Blau's Blog

Warframe: Shrine Defense is pretty neat

Date: [4th Oct 2024]
Categories: [Video Games], [Warframe]
Tags: [koumei]

A couple of days ago, Warframe released their Koumei and the Five Fates update. With it, of course, is Koumei, the new mission type to farm for her and her weapons (Shrine Defense), and a lot of new features (Companion rework part 2!) and bug fixes (seriously, check out the patch notes for the initial update and the two currently live hotfixes, 37.0.1 and 37.0.2).

I've currently got Koumei and her weapons building (also, thank you DE for reducing her build time from 72 hours to 24 hours, that's really cool and I think more of the early-game frames - say, planet boss drop frames up to Mars - should have this reduction) so I can't really talk about those directly yet, though she does look really fun and I'm excited to try her out later on.

Shrine Defense is a pretty neat mission type. You could imagine it as a mix between Defense and Interception (or maybe Infested Salvage?), but tooled in a way that it's very friendly to new players, since it's accessible after the first two main missions (Awakening and Saya's Vigil). Aside from running out of revives, there isn't really a way I know of to fail the mission. The enemies are all around level 10 (give or take) on base difficulty. The "defense" targets can't be destroyed; their progress bars stop until enemies in the area around them are dead. Plus, you get to listen to some pretty fantastic side chatter from the Ostrons in their houses ("I am going to hit you SO hard" makes me laugh every time).

The goal of the mission is to take offering baskets from the two Ostron houses to Koumei's shrine. The Ostrons can't work on their offering baskets while the Infested are near their doors, so you need to clear them out (progress towards the next basket will stop until the Infested are gone). On depositing a basket, Koumei will roll her dice, grant you a buff, and spawn a bunch of health orbs for you.

Once you've deposited 5 baskets (the initial basket and two rounds of defending each house), the mission objective will switch to Exterminate, where you need to kill X number of enemies (depending on the number of people in your squad). Once you do this, the boss, an Infested Oni (a fancy looking Carnis) will spawn from the ocean. After you empty its first health bar, it will go immune, and you need to bring Koumei two more baskets. The invulnerability will be removed and you can kill the Oni. After some dialogue from Saya, the mission will end.

I farmed out the mission solo, base difficulty, with Gyre, which was probably overkill. I mean, almost anything I could bring would have been overkill for that difficulty level. I did try Steel Path, but my Gyre is not really kitted out for Steel Path yet, and just in general, Steel Path was nowhere near as efficient as just blasting through the base difficulty over and over. Kullervo might have been a better choice, now that I think about it. I'll have to try that.

After a while I got in a rhythm and was able to finish the mission in just around 3 minutes each round. Here's how I was doing it:

On mission start I'd fling forward with Drifter to get to the basket, throw down Zenurik 1 (the energy regen bubble), grab the basket with Gyre, wait a moment to regen Drifter's energy, then void sling myself over to Koumei's shrine and Transference back into Gyre to deposit the first basket.

By now, the Infested coming out of the water should be most of the way to the defense areas. Run over to Point B, cast Cathode Grace and kill a few things to start regenning energy, then as soon as there's enough energy, cast Rotorswell. Maybe run around a little bit to boost up Cathode Grace and Rotorswell's timers. Park Gyre in a central spot on Point B, then Transference and fling over to Point A with Drifter. Clear out the point - I have the amp secondary fire where the projectile acts like a glaive, but I can't remember the name or number, helps a lot though. Gyre's Rotorswell will keep Point B clear.

Point B will probably finish its timer before Point A. Once that happens, transference back into Gyre to pull her over to Point A. When Point A is done, grab the basket with Gyre, head over to Point B, Transference out, then grab the Point B basket with Drifter¹. Fling yourself over to Koumei's Shrine, deposit Drifter's basket, then Transference back into Gyre to deposit her basket. This process then gets repeated once more to get the second round of two baskets, for the total of five.

After 5 baskets are deposited, the mission goal swaps to Exterminate. We'll still need two baskets to finish the Oni, though, so repeat the process above one more time. By the time the Oni spawns, the baskets should be ready (or close to ready) to grab. Transference into Gyre, grab Point A's basket, then smack the Oni to drop its health bar down if it isn't already. Transference, void sling over to Point B, grab the basket, void sling over to Koumei, deposit both baskets. The Oni will teleport closer to Koumei's shrine, where you can kill it. Now you just have to listen to Saya's end-mission dialogue, wait something like ten seconds, then the mission is over.

Even though the individual missions were very quick, the pearl grind was not. Though, this was largely my fault; the first day I was getting tired and ended up buying the parts I was missing with pearls so they could build overnight, which is not a great idea because I still had to farm for things that don't drop during the mission (the two augment mods and Koumei's Prex, totaling 500 pearls), which ended up with me having to farm out about 400 extra pearls, with duplicates of all the parts anyway.

I'm not really sure if I'll come back to the mission or not, beyond goofing off in Steel Path or helping my friends farm more quickly, but it's a neat mission type and I'm keen to see the mechanics in other parts of the game sometime.

Overall, neat mission! Very good intro-level quest. Might not add a lot of story per se, but does add worldbuilding / world flavor, which is always appreciated, especially for those of us who have been around since Cetus came out and have forgotten almost all the stuff we learned back then lol. Plus, Koumei being pretty easy to farm and having a reduced build timer means that new players get access to a pretty cool newer frame and weapons early on, which is always welcome.

I haven't gotten to try very much with the other major points of the update - Caliban rework, Hildryn and Nova updates, Companions 2.0 - but once I play with them a bit I'll let you all know how it goes. Can say this for now though: having more mod slots on Companions is super welcome, and popping Smeeta's Resource booster buff out of Charm into its own mod that you can put on other companions is extremely welcome; as much as I like my Smeeta, it didn't feel great being pigeonholed into using one singular companion type over the others (Vulpaphylas have a similar issue, from Devolution). Should build up my Vasca Kavat again sometime.