Personally I’m more anxious about Aten, since the mobile defense consoles are already squishy and aren’t scaled for the T4 void multiplier. They can go down in seconds.

I’d be interested in a solo Mag playthrough, but I wonder how the early grind towards the mods she needs would be.

Considerations like that are why I decided you can trade a prime set over so that more frames are available from the start.

In the ideal thought experiment, you’d just start with the frame.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Speaking purely in maths terms, I’d say Banshee is the best support due to the overwhelming power of stacked Sonars ;)

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.

It’s wild to me to think that the Stahlta and Stropha came out five years ago and they’re still some of the best weapons in the game.

Sitting and thinking about this, I realised most of my favourite frames essentially all buff weapons to the point that there are no “not powerful” weapons. Banshee, Nyx, Zephyr, Sevagoth, Frost, Limbo, Ivara.

Some of my standout niche or “hidden boss” weapons are:

• Basmu: the cooler Nukor. Has a lot of different elemental builds. Has a cool corr-cold-blast build due to its primary fire having split elements between direct electric and radial heat. I’m still playing around with getting a good altfire build.
• Staticor: has the niche of being fairly weak on paper, but with an absolutely phenomenal radius and fairly good status chance. I’ve been running it on Frost and it performs way ahead of what it “should” according to my spreadsheets, so I don’t know.
• Alternox: I don’t care what anyone says, I love running this on Gyre because of how good it looks. With a riven and a bit of love, it’s quite functional as a crowd clearer, range extender, and bubble popper.
• Sibear: kind of a bad reputation as the most meh incarnon, but even if that were so it’s in the context of incarnons. Still hits like a truck, high range, stacks slows, readily stacks large amounts of cold, and combo racking that would make any gunblade blush.
• Redeemer Prime: Melee Afflictions gave this one new life. I run it on Stealth Xata builds as a nuke weapon.
• Pathocyst: people sleep on this one. Has the highest raw damage of any glaive, so it’s a great Afflictions carrier or Duplicate nuker. Still playing with a Crescendo build for heavy blast spam.

And an honorable mention to the Kuva Karak. Has a niche as a mag/blast weapon with good hybrid stats. I’ve actually found it outperforms the Tenet Flux as a Blast carrier, which was surprising. Great with Nautilus since it stacks IPS quickly to refresh Cordon.

There are at least three Dystopias in the game, lol. CN Dystopia, Professor Dystopia, and you.

Could you post your favourite loadout, in terms of the frame you use, the weapons you use, and their mod configs? I can give more tailored advice with that information.

Give her augment a try, since it turns her into a nuke frame. I wasn’t a fan before the augment either.

Voruna is an outstanding frame, being an agile, highly mobile, invisible nuker with super easy energy economy, at least if you run Ulfrun’s Endurance. She’s able to project extremely spicy slashes over a wide range through the combined action of her 2 and 4. The mobility afforded by using Dynar’s passive is both fun and effective for what she wants to do, and she has gap closers in the form of Raksh and Ulfrun.

Lycath’s Hunt is self-sustaining if you keep priming enemies with Raksh, and kills from Ulfrun will count as melee kills to spawn health orbs, meaning Voruna should essentially never run out of energy.

The conditions for the +dmg/-acc corrupted mods are basically “high accuracy, low crit, low status”. I use Magnum Force on Hildryn’s Balefire.

Stacking base damage always grows linearly, which can beat crit on weapons with bad crit stats, and can beat status on weapons with low status chance, but will very rarely beat both, and usually on very old weapons.

I think the shield gating changes and Secondary Fortifier have done wonders for his survivability and chill factor.

More broadly it sounds like I should cover his survivability techniques and tools?

I think the Limbomb build is essentially dead on SP. I couldn’t get it scaling properly even with Panzer viral and fullstrip. For all I know it’s bugged and doesn’t properly account for the SP health multiplier, like how Oberon’s Reckoning didn’t used to account for the SP armour multiplier.

Limbo has been through a few iterations, how about his current state and how the game has changed to give him tools to mitigate his pain points? For example, Zariman was kind of the Limbocalypse due to Overguard, but he has Fortifier and Magnetic to deal with that mechanic now. I also didn’t join until 2015/didn’t get seriously into Warframe until 2021, so I personally just can’t speak for launch Limbo.

Styanax is a beast in Circuit since his Final Stand spears scale off the amount of decrees you have. He’s easily one of the best Circuit frames, standing alongside Nova, Vauban, Gyre and Protea for hard-scaling Circuit nukers.

To be fair, Styanax is a beast everywhere due to the raw power of Final Stand (especially augmented with Overguard) and Tharros Strike. If you’re not in Duviri, the projectile ability scaling can be tapped with Arcane Arachne.