Grakata actually has pretty good crit stats too:

Physical Damage 9
Crit Chance 25.0%
Crit Damage 200%
Status Chance 20.0%

Compared to Soma:

Physical Damage 10
Crit Chance 30.0%
Crit Damage 300%
Status Chance 7.0%

Soma is clearly going to win out on raw DPS on crits, but it isn't available until Rank 6, and like I said, the status effects seem like they might be fun to play around with even if you have the Soma.

If I had it all to do over, I would have built a Grakata right away as my first go-to primary, even if it's butt ugly.

Yeah, that Grakata does sound pretty nice. I saw someone with it a while ago, thought it seemed pretty awesome, and got the name from them, but then promptly forgot about it and moved on to other weapons.

I'm pretty spur of the moment when it comes with weapons, and just whatever I'm having fun with... min/maxing be damned!

Bronco Prime is a secondary weapon. Boar Prime is the primary shotgun you want. I haven't looked closely at how it compares against the Drakgoon, but people have said the Boar Prime is better.

I've only shied away from shotguns because I like to use Carrier so much, and I don't want to have to duplicate every shotgun mod. I guess alternatively, I could put Dethcube's rifle on Carrier when I'm using a shotgun, but I also find the shotgun mods to be more limited and disappointing than rifle or pistol mods.

The nicest thing about the Bronco Prime is that uses pistol mods, which eliminates mod duplication and also gives you better mods to work with like Lethal Torrent and Hornet Strike. The downside is that it's semi-auto, and doesn't sound nearly as sweet as the Boar Prime (seriously love the sound of that thing). FWIW, my instinct is that the Boar Prime will beat out the Sobek for DPS [edit: looking at the stats, I'm not so sure] and for looking/sounding amazing.

The downside of both is the lack of polarity slots. I'm 4 formas in on Bronco Prime, and I have plans for one more. But it's going to be a pretty sick build, and it's a great compliment to the Soma.

Yeah, I swap Carrier with either Dethcube's rifle or the shotgun, depending on what type I'm currently using. You are right, the mods for Shotgun's are lacking a bit in variety.

I still haven't found a secondary I like as much as the Dual Gremlins, those things are sick as hell. I'll have to give the Bronco Prime a try though. I just love the idea of dual SMG's spitting out an insane number of rounds very quickly.

In either case, .

After some reading and video watching, it seems like the Hek is the shotgun of choice among the available primary choices.

Given that the Bronco Prime is for all intents and purposes a pocket Hek with better mods, if you really want to run a shotty, you'd probably be better off modding up a Bronco Prime and using it as your primary and running some exotic primary as your secondary like a bow or a sniper rifle. You'd also have the advantage of having a really formidable secondary to go with your Soma/Synapse/Ignus.

Agree that the Gremlins are amazing in a very straightforward balanced way, which is kind of what you want from a secondary IMO.

Except I've Forma'ed Rhino 3 times... ugh. They need to allow you to transfer some Forma's over or something. Or maybe I should just stop forma'ing non-prime frames.

So I purchased the Braton rifle for 25k credits. Anything else I should spend my credits on right now? I have about 70k.

So far, with the online multiplayer, I've had the most fun with the one defense/wave mission I've done. The other ones with higher up players, they blast through the level and I feel like I'm playing catch up instead of exploring and playing. Last one I did was the Vor assassination mission and I think by the time I caught up to them at the end I had picked off about 4 bad guys they had left behind. Never saw the guy who had to be assassinated and ultimately don't get many rewards or anything from the level.

Is there any value in playing these levels solo? Or do you lose potential good drops when you do?

Nah, hold on to your money, you're going to spend A LOT on fusing mods.

You can play solo, only reason not to is it can make some missions take longer (although depending on your setup, it can make some mission types quicker as well). XP gains would be slower going solo as well, since there is no XP split, so more kills = more xp.

Just to say, my Grakata is a beast. Raw dps it is not going to touch a soma, but it proc's non stop. With a hammer shot and the upcoming mod reward it will have 40% status chance. Viral damage is crazy on it. It is also almost comical when you have blast damage on it as it knocks downs enemies all the time. I sort of think it would be a good 4th weapon with 3 somas on the team just to proc the various effects.

I know for a fact that it is a beast with Viral (and this is just around 28% proc chance) and a blast damage is almost funny how it works. I have yet to try radiation, but I have heard you can almost make it a mini-nyx chaos gun and just spin around hitting multiple targets. I might try to fit in shred just so I can hit multiple targets with each shot.

Point Strike is an easy mod to get so it is a real solid gun to start with until you get to master level 6.

Went home for lunch and...

Forma Oberon...I think he has more to give and has actually been fun to play with. Casting three Hallowed grounds in-a-row was a hoot.

