Twin-Shadows [Saryn]

[Saryn] is one of my favorite warframes, and it's no surprise to anyone that knows me that she was the recipient of my first umbral forma. What surprises a lot of people is that she was also the recipient of the second, but there's a reason for that - I wanted a modular, adaptable [Saryn] build that could handle a variety of situations, and slotting a second umbral forma frees up flexibility for several slots. In the end, I have an endgame [Saryn] that can handle just about anything.

The Choice to Go Umbral

[Saryn] is one of those warframes who benefits from all three umbral mods: she has high armor, making [Umbral Fiber] good on her; higher health than she does shields, which makes Umbral Vitality decently effective; and good benefits from Umbral Intensify - namely, that her spores, miasma, toxic lash, and molt all benefit from it, especially when you add in augments. As a result, she's a candidate for running all three of the mods. That being said, there are situations - which we'll get into below - in which we don't necessarily want to be running [Umbral Intensify], and that frees us up for a variety of builds if we leave some slots unpolarized.

The Choice to Run Augments

In terms of practical building, [Saryn]'s augments are of mixed usefulness. Her Molt augment, [Regenerative Molt], helps her gain back health over time, and this health is based on ability strength, which means that at higher levels it can actually remain quite useful, especially if you're taking lots of fire. It's almost a must-have on any build, and it's hard to imagine a situation where you wouldn't take it unless you're dumpstering ability strength.

Her Spores augment, [Venom Dose], is situationally useful. Because it adds corrosive damage, it allows us to open up some weapon slots for other mods, or to run mixed damage types, such as corrosive/radiation/viral, or corrosive/gas/magnetic. To give just one example, it lets me take an [Ignis] modded for gas into just about any level of Grineer mission, assuming that I'm also running [Saryn]. That amount of stacking damage is nothing to sneeze at, and it helps your allies as well.

Her Toxic Lash augment, Contagion Cloud, is arguably the worst augment of the three; however, I still find it useful. It grants damage-over-time clouds on kills, which is incredibly useful for clearing out dense packs of enemies. At first it seems that 300 damage per second isn't a lot, but you have to remember it stacks per enemy killed, and in a dense pack they'll basically all chain into each other as they die to it.

In summary, I've decided to run two Zenurik polarities instead of three, mostly so that I can run three augments when I want to and avoid running three when I don't. While it would have been possible to only use a single umbra forma if I polarized every other slot, it would have restricted the build options, and I wanted multiple umbral builds instead of just the one.

The Choice to use Aura Forma

Again, this is about adaptability. I've shown Saryn here with an Energy Siphon equipped, and that's generally my go-to mod; however, other builds use things like [Steel Charge] or [Power Donation] to achieve different effects. I've found it to be worth putting an aura forma in Saryn, because I use her with different auras fairly frequently and because I only have one double-umbral frame.

A Note on Damage Types

This build first arose as part of a quest to do multiple damage types with [Saryn]. For starters, she has Corrosive, Viral, and Toxin built in; with [Venom Dose] she also adds Corrosive to her attacks, and those of allies, and with [Contagion Cloud] she more or less simulates Gas damage. It's incredibly valuable to have so many types of damage loaded on one frame, and I use it to my advantage in a loadout I have which makes use of all thirteen primary damage types - three physical, four primary elemental, and six combined. The loadout makes use of [Tiberon Prime] and [Hystrix] for maximum adaptability, and it gave rise to this build's name, a [Reflection] of its adaptability to any situation.