Protea is a fairly strong caster frame that also doubles as a support frame.

Protea’s shield grenades are extremely helpful for any content where enemies do very high damage to the player as long as the damage isn’t toxin. They’re functionally Arcane Aegis as an ability. The Tap/Hold functionality can be inverted in settings if you find you primarily use one mode over the other making it a little more comfortable to cast. The slash grenades offer some minor CC but the damage feels a little lack luster to me, at least when compared to her turrets.

Blaze Artillery is a very strong ability and it becomes more effective the more duration you mode for. It still requires some range to be effective though. Grouping abilities also help to make the turret more effective because the splash damage also increases its shot multiplier. There is also the Temporal Artillery augment for this ability which essentially turns the turret into one of Xaku’s, but the combo count is capped to 20, and requires using Temporal Anchor to be used at the same time.

Dispensary is Protea’s other support ability. it’s very useful if your loadout includes weapons with very low maximum ammo/arch guns or if you’re going to be doing anything that requires staying in a small area for a some amount of time like piloting a railjack or defense/survival missions. The augment for this ability was never really worth using and after the recent QOL changes to radar and companion reviving is even less useful. The Helmenth version of this ability was probably over-nerfed and only has 50% of the duration when subsumed onto another warframe.

Temporal Anchor is an ability that feels like it griefs you more than it helps you. If you forget to cancel the ability before the timer expires, you can be sent back far behind the rest of your squad. If it was possible to cancel the rewind while in progress it wouldn’t be as bad, but as the ability functions currently, you’re probably better off replacing it with something else. The Temporal Erosion augment seems somewhat useful, but with the armor rework it’s probably less important to have.

My only real issues with Trinity are her low duration on her 1, 3 and 4, and her augments really need to be better, especially champion’s blessing which wasn’t really usable because of shield gating and is even less usable now with Overguard becoming more common. Energy Vampire Trinity still has its niche though, and is still probably my go to frame for the Index. Link isn’t bad either in Radiation sorties besides the very low duration.

Brief Respite and the Augur set mods can be used to prevent Harrow’s Penance from triggering his shield gate. Penance drains shields based on your current shields when cast and the small shield restore from these mods will keep your shields from fully depleting. Augur mods are slightly better because they work in overguard shield ranges.

Seeker for punch through to prime more enemies at the same time?

Isn’t the fire rate cap meant to be 5 for semi auto weapons after that “nerf/buff” that didn’t really solve accessibility issues a while back?

The reload time doesn’t seem too terrible if it still has the infinite ammo gimmick from the Magnus Prime unless you constantly reload out of habit. Not being able to use Deadly Manoeuvres does make the single Magnus the better weapon to me.

I don’t think Trinity really needed much of a rework other than some extra base duration and maybe some range for her 1, 3 and 4.

The cap for damage ability damage reduction is 90% for most other warframes that have a damage reducing ability (i.e. Parasitic Link/Immolation), both Link and Blessing should have their cap raised to 90%.

Her Pool of Life augment seems kind of pointless on her because energy/health regeneration is the rest of her kit, unless you run a gimmicky mods like Energizing/Mending shot. It’s still a somewhat useful mod for anyone that’s subsumed Well of Life onto another warframe though.

Champion’s Blessing was never particularly useful due to shield gating, but is even less useful with everything getting overguard in recent updates. It requires constant up keep or else you lose the entire buff. Other healing buffs like Wisp’s Health Mote, or Sevagoth’s Gloom also make building up the buff from Champion’s Blessing difficult.

Some type of heal over time effect being added might be helpful for any game mode that requires you to be mobile instead of just camping in one place. Mostly just a convenience thing rather than useful because Blessing already burst heals everything in affinity range.

Railjack is pretty mixed for me.

I liked the Grineer missions where your squad could complete different objectives in parallel/spit the squad up to perform different tasks, and the missions also felt somewhat unique compared to the base game. Corpus missions on the other hand just feels like playing a mission to play some other game mode already available on the base star chart.

I don’t like the current energy system for ship abilities, it feels like it was balanced poorly because it’s dependant on which warframe you chose, and feels like certain warframes were nerfed before the system was even implemented. Energy costs scale poorly with Hildryn, she was nerfed before the update dropped because people wanted to make use of Shield regen for casting abilities. If I remember correctly, this was also part of the reason Dispensary’s duration was nerfed as a Helminth ability when the helminth system was added.

Current combat in space is an improvement over what we had in early versions of railjack; if the host had bad weapons for their railjack you had to put up with it because enemies heavily resisted archgun damage. The Amesha was and probably still is the only usable archwing for these missions. Gunnery 10 still feels like it’s a nerf, I just prefer the feeling of having control over what I’m shooting at and not that it’s automated for me, the extra overheat on top of that doesn’t help either though. Other people might appreciate the lock-on, but it probably belongs under an accessibility setting rather than the last unlock for an intrinsic.

Not sure if void fissures ever changed, before if you were moving too fast through the level, you would just hit multiple void fissures and die. I think they might have just been spawning them directly on the player as the tiles loaded.

Overall, I think most of the game mode needs a rework and other game modes to differentiate it from the base game.

Styanax was pretty fun to play, I had it modded to be a shield tank before his Final Stand augment was added, so he had pretty good survivability. His 1 without his augment feels terrible to use though because it requires you to hit a target to group enemies and if that enemy has Overguard it won’t group any of the other enemies around even if they aren’t protected by Overguard. It doesn’t help that Overguard is getting put on everything in recent updates, his augment does let you hit the ground instead but that feels more like a band-aid instead of just letting it group enemies that aren’t CC immune.

He had pretty good energy management with rally point and tharros strike helped with removing armor from tankier enemies before killing them to replenish your shields. I don’t think Final Stand was useful on its own, but it is a very good ability if you’re using its augment.

Dealing with eximus/over guard units seems like it would be a pain, especially for how squishy he is and not really being safe in the rift anymore.

Survival techniques/tools would be helpful. It could also just be me being too used to Limbo before the eximus rework, and using the rift as a “panic button” expecting to be safe from eximus.