Warframe guide

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Not that I would ever consider Ninkondi other than squeeze MR out of it.

really?

Ok, I get that the Ninkondi is not used by many players. It is not a top tier weapon but I leveled both versions, the normal one and the prime one a few weeks ago and it did not perform bad. I have two rivens for that weapon but my stats on them are bad and I currently lack Kuva to reroll them.

But lets take a look at your riven.

Actually I would have prefered to see how it looks when fully upgraded but I simply calculated the stats. (just a rough calculation)

Fully upgraded you should have ~220% additional crit chance.

The other stats almost negate themselves... well... i actually think they are calculated seperately so your combo counter should increase much faster with that riven.

But the crit chance is the most interesting stat.

Ninkondi prime has 22% base crit chance... with +220% from the riven you end up having a total crit chance of 70%. Thats not bad. This riven twice as good as a true steel mod. (ok consuming also twice the mod capacity - but a forma will help there).

The ninkondi prime also has a high status chance and with 3 of the 60/60 status mods you can get the total status chance to +100%... on top of that 70% crit does not sound all that bad.

Ninkondi currently is not used by many players thats why it has a very high riven disposition - with other words... the stats on the rivens are very high.

That compensates that the non-riven Ninkondi does not perform as good as other weapons.

The riven is not a perfect roll... but it is still pretty good.

I would even try to turn a Ninkondi with such a Riven into a heavy attack weapon because as you can see the Crit chance doubles on heavy attacks. You would have a +120% crit chance on heavy attacks. It would be worth a try to do that.

Amesha and Itzal are most likely the better solutions. The odonata is more a support archwing which helps you to protect other players. If you want to kill npcs and collect loot the Itzal will be good (good for farming) however I think with the latest Railjack update the loot distance increased and the Amesha with the damage boost might be the best option. I personally still use my Odonata Prime... simply because of the fact that its the only Prime Archwing... and I upgraded it while my other archwings still suffer the 30 mod capacity limit. I did not really bother to upgrade them as my gameplay mostly was focused on ground.

I am not sure if your idea about the Itzal and its cload to unlock the riven will work. IIRC the Itzal unclocks the moment you fire a shot.

If you need help to unlock that Riven I can cloak you... thats no big deal. Just give me a shout in the game.

I personally would not really put forma or a reactor on a Sahasa Kubrow. Generally I dont really like Kubrows.

For the most of the time I used the Helios sentinal for the autoscan feature which pretty much is the most useful feature you can have until you have literally scanned everything in the game.

Nowadays I switch between the Helios and my Smeetha Kavat. There are other Kavat, Kurbrow and Sentinels which have unique abilities but to be honest... I dont see why I should need those. The helios does the scans so I dont have to do that stupid tasks. That makes the gameplay so much easier... and the smeetha has incredible buffs (they are not 100% reliable but when they work they are really impressive). The Sahasa in my eyes... is ... just a dog. Its ability is to dig up stuff... that does not happen too often... and the quality of the stuff it digs for is debatable.

If you have a weapon which lacks ammo with would be probably worth thinking about using an ammo mutation mod instead.

Combustion beam on Ignis Wraith... well... you can do that.... for fun reasons but not for an endgame build.

The Ignis already has AOE... it actually does not need more of it but lets face it... the Ignis needs more DPS. You do damage to many targets but its actually not that much damage on a high-lvl single target. You need ages to burn down an NPC with many hitpoints. The combustion beam wouldnt help you there ... but a mod which increases your damage output would help significantly.

For fun reasons yes... but not if you are looking for DPS.

Quote from Ajay

EDIT: About Pavlov spy missions... thx for the guide, doing those now. Managed to cheese the Orokin Spectators using Excalibur Umbra: Orokin Spectators/Sensor Regulators will not raise an alarm if they are attacked by Ex Umbra if you are in Operator Mode. The problem is to keep Umbra on platform, though.

Id adivce to take a sniper to that mission and kill the spectators from distance. Thats and easy and secure way.

Or you bypass them (you can jump down the platforms and pass below the spectators... then you climb up again to the door).

Quote from Ajay

Thought so. So... time to go hit up Derelict and look for Heavy Caliber I guess?

Would be an option, the question is how long you need to grind for it if that is the only mod from there you need.

An alternative (you didnt hear that from me) is to do Cetus bounties. Pick the ones which have Vigilante Armaments or Augur Reach in the reward pool.