Went ahead and put the Grakata in the cooker

I checked my Synapse and not sure how it's showing (might be a bug in the menu) but with my Grinner Loadout I have 855% corrosive damage; on with my Corpus Loadout...1,550% magnetic! It's like a Supercharged Bug Zapper. Plus I'm using the Rifle Aura Mod which gives an additional 27% Rifle damage.

I'll probably end up with getting the Sobek for kicks. Before all these new guns and mods hit and all, the Sobek was THE Shotgun to get. So it might be worth revisiting since I sold the Hek.

Forma... Oberon?! You crazy!

Hopefully you saw my response to you on the last page. Lots of advice.

I played through the tutorial on this, and when I got to the map of all the planets, it said I could specify whether I wanted to play with anyone, only people on my friends list, or just by myself. I went to set it to only people on my friends list, but didn't see the option listed anywhere. How do I go about doing that?

I did, thanks! Trying to get off the first planet, get some more experience and understanding under my belt, and rank up my character (failed the first time), before I pull the trigger on all the platinum purchases. Looked for you online earlier today when I was playing but you weren't on. Also need to add everyone else to my list.

Ah, something I should have mentioned before. Warframe has its own friends list and clan system outside of PSN. You can add your Warframe friends through the chat tab, which is opened by pushing the options button.

To set a game to friends or clan only, the option is "private" (so they can join uninvited) or "invite only". You can change the setting in the "play" menu by pressing triangle, and it shows on the bottom right of the screen.

The norm for us when we play together is to use party chat at the system level because the game only keeps you connected when you're in the same lobby. What we find is that on any given night, we might be trying to accomplish different things and therefore playing in different games, but it's still good to talk strategy, because at the end of the day, the game is mostly just a loot grind.

Excellent! Glad it didn't get buried. Just so you know, there's a couple of missions/events going right now that you should get in on.

The more pressing is a Corpus invasion on Uranus with a reward of an Orokin Reactor (an item you permanently attach to a warframe that gives it double points to apply to mods). You won't have access to it, but one of us can "taxi" you to it via invite. On that one, you run the mission 5 times, and you get a blueprint. Done and done. Your low level frame will be pretty squishy, but it's an exterminate mission, so you should be able to just hang back and soak in XP from other people's kills.

The other is a bit more involved but will give you a set of guns that will presumably never be available again. It's on Earth, so you should be able to get to it pretty quickly, and you have 5-6 days. It involves taking pictures of plants to build an antitoxin, injecting it into this thing, and then defending that thing. It also has a day/night cycle, so you have to be on at certain times to get the right plants. It's easier than it sounds, but it would help greatly if I could show you how it works rather than try to explain on here. One of us may be close to building the grand antitoxin, so there may also be a shortcut.

I think it would also be good to get you both in a Rhino as soon as possible. Even at low level, he's survivable anywhere in game, and he's probably the best "starter frame" in the game. He also happens to be my second favorite frame and his parts are available at pretty low level. We'll have to make a couple of separate but quick/easy runs to get a couple of materials for crafting.

The answer to your credits question is that you will need them to craft frame parts, and we're going to need to build you a Sentinel as soon as we can.

I'll send you both in-game friend invites and am happy to help. Will most definitely be on tonight, and probably very late.

Yep...had a spare one, pretty much ok with where the Synaspe, Twin Gremlins and Soma are and no other Frame needs one at this time though Nova might get one more but still got to finishing maxing her out.

Before calling it a night got one run in taking down the boss that drops Nyx BP's and got the missing one. I'll give her a try.

Moved my Serration Mod from (7) to (8)...cost 123,000 credits and good bunch of mods. Step by step....

Would like a shot at the Pathogen Round again tonight if possible or Fever Strike.

I'm hoping tonight is giving Wiz and/or SM the live tutorial.

I also potato'd and forma'd Oberon (for a dash aura), but I'm at the point where investing in frames doesn't require a ton of thought, and I have so many forma (7) and forma blueprints (~25) and materials that it's usually just a matter of grabbing an Orokin Cell from Sargus Ruk to make the next forma.

As for Reactors, the few frames I have left to potato are marginally appealing to me, and I'm happy to wait for the next "free" potato to get to them. The one from the current Corpus invasion will probably go to Nekros, just because I could see him being an interesting solo character, and he's a hell of a farmer with the double drops. He's also different, where I see Banshee/Saryn/Ember as variations on a theme that I have covered with guys like Frost and Volt (projectile, AOE, etc).

