polarizing changes coming to Warframe in a 20-minute video.

The biggest takeaways from these changes came in the form of a universal nerfing to three melee mods: Blood Rush, Condition Overload, and Fury. For a quick run-down, these mods scaled extremely well into the late game, keeping melee weapons on par with extremely high-leveled enemies. Only a handful of primary weapons were able to keep up while most became peashooters.

In order to bridge the power gap between primary and secondary weapons to melee, there were brand new “galvanized” mods introduced for these weapons. They’re like the Stalker Acolytes mods in that you have to complete a certain condition for a secondary, powerful effect to take place. For example, Galvanized Chamber is an altered version of the rare mod, Split Chamber. It acts the same as its base counterpart, but has a condition in which if you kill an enemy, you get an additional 30% multishot for 20 seconds, which stacks up to 4 times, bringing the power of the multishot above 200%.

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All primary and secondary weapons will be able to have arcane enhancements equipped too. Like kitguns, they are these auxiliary mods that bring up the power of the aforementioned weapon classes even further.

I like the additions of these kinds of mods to bring weapons up to snuff with the meta, but I feel this is only a temporary bandage to the balancing solution. Personally, I would have wanted just a flat out primary and secondary weapon buff or all mods across the board to have gotten buffed. I’m not too much of a fan of nerfs in a PvE game unless there’s some kind of game-breaking exploit or synergy where you can power through the toughest fights with no effort.

Secondly, farming for Steel Essence has become a bit harder for many because players would come in with resource boosters and Smeeta Kavats to dramatically increase pickup counts. To offset endurance farming, Stalker Acolytes will spawn more frequently and earned essence in Incursions will increase.

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Onto the actual update that dropped in early July, though: the ‘damages’ aren’t even as bad as many had anticipated. In order to obtain a lot of these new components, you do need Steel Essence and another late-game component called Vitus Essence. However, their acquisition costs are reasonably cheap.

This is what I wanted to praise Digital Extremes the most with this update: finding a good balance between grinding and progression. Sure, we got a plethora of new weapons and a new frame, but the grind is actually very bearable. As an endgame player, farming for the new Sisters of Parvos weapons doesn’t feel like a drag anymore, along with farming Kuva Liches. The murmur farming was a tedious chore, but getting the unlocked requiem sequences has been noticeably streamlined. On top of that, there is a new universal requiem mod called Oull that makes Lich/Sister hunting much easier. Matchmaking also heavily improved with this aspect of the game, making farming groups more accessible.

The integration of defeating your Lich or Sister in a Railjack Assassinate mission is also really neat. As we are slowly gearing up in the next big chapter of Warframe— hopefully in the form of The New War— we’ll be using our railjacks more and more. They’ll have more uses and will get the quality of life updates needed to where it can become a core part of the game.

Onto other tidbits of content in this update include the fan-made Yareli Warframe, new mission variants into Railjack missions, and Ergo Glast vendor items. As of writing this piece, Yareli has undergone significant balance changes because she was underperforming. Hopefully she will be put into a place where her kit will be on par with the stronger frames.