Vigilante Armaments can be sold to other players for 8-9 plat.

Augur Reach ~15 plat

Both mods drop very frequently.

People are willing to sell Heavy Caliber for ~10 plat.

That probably is the faster approach (if you dont need any other mods from derelict).

Warframe and Grind

I was not sure if I should really bother to write about this topic. Maybe it is a waste of time but since we shortly talked about grind in Warframe a few weeks ago I wondered if you can really say that the game is player friendly when it comes down to the topic of grind.

Somehow I have to compare Warframe a bit with my experience in Destiny 2 and right away have to say that the games are not comparable.

I stopped playing Destiny 2 (a game which I really like) because I was not happy about the grind.

Every few months a new season gets released and you have to invest money again in order to play the content. But worse than being forced to pay over and over again in my eyes was that Destiny with every update changed the meta to the point where the new weapons almost always outperformed the weapons you had from the last seasons. If you wanted to stay competitive you had to grind for the new stuff... which due to RNG and different stat rolls on the weapon easily could take 4-6 weeks. More than often enough you even were forced to play content you did not even like to play. And if you dont have these fancy new weapons you of course had a major disadvantage in PVP, which in return you had to do in order to complete grind for other items.

With other words Destiny 2 always forced you to grind... and once you had stuff you wanted the meta changed and the grind started all over again.

On top of that your inventory space was very limited. It was/is impossible to store all your earned weapons and armors in there with the result that you had to dismantle stuff at some point to if you wanted to earn new stuff. If you dismantled stuff and later the meta changed again you might be in the situation where you realize that the stuff you just got rid of actually turned good again... so you have to start grinding for it again... if these items are still available (which often was no longer the case).

In comparison to that Warframe is very different since all the items are available at all the time and meta changes have less impact on them since the stats are mostly based on mods instead of the weapons.

You could argue that Primed items are not always available since they regularly get Vaulted (you can in theory not earn them) every few weeks while other primed items get unvaulted (return to the game). That however does not mean you can not get the vaulted items at all. You can trade with other players which have the item parts. With other words... there is a workaround to this limitation. You also could have luck (happened many times to me) and you got Vaulted items because another player opened relics that are actually not available to you. You can fetch the rewards of the other players in your team.

In this regard there is very little that is not available to you.

You just have to accept that it takes some time until you get hands on all the stuff which by itself is not a big deal since Warframe has plenty of other content to play and many other items to get.

The question if Warframe is grindy or a game for casual play depends on what you decide.

The game wont push you into a grind.

There is no seasonal content that you have to play. There is very little content that is only available for a limited amount of time.

e.g. there are events... but most of them repeat every few weeks or months. If you cant do the event you can do it at a later point of time.

There are events which are a bit rarer... once a year maybe.

e.g. The Scarlet spear event we recently had.

Such events are designed to be relative easy to complete. Scarlet spear ran for 1 month (pretty long) and required you to collect 50.000 points in order to get the main reward. I personally started late and also ended it relative soon... with 1.2 million points. Getting 50.000 points was no big deal for anyone. The developers don't want the players to end exhausted by the grind. They even adjust the reward structure in the middle of the event if they see that players have problems reaching their goals.

Still the game has content to keep players busy for years.

You could argue that this is also some sort of grind. To be honest... that is true.

There are reputations with the different factions you need to level up, there is focus to gain, there is the hunt for the fancy mods, etc.

All of that could turn into a pretty grindy situation.

Or you could just play the game and automatically collect and rank up the stuff in the process. You eventually reach the point where you have maxed out everything.

I personally have decided to cycle through content. I don't want to spend a week solely with focus farming but it is very likely that I play one mission a day which grants a good amount of focus points. I don't want to do Eidolon hunts everyday but I do them from time to time. I cycle through the tasks for them to remain interesting.

I also have learned to combine tasks.

It is pointless level 10 new weapons from rank 0 to 30 by grinding your way through mission. But it certainly is not a bad idea to level these weapons if you intend to open a few relics... or to equip an unranked weapon when you are doing bounties on Earth or Venus. These weapons increase their level almost automatically. You can reduce or pretty much completely negate the grind if you combine tasks.

I am close to MR25 meanwhile. That means I have leveled almost 400 items from 0 to 30 but I never considered it a grind job to do. I did it while I was playing the game... while doing other tasks. When I unlock relics or do a defense mission I try to equip an unranked weapon because the shared affinity from the team will always level these items automatically.

