The crystal geode, mineral manipulator, DE please give us Mirror Defense omnia fissure - Citrine!
Passive: Citrine emits a healing aura within a radius of 50 meters, granting the Geoluminesence buff to herself and allies that continuously recover a base 5 Health points per second. Whenever she picks up a Health 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: 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, awarded from Mirror Defense.
It feels kinda insane to me to think she’s going to be primed relatively soon. I returned to Warframe in-between Voruna and Citrine, so it feels like she’s still a “new” frame in my head.
I really wish her passive was just…anything. 25hp/s is just so useless, and that’s after you build it up. It’s nice to kinda counteract the self damage from Combat Discipline, but could honestly be 50 or even 100hp/s without being seriously that strong.
Otherwise, I’m a big fan of the “mostly self-interested warframe that happens to buff their team.” I wish I saw her more frequently, and hopefully once she’s Primed more people get a chance to play with her.
Is there a release date for Citrine prime?
It’ll be next year. When exactly kinda depends, we still don’t know what order DE is going to return to releasing primes post Xaku. After Yareli might be Gyre - Caliban - Styanax - Voruna - Citrine, which would a Summer 2026 release. It also might go Caliban - Styanax - Gyre - Voruna - Kullervo - Qorvex - Citrine, which would put Citrine at the end of the 2026. They also might do Caliban - Gyre - Styanax - Voruna - Kullervo - Citrine.
Until we get the next Prime, there’s no way to really predict, because we don’t know what order DE wants to release Primes moving forward and this is their best opportunity to change it.
Citrine is getting a new Deluxe skin soon which will hopefully motivate people to actually farm her cause I never see this frame played. I genuinely seen more Oberons in PUBs than Citrines! Granted, I’m guilty of that myself but that’s mostly cause this frame is a fantastic support and I play this game solo 98% of the time. She’s really damn good! Her 1 can sustain even the greediest builds with the showers of health and energy orbs it generates, her 2 takes the glass-themed 90% DR Gara has and makes it incredibly convenient to maintain it on your entire team, her 3 is a slow but still decent primer and her 4 is a CC with a dmg boost that still applies it’s crystal growth debuff even on Overguarded enemies! I know we’re in a shield gating meta but as a die-hard health/armor tank I’m always happy to see a Citrine, 90% DR and free HP regen as well as infinite health orbs to supercharge my Arcane Blessings!
Citrine was the first frame I made after coming back from my years long break and it felt insane how good her survivability was, not to mention the healing and damaging aspects. I have to guess she’s a little redundant when Wisp can output enough buffs and healing for any situation, but still, what a beauty.
I would take a Citrine over a Wisp any day, 90% DR is far better than the little bit of extra health Wisp can give and her fire rate buffs are more often than not more annoying than helpful, it makes your ammo economy absolutely awful and turns everything into a bullet hose. Citrine’s energy and health orbs are always useful, especially now when so many people run some sort of Equilibrium effect and her 4 can allow you to red crit with ANYTHING! I wish I saw her more often, she’s probably the support frame I’m most happy to see in my squad.
She’s pretty good! Recrystallize gives her a really interesting playstyle with some of the old low-CC-high-CD style weapons like the Nukor or Sporothrix. Or you can just run a blast influence Corufell and murder everything forever.
For most content, Preserving Shell and her passive work together to give her an excellent health pool for surviving toxin damage, above which she can run Arcane Aegis with Preserving Shell for a nigh unbreakable shield. Extremely survivable with minimal input.
For CC, the spreading Cold from Prismatic Gem and mass supply of energy orbs from Fractured Blast lets her run Arcane Eruption for extended knockdowns. I don’t run the build, but like Nezha she’s an excellent candidate for the gloomquake strat of combining Gloom with Eruption knockdowns to lock down a wide area. Citrine is an amazing priority killer and can quickly murder anything left standing.
I have a Circuit build that makes Citrine a high priority pick. Due to her high potential armour with Health Conversion, she can easily reach +1100% power strength with Fortified Will and Inner Absorption, and then Close Contagion and Shattering Frost work together to turn Prismatic Gem into a doom laser. Obviously this many decrees is very RNG, but on longer runs it’s less of an issue. I run Pillage on this build, but I think Decoy with Vaz spam for personal survival is an option to make excavations less awful.
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.
