luxetobscura

I recently took Citrine to EDA after a long period of dust collection and was pleasantly surprised by how well she aged.

• Automatic priming with Prismatic Gem and (Re)Crystallize's crit chance/damage bonuses make her a fun substrate for weapon builds that would otherwise be constrained by mod slots.
• She also makes excellent use of Archon Continuity/Stretch and Arcane Impetus, freeing up efficiency/strength mod slots for defense and parkour.
• Fractured Blast serves a dual purpose as health/energy regen and constant shield gating, so you can comfortably run negative efficiency (or deal with Energy Exhaustion/Constricted personal modifiers) as long as you keep up the KPM.

My main gripes:

• Preserving Shell upkeep is difficult in enemy-scarce environments and damage reduction doesn't scale super well as of right now. I did the most boring thing possible and opted to run a shield gating build instead.
• Crystallize casts so slowly that I felt compelled to use two amber cast speed shards.
• Can we talk about how shitty Mirror Defense is, even after the overall defense changes to 3 waves per rotation? The hardest part about playing Citrine is farming her parts in the first place.

Not really sure how I feel about Temple yet. I love the design (glam rocker with a flamethrower guitar probably would've been my hyperfixation like 15 years ago), but it really feels like Arcane Hot Shot was designed specifically for this frame, and I'm not too happy about Temporal Archimedea's timegated progression.

To expand on the metronomic clunkiness of the Backbeat mechanic that other people have mentioned already, it introduces an extra latency in the gameplay loop. Normally it goes something like: see enemy > aim > cast. With Backbeat, now it's: see enemy > aim > delay until next Backbeat window > cast. So optimal gameplay essentially forces you to quantize your casts to the hard-coded Backbeat frequency. The most obvious brute-force solution to this is to simply Always Be Casting on the Backbeat, but that feels profoundly dumb.

His tactical alert variant has no ability immunity. I just hosed him down with Mesa.

Edit: whoops, looks like the event ended right as I replied. I hope you figured out a build!

Great timing, since I just wrapped up MHWilds for now. I'm definitely gonna be retouching Ash too if you know what I mean.

I'm not super keen on more Archimedea, especially with defense and assassination in the rotation. I do like the sticker system conceptually - it reminds me of Smash Brawl. More mod systems!

I wasn't aware of the damage redirection priority before Overguard... My Nekros was relegated to Argon and Arbitration farming for the last few years, but sounds like I'll have to experiment with more modern setups.

I love how this post turned into a Chroma thread, lmao.

Rhino might be simpler and more effective, but Chroma looks cooler and makes the game more interesting imo. That's the lifeblood of endgame for me.

I farmed up two copies of Arcane Energize for some newer players and Avenger/Fury/Arachne/Strike as well. As for everything else... The Vosfor must flow.

Fun build! I tried this out on my support Styanax and it works quite well.

Here's my variant, with 2 cast speed and 3 ability strength shards.

Ohh, I do really want an Influence Whipclaw. Maybe Atlas will be saved that way too.

Hold-to-spam for pseudo-exalted abilities would be really nice too. In the meantime, the OG hack of binding 1 to scroll wheel will have to do.

Khora is a monster. Lots of people use her for farming/interception, but I much prefer to run her as a whip-cracking DPS with Magistar Incarnon, Magus Aggress, and Amethyst Archon shards for melee crit damage.

Definitely concerned that Khora won't be able to casually hit huge damage numbers after the pseudo-exalted rework. We'll see what happens, I guess.

Melee Doohickey

They're ok. Just a fun little toy that brings back nostalgia and not much more, at least for PvE purposes. My old hands are content to bullet jump as DE intended when they folded coptering into the game.

Are they banned in Conclave?