So it never was a grind on top of the gameplay... it always was a side effect of the gameplay.

I also never made Focus farming part of the grind. I collected focus while playing the game... not grinding for it... but simply collecting when available.

Maybe this is a healthy and fun approach this game allows you to make. You don't have the pressure or the fear of missing out.

That however does not mean that Warframe is totally free of grind.

I specifically decided to test how much grind players are facing with one very specific task.

I have started playing about 18 months ago... took some-when between a break of 6 months (no big deal as you wont miss out content), I mostly played the casual way.

This casual approach ended with having almost all the Prime Warframes (I only miss 3) but actually only having 5 of the non-prime Warframes. I collected the prime frames by simply playing the game but never really bothered to grind for the blueprints of the non-prime warframes.

Since this in my eyes is the only grind you can not fully cover in a casual way, I decided to get this grind done and focus my gameplay completely on getting these frames.

Yeah, that was 3 weeks ago and guess what... I am not done yet. There is one single blueprint I still have not been able to get even though I played that very specific mission twice a day...everyday... for 3 weeks.

Some of the Warframes are very easy to get. Gara and Garuda are easy if bounties belong to your normal gameplay routine. Some other frames just require you to kill some bosses 10-15 times (10-25% drop chance for the blueprints), so after 1-2 hours you have everything you need. But then there are also frames which require a lot of luck. Some are locked behind the C rotation of hard missions and even there they only have minuscule drop chances.

The grind is real if you go for the same approach I took.

There are some frames which are a nightmare to get.

Ivara is challenging since it requires you to complete C rotations of spy missions (easy, normal and hard ones). That requires you to know how to do these spy missions flawlessly.

The Harrow chassis drops from nearly everywhere... but all the other components are very hard to get since they are locked behind C rotations of disruption and if I remember correctly defection missions. That is god awful to play.

Ash only drops from Maniacs which only appear randomly in very specific mission types.

But the two worst frames to complete in my eyes are Khora (that is the one i still don't have) and Grendel.

Grendel requires you to grind 75 Vitus essence from Arbitration missions. If you play Arbitration survival you get that done in 4-5 hours grind. But that does not mean you already have the frame... no you only unlock the location where you can find the Grendel blueprints. And there the real grind starts. This are 3 special missions you have to do. One 20 minutes survival mission, one excavation mission (for 800 cryotics) and one defense mission (15 waves). Does not sound too complicated until you realize that you have to do it on Europa vs lvl40-60 enemies and ALL your mods, your augments, your arcanes, your gear wheel... all of that is disabled during these missions. These 3 missions are a fucked up nightmare. Try to survive 20 mins if you can not kill enemies fast enough for them to drop oxygen. Try to defend a target if you can not deal enough damage. Try to find other players to help you if nobody really wants to play that mess. I in the end managed to finish the missions solo but I in the end took many hours and many tries to finally get the missions done. I had to use every dirty trick I could think of to even have a small chance to get the missions done.

And Khora... well, this is an ongoing project. The last blueprint I need drops from the C rotation of Sanctuary Onslaught (normal). That means it drops after completing wave 8. That is ~20 mins for every try. I have done 40-50 tries already. The "nearly guaranteed" drop is at 64 ± 19 C Rotations but I have read that some players took well over 100 tries to get the last Khora blueprint.

Is that grind justified? Is it worth it?

For Khora alone probably not. But Sanctuary Onslaught (and its elite version) are also very good ways to earn Focus. So even a failed attempt is rewarding. Here we are again at the topic "combine tasks". I don't need Khora anytime soon and if it drops in another 3 weeks it still will be ok because every run is still worth it.

The grind for the non-prime Warframes is something you don't necessarily have to do (unless you want to max out your mastery rank or if you want a very specific frame). Getting the Primed versions (if available) often is easier and for sure more rewarding. You can also take a shortcut and buy the warframe directly with ~300 platinum. In some cases it is easier to earn 300 plat than to grind for a specific warframe.

I think I end this with the conclusion that Warframe is a very casual game in which you can avoid much grind if you play clever. But it is not free of grind if you want something very specific.

It is always a good idea to spread your activities. There is plenty of stuff to explore and do. You earn rewards almost automatically.

