The key philosophy to have if you want to advance through Mastery Ranks fast, is to first understand Mastery Rank, first then can you devise a solid strategy to bend it to your will :)

Understanding Mastery Rank

Alright, so Mastery Rank for all of you who don’t know is a players “Rank” or Level, in Warframe.

You level up your Mastery Rank by collecting “Affinity” in missions – either by picking up “Affinity orbs” (see image below).

And/or by killing enemies and/or by completing your “mission affinity quest” (every mission you enter you will get a missionto do a task for example “kill 20 enemies using secondary weapon” – completion of this quest grants “mission affinity”). The Affinity will be transfered to your Warframe, your Sentinel/Pet/Companion & its weapon, and/or your primary, your secondary, your melee.

Basically if you kill enemies by using your Warframes abilities – your Warframe will get the majority of the Affinity (experience) making it level-up faster than the rest of your equipment(!).

There are also tricks you can do to focus your affinity gain to specific single items – for example by equipping “none” in the weapon slots not intended to be leveled (or pet slot). See image below.

This works  because if you have one primary, one secondary, one melee and a pet equipped at the same time- all of these will share the affinity gained on missions- making them all level up together at the same time, even if a bit unevenly (the most used way of killing will gain more affinity) – this is not always maybe what you want though :) So now you know how to fix it if ever needed! Try it out, you will surely notice faster level up for single items this way :)

To calculate Mastery Rank points I will post some data referenced from Warframe.wikia.com as well as from personal experience:

• All manner of Weapons- whether it be Sentinel weapon, Archwing weapon or Primary/Secondary or Melee – these will give 100 mastery rank points/level-up (0-30 levels means 3000 mastery rank points total per weapon).
• Warframes, Companions (Kubrow, Kavat, Sentinel) and Archwings in contrast give 200 mastery rank points/level-up (0-30 levels mean 6000 mastery rank points total per warframe/archwing/pet).
• Victory over the opponent frame in a junction will grant you 1000 mastery rank points.
• And apparently will clearing a main objective of a node (one time) give around 63 mastery rank points according to warframe.wikia.com.

Important Note to Make! You will ONLY get Mastery rank points ONCE per weapon/warframe/companion/archwing. Deleting or selling a weapon that already was leveled to 30, and buying/crafting a new one, and leveling it up from 0-30 once more, won’t give mastery rank points again! (Trust me on this, made this mistake plenty of times myself with Braton back in the day before knowing better ;P)

This brings us to the:

Philosophy behind how to advance through mastery ranks quickly in Warframe

Warframe is a farming game, and the basics above gives a fundamental understanding of how the system works and what can be done to reach higher mastery ranks faster – namely get weapons, warframes, pets and archwing stuff and level it to 30, then you can get rid off the things you didn’t like after trying them out, and keep the good stuff (doing this also helps lighten the platinum expenses for “extra slots”).

The beauty of the foundry is that it allows multiple parallell craftings to occur simultaneously. You can for example craft all of the warframes at the same time! (provided you got the necessary materials and parts of course). Same goes for weapons or anything else as long as your not trying to craft the same item at the same time, then you actually have to wait for the first one to finish :)

So as a new player to the game of Warframe, you want to get as much equipment to craft as possible, and level it up to 30 before choosing what to keep or not to keep – because this will advance your mastery rank in the way it was intended. Simply switch out a weapon, warframe or pet when it reaches 30, to another one that is not yet completed level 30 to keep advancing through the mastery ranks.

Pro Tip: Don’t get rid off equipment until it has reached level 30 to take care of the maximum possible mastery rank that can be obtained from it!

When about to rank up Mastery Rank

If you are about to Rank up to next Mastery rank, you can either go to youtube and search something in style with “Mastery rank up 9 test” to see how the test from 8-9 is done (I think it will be), or you can head over to Mercury’s Larunda Relay station – and ESC-Fast-travel to Cephalon Simaris:

and when you’re in his chambers, turn to the right, right next to the door, and go up the stairs there:

you can see 1 booth for each mastery rank-up test:

Here you can practice – as well as do the qualifying actual test. Practice tests can be useful to try out and find out tactics to complete mastery rank tests without actually doing them risking getting the 24hour “cooldown” on trying your mastery rank up test again, which is what happens if you fail the actual test.

Hope this helps, Enjoy y’all ;)