Warframe: Citrine Guide

Discover everything you need to know about the Citrine guide in Warframe, including its abilities and builds. 

Citrine is a geode-themed Warframe that serves a supportive role. She can recast Preserving Shell while it’s active to preserve the current damage reduction value. She is the best character to choose if you’re looking for devastating heavy damage in combat. Citrine is considered the best support frame in the game due to her unique ability to boost status effects on enemies significantly. Her kit is designed to support allies with increased status chances. If Kullervo is not your best pick, then Citrine can help you a lot in a tough encounter where you need a supportive ally. In our Warframe: Citrine Guide, we’ll discuss Citrine and what are the best builds along with a deep dive into its abilities.

Citrine in Warframe – Overview

Citrine is a Warframe character who uses crystals to support her allies in battle. This character has abilities like Fractured Blast, Preserving Shell, Prismatic Gem, and Crystallize. Her Crystallize ability summons crystals that seek out enemies and freeze them. Prismatic Gem is a unique ability that lasers enemies with heat, cold, toxin, and electricity with the help of the gem turret. Citrine’s passive ability grants nearby allies five health regenerations per hold pickup. Citrine’s third ability gives her teammates weapons. You need to position her Crystallize strategically to inflict status effects on enemies within its radius. Citrine can create a small area of damage with a chance to apply status effects. It’s best to pair Citrine with weapons that have a high fire rate to maximize the chance of applying status effects.

How To Craft Citrine in Warframe

Citrine’s blueprints and the blueprints for her weapons can be farmed from the new Mirror Defense mission, which is found on Mars. This mission is unlocked only after completion of the “Heart of Deimos” quest, an early-game quest. The requirements aren’t too high to enter. The mission level is substantially above that of normal Mars missions, closer to that of Uranus and Neptune. With enemy levels scaling as the mission continues, giving you increased difficulty. It’ll still be a steamroll for more established players, but it’s not to be confused with typical Mars missions.

There are three ways you will get rewards from this mission. First, is the standard reward rotation process at the end of each round. One round consists of defending both crystals once and awarding a random reward from the relevant drop tables. Mirror Defense uses the AABC rotation just like normal defense. Citrine’s main and parts blueprints drop on rotation C, while her weapons’ main blueprints drop in rotation A, and her weapons’ parts drop on rotation B. While the arcanes are split across both rotations B and C.

The second reward given from this mission is also at the end of each round. Two unique resources were added to this mission. The Belric Crystal Fragments, which are blue crystals, and the Rania Crystal Fragments, which are red crystals. You’ll get ten of each of these per round on normal mode or fifteen of each per round on the Steel Path mode. This is guaranteed every single round so long as you successfully defend. The third reward is more of these crystals, awarded every time your squad picks up a total of fifty Citrine’s Remnants throughout the mission. We will be going in detail how to use Otak’s shop in Warframe: Citrine Guide.

These Remnants can be picked up at any time, carrying between both crystals and rounds during a mission. Every set of fifty pickups will award you either Belric or Rania Crystal Fragments, alternating between the two. You’ll get five Fragments as a reward on normal mode or seven on the Steel Path. Steel Path awards about 50% more Crystal Fragments in exchange for a massively higher level and threat of Acolyte attacks.

Otak’s Shop

These Crystal Fragments have exactly one purpose. They are the currency used with Otak in the Necralisk on Deimos. You can turn them in to purchase the blueprints and arcanes that drop randomly from the Mirror Defense mission. There are also a couple of extra items exclusive to the shop. You don’t need these Crystal Fragments to build anything or to be used anywhere else. They solely act as a token system for buying what you didn’t get whilst farming. In this way, then, if you aren’t lucky enough to receive Citrine or weapon blueprints by chance, you can use the crystals to get what you’re missing. This means that every mission is always giving you progress one way or another. Always hold off buying items from the shop until it would complete a set for you.

Reward Rates

If you buy a blueprint earlier and then go back to farming, you might end up getting that same blueprint as a random drop. This is effectively wasting the Crystal Fragments you spent. The ability to earn extra Crystal Fragments by collecting Citrine’s Remnants during the mission, the rate at which you can farm the rewards is partly skill-based. You’ll want Warframes who are good at getting around to collect Remnants, so as not to miss and waste any. As mentioned in the patch notes, the Remnant spawns are slightly affected by killing enemies. As long as you consistently keep the kills going, Remnants should keep spawning.