It is always a good idea to combine tasks. You don't have to forcefully level weapons... that stuff can happen when you do other tasks.

Trading with other players is one of the best ways to avoid grind. You could have bad luck and never see a specific mod dropping for you... but on the other side you might get many duplicates that you don't need. Trade the duplicates with other players and use the earned platinum to buy the mod you want from another player. The market lowers the grind.

Edit: The very first mission today dropped the last blueprint that i needed. Sometimes its just that way.

coffee breaks

this week nightwave is easy. You can combine the weekly tasks with the elite task to open relics

Reason why people rush through missions is the end reward. It very often is more rewarding to complete a mission in 3mins than to kill everything. Opening lockers also is not very rewarding but consumes much time.

Rushing through a mission and destroying the crates on your way is more rewarding because you complete multiple missions in the time it would have taken to open every locker of just one mission.

Certain mission types are also not designed to reward large amounts of affinity for killing npcs. Eg. Capture or exterminate

From an efficency driven point of view it would be better to get these missions done fast and use the "gained" time to do a defense mission until wave 20 instead. The affinity you earn there is higher and for sure you get some relics.

Btw since we get a new corpus tile set we don't really know if Jupiter still involves these jump passages.

Not sure if the corpus rework even involves Jupiter to be honest.

And the kuva bramma gets nerfed.... yay?

the game and the star map was very different back then

Time for an Eidolon hunt guide.

This wont be an easy guide nor will it be short but I will skip a bit info that in my eyes you wont need.

I link a few videos I recorded to show how such hunts work. I think it is best to see how the stuff I describe actually works.

Why doing Eidolon hunts?

They allow you to collect sentient cores of higher rarity which you will need in order to improve your standings with the quills.

That in return gives you access to better amp componentes and arcanes (very important). Arcanes can massively improve your builds without using mod slots. You can sometimes even remove specific mods from your builds and replace them with others if the arcane is able to cover the same job.

You also will earn Eidolon shards which will help you to gain focus points and allow you to unbind certain focus abilities (which in the end means that you can combine different focus schools, at least in a limited way).

Eidolon hunts are considered end-game activities.

You can accept one of the two Eidolon bounties on cetus during night time.

Cetus has a day/night cycle and if you want to do a hunt you should plan accordingly. The orbiter navigation console shows information about the cycles and the navmap on the plains of eidolon also show detailed information about the current day/night status.

Depending on which bounty you select you should consider that such a hunt might take some time.

The easy bounty is a Terralyst hunt where you only have to kill or capture the very first Eidolon (the Terrayst). This task can be done in just 10 minutes or less and should be your first go if you are new and interested to learn the mechanics.

The 2nd bounty requires you to capture the Terralyst, capture the Gantulyst and kill or capture the Hydrolyst. This task is much more difficult and time consuming since not only you have to deal with 3 Eidolons... these Eidolons also get more difficult and dangerous.

While the Terralyst only fire a few shots on the ground to deal damage and stomp his foot to knock you back the Gantulyst will also cast energy beams which do AoE and the Hydrolyst will cast lightning strikes that you have to avoid and some kind of poisonous AoE around it.

Gantulyst and Hydrolyst are way larger than a Terralyst and therefore move faster which makes it harder to follow them in operator form.

Kill or Capture?

Generally you should try to capture Eidolons because the rewards will be better.

You get bonus Exceptional Sentient Cores for a capture aswell as Flawless Sentient Cores and Brilliant Eidolon Shards.

The difference between kill and capture is pretty easy.

If you do not have charged Eidolon lures at the final phase of the fight you are going to kill the Eidolon.

To capture one you need at least 2 charged lures for the Terralyst and 3 charged lures for the Gantulyst/Hydrolyst which are close to the Eidolon right before you kill it.

You can find these lures everywhere on the map close to Grineer camps. Shoot at them... then hack them. Now they will follow you.

To charge them you need to find Vomvalysts. Once they get close to your lures they establish a link to them. Now it is time to kill the Vomvalysts. You will notice that instead of dropping Sentient Cores the will transfer their energy into the lures.

One lure needs 3 of these charges until it turns from yellow to blue. Only blue lures can capture Eidolons.

So your first tasks always will be to get some lures and charge them.

Charged lures can be damaged and killed by Vomvalysts... so you have to protect them. That won't be a big deal if you are only going for a Terralyst since Vomvalysts only do enough damage to lures if they get buffed by the Eidolon. The buff from a Terralyst is not strong enough to be a danger to your lures.

