I’m half-way through Sedna right now. I have just 1 Warframe (though I did start building Limbo last night when I remembered I did that quest) and it, a long with my best weapons, are maxed out and either at mod capacity or damn near (still need endo for a few). MR5.
I have a railjack, I unlocked the Operator, and I have so many resources and credits. But everything is starting to take forever to kill and hurts me so much. When I did the whole Drifter quest thing, I choose everything I already used but it was so much stronger. The Warframe had way more shield and health even though I have Redirection and Vitality maxed out on it. The Boltor had a super high ROF compared to what mine has and did way more damage.
How the hell do I get that kind of power on my normal stuff? I know about Forma but I haven’t even seen some of the mods for the weapons I have I’ve seen suggested for maximum damage, so I’m just hanging onto those until it makes sense to use them. Is that really the only way to get stronger?
Warframe’s early game is a bit of a mess balance-wise, and has very little guidence.
Make use of nightwave for some useful Aura mods, and you can get some weapon/warframe slots for ranking it up. Any challenges that aren’t completed by the end of the week just get banked and become available again once you’ve completed some of your current week’s challenges. The weekly challenges never really expire until the end of the current nightwave cycle which tends to go on for quite a while. You can purchase Orokin Reactors/Catalysts from nightwave to increase your warframe/weapon mod capacity to 60 (for a rank 30 warframe/weapon). I don’t think I would really want to use many of them on a base warframe/weapon, you’re better off using them on a Prime instead/or if there’s a base warframe/weapon you tend to use often. Once you progress further into the game, you usually have more Reactors/Catalysts than you can use.
Forma is the other way to fit more mods into your warframe/weapons, a little build restricting because they need to match the polarity to reduce the mod cost (or penalty if it’s a different symbol), but that’s where the min-max fun is if you’re into making builds.
If any build guides suggest “Galvanized Mods” or weapon arcanes, then you’re looking at a guide aimed more for very late game. Modding generally follows the same pattern for all weapons, Base Damage, Crit Chance, Crit Damage, Multishot, Element, Optional/QOL.
For a primary weapon you want:
Serration, Point Strike, Vital Sense, Split Chamber and your other mod slots are for an elemental combo/option mods (reload speed, fire rate, etc). You might have noticed a planet will suggest an element type like Viral, you would go into the mod screen for your weapon and type in “Viral” into the search box and it will filter mods that can be used to make that element.
Secondary Weapons: Hornet Strike, Pistol Gambit, Target Cracker, Barrel Diffusion, element and optional mods. Melee: Stance Mod, Pressure Point, Organ Shatter, True Steel, element and if your melee weapon is slow then you will want a mod like Fury on to increase the attack speed, otherwise this mod falls under the optional category. If you have the Skijati, that weapon comes with the Sacrificial versions of point strike/organ shatter along with the polarities to use those mods, so use those instead of their base versions.
One last thing is if you haven’t joined a syndicate yet, pick one and rank it up. Either pick New Loka, Perin Sequence and Red Veil OR Cephalon Suda, Arbiters of Hexis and Steel Meridian. Someone probably can probably do a better explanation on how these syndicates work than I have time to write right now/there should be existing guides which should be able to explain how they work in a much less confusing way than I would explain it.
Just want to add: forma are for when you’ve run out of capacity after you’ve installed a reactor/catalyst. You can install them before, but it’s really inefficient.
Also, if you put all the basic mods on a weapon, and it still feels weak, take a look at its base (unmodded) crit and status chance stats. If, say, base crit chance is significantly lower than base status chance, then replace crit mods with more status/status chance, and see if that feels better. Same principle for frames: some frames have really low base shield, or their abilities don’t need range, or they don’t need to worry about energy management, so you’re better off swapping out some mods for others.