However, if you stop killing, the Remnants also stop spawning. You can test this with a group of players from the community. Also, you can have all four players focused on scooping, including Titania’s Razorflies passively killing a little over one hundred enemies. You can gain 105 total Crystal Fragments from the mission rewards. Do the same with two scooping frames and two damaged frames. You need to rack up over one thousand five hundred kills. You still have the same number of fragments. However, when switching to entirely non-damaging setups for looting, using Gara’s Mass Vitrify to stop the enemies, the Remnant spawns would not replenish.

Once you shattered the glass wall from Gara, killing dozens of enemies instantly, the Remnants resumed spawning. You do need kills to get more Fragments, but you don’t need lots of kills. You just need enough kills to keep the process going. We’ve observed that solo players not well-equipped for scooping Remnants can get as low as two extra Fragment rewards per round.

More competent teams focused on collecting Remnants can comfortably get an extra six Fragment rewards per round. Regarding actual fragments, this puts a slow farming rate at 60 of each color on rotation C for normal mode or 88 on the Steel Path. This climbs to a higher rate of 100 for a more competent squad. This is of both colors on rotation C for normal mode or 144 on the Steel Path. You may get a little bit more than that for particularly efficient squads. However, the slow solo runs may be yet worse, but these are the reasonable ranges to expect.

Farming Citrine

For farming just Citrine, the high-earning squad on the Steel Path will typically have a full set in eight runs of rotation C. This is with twenty-five minutes per rotation C, which is about three and a half hours. Even the worst-case scenario of that squad will end up taking only eleven runs and that’s with buying all four parts of Citrine from Otak’s shop. As for a low yield on the Steel Path or a high yield on normal mode, the average is, instead, about ten runs of rotation C, which is about four hours.

A low-yield squad on the Steel Path not picking up many Remnants. As it may need to keep running for up to eighteen rotations, while a high yield on normal mode would be done within fifteen rotations. So, up to six to seven hours if you take the easier mission or do the harder version slowly. At the worst end, where you’re both slow at gathering Remnants and only on normal mode, the average runs for Citrine Rises to twelve, which is about five hours.

This is with a maximum of twenty-six runs if you get unlucky, which is about eleven hours. This would only be the case for someone running solo, without parkour or flight bonuses. He simply fails to get more than two extra Fragment drops per round. On top of this, Citrine does require modest materials to build, including a couple of gems from Deimos’ open-world mining.

Citrine Blueprint

• 25,000 Credits
• 1 Citrine Neuroptics
• 1 Citrine Chassis
• 1 Citrine Systems
• 3 Orokin Cells

Citrine Neuroptics

• 15,000 Credits
• 1,000 Rubedo
• 1,500 Salvage
• 15 Faceted Tiametrite
• 2 Argon Crystals

Citrine Chassis

• 15,000 Credits
• 1,200 Cryotic
• 3,000 Alloy Plate
• 6 Stellated Necrathene
• 2,000 Nano Spores

Citrine Systems

• 2 Morphics
• 15,000 Credits
• 15,000 Circuits
• 1,500 Polymer Bundle
• 3 Gallium

Citrine Abilities

Here are all the abilities of Citrine in Warframe including its stats.

• Health: 135
• Shields: 100
• Sprint Speed: 1
• Armor: 250
• Energy: 120

Passive

Her passive is Regeneration Aura, healing herself, her allies, and companions for five health per second. This can also apply to some objectives, such as excavators and defense operatives. However, it doesn’t apply to other ones, such as Defense and Mobile Defense consoles. The healing that you get will have a bonus by 0.1 for every health orb or universal orb Citrine collects. This is up to a maximum of 25 health per second after 200 health orbs. If the passive has yet to max out, Citrine can collect health orbs, even at maximum health, just like when you’re using Arcane Blessing or Synth Fiber.

