Introduction

This is a party support focused [Hildryn] build specializing in keeping your teammates alive, topped up on energy, and at full damage potential from defense stripping. There is a... significant amount of investment put into this build, so be sure to read through and make sure it's the right kind of build for you before stuffing it into a loadout slot.

Build features:

• Allies have practically infinite energy, as every cast of Voracious Metastasis gives them approximately 100 energy per second for 7 seconds
• Haven provides both powerful shield regen and an enhanced shield gating value (a full 3.5 seconds, the same as Hildryn herself)
• Enough Strength to provide 100% defense stripping with Pillage
• Significant damage from Balefire Charger, leaving your standard secondary slot open for a primer or support tool like Grimoire
• Flexibility for weapons and companions overall, letting you pick and choose your favorites

Playstyle

Cast Haven at the beginning of a mission, then cast Voracious Metastasis either when allies' energy is running low or you've taken enough damage from Combat Discipline to be a concern. Use Pillage whenever your shields start getting low, or if there are enemies you need to strip armor/shields from.

Stats

Strength: We want this as high as possible to maximize both the armor stripping from Pillage and the damage Balefire Charger puts out.
Duration: Surprisingly, we want this to be below 100% so that Voracious Metastasis fills energy/health faster. ~75% is the sweet spot, because too low and Pillage loses a lot of effective range due to it scaling off of Duration for its expansion.
Efficiency: We also want low efficiency for this build. The higher the cost for Voracious Metastasis, the more energy it will return.
Range: A little bit of range is handy to have both for Pillage's initial radius and for Haven's tether range.

Reaching 400% Strength

Aside from the mods in this build, we need additional sources of Strength to hit 400% Strength for a full Pillage strip. I currently am running 3 tauforged Crimson shards to reach 367% naturally, and make up the difference with Vome Invocation on a Grimoire secondary.

Mods in this build

• Combat Discipline: This alongside Arcane Avenger grants crit chance reliably, making Balefire Charger usable as a crit-focused weapon. The health loss is of low concern as long as you keep up Voracious Metastasis consistently.
• Primed Sure Footed: Reliable anti-knockdown. Not necessary for the build to function, but significantly helpful to avoid getting Tekken juggled.
• Adaptation: Damage reduction on shields means we can be near-invulnerable just by pressing 2 to restore (usually) the entirety of the shield pool.
• Primed Redirection: Hildryn's huge shield pool gets downright silly by adding this. Also acts as a Primed Flow in this build.
• [Stretch]: We want some Range in the build to compensate for the low Duration with Pillage, and to have a longer range for Haven tethers to teammates (and enemies). Stretch alone is sufficient.
• [Augur Secrets], [Blind Rage], [Transient Fortitude], [Umbral Intensify]: We need to pump up the Strength for most of [Hildryn]'s abilities. The most important is for Pillage, which reaches 100% defense stripping at 400% Strength. We can't quite get to 400% without some help from other parts of the loadout, the options for which are covered below.
• [Blazing Pillage]: This gives Pillage some extra offensive capability since you should have Haven up at pretty much all times.

Helminth

Subsuming
Voracious Metastasis is the reason this is a support build and is the main build-around. For the listed setup, you'll want to replace Aegis Storm.

Shards

You want as many (tauforged) Crimson shards for Strength as you can get your hands on to get closer to the 400% breakpoint. Once you've reached it, the remainder of the slots are flexible.

Casting speed is nice on Hildryn but not necessary like it is on some other frames.

Arcanes

• Arcane Avenger is used in conjunction with [Combat Discipline] to improve [Balefire Charger]'s crit chance and make it viable that way. This slot is flexible if you don't want to use Balefire (see Alternatives and Options below for more info)
• Arcane Aegis is a fantastic survivability effect, as 30% of our full shield pool is very significant.

Alternatives and Options

If you aren't interested in using [Balefire Charger], you can instead subsume over Balefire, replace [Combat Discipline] for [Growing Power] (or [Corrosive Projection] to lower the Pillage full strip breakpoint to 328%), and Arcane Avenger for another arcane of your choice (Barrier and Augmented are both good options). This allows you to also bring CC in the build with Aegis Storm, although it's very limited in usability without Balefire.

Some mods are flexible if you don't own them.

• Primed Redirection is perfectly fine as a replacement for regular Redirection. It's what I used until the Primed version was released.
• Primed Sure Footed can be replaced by Power Drift to help reach 400% Strength more reliably.
• [Umbral Intensify] can be replaced with regular [Intensify], but you'll have to make up the Strength difference with something else.

Challenges

Infested missions cause trouble for [Hildryn], and especially with this build since we're running negative efficiency and there are very few armored Infested enemies to Pillage shields from. You'll have to switch up your playstyle or bring an altered loadout (or even simply a different frame) for these missions.

Using Balefire regularly is a significant drain on shields, demanding more frequent Pillage casts. Be sure to keep an eye on your shields.

In missions with a high enemy density, the drain from Haven can quickly drop your shields. Try and keep your distance a bit from large packs of enemies to reduce the strain on your shields.

Arsenal

The choice of weapons you have is fairly flexible. Since the build lacks hard CC, weapons that can CC or group enemies may be useful. Otherwise just bring something you're confident in for damage, since the best status effect is Death.

• Grimoire allows you to reach an extra 60% strength on secondary fire with Vome Invocation.
• Proboscis Cernos has innate grouping on its shots to ball up enemies
• Tenet Ferrox's alt fire draws enemies in
• (Prisma) Lenz applies Cold procs to everything caught in the original area, slowing them
• Exodia Epidemic on a melee weapon can suspend enemies in the air
• Nautilus can group enemies up with Cordon
• Anything with consistent Electric or Radiation procs can help draw off enemy aggro from teammates