you can use a NL for trance. it just requires doing things a little differently. its excellent for uk hardcore style stuff, very hard, bright hard trance leads. to make softer pluck type sounds you need to put a bit more effort in but its very doable. extremely versatile synth in my humble opinion.
virus? virus is a different beast. getting bright, hard sounds out of it requires alot more effort since it is characteristically dark. it is also alot more difficult to program than a NL. you can make quite satisfying plucks and lush pad like trance saw type sounds. then again you can make most sounds on it, but it depends very much on your ability to program it and how long you are willing to stick with it.
for example, the virus isnt the type of synth where you just tweak some knobs and hey presto! you get a great sound. it doesnt work like that. you have to do alot of meticulous fine tuning in the mod matrix during and after building a patch. use the mod matrix to change envelope curves to give a sound different attack and transients and decays (envelopes on the virus are linear by default i think but can be changed with recursive modulation in the mod matrix). to brighten up sounds you need to painstakingly adjust ring modulation and filter saturation in conjunction with key follow in this delicate balancing act to get everything right.
if you are ok with all that and dont mind spending a load of time learning how to do it then you will probably like the virus. in my opinion, it sacrifices immediacy, instant playability and gratuity in favour of complexity. at first its extremely underwhelming and somewhat awkward to get anything good sounding out of it. but give it a year of fiddling every day and learning the manual inside out and you start to see some of the possibilities.
i like the NL though and i do believe it is capable of a great variety of sounds, all types of trance sounds amongst them but there are very subtle movements and random elements you cannot put into the sound of NL which you can with a virus. its very subtle and it all comes down to modulation options. and the virus has these in spades. whereas the NL doesnt have quite so much.
then again, the NL sounds absolutely amazing very quickly, sounds incredibly bright and cutting and it sounds great without any fx. which should be a testament to how good those raw oscillator waveforms are.
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