Equinox – Night and Day, But Mostly One or the Other

I always felt like Equinox was an early attempt to try something new. A Warframe that is two Warframes in one. A Warframe that can change from one form to another, complete with a new set of abilities. Does Equinox manage to pull this off? Yes. But Equinox is a very weird frame.

Everything from start to finish is off about Equinox. The very first thing one might ask is “what is this?” swiftly followed by “is it a boy or a girl?” and finished with “OW WHAT THE FUCK WHY AM I BLEEDING TO DEATH?” The answer to the first question is Equinox. The answer to the second question is that Equinox is female. Both of her forms, Day and Night, are female. This was confirmed by a DE staff member a billion years ago, but somehow it’s nowhere near as prevalent as Nezha being considered a female.

The answer to the third question would be Equinox’s Day side. Equinox’s Night side would put you to sleep before murdering you.

You see, Equinox is split into Night and Day. The Day Form goes around hurting enemies while the Night Form goes around protecting allies and putting enemies to sleep. You switch forms as and when you need to, with the brightness of your energy colour determining which side you start off as (with Day starting with bright yellows and oranges and Night starting with blacks and dark blues).

Unfortunately, because of how Equinox works, this does kinda mean that you only get 7 abilities instead of 8, because her first ability is simply switching forms. Switching forms is nice, but most of the time you want to build towards one side or the other. That’s okay though, because Equinox’s both forms are good at specific tasks.

The Day Form is probably one of the best murderers around, especially against non-Grineer enemies. Increasing Ability Strength and causing vast amounts of accumulating slash damage is very handy for nuking levels. The Night Form isn’t really used as a support, but mostly for her ability to put enemies in a large radius to sleep. This means Night Form can be used to get vast amounts of stealth kills far quicker than someone like Ivara or Ash can. So Night Form is good for Focus Farming. But then again so is Day Form if you use her on Sanctuary Onslaught or something.

Still, having the choice to switch between vile murderer and team protector is pretty nice. You can sort of get away with having both on the same build, but because Day Form relies on high power strength, range and efficiency while Night Form relies on high duration, range and a bit of efficiency, you’ll have to sacrifice something somewhere. Min-maxing for one form is ideally the best way to use Equinox but to do so, you need to be careful how you forma her. You could always build two Equinoxes but…

You see, the worst thing about Equinox though is that she’s a pain in the ass to farm for. She’s not quite Khora levels of insanity, because you can farm Equinox parts on Titania, the Uranus Assassination mission against Tyl Regor. Equinox though comes in way more parts. You need the chassis, neuroptics and systems to build the Day Form and the chassis, neuroptics and systems to build the Night Form, then you have to stick them both together. That’s 8 parts you need to farm from one boss instead of the normal 3 parts. This dilutes the drop pool, meaning it’s far, far harder to get that one piece you want.

Thankfully, the Tyl Regor fight is actually pretty straight forward. You fight Tyl until he runs away, you kill some Manics after he floods the place, you fight him some more, you fight some more Manics, then he floods the place once more, you fight more Manics and a Manic Bombard and then you kill Tyl Regor ‘once and for all’. If you have Valkyr or Rhino or Excalibur or a good, well-modded gun or two, then this is a very quick battle, assuming you don’t get lost on the way there. Tyl Regor also has an amazing voice and great acting, so at least your ears will get a pleasant massage while you fight.

Once you have Equinox though, you can be thankful you won’t have to do that farm ever again.

Unless Equinox Prime works the same way…

And she’s… coming soon…