Ok, assuming you have lures it is time to find the Eidolon.

It can be anywhere on the map but initially spawns at the big lake and walks clockwise over the map.

If you find it you should mark it so that all team members know where it is.

Now it is time for you to switch to your operator form and start destroying the Eidolons shields (purple). The Eidolon can not be damaged as long these shields are up and they can only be damaged by an amp.

Generally every amp works (as long you dont use the Mote Amp -> it sucks). Some amps are more effective than others but have disadvantages in other areas.

Amps consist of 3 pieces. The Prism (which determines the primary fire mode), the Scaffold (secondary fire) and the Brace (which adds bonus stats).

The Tier 7 amp (Klamora-Propa-Certus) I use in the vids is specifically effective against Eidolons but will lack the range that other game activities might require.

You certainly wont have access to it if you are just starting doing Eidolon hunts.

My advice for a beginner amp would be the Shwaak-Shraksun-Lohrin combination. I have used this for a long time and it works pretty good. You can rank up your standing with the quills to tier 3 by killing Vomvalysts at night and providing the sentient cores to the quills.

Once the shield of the Eidolon is destroyed it will flash red and now you can damage the Eidolon by shooting its Synovias.

The Synovias look a bit metallic and are located on the Eidolons shoulders and its knees. Terralysts have 4 Synovias, Gantulysts and Hydrolysts have 6 of them.

You need to switch back to your Warframe and if possible use a hard hitting weapon with good range. Snipers work good but also kitguns like a Tombfinger will get the job done.

When you hover your mouse over the Synovia the grey health bar of the eidolon will change color to yellow. That is a good way to find the right spot to shoot at.

Once destroyed the Eidolon will stagger.

IF you do not have a charged lure the Eidolon will start to disappear now and spawn at a different location on the map.

But if you have a charged lure the Eidolon can not escape. This really saves time.

Since you only destroyed one Synovia so far the Eidolon how will restore its shield to 50%. Time for you to switch to the operator mode again and use your amp to destroy the shield.

When you see the red flash you can use your warframe again to destroy the 2nd Synovia.

Same as before. The Eidolon will stagger. Your charge lures will prevent the Eidolon from escaping. Then the Eidolon will recharge his shield and you do the same process again two more times until all 4 Synovia (2x shoulders, 2x knees) are destroyed.

The Eidolon will fall to the ground but it is not dead yet. It will call for help.

Vomvalyst will approach and try to heal it.

You need to kill them... and if possible charge the remaining lures. Remember, for the Terralyst you will need 2 charged lures.

The Terralyst will stand up again. This time it will not have any shields and you can deal damage directly, anywhere on the body.

IF you finish off the Terralyst now without having 2 charged lures the Eidolon will be considered "killed". That also means if you wanted to do the 3-Eidolon hunt (Tridolon) your bounty will fail at this point because you only get Eidolon shards if you capture them.

With 2 charged lures the Terralyst is considered "captured" and leaves a large amount of Sentient cores of different rarities aswell as an Eidolon shard floating in the air.

If you took the easy bounty you are done. Congratz.

If you took the hard bounty (Tridolon) you collect the sentient cores and the shard.

Now you move to the big lake with the (I assume) Eidolon/Sentient bones in the middle. There you can place the Eidolon shard (you can see me doing that multiple times in the vids).

When all team members have done that a new Eidolon will spawn from the lake.

I advice to make sure to get enough lures before placing the shard. The 2nd and 3rd Eidolon require 3 charged lures for the capture and it can be that lures get destroyed. So better collect a few lures more than you would need.

The procedure for the Gantulyst and the Hydrolyst Eidolon is pretty much the same as with the Terralyst.

The main differences are that these new Eidolons will attack you more frequently and deal more damage. You also need to destroy 6 Synovia (two additional ones on its back).

- charge the lures

- defend charged lures from Vomvalysts

- use your amp to destroy the Eidolon shields

- use your normal weapons to destroy the Synovia

- repeat, repeat, repeat...

If on the final damage phase you notice that your team does not have 3 charged lures you should try to get new lures from somewehre and get them charged asap.

Tell your team to slow down if necessary. You can charge new lures on the final phase if required. That is possible.

