Press ‘2’ to Give Energy

Despite all of my talk about Warframe, there’s something I’ve been almost hesitant to mention. I’ve always been someone who veers towards healers and support characters, but here I am, playing Warframe and keeping far, far away from the main support character in the game.

As Warframes go, Trinity isn’t that hard to get. You need to complete quite a few junctions – Venus, Mercury, Mars and Phobos, before you can access Ceres and reach the boss battle there. For some reason, the boss fight is against Captain Vor and Lieutenant Kril, two bosses you’ve already fought on Mercury and Mars respectively. Surprisingly enough, I managed to get the parts I needed for Trinity in three tries – compared to the over ten tries I needed to get Ember’s parts.

Strictly speaking, I should have gotten several other frames first, as my order of Warframe acquirement is quite weird. A normal player, after having probably picked Excalibur over Volt and Mag, would have picked up Rhino on Venus and Frost on Mars, before getting Mag from Phobos, and then getting Trinity from Ceres, while having picked up the parts for Oberon in the mean time. I somehow managed to skip half of those, getting Ember from Saturn, and my beloved Volt Prime from relics and pressies, before getting Trinity.

But I had to get Trinity at some point. She’s one of the most required characters in the game and Warframe’s main healer. Plus, I’d seen all my higher level friends play her and be incredibly effective, especially with their ability to increase teammates’ shields.

I was in for a disappointment. As I took Trinity for a test run on E Prime (as I do with all my new frames), I found her tedious. Her healing ability only heals. It’s great for CCing one single target (perhaps a Bombard or Toxic Ancient), but you have to shoot the target to actually get heals, despite the fancy green healing effects. Sounds good in theory, but it turns out that most people don’t actually NEED healing. People need their shields refilled – I had my own example already, with Volt having 800 shields and only 420 health.

I soon unlocked Energy Vampire, the bread and butter of Trinity. As I used it, I realised three things. 1. This ability is a pain in the ass to aim. 2. The casting time is ridiculous. 3. This was the same ability Davjo and company were using and it wasn’t giving me shields, just meager amounts of energy.

Fine, I thought. I’ll finish leveling Trinity up and find the rest of her abilities.

I hit level 30 on Trinity a while ago. I still don’t know what Link does, apart from connecting to an enemy, and I think it reduces damage or something. The in-game description wasn’t clear. Bless was the only ability that made sense, which heals everyone in a large radius, filling shields as well. The catch was that the amount of heals and shield given depended on how desperately the team needed them. Oh and it has a casting time.

It sounds like a pretty damn good kit, but I found that, while playing, it wasn’t. Few people actually needed healing and you can only stun one enemy at a time. Link seems hit and miss and at higher levels, you don’t want to get hit anyway. Bless is a “shit we’re all going to die button”. The only real ability that gets used regularly is Energy Vampire.

But that’s fine. Some characters are a one-button-only character. Medics in TF2, always the best example when it comes to healers, mostly only ever press 2 buttons. The issue is, Medics don’t need to stand still to heal, and everyone always needs healing. For Trinity, everyone needs energy, but Energy Vampire on its own actually isn’t that great. Those shield boosts I mentioned earlier while using Energy Vampire aren’t actually a default thing on Trinity. What you need is a syndicate mod, an augment, that converts unused energy into ‘overshields’. Think Overheal but obviously for shields.

Now, I don’t know how hard this mod is to get, but without it, Trinity feels incredibly… useless. The reliance on a single mod, combined with a weird-looking character with a flappy skirt, weird interactions with mods and duration, hard-to-aim abilities, unattractive cosmetics, looking way worse than her Prime self, having annoyingly long cast times on most of her abilities and the sudden cries from team mates to use Energy Vampire all the time, it’s just… not satisfying.

Yeah, that’s it. Playing Trinity isn’t very enjoyable. Yet she’s the most meta pick around.