What is the end game for high tier difficulties in this game. Right now I am using the Rhino(18), Braton(18), AkLatos(18), and Fragor(19) which are modded out with mostly common mods and some rare. So my question is what should I be shooting for in terms of warframe, weapons, and mods to stay competitive later on and be a credit to team. My playstyle generally revolves around gunplay and some melee while not using so much(though would consider it once I become more comfortable with the game). Any help would be appreciated thank you.

Balance is "fairly good", though a few warframes certainly are quite a lot stronger than others, especially at specialized tasks (for instance: Frost, Vauban and Nyx are the strongest for defensive missions), same goes for weapons, though they aren't as well balanced.

That said, you will want to swap warframes and weapons regularly to get your mastery level up - this will give you access to a handful of mastery locked weapons. You gain mastery each time a warframe or weapon levels up. (but not after using Forma (don't worry about forma for now, though). I typically swap out a weapon/warframe whenever it hits 30 (this is the max rank).

As for mods, I've started focusing on getting a few mods up to high ranks to get maximum gains from them. Downside of this is needing to unequip a warframe/weapon when I am done with it.

That said, there are several types of builds (mod setups) for each warframe and weapon, you are best off deciding what works for you, or checking what others are doing, as there are so many different weapons and warframes that it is almost impossible to produce any sort of compendium. A good place to start is the Warframe Wiki.

Hope that helps? Feel free to ask if you have any specific questions :)

Thanks for your advice and I just fully figured out the mod system today and raised my shields, health, and sprint speed(Rhino is so slow).

I think this is the games biggest failing of letting the player know that. I had zero idea of that until a few weeks ago and I've been playing in the beta. Maybe it does say somewhere and I missed it but it isn't the most obvious if I'm honest.

@mrcraggle: No, I don't think it does. But on the other hand, there isn't a lot of things that require mastery ranks as of yet.

You can buy everything in the market at Mastery rank 4. I believe the clan weapons have pretty high mastery requirements as well (7 for Lanka, 6 for Flux, 4 for Spectra...)

Yea, that's true. If you're not in a clan, you can get to rank 4 and now really be concerned with going past it as you have access to every weapon pretty much. Not sure about prime weapons as I don't have any yet.

Yeah speaking of the clan thing how does it work in the game?

@rhinothewino: How do you mean?

The clan chat is just a tab in the chat window, you need to click on the text that says "clan" to see what is typed in there (the text turns red if there is unread text on the tab).

If you mean the dojo, you first need to build the dojo key in your foundry (accessed using the "foundry" button on the top of your screen at the main solar-system map screen).

@mnemoidian: I did not have that option available last time I was on.

I enjoyed playing two mission of this game last night...have NO CLUE what is going on or why? All I know is there is this bad guy with a 'poppin fresh dough' face running around on chicken feet who hates my character. Then you and three other people run around (breaking?) (fixing?) things on 'poppin fresh dough' face's ships until you pop out of the ship on rocket assisted escape pods - I think. A lot of fun, but about as clear as thick paint for knowing what is going on, let alone how to upgrade your armor or weapons.