Just finished maxing out my Railjack Build and recalled that it at least appeared to be that Railjack was an underappreciated game mode.
So, does anyone like it now? How’ve you built your railjack? Do you use Lavos when doing Railjack or manufacture energy as-needed?
I was on Switch at the time, and even with the godawful load times it was my favourite content. Whenever I had relics to crack I’d drag the clan with me into Void Storms, or even just solo Corpus Void Storms. The thing that killed Railjack for me was the introduction of SP fissures, since the value proposition of doing a soft-endurance endless fissure is way ahead of anything else in the game.
I’d still recommend Void Storms in a heartbeat to new players though. They’re hugely valuable everything farms with credits, endo, and preradded relics.
As for Railjack itself, I really like the quality of life of universal affinity and shared loot, as well as the collaborative nature of the objectives. It’s cool playing with my friends and operating as a team, which is basically unique in Warframe in its current state.
Railjack itself is fun.
Railjack in pubs is hell on earth. Because you can never be sure when it is safe to “abort mission” so you basically need to rush to Nav to go back to dojo after every single mission. Which often includes at least one person who wants to do another one and doesn’t realize WHY you go back to dojo during pubs. Also, when there is a Nightwave for it, you have the hosts who just leave party the moment the objectives are done which has like a 70% chance of putting the rest of the party into a nav-less railjack where they just have to quit out and lose all the rewards.
Also, we are at the mercy of the host’s railjack. It has gotten better but you still get the occasional “meta” railjack where only the pilot seat has good guns and everyone else needs to just get in their archwings or do endless repairs and forging because the guns are worthless.
Which… basically makes it the worst of all worlds in Warframe
- We have the host migration issues but they are almost guaranteed rather than occasional
- We have the annoying delay between runs common to the open worlds
- Much like Spy, a bad matchmaking guarantees a loss or a miserable time
Which is why I suspect that Railjack will always remain a thing that is there for story quest sequences and not much else.
Railjack is pretty mixed for me.
I liked the Grineer missions where your squad could complete different objectives in parallel/spit the squad up to perform different tasks, and the missions also felt somewhat unique compared to the base game. Corpus missions on the other hand just feels like playing a mission to play some other game mode already available on the base star chart.
I don’t like the current energy system for ship abilities, it feels like it was balanced poorly because it’s dependant on which warframe you chose, and feels like certain warframes were nerfed before the system was even implemented. Energy costs scale poorly with Hildryn, she was nerfed before the update dropped because people wanted to make use of Shield regen for casting abilities. If I remember correctly, this was also part of the reason Dispensary’s duration was nerfed as a Helminth ability when the helminth system was added.
Current combat in space is an improvement over what we had in early versions of railjack; if the host had bad weapons for their railjack you had to put up with it because enemies heavily resisted archgun damage. The Amesha was and probably still is the only usable archwing for these missions. Gunnery 10 still feels like it’s a nerf, I just prefer the feeling of having control over what I’m shooting at and not that it’s automated for me, the extra overheat on top of that doesn’t help either though. Other people might appreciate the lock-on, but it probably belongs under an accessibility setting rather than the last unlock for an intrinsic.
Not sure if void fissures ever changed, before if you were moving too fast through the level, you would just hit multiple void fissures and die. I think they might have just been spawning them directly on the player as the tiles loaded.
Overall, I think most of the game mode needs a rework and other game modes to differentiate it from the base game.
Yes. The biggest flaw of railjack is that there isn’t enough of it.
DE, please add more railjack
I literally started playing the game in earnest because the Railjack shit looks dope. It’s the one thing I’m actively working on getting to.
in theory, railjack should be THE mode for mid game content. It’s fun, and a logical extension of mechanics from normal starchart missions in that you are now responsible for your own insertion and extraction. I haven’t done much of it though because it doesn’t really seem to matter, often I forget that it’s even a thing.
It’s honestly my favorite game most both to solo and in group(specifically if I get to use my ship) I do wish the RJ specific things all had a higher drop chance though. Been off and on farming Nautilus for a year and now prime is out lol.
Yeah, I don’t have the Nautilus either. I do really love how customizable the Railjacks are, I don’t believe I’ve ever been in two that flew quite the same.
Mine’s built for keeping the shields up and ignoring enemy shields, including the directional ones.
I recently switched to ignoring shields build so good I also modded heavily for speed. Just a good time.
Interesting. Mind sharing your build? I went with mine because I like Onslaught Matrix as my aura and found just the right pairing of mods to allow me to have functionally infinite shields so long as I’m not face-tanking a shipkiller platform.
I liked it on release, I wish they’d make more content for it though
Same. It’d be so cool if they brought the Jordas Golem back as a Railjack Boss. Heck, add it’s node in Pluto Proxima and give us a little story about us not killing it and now it’s about to cause a major outbreak.
Would be even better if Parvos was our ally for the operation/quest for his own selfish reasons. So far he’s only been an enemy in spite of comments from him that he’d like to work with us (presumably us working for him tho). For whatever reason he wants Pluto not-infested and decided to hire the best there is for doing just that.
Oh! Just thought of the perfect thing: He’s hired us in part to study the Railjack. He’s offering Railjack parts, or at least parts compatible with Railjacks, for our assistance while he’s using data collected on us to bootleg our boats.
Nothing to add other than I really like it, too. I just want my stupid crew to stop flying around when I’m lining up the big gun…
You may want to adjust their assigned roles. Mine never try to fly the ship because they’re all assigned to other tasks.
I enjoy it, but I feel like it’s something they could do more with and don’t.
Maybe one day they’ll find other ways to sneak it into new content, like the Necramech. That was also interesting but underwhelmingly supported, and now they try to squeeze it into places to make it relevant. But it still feels like it needs….more.
Oh, and who remembers Fish Team? I don’t even know if that feature got added, I avoid the Lich stuff.
I think it’s a fun change of pace. Unfortunately I enjoy flying in the arch wing most and it’s always hard to compete with the railjack for kills and the main objective like in most gamemodes is usually over on a few minutes
Yeah, some more game modes which incentivize splitting up between the RJ and some Archwing fliers would be neat.
I think it would be strongly improved by making “away crew” and “railjack crew” seperate squads. I know it won’t ever happen, but playing solo is a pain in the ass because you have to keep swapping between the two positions and public matchmaking… well… come one now…
Actually, one of, if not the last post I made on Reddit before the Rexodus was a long critique of railjack and how I thought it could be improved. Some of my big points was AI crew improvements, so you can actually play solo the way the game move is intended.
Its my favourite game mode and unfortunately marred by DEs inattention, though I’m hoping it recieves some love when infested liches drop, presumably with infested railjack nodes alongside them.
I like to run solo with an NPC pilot, gunner and engineer so I can personally focus on boarding and the tunguska cannon. I do wish piloting NPCs would get some improvement though, they DO fire at exposed radiators and security nodes but they try to shoot through walls which doesn’t work even with photors, if DE could just add some waypoints around each main target that the NPC pilot can be forced to fly to so they can actually perform the external part of the mission I’d be super happy.
I liked it at first when it was slower paced, required teamwork and felt like a battleship. I loved the idea and the theme of having a ship with people in it. Then it slowly turned into boom and zoom dogfighting thats easier with NPC crew than other players, except it still somehow feels floaty and janky despite being a high speed game mode. The technical issues and progression is improved over launch but everything else about the mode is just not satisfying or fun to me anymore.