 
The range of this aura is affinity range, meaning it’s 50 meters in normal missions. You can enhance the affinity range by using the Vazarin focus school. This is specifically the Mending Unity ability, for up to 25 meters extra range. However, the increased affinity range of the open worlds and Railjack missions does not increase the range of this healing aura nor do Fosfor flares. Health orbs themselves don’t crop up too commonly in normal missions.

Fractured Blast

• Drain: 25 Energy
• Range: 14 Meters
• Damage: 500 Impact and Slash

Fractured Blast sends out crystal shards to damage enemies in a cone in front of Citrine. This cone is affected by your range and it’s limited to line of sight. This deals a modest amount of damage with guaranteed slash and impact procs. The slash proc uses the entire ability damage in the calculation. It delivers 35% of ability damage as true damage every second whilst it’s active. When struck, enemies are also marked with a small crystal above their heads. If they die while this crystal remains on them, they have a chance to drop extra health and energy orbs tied to your strength.

This chance can go above 100% and this will produce additional orbs. However, the crystal effect’s duration doesn’t have a link to the ability. Instead, it remains in place so long as an enemy has a slash proc on them. Status duration bonuses can increase this timer. Citrine can grant another ability, as well as by simply applying new slash procs. This is similar to Voruna’s Fangs of Raksh ability, maintaining the ability’s effect by maintaining the relevant status proc.

Strangely enough, though, applying an impact proc does not maintain the bonus orb effect, only adding slash procs does. This ability is crucial to powering up Citrine’s passive. It holds incredible sustained potential for you and your team through extra healing and energy support. You can subsume this ability onto other Warframes through the Helminth system, though the damage and orb drops are half on everyone else.

Preserving Shell

• Drain: 50 Energy
• Duration: 25 Seconds
• Radius: 50 Meters

This applies damage reduction to Citrine and allied Warframes, but not to companions, NPC crew, or objectives. The range on this is, once again, affinity range, so it follows the same rules as her passive. This includes removing the reduction if allies leave the affinity range and reapplying it once they re-enter the range. The damage reduction starts in an amount based on your strength, and it can climb to a maximum of 90% reduction with kills and assists. However, the defense also decays after a couple of seconds of no kills or assists. While the damage reduction is above 75%, it’ll decay at 2% per second. Once you’re at all or below 75%, the decay becomes just 1% per second, down to a minimum of 25% damage reduction if you let it fall low enough.

Recasting Preserving Shell will refresh the duration. It will set the damage reduction to the higher value of either the current reduction or the starting value on the cast. While this does mean you can theoretically maintain 90% damage reduction with minimum strength, strength also affects the rate at which you gain damage reduction from this ability. The base values are +3% on kills and +1.5% on assists, though the UI rounds down the reported value to the next whole number. The fractional damage reduction is still applied though. Two assists are always worth the same as one kill, and decimal increases or decreases do affect your overall gain. This is easily one of the strongest defense abilities in the entire game.

Some frames can match or beat the damage reduction individually. Mesa can reach 95%, but it’s only against ranged, attacks, and the Yareli has an indefinite 90%, but this requires being on Merulina. Some frames can apply similar damage reduction to allies. Trinity’s Blessing, for example, gives the whole group a 75% damage reduction. Gara and Nezha can use 90% but must target each person individually. For Citrine, she just activates it for group-wide damage reduction, requiring only kills or assists to maintain its power. When you consider that Citrine is also applying healing to the whole team in the same radius, she’s immediately a solid support and tank frame. 

Prismatic Gem

• Drain: 75 Energy
• Range: 15 Meters
• Duration: 30 Seconds
• Damage
• 1,000 Heat
• Toxin
• Electricity
• Toxin

Citrine deploys a large intangible gem a short distance in front of her, creating an aura with a base radius of 15 meters. This is affected by your range stat. Citrine and allies within the aura will receive a buff to status chance and status duration. The status chance is a modded bonus equal to your strength stat, while the status duration is also a modded bonus. This time equals your duration stat. On top of this, the gem joins the battle with its attack. When you attack an enemy with either you or the enemy inside the aura, the gem will target the enemy too.

