Had a discussion with the clan where a newer player was planning on skipping Trinity since “she’s a support frame”. Having tinkered with her builds a fair bit, I think it’s more fair to say she can be built as an unkillable melee nuker, making her maybe more like a “war cleric” or such.
I still need to test if Empowered Blades is actually usable at level cap with the constant recycling of shields between empty and full, but at least at “normal” levels of content (less than level 550), Trinity has an extremely powerful melee setup with the aura.
source: upload to the wiki
It’s important to note that status damage is applied twice in two instances, and three times when both situations are true: whenever Blast damages nearby enemies, and whenever status is transferred through Melee Influence. Adding another 60% status damage is thus 73% more damage on regular Influence builds, and an impressive 127% more damage on Blast Influence nuke builds.
Trinity is an excellent carrier for Empowered Blades as she has two very effective methods of generating shields: Blessing, and her Energy Leech augment Vampire Leech. In addition, her shield recovery is for everyone, so she doesn’t grief her teammates as hard as other viable EB users!
We can extend this ability to buff melee even further through a variety of helminths. Due to Trinity’s incredible energy economy, she can afford to run extremely high power/low efficiency builds to offset “helminth nerfs”:
- Xata’s Whisper: the Blast-Xata multidip interaction goes even harder here due to the extra status damage. Boxes you in to Blast Influence builds though.
- Sentient Wrath:
AoE damage vulnerability and Tau status for status chance. Another source of multidip for Influence.1/6th better than Roar and provides a bit of CC, but otherwise limited by line of sight. - Roar: after nerfs to Sentient Wrath, it’s significantly better if you’re planning on using Influence to do LoS-ignoring nukes
- Eclipse: double dips on glaives and certain “glaive maths” projectiles like the Okina Incarnon ghost sai (although something else weird might be going on with that weapon).
- Wrathful Advance: since this is a melee buffing setup
- Nourish: scaling shield support due to the interaction with Vampire Leech. Offsets Blind Rage.
- Infested Mobility: the people thought they were safe from Slamkong, but Slamkour never went away.
Weapons I’ve personally tried and can recommend with this setup:
- Sancti Magistar Incarnon
- Praedos
- Halikar Wraith
- Pathocyst (looking forward to getting an electric Coda Pathocyst)
- Corufell
- Stropha
- Okina Incarnon
It seems to be shield drain per enemy hit, and it might be interesting when multiple people in the squad are using the aura.
Really shouldn’t be a problem for Trinity thanks to Link, and theAbating Link augment should make any non-slash DOT more effective against enemies that normally have armor.*Link will not redirect shield drain to enemies.
I haven’t noticed Link (nor Blessing) mitigating EB, so I would guess it’s using the same code as Hildryn’s shield drain. There are some other quirks too, like it will consume shields even when you’re otherwise protected by Overguard. I’ll need a better test setup but I believe it drains energy during Ivara’s Prowl too, although it’s not “damage” so it doesn’t trigger Avenger or Aegis/Barrier.
If it is using Hildryn code I wonder if it’s subject to global efficiency effects like Impetus 🤔