Five Things I Wish I Knew When I Started ‘The First Descendant’

Okay, this is a little late after launch, but since there are other news headlines at the moment, I thought I’d write about a bit of everything. Specifically, some advice on the game I’ve sunk 70 hours into in two weeks: The First Descendant.

It’s a looter shooter in a market where many people are exhausted of looter shooters, but it’s free, it’s grindable, and it could be a lot worse. By the end, I was finding it very engaging. I will admit, though, that it’s an insanely slow start. So let’s run through the list. Here are five things I wish I had known going into The First Descendant.

1) It gets better – The First Descendant made such a bad first impression on me that I almost gave up. The beginning of the game is rough and generic and easy to bounce off of. But I’d say things change. It starts around the time you unlock Bunny, the electric character who flies around with a shocking AOE attack, as she’s currently one of the best characters in the game and more fun than the three starters you can get. But it takes longer to complete the map and quests. I’d say the game gets good when A) you start fighting the first real bosses, the Void Intercepts and B) when you reach the last three regions of the map, because that’s when things really start to come together.

2) Ignore the microtransactions – Really, you can. It’s fine. It’s a total vibe killer that you can buy power and characters outright, but the game is a lot more fun if you pretend that none of that exists, because you can work towards what you want at any given time, and eventually get it. This isn’t Genshin Impact where you run out of “power” to farm on a timed reset and can pay to get past that. You can play as much as you want and I’ve never hit a wall where I felt like I had to spend money to get past that. Just farm more, just upgrade more.

3) Your power lies in your mods – Yes, this is a Warframe thing (like most things in this game), but you’ll find yourself really growing in power when you understand that you’ll need to seriously invest in upgrading your mods to keep your character scaling with the game’s increasing difficulty, especially towards the end. A few sub-tips here:

• Blue mods cost much less to upgrade than purple mods, and there are no drawbacks
• You can save all your duplicate mods at the vendor for huge amounts of upgrade currency
• You need HP and Defense mods that are upgraded quite a bit for much better survivability. Shield doesn’t scale that well.
• The elemental resistance mods should be upgraded and recycled for elemental Void Resist bosses.
• Remember that you can also use mods in any weapon. And when you dismantle weapons, the mods are not dismantled from the weapon.

4) The game tells you exactly where you can grow things – It took me a while to figure it out, but if you go to the Map Screen > Access Info and then you can go to individual Descendants, weapons, and materials. Click through those specific materials for each thing and it will take you to an exact mission on the map where you can/should farm. Some farms produce a better percentage for the same item than others, so keep an eye on that.

5) Upgrade your weapons as you go – This is basically weapon “infusion”, but in addition to mods, it keeps your weapons at enemy level as you progress. It’s annoying because you have to craft something that takes ten minutes to infuse, but it’s cheap and not a huge deal. I mainly did this for my main weapon that I was using, then you can just use random high-level weapons for the other two until you want to specialize. I would make sure to keep upgrading somewhere between every 5-10 levels you get behind the current drops.

Bonus: Best weapon overall

Right now that would be the Tamer, a primary ammo machine gun that does insane damage compared to the competition. Nexon has outright said that they won’t be toning it down despite this. It drops in level 60+ zones, and you can check the farming page to see exactly where it drops on any given day, as it rotates.

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Pick up my science fiction novels Herokiller series And The Earthborn Trilogy.