Pretty good night last night! Orokin Reactor mission, Energy Siphon alert, leveled a few frames up to 30 (Ash/Oberon), leveled Excalibur up to 12 (he's not terrible), gathered a ton of credits on those void runs, started the build on the last Prime (Burston), almost have Bronco Prime ready for its last forma, and finally got the Stalker to drop something! It was the Dread bow rather than Despair, but at least it finally happened, and it makes me feel a bit more patient for Despair. He actually showed up on the alert for the Energy Siphon, and he was after one of my random mic-less squad mates, so it was a challenge, but I killed him right in the face with my Soma. So in one run, I got Dread, Energy Siphon and a random Orokin Cell (somehow).

Yea Chess...you did have a good run and guessing the Dread bow was icing on the cake...about #@!* time right.

Question on mods with "Pass Thru" like Shred and Metal Auger. How do they work with either a elemental base weapon or one that is heavy on the elemental/combo side? Does the elemental also have the same chance of pass thru as bullets? On the wiki it doesn't say what effect it has with elemental based mods.

And to add to the request for tonight...along with Pathogen Rounds and Fever Strike, I can go for some quick Orokin Cells. I have (30) but with any luck (10) will go for the Bronco prime (not holding my breath on this one) and maybe one more Prime. And I guess we both can work on leveling up the Grakata...mine will be ready by the time I get home

Depends on Wiz and/or Mallet. If they need a taxi/invite to the Orokin Reactor event (assuming it's still live this evening), that will be the first priority. It would be nice if they could end the night with a Rhino and with a free Orokin Reactor for him cooking in the foundry.

But if they aren't on, I'm game for whatever. Dakra Prime, Latron Prime and Burston Prime cost me a combined 35 Orokin Cells over the past couple of days, and I'm sitting at zero. But I don't really have anything else to build right away either (all frames, all Primes and most helmets done), so I really just need one per day to keep formas cooking.

As an experiment, I'd like to start with a tour killing Grineer bosses and then just run whatever for the rest of the night to see if we can double/triple/quadruple our chances for a Stalker appearance. Given how long it's been since I've seen him, I'm wondering if 1) some bosses are better than others or 2) maybe you lose your death mark every day.

Not sure about pass through, but I would think the bullets would keep their procs as they pass through. I was trying to figure out how to work a pass through mod onto Bronco Prime, but I'd have to lose some raw damage, and I'm not down with that. I do think Shred is a pretty solid mod on the right rifle though.

Your shots have a chance to proc on any enemy they touch. Pass through can allow one shot to proc on every enemy that shot hits. On a defense mission with a shotgun, I have seen 8 enemies all light on fire at once with one pull of my hek....

The problem on crit guns like the soma or grakata is I can't find room on my build for a mod like shred.

Same, though I have to say that I have a hard time seeing a DPS difference in actual practice between the fire rate and pass through of Shred vs a third elemental mod on Soma, and I like the way the gun handles better with Shred. I know the math, but the actual kill time feels very close, and numbers with Soma are so silly, it's almost completely academic on most enemies.

My case for Shred on Soma (not currently equipped, but for sake of discussion):

I think the first second of firing is the most important for DPS purposes on the Soma, so maybe a 30% fire rate could be just as effective as a 90% elemental in the first second. Basically, the elimination of spin up makes burst firing on individual enemies a much more viable option, and it seems to make the gun slightly more accurate as it feels like it cuts some of the recoil animation (maybe my imagination).

Secondarily, enemies line up and bunch up a heck of a lot more than we give them credit for. If a single bullet is hitting 2-3 enemies, that changes the math quite a bit.

For sustained firing, an elemental wins hands down, but how often do you really do that with the Soma, unless enemies are bunched up? And if they're bunched up, again, punch through changes the math.

I don't really have ammo issues either way, so that isn't a factor.

Thanks. I might not bother to continue with it, then. Loot grinding isn't my thing, and I don't really have time for it.

I get that, but I didn't mean to use "grind" as a pejorative in this case. The process of improving/perfecting weapons and frames is the real draw of the game for me, and the gameplay is compelling enough to make whatever grind there is interesting.

There is plenty of farming involved, but it's no worse than something like Borderlands IMO. The difference is that in Borderlands, I might farm the same boss trying to get the "best stats" version of a randomly generated gun, and in Warframe, I can put those stats together myself through mods, and there's nothing random about it. I'm literally customizing to my liking (see discussion above about the Soma).

The same goes for your frame (character). You level it up and customize it with about the same level of grind you'd see in Borderlands and with a points system that should feel very familiar.

And the crafting is very straightforward and uses elements that are easy to get provided you have people to show you the best "fishing spots".

It's basically Borderlands with much more variety of characters and much more customization (as opposed to randomness).

Cool either way. Just wanted to clarify and not turn you off from an amazing game with my poor choice of phrasing.