Your team in that case just needs to prevent that Vomvalysts heal the Eidolon until the 3 lures are charged. Then you can finish off the Eidolon.

That is how Eidolon hunts work.

General tips:

1. Remember to collect the Sentient cores whenever you can. Always collect the floating Eidolon shards after you defeated one of the Eidolons.

2. The unidentified item you get after defeating an Eidolon is always going to be an arcane. Every Eidolon has its own set of possible arcance drops. That means sooner or later you will have to do Tridolon hunts if you want rarer variants of Arcanes.

3. General advice I consider highly important is to spent as much time as possible in operator form.

When controling your operator your Warframe is invulnerable. It is the best way to prevent dying. If your operator gets killed... instantly switch back to the operator form to prevent that your warframe gets damaged. Only use your warframe to bulletjump into the range of the Eidolon (and if possible switch to your operator mid-air to avoid AoE damage) OR when the Eidolon is vulnerable and you need to use your normal weapons to destroy the Synovia.

4. Use your operator cloak as often as possible. When you are cloaked your operator does not take damage.

Pro tips:

1. You might notice in my vids that very often right after I took down the shields of an Eidolon you hear that sounds which indicates that a Synovia was destroyed.

That means a team member one-shooted the Synovia.

You most likely wont get that done because you would need to deal insane amounts of damage. Don't worry about that. You don't need to one shot anything to do Eidolon hunts. It simply is not necessary.

However, I will show you in the vid below how these players actually are doing it.

As you can see my sniper rifle does ~50k damage on the grineer if I hit the heads and if it orange crits it does ~98k damage.

The lower damages you see sometimes are because I either do not hit the head (my eidolon build for that sniper rifle has reduced accuracy -> heavy caliber mod) or because of higher distance to the target (every weapon has a damage fall off based on range).

Just ignore the lower numbers.

The players which one-shot Eidolons utilize the Madurai Focus school... specificially the ability "void strike".

On max level this ability increases the total damage of your next 8 shots by 12% per second you have used Void cloak.

So if you stay cloaked for 30 seconds it's 30x12%=360%. That means your next 8 shots fired will deal x3.6 damage. A crit hit that previosly did 98k damage would do 353k damage now.

The scaling of that ability is to my knowledge unlimited. If players stay cloaked for minutes they will deal millions of damage with just one shot.

That is pretty cool actually... but it also means that these players will not help you to kill vomvalysts nor will they contribute in destroying the Eidolon shields.

You can see the damage multiplicator in the upper right corner.

It certainly is worth to know how it works. I personally don't use that method very often because usually I have the strongest amp in the team and focus on bringing down the shields.

2. It is very important to have high crits when playing Eidolon hunts. In the vid above you see why. Yellow damage = ~50k damage, Orage damage = ~98k damage.

You can make sure to use weapons and mods which increase the crit chance.

But there also is another method worth to consider. Pets.

There are two possible methods.

You could use a Smeetha Kavat. The Smeetha can use the charm mod which can grant a random buff to the kavat owner every 27 seconds. One of the six possible buffs is a 30 seconds increase of crit chance by 200%. This is a pretty high buff but since these buffs are random they are not reliable. You might have a totally different buff when you actually need crit chance during a damage phase on Eidolon hunts. On top of that, the Kavat might die and you have to revive it which costs time.

An alternative is to use a sentinel instead (it does not matter which one). Important here is that you select a primary sentinal rifle (keep in mind that the deconstructor of the helios is not a primary weapon. It is a melee weapon).

Now you can put as many mods of the Vigilante mod set onto that weapon. Fervor, Offense, Supplies and Pursuit fit onto that weapon... which would mean that you have a 20% chance to "enhance" crit hits. That means a yellow crit will be enhanced to orange, orange to red. In theory you can put the other 2 mods of that set to your warframe to increase the % to 30. Your sentinel will be pretty much useless during the Eidolon hunts in terms of killing enemies. Every pet is useless in that regard. But the buff from the vigilante set is very useful when you want to destroy the Synovia.

When your sentinel is being destroyed you can not revive it (unlike kavat) but you do not need to worry about such details. The buff from the Vigilante set always will be active even if your sentinel is dead. It simply does not matter. Take a sentinel on the hunts... make use of the vigilante set on the sentinal weapon. Do not bring a kubrow or kavat. Especially do not bring a Kavat since the wild Vasca Kavats might attack and infect it with the virus on the Plains.