Hey, it’s been a while. I think it’s about time Hildryn got some love. I was really hoping that she’d receive some tweaks for her prime release, but it seems that she flew under the radar. DE please consider giving this frame some QoL improvements, it would make her a lot more fun to play, especially in steel path content.
Her biggest pain point lies in how her channeled abilities interact with her shield-gate passive. Both her Balefire and Haven abilities consistently drain shields and shut off when shields are depleted. For lower-level content, it's easy to maintain her shields thanks to the adaptation mod, but as enemy level increases, keeping her channeled abilities up rapidly becomes a futile exercise. Even at around level 200, eximus units can start burning down Hildryn's shields, shutting off all channeled abilities every few seconds. The resulting playstyle has you reactivating your Balefire and Haven abilities every few seconds in between spamming pillage and trying to use the Balefire once or twice before your shields get one shot again. It’s annoying enough that after a certain point, I opt to stop reactivating them, reducing her kit to just using pillage, which is disappointing.
The solution that I’d like to put forward involves adding to her passive a “drain-gate” effect for Balefire and Haven, and potentially even Aegis Storm. The idea is that channeled abilities will continue their function for the duration of Hildryn’s shield-gate, but will shut off if shields aren’t replenished before that period ends. In practice, this would make it so as long as you’re maintaining your pillage casts Haven and Balefire won’t have to be recast (to clarify, Balefire will remain channeled, but cannot be fired while shields are depleted). This effect doesn’t have to apply to subsumed abilities, but it would make it a lot easier to maintain two or three of the base abilities that are integral to her kit, without making her overpowered.
Another tweak that would help her kit, would be to allow the casting of pillage while in Aegis Storm. Ever since the changes to eximus units with overguard, a lot of crowd control abilities have become less effective as eximus aren’t affected by most forms of CC. This change has made it even harder to utilize Aegis Storm in Steel Path, where activating this ability makes you a sitting duck for all the unaffected eximus units to shoot down with zero counterplay. By making this change, Hildryn would at least have a fighting chance of using this ability without immediately getting downed (and being able to continue flying around would also make her more fun). If the amount of energy orbs spawned is a concern, the rate of their spawn could always be reduced or perhaps changed to a % drop upon effected enemy death instead.
I’m not a game developer and I’m not sure how hard these changes would be to implement into the game, but I’ve been playing this game (and Hildryn) a long time and I’m confident that these tweaks would really help.