Another Look at Trinity

The last time I looked at Trinity, the primary healing character in Warframe, I wasn’t a fan of her. I found her tedious and awkward, while acknowledging that, with the right setup, she could be really strong. Of course, back then, I still didn’t have Continuity, nor did I have many of the higher end mods that make Trinity good. Now that I do, I think it’s time to look back at her.

Basically, Trinity is the best support character one could ever ask for in a video game. Or at least, she would be if it wasn’t for her casting animations. She can be built for huge healing and damage resistance, she can be built to fill team mates with energy and give overshields, she can be built into a tank and there’s also ways to build her into an awkward single-target assassinator.

Oh and she renders the downsides of various missions meaningless. Reduced health? Have Trinity heal you. Lose health over time? Trinity. Low energy? Trinity. Got to keep a stupid defense target alive? Playing Defection for that retarded chance at a piece of Harrow? Trinity.

But really, there are two main Trinity builds: Bless and Energy Vampire (EV for short).

Bless is a team-wide heal which instantly restores health and shields and gives damage resistance. With high duration and power strength, you can get up to 70%-ish damage resistance with ease. Energy is not a problem because you can just use Energy Vampire on some unlucky enemy and suck the energy from them, or kill them while Energy Vampire is being used and get all that energy in one go. Bless can be used repeatedly, even while the damage resistance is still active, so it can easily be refreshed.

Energy Vampire is basically the opposite, using negative duration (i.e. less than 100%) so that Energy Vampire ends incredibly quickly, giving out all its energy in one go rather than waiting for each ‘wave’ of energy. This build is generally paired with the Vampire Leech augment, which can give people overshields – up to double their current shield.

Oddly though, both builds are still good. With a Blessing build, you can still use Energy Vampire and the slower waves of energy can be countered by killing targets. When using an Energy Vampire build, you can still spam Blessing and get the instant heal, you just have less duration on the damage resistance. But since you have a ton of energy anyway, you can use Blessing after every cast of Energy Vampire.

And this is even before we talk about Trinity’s other abilities. Really, Well of Life, her first ability, is pointless since you can instantly heal with Blessing. But Well of Life will stun an enemy for a pretty long time and will heal you as you shoot them, making them really good for tough enemies. Link basically just connects you to three nearby enemies and directs all of the damage you take onto them – combined with Blessing’s damage resistance and Link’s own damage resistance, you can basically play Trinity as a tank.

It’s not like Trinity is even hard to obtain. You can get her from Exta, Ceres, where you fight Lech Kril and Captain Vor in a tag team fight, but the fight itself is pretty easy, even with basic weapons. All you have to do is time your attacks, dodge theirs and you’re golden. She has similar crating requirements to Frost, who you obtain from Mars, and Ceres is only a trip to Phobos away from Mars. As of 11th Jan 2018, Trinity is now obtainable from Ambulas on Pluto. Frost has taken her place on Ceres while Excalibur is now available as the drop from Mars boss Lt. Lech Kril. Trinity Prime just got vaulted, but all her parts were common or uncommon, meaning there are lots of relics around still containing her and she’s still cheap to trade for.

Although Trinity doesn’t have an ability to actually attack enemies, that doesn’t really matter because Trinity, like all other Warframes, can use whatever gun she wants, and she can shrug off any damage you throw at her and heal her entire team.

Actually, that’s probably Trinity’s only real weakness – that she needs a team to be efficient. Since Trinity lacks any real crowd control, she could eventually get swarmed, and all the healing in the world won’t be enough if your weapons aren’t doing any damage to level 150+ enemies. But combine her with someone who DOES have a lot of crowd control, throw in an Ash or an Excalibur or someone with high ability scaling and give her an Atterax with a Maiming Strike combo build (which does critical hits that do more and more damage the larger your melee combo) and you could easily go on forever.

How variable and durable she is just goes to show how powerful Trinity is as a support character. In a fight against any other support character, Trinity would most likely win, even if you gave her mediocre weapons.

The only REALLY bad thing about Trinity, which I still dislike, is her ability casting time. They seem to take forever, and Well of Life and Energy Vampire can’t be cast while in the air or before the previous cast has ended. But you’ve got to have SOME weaknesses, and really, Trinity could do with a few more.