The crystal maiden, the walking geode, incredibly annoying to farm - Citrine!
Release date: 2023-02-15
Passive: Citrine emits a healing aura within a radius of 50 meters that continuously recover a base 5 Health points per second. Whenever she picks up a regular Health Orb, Dispensary produced Empowered variant, or Transmutation Probe converted Universal Orb, regeneration rate is permanently increased by 0.1 points, up to a maximum heal rate of 25 points per second.
Fractured Blast - Slash and stagger enemies with a crystal blast that inflicts Bleed. Enemies afflicted with this Status Effect have an increase chance of dropping Health and Energy Orbs.
Preserving Shell - Citrine guards herself and nearby allies with a crystalline shell that gradually decays. Kills and assists increase the defensive power of the shell.
Prismatic Gem - Deploy a gem that shoots prismatic beams. The gem targets enemies that are taking weapon damage from Citrine and her allies. Its beams inflict Heat, Cold, Toxin, and Electricity Status Effects. Status Chance and Status Duration increase for nearby allies.
Crystallize - Citrine summons crystal fractals. The fractals rush forward, seeking enemies. Enemies touched by the fractals are paralyzed crystalline growths. Hit the growths to deal Critical Damage.
Acquisition: Pain
Main and component blueprints can be obtained from Rotation C of Mirror Defense Tyana Pass on Mars. Alternatively they can be purchased from Otak in the Necralisk, Deimos with Belric Crystal Fragment and Rania Crystal Fragment.
Citrine, one of my favourite support frames. Absolute crit chance and status chance on the same kit goes extremely hard. The unusually high status chance that Citrine bestows opens up all kinds of Melee Influence shenanigans surrounding the usual blast procs of heavy slams, but this time with high electric proc rates to consistently spread those big blasts around.
With her new augment, she trades CC for functionally being the cooler Harrow. High range and decent duration keep the crystals rolling indefinitely. Also as a side note, you can think of the crystals as being a mix of Nukor microwave and Banshee sonar: the entire body part is actually marked, but it also grows a big growth that functionally makes it a larger target.
As our tools evolve, Citrine just keeps getting better and her loadouts become more and more expressive. Given how early she’s available, I’d say she’s an excellent part of any new player’s toolkit.
The second best support frame in the game, only beat by Wisp due to the sheer convenience of her Motes. While her abilities require her to do far more than just “press 1 and enjoy buffs” to get their payoff, the reward is well worth it! This frame takes Gara’s best abilities and makes them even better! Team-wide 90% DR with none of the annoying maintenance associated with Splinter Storm. Crystallize is Mass Vitrify but in a cone and much much faster, while giving everyone capable of aiming red crits with any weapon. More of a status person than a crit one? Prismatic Gem has you covered, all enemies now come pre-primed while your weapons get bonus status chance and duration! And her Fractured Blast provides both health orbs to fuel her passive and energy orbs to keep her energy economy going. With Equilibrium on you can forgo efficiency completely and not care one bit. If this frame wasn’t locked behind such an annoying farm I imagine she would be way more popular, it’s the one bad thing about her.
Speaking purely in maths terms, I’d say Banshee is the best support due to the overwhelming power of stacked Sonars ;)
Alas sonar got capped at only 2 stacks.
Mostly capped at two stacks, although there can be funny business based on how many body parts an enemy has. I don’t think there are any enemies where that’s relevant. Also, the stacks multiply against themselves, so a 200% strength Banshee is actually a 100x multiplier, not a 20x multiplier. Even a 155% strength Banshee yields a 60x double stack.
Not counting things like Secondary Surge Deathtrap Trigger setups, or multiplicative Accuracy Harrow setups, even a single stack of Sonar outperforms Citrine for most weapons and Harrow for some, or for enemies without headshot multipliers. Double stack, I don’t think anyone comes close, not even a hypothetical Sentient Wrath Rhino.
The perfect warframe.