To trigger this, you’ll need to attack with either your weapons or Fractured Blast. The gem will deliver four hits of damage equal to your ability damage. This is modified where your strength starts. Those hits will be each of heat, cold, electric, and toxin, and all four hits are guaranteed to proc their respective status effect. These status effects are also enhanced by the gem’s aura, even at the base duration. You’ll still have 12 seconds of status damage per hit.

The Prismatic Gem will repeatedly target a time with no discernible order as to how it chooses its next target. The only control you have is on choosing which enemies you damage. The gem will target each enemy once per hit you land on that enemy. The gem will queue at multiple attacks if you target a group of enemies at once. It will not attack the same enemy more than once for various hits within half a second. This prevents it from ridiculously scaling with Multishot.

Crystallize

• Drain: 100 Energy
• Duration: 8 Seconds
• Range: 30 Meters
• Damage: 500 Impact

On cast, Citrine will lurch forward and downwards, summoning creeping crystals when she lands. These crystals will target all enemies in line of sight within a hemisphere in front of her. They crawl towards each enemy and incapacitate it in a large crystal. The ability can target enemies above and below Citrine even with no physical route between you and the enemy. So, long as they’re in range and line of sight. When struck, the enemies will also have a large crystal grow on them. This crystal gives you another location to damage the enemies. By striking the crystal, your critical chance is set to 300% for that attack. This is regardless of your critical chance before, even if your critical chance was higher.

This is identical to Smeeta’s charm, where that one forces you to a 200% critical chance when that particular buff occurs. It seems that Citrine’s 300% overrules the 200% you get from Smeeta. You do still get the higher of those two effects. The critical bonus from these crystals, however, is a bit choosy. Radial attacks from AoE weaponry don’t seem to get the critical bonus. While melee weapons can struggle to consistently hit the crystals due to how the weapons are swung around. Precision range attacks from ordinary guns, as well as lasers. Wide projectiles like the Arca Plasmor, and from Gunblades can all strike the crystals for this critical bonus without issue.

The lower your weapon’s critical chance, and the higher your weapon’s critical damage, the bigger the effect you’ll get from aiming for the crystals. Just bear in mind that many weapons, especially high-accuracy weapons. They will perform better just by aiming for headshots rather than going for the process of conjuring these crystals first. Crystallize has a major weakness. It only lasts for a base of 8 seconds. That’s the same base duration as Ash’s Smoke Screen for invisibility. Couple this with a long cast time, and you may need to cast this ability more often than you like. Citrine is a more than capable health-tanking Warframe, with health and energy sustain options plus status spreading.

Her damage output is fine enough for Star Chart levels. It can be mostly ignored once you get into high-level content. This invites you instead to use weapons that benefit from multiple status effects on the enemies. In this way, Citrine dissuades you from using AoE attacks for damage. You cannot benefit from her kit as much with those. When using Citrine in higher-level play, her fourth ability for control and damage doesn’t scale.

Citrine Builds

Here are the best builds for Citrine in Warframe, as we include the best abilities to deal with devastating damage in combat.

Citrine and Core Build

Use Adaptation for more general damage reduction to stack with Preserving Shell. Arcane Blessing for a very high health pool and Rolling Guard for an extra defense in tight situations, such as if you get silenced by the Violence Acolyte. While we’ve removed the crowd control ability innate to Citrine, the use of Arcane Eruption replaces this. Fractured Blast will be generating a lot of energy orbs, and between the four abilities Citrine has to cast. We can keep a constant flow going. This means enemies will be repeatedly knocked down in a wide area passively, further enhancing our survival.
This is a heavy amount of defense to shut down anything any enemies might try to throw at you. For casting stats, Blind Rage ensures a total armor strip against all enemies and a near-total shield strip. This will generate a large amount of orbs and give Preserving Shell 79% damage reduction immediately on casting. Prismatic Gem also benefits from this much strength. This put out more damage and nearly 200% status chance to our weapons.

Archon Continuity is providing both a large duration bonus for the whole kit as well as applying corrosive procs from Prismatic Gem. We’ve got Stretch and Augur Reach to give a range boost on her 1, 3, and 4, and Equilibrium. This allows you to generate even more energy from the abundance of health orbs being dropped. This makes it easy to use abilities on all enemies. Given the amount of sustain that Citrine already has, there’s no purpose to use Archon Stretch on this build.

