My favorite tank! I never use her 1 or 4, though, and should probably subsume something over one of them. Aegis Storm is ok as a panic CC when playing in a group, but not being able to use my loadout at the same time is so off-putting. As for Balefire, I’ve never found it to be better than my regular weapons, and I don’t find it fun to use.

Helicopter shield mom!
With her augment and a strength over everything build I find she can be very strong if a bit braindead, just keep spamming pillage + haven and everything around you will quickly burn and die, balefire also becomes a lot more viable as a crazy raw damage weapon once everything has no armor. That said her kit feels a bit simplistic? Outside very low level nuking pillage is really her only trick with haven really just being an extension of pillage and balefire not really doing anything that couldn’t be done by any other weapon.

Hildryn is not a frame I have much experience with. Her style of tanking was never my thing, I prefer to stack damage reductions instead or ignore damage altogether through abilities like Rhino or Revenant. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of her Pillage on other frames, though! She does make the absolute best use of it thanks to having access to Haven enabling her to use the Blazing Pillage augment to stack infinite heat procs on anything while also completely stripping it’s defenses.

Hildryn is one of the more fun tank frames to play, and is actually pretty good for harder content if you’re having trouble staying alive.

Balefire unfortunately falls off in higher level content, exalted weapons are probably in need of an update to make them on par with current weapons.

Pillage is a very versatile ability, removing armor/shields from enemies and replenishing the players shields and cleansing status on the caster and their allies. As long as you can keep Hildryn’s overshields active with this ability, toxin damage will not be able to bypass your shields.

Haven along with the Blazing Pillage augment makes Hildryn usable against the infested too while providing a bit of extra CC with the Heat procs.

Aegis Storm is also kind of useless, it reduces your mobility and only lets you use Balefire as a weapon. It can generate energy orbs but those are really only useful for your team mates and only moderately useful to Hildryn.

Rakta Dark Dagger is a pretty good weapon to pair with Hildryn as an alternative to Blazing Pillage or if you just want to quickly max your shield without waiting for Pillage to end.

I also like using Chroma’s Elemental Ward (Electric) and replacing Hildryn’s 4. It both gives Hildryn even more shields and reflects damage done to Hildryns shields back to enemies. Abilities that drain Hildryns shields like Haven will also trigger this effectively turning Hildryn into a walking shock mote. This used to be really fun with the old Unairu’s damage reflect, just being able to walk into a group of enemies and killing them with all the reflected damage.