DR: check
Self heal: check
Energy generation: check
CC: check
Damage: check
Status priming: boy do i even need to say it
Synergy with other weapons: check (both status and crit)
Decent default range and duration of abilities: checkShe’s one of my main go-to frames for difficult endgame content and she never lets me down. The only thing she lacks is armor strip but this is easily solved by helminthing pillage over her #4, if you don’t want to build around it anyway. I’ve also seen people talk about doing it with green archon shards and corrosion status but the math never checked out for this for me, it takes way too many hits and too long to fully strip an enemy this way.
I didn’t know people had issues with her acquisition, I got a few parts out of the mirror defense and then bought the rest with the currency. It was one of the first frames with the pity currency mechanic and i thought people were happy enough with it ngl
Also, we’re really due for a skin for her! Wish we get a deluxe soon
For green shards, you use Archon Continuity and it turns your Prismatic Gem into an armour removal laser. I also use a corr/cold Verglas companion.
Regarding the farm, it’s only easy if you skip the Arcanes, which is a tough sell given how good Encumber, Steadfast, and Plated Rounds are.
Prismatic Gem has a 25% to inflict toxic (corrosive) status per tick. It takes 14 corrosive stacks to fully armor strip something with emerald shards. It means it takes ~56 hits on average on an enemy before they get fully armor stripped.
I don’t really see how is that optimal. Even if we have a weapon doing corrosive damage (which is not common since viral is meta now) reducing this time in half, it’s still over 20 hits - I want most of my enemies dead before I hit them 5 times, not 20 or 50.
It looks bad like that, yeah, but in practice:
A corr/cold verglas will apply 10 corrosive to the enemy, then an Archon Continuity Prismatic Gem applies the final 3 or 4 stacks very quickly. You can go the other route and continue to run a Panzer and use a corrosive beam like an Atomos, Gaze, Cycron; or for Primaries anything from a corr/heat Phantasma to your favourite corr/cold beam or multishot weapon like the Boltor.
That said, you’re right, there’s about parity between Viral and 92% and over Corrosive. I double-checked my maths and realised I’d misremembered fullstrip as being a 7x multiplier.
So, I guess my new conclusion is that Arch-Con Citrine is mostly just a buff if you’re doing a corr-viral or corr-viral-mag setup.
edit:
I forgot, one thing I definitely don’t know and will test soon is whether the Prismatic Gem beams spawned by squadmates count as Citrine’s ability, and if so whether they inherit her jade shard.
Allies also shooting the target doesn’t really make it better, in the end it still results in needing lots of hits to strip - likely more than it’s required to kill.
It still sounds like this is all more due to Verglas being OP than anything to do with Citrine, if it alone accounts for instant 80% armor strip. With a companion, shards and corrosive weapon even Loki can fully armor strip then, it has nothing to do with the wf or prismatic gem.
I’m not saying it doesn’t help, each free corrosion stack when near Citrine helps a bit even if you dont equip emerald shards. In my experience though, in practice, it’s easier to just cast pillage, immediately fully strip that thrax centurion and oneshot him than depending on corrosive stacks building up. It’s just too slow.
edit: You mentioned mutlishot boltor, I dont think prismatic gem triggers off multishot otherwise shotguns would be completely busted with it. Shooting an enemy with a single shotgun blast doesn’t proc the gem a dozen times afaik, maybe it has an internal cooldown.
edit: You mentioned mutlishot boltor, I dont think prismatic gem triggers off multishot otherwise shotguns would be completely busted with it. Shooting an enemy with a single shotgun blast doesn’t proc the gem a dozen times afaik, maybe it has an internal cooldown.
Bad writing on my part, I was trying to get at high-multishot weapons being an alternative route to high procs per second than just beams, in case it seemed I was restricting Citrine’s loadout options to just beams. Boltor is just a standout since it’s a great hybrid weapon.
She’s fantastic for supporting her team, but the fact that she can’t protect defense objects or defense operators with her abilities bumps her down on my list. If I need a healer there’s a good chance I’ll want them to do that too, so I usually pick Oberon or a CC frame.
