[Equinox] for Dummies™

[Equinox] behaves in 2 forms: an offensive day form and a defensive night form. Her abilities behave differently based on which form she is using. Your starting form is determined by your emissive appearance color; use light for day and dark for night.

Press 1 to switch forms {Metamorphosis}. If you switch to Day form, you get a slight boost to damage and movement speed. If you switch to Night form, you get a slight boost to shields and armor. The buffs scale with strength and duration.

Day Form

Press 2 when aiming at enemies to use {[Rage]}, which affects enemies in a small radius from very far away. Under Rage, enemies will move and attack faster, but will take quite a bit more damage.

• The effect scales with strength and duration
• The ability can be cast through walls and from further away with more range
• Speeding up enemies is useful for slow missions, such as defense and excavation

Press 3 to release an aura {Provoke}, which enhances the ability strength of Equinox and her allies. This can be used for just about any ability that requires strength.

• The aura scales with Equinox's own strength, but doesn't double dip on itself
• The aura drains energy per ability cast and allows Equinox to continue regenerating energy through E-Dash, Energy Siphon, etc.
• The aura's energy drain per ability scales with efficiency

Press 4 to release and offensive aura {[Maim]}, which will inflict one slash proc onto enemies in range. For each enemy killed in the aura, 75% of their max health will contribute to a single charge, which can be released by recasting the ability. The charge releases one "bomb" that inflicts the accumulated amount in slash damage.

• The damage from the slash proc scales with strength, but the damage from the single charge does not.
• The damage from the single charge is per enemy and is NOT split, however the damage diminishes with distance, which can be increased with range.
• The aura's initial energy cost scales with efficiency, and the drain over time is affected by duration and efficiency.

Night Form

Press 2 while aiming at enemies to use {Rest}, which affects enemies in a small radius from very far away. Under Rest, enemies are put to sleep. While asleep, enemies are vulnerable to finishers (unless immune to them) and take stealth multiplier damage.

• The effect scales with duration
• The ability can be cast through walls and from further away with more range
• Enemies will wake up if they fall below half of their maximum health while asleep

Press 3 to release an aura {Pacify}, which reduces damage from enemies. Damage reduction falls off with distance.

• The aura scales with strength
• The aura drains energy per enemy in range and allows Equinox to regenerate energy with Energizing Dash, Energy Siphon, etc.
• The energy drain per enemy scales with efficiency

Press 4 to release a defenseive aura {Mend}, which will grant [Equinox] and her allies shields for enemies killed in the aura range. Killed enemies will contribute 75% of their max health to a single charge, which can be released by recasting the ability. The charge will split the accumulated health into a pulse that restores the health, then the shields of Equinox and her allies.

• The shields restored per enemy killed scales with strength
• The aura's initial energy cost scales with efficiency, and the energy cost per second scales with efficiency and duration

(The meat of the build starts here.)

Strategy

The build relies heavily on the 4th ability of both forms (see [Energy Transfer]), keeping allies alive in Night form as you rack up damage for the [Maim] bomb in Day form. The 3rd ability, [Mesa]'s subsumed Shooting Gallery, handles survivability issues by jamming guns and stunning melee users. The 1st and 2nd abilities are used depending on the situation, when you need to go from offense to defense or vice versa.

Stats

Why are both [Streamline] and [Fleeting Expertise] max rank? The answer is that you [Reach] the minimum drain of 0.88 energy per second with 40% duration and 190% efficiency (the 15% excess is still factored into the aura part), achieved in just 2 mods. If you were to build [Equinox] for more duration while keeping 175% efficiency AND the 0.88 energy drain per second, you would need 99% duration, which would [Sacrifice] another mod in the loadout.

[Equinox] relies heavily on range so that she can build her [Maim] bomb with dead enemies from further away. Expect relative safety with Shooting Gallery for 44.8m and [Maim] potential for 50.4m.

Outside of a shorter duration on her 2nd ability (8.8s), the 40% duration isn't going to hurt [Equinox] too badly. You should reasonably kill most enemies within 8 seconds, even if you bring unranked weapons to ESO like I do. Otherwise, the night form's Rest allows for finishers. For shooting gallery, you get 12 seconds of jamming (and a few seconds of damage buffing for each ally you bring), so you'll be recasting this frequently, but I've found that you may actually want this because some enemies don't behave properly and attack anyway.

Strength isn't super necessary, but has its uses. While you use the 4th ability in night form, you restore shields for each enemy killed, which scales with strength and can build overshields. Shooting gallery only gives 10% ally bonus damage at 40% strength, so if you want to add a strength mod, you're a nice person. [Rage] makes enemies take 20% more damage at 40% strength while affected, but enemies will also attack and move faster, so build strength at your peril. An important note from the low strength is that the amount of damage that goes into the maim bomb does NOT scale with strength - it is always 75% of the max health of each killed enemy in range.

Bonuses

For the aura, I personally prefer [Enemy Radar] so that I can eyeball the best place to drop the [Maim] bomb, but if you think you'll recast the 4th ability before the slash proc ends, then by all means use [Corrosive Projection].

Arcane Guardian is a must have for survivability, bringing Equinox's EHP up to around 3200. The other arcane is optional - I personally use Arcane Grace.