Once you’ve completed the star chart, what do you do next? The Steel Path offers players the chance to show off their knowledge and skill against tougher, high level enemies in a variety of missions, with enhanced rewards.

Unlock: One the player has completed all “connected” nodes on the star chart, Teshin will message the player about unlocking the Steel Path – all you need to do is go to a relay and speak to him. In essence, you need to complete every node on the star chart, with the exception of the Assassination Missions: Mutalist Alad V and The Jordas Golem.

Teshin will provide a toggle on the right of your start chart, that swaps you onto Steel Path mode. In this mode, you’ll need to work your way through the nodes again to unlock them, but there’s also 5 alerts every day that will unlock nodes further along the chart. These alerts are also a good way to get a group for Steel Path missions.

Enemies: The enemies you’ll face in the Steel Path are much tougher than normal. All enemies receive an additional 100 levels (only 50 in archwing missions) and have 2.5 times the normal amount of health, armour and shields. Suffice to say, they can take a serious beating before going down. Other than that, the enemies are identical to those you’d find in any normal mission… with the exception of the Stalker’s acolytes.

Acolytes: These charming fellows will appear in any non-archwing Steel Path mission, with one turning up every 5 mins or so. They are tough, have access to some special abilities and and hit very hard. Each one is themed:

• Angst: Teleports, uses an area effect damaging scream and wields deadly claws. Keep moving and you’ll avoid most of her damage.
• Malice: Summons drones, magnetises players and wields an opticor laser cannon. This guy is very dangerous, with magnetise pulling any ranged attacks (including your own) back onto yourself. Either stay out of his line-of-sight and roll while magnetised, or fight him up close.
• Mania: Can teleport players or generate turbulence to deflect incoming projectiles – also uses a blade whip that can strike you at range. Mania will ragdoll you if he reaches you, leading to a quick loss – stay out of his reach while his turbulence is active, but not so far away that he uses the teleport.
• Misery: Can knock down/back players at range, while summoning shadows to harass you – he will also attack at close range with a scythe. Just stay out of close range and you’ll be fine.
• Torment: Can turn into an invulnerable wave or summon a barrage of water, both of which can knock down players in the area. Equipped with akvasto pistols, all you need to do is move out of the area attacks and you should be fine.
• Violence: Uses damaging ice waves and can slash-dash, while also periodically casting silence to prevent the use of special powers. Wielding a rapier and claw, keep on the move to avoid being bled to death.

Damage: Steel path enemies are very tough, especially if they’re armoured. As such, you can’t really rely on conventional gunfire alone.

• Condition Overload: Using a ranged weapon to apply several different status effects then heavy attacking with a melee weapon modded with condition overload can hit extremely hard.
• Defence Strip: Shred on a kavat, the powers Pillage and Fire Blast or the Shattering Impact melee mod can all remove armour from a target, making it easy prey. Pillage can also be used to drain shields from corpus.
• Finishers: Staggered or helpless enemies can be interacted with to perform a finisher attack, ignoring their armour and dealing increased damage. This is slow though, and often requires you to use a power to render enemies helpless.
• Viral/Toxin: The viral status effect multiplies any incoming health damage and toxin damage ignores shields – this is a good combo for taking out shielded corpus units.
• Viral/Slash: Slash status effects cause a bleed, dealing armour ignoring damage over time that is multiplied by the viral status effect. Hunter Munitions will grant your critical focused primary weapons a good chance to inflict bleeding, making this a solid choice against grineer.

Survival: Thanks to the level of Steel Path enemies, the incoming damage can be hard to manage. There’s a few ways to deal with this:

• Duck and weave: Keep moving and the majority of shots will miss you, and melee attackers won’t reach you.
• Crowd Control: They can’t hit you if they can’t fire. Use powers to slow down, blind or confuse attackers – or try using a weapon with radiation, heat, electrical or cold damage and a decent status chance to disable attackers. Consider Sevagoth’s Gloom or Wisp’s Breach Surge, both available from the Helminth.
• Damage Reduction: Many frames have powers that can reduce incoming damage – or you can use the Helminth to inject one. You can also try the Adaptation mod to reduce sustained incoming damage. Nova’s Null Star is available to all frames via the Helminth and will provide 5% damage reduction for every active particle.
• Health Tank: Inaros Prime (or any frame with decent health and armour) can use “arcane grace” to regenerate health faster than enemies can take it away. You could also try Life Strike on your melee weapon to recover health. Be aware that certain high damage attacks could still kill you if you rely on this alone – for example, acolyte Malice and his opticor.
• Shield Gate: Whenever incoming damage breaks your shield you become invulnerable for a moment, preventing further damage. This “shield gate” remains depleted until your shields fully recharge, so use the Augur mod set, warframe powers or the Guardian precept for robotic companions to rapidly recover!

Rewards: All missions in the Steel Path have improved mod/resource drops and may drop riven slivers that can be traded in to Paladino at the Iron Wake base on Earth. 10 slivers will get you a random riven mod that you must unveil as normal.

In addition, the acolytes and alert missions provide steel essence, a currency used to buy rewards from Teshin. These include some basic cosmetic offerings and a unique special offering that changes every week, including Umbral Forma, a pack of forma, riven mods and kuva/endo.