This setup also uses two quality-of-life mods. Natural Talent is very important on Citrine as her cast times are very long. We’re also using an Amber Shard to further reduce the casting time. The other mod here is Preparation, to ensure we start with enough energy to get the ball rolling.
By running Blind Rage, we’ve got low efficiency. Using all of Fractured Blast, Preserving Shell, and Tharros Strike immediately in a mission is very helpful. We also recommend using one or two Azure Shards for energy capacity. This makes it easier to cast multiple abilities in one go before you need to pick up orbs for energy.

Citrine base max energy of 180 would, otherwise, prevent you from casting both Preserving Shell and Prismatic Gem without a pickup. It could potentially leave you without enough energy to cast Fractured Blast. If you don’t want to use Archon Shards, you can instead drop Rolling Guard for Flow to get your energy capacity that way.

Lower Tier Build

For lower-level play where you’ve yet to unlock the Arbitrations and Veilbreaker upgrades, instead you can use this downscaled build. The approach is much the same, just weaker as we’re doing away with a lot of tank and passive control. We’ve got Vitality to ensure there’s enough health buffer in all situations, and Flow for energy buffer too, all while maintaining the strength. If you’re a low-level player, you won’t have access to Tharros Strike. This is unless you buy or have Styanax as a gift. So, instead, you can use Nekros’s Terrify, which will still give you enemy armor reduction and crowd control. You can stick with Crystallize for the crits and no Helminth requirement.

For those of you at the highest of levels, you can substitute out Natural Talent and Preparation through the use of more Archon Shards. Two Tauforged ambers will cover you for casting speed. One or two Azure shards for energy capacity, and one or two Ambers for a bit more starting energy. This would free you up to use Primed Sure Footed for knockdown protection and Archon Vitality for the health maximum and heat damage bonus. In a nutshell, Citrine’s sheer tank, sustain, and support, along with a relative lack of crucial break points, gives a lot of flexibility in modding her. She’s a very forgiving frame, especially with Archon Shards added in, allowing you to be a bit more creative.

Gauss Augments

Citrine’s Recrystalize augment is good in some builds. This augment mod allows Crystallize to spread to additional enemies when crystalized foes are killed by shooting the growths. You can acquire this mod by the following methods.

• Attain the rank of General under Steel Meridian
• Get the rank of Exalted under the Red Veil
• Spend 25,000 to purchase

Crystalized enemy will have the normal base duration of Crystalize of 8 seconds. Keep in mind the new enemies cannot be frozen but they can be staggered with an impact proc and stuck with a crystal. It can be shot again to spread the effect to new enemies. Crystallize augment is more common, so we have two unique augments. Prismatic Core and Void Recall are the two new augments that can deal massive damage in tough encounters.

Void Recall- It holds cast to teleport the gem to your location when this augment is active. The duration extends by 8 seconds and inflicts void damage and status to nearby enemies.

Preserving Shell augment- The incoming damage has a 20% chance to enhance the defence counter by 1%. The status effects have their duration lowered by the percentage of Preserving Shell. Both of these conditions become true if the chance goes up over 100%, and has a chance to increase by an extra 1%.

Cosmetics

Citrine can be equipped with the Kalite Helmet. You can get the blueprint of this cosmetic as a Cred Offering. Nightwave also features a Cred Offering store, where players can purchase several items, including Cred Offering. You can purchase the Kalite Helmet from the market for 75 Platinum. You can also get it as part of the Crystal Bastion Collection for 740 Platinum. Navigate into the arsenal to equip this helmet and press the LMB on the Appearance’ tab. You can see the helmet under the section labeled ‘Helmet’.  

FAQs about Warframe: Citrine Guide

Who is Citrine in Warframe?

Citrine is a Warframe character who uses crystals to support her allies in battle. 

What are the abilities of Citrine in Warframe?

Citrine has abilities like Fractured Blast, Preserving Shell, Prismatic Gem, and Crystallize.

What are the requirements to get Citrine Blueprint in Warframe?

The materials required to obtain the Citrine Blueprint are 25,000 Credits, 1x Citrine Neuroptics, 1x Citrine Chassis, 1x Citrine Systems, and 3x Orokin Cells.

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