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.
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: check
She’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.
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.