Five Game Challenge Day 4: Hunting Eidolons

I left off Warframe in a weird space. In some ways I was very advanced. I have collected the parts for, built, and leveled a good number of Prime frames. I’ve a large arsenal of weaponry. I even accumulated a significant bank of platinum through trades.

But in certain other ways — I was very behind. Even for the time I was playing. And I need to be a bit careful here. Because even now, I feel there are some elements of the game that simply shouldn’t be spoiled. And it is largely in those areas I am behind. Focus. Amps. That sort of stuff. (Don’t go looking that up if you at all value not being spoiled on a significant story element.)

So when I started back yesterday — I thought I might try start it off easy. Get used to the crazy mobility Warframe offers. The bullet-jumps, the wall grabs and jumps. Just the overall ballet of death and destruction. The best way I thought to achieve this would be some missions on planets I already knew fairly well. No Spy missions. No Rescues. Just good ol’ Exterminate or Defense.

Well… My friends had other ideas. “Hey- It’s night-time in Cetus for another 30 minutes. Let’s go on an Eidolon hunt.”

Largely because I can’t actually fly with my Archwing in the open-world areas yet — I arrive at the battle site with the first tier Eidolon last.

But it did at least present the opportunity to take that screenshot, with my ant-like buddies down below. So ant-like in fact you’ll probably need to click through to even see them for a scale comparison to the Eidolon itself.

My job was primarily to keep the Eidolon Lures alive. Without them the Eidolon can escape the battle at will. The Lures will ensure they don’t. But they will come under attack fairly frequently — both through incidental AoEs and from the adds that can show up during the fight.

So I took in Trinity Prime — the best healer in the game in my view. I was loaded for Energy Regen, Skill Range, Power and Duration in order to supe up my ‘Blessing’ ability. (An AoE Heal and Damage Resistance buff.)

My other job — even though I took the Energy Regen aura — was to not get hit by the huge magnetic pulse the Eidolons do every so often, as it wipes all built up energy.

Did I mention it’s a huge AoE? Like seriously, you need to seriously skiddadle when the warning telegraph comes through. At first I was given advice that you could Void Walk through it — but that ended up being false. If your frame was hit regardless of Void Walk status, energy was reset.

Luckily, this was a lesson I learnt on an attempt where someone other than me mucked up. (Yuss! Because I almost certainly would have on that first attempt given the time to. xD) We let the lures get too far from the Eidolon and it decided we weren’t very fun playmates any more and exited before we could re-tether.

Anywho — we got it!

Spoiler: Yes, yes he does have a bigger brother. Two actually. We didn’t get around to the third, we were running out of night and these things are nocturnal.

But we did engage and ultimately best the second one. And by comparison, the first Eidolon is just a warm-up. The second launches what appears to be a series of orbital lasers at you. You do get a momentary highlight on the ground as they spin-up so you can move, but as the fight progresses you can get these on top of homing orbs of damage and the magnetic pulses seen from the first boss.

With just moments to spare before daylight where the Eidolon would have departed — lures or no lures — we successfully navigated the various shield and damage mechanics and the whole staying alive thing. I got better at weaving between the fields of damage to drop in a Blessing for maximum effect.

Heck, I even started to learn to identify when the annoying little-bitty-healer-drones would come and — perhaps more importantly — what they even looked like so I could deal with their physical form and help the team out that way.

It was a real trial by (orbital bombardment) fire — but nothing quite like it for reclaiming a set of rusty muscle memories.