Dazubo

That would be great as it fixes several things: You could stay mobile with link in solo, you keep the DR, and you keep the target alive as long as you heal yourself (which is a big problem currently as linked targets have a tendency to die suddenly and subtly). Honestly, it feels like it should be part of the core kit (exempting bosses from the healing).

He has a lot of niggling issues, but my main issue with him right now is requiring him to stand in place if playing solo to benefit from his link. Warframe is a pretty fast moving game these days (the prevalence of speed frames speaks to this) and Nidus kinda sucks in that regard. I see a lot of people saying Nidus is fine, but he's only fine when doing one thing, which is standing in 1 place and spamming virulence or larva. Ironically he sucks on defense since none of his abilities really benefit the defense objective (the ultimate HP/s is trivial). Imo his design age is starting to show with the current state of the game. I don't necessarily advocate for increasing his power level (except his ultimate), but giving him more flexibility and generic survivability instead of his 15 stack immortality gimmick. My top 4 things to improve are: 1. Make it so he can use link but still stay mobile in solo play (and also change the augment so he doesn't get immediately 1-shot in level 400 missions before he can use a single ability). 2. His stack generation in teams sucks, it's antithetical with traditional teamplay (you don't want enemies to die until a certain point). The larva changes don't really help. It also sucks in solo play against low density targets, like when fighting bosses. I'd rather require 30 stacks for immortality but be able to get them more consistently against both numerous and few targets. 3. His immortality is pretty OP in generic missions with lots of enemies, and almost completely worthless in boss fight without many trash mobs. It would be nice to have a middle ground. Since his immortality is tied to his stack generation, this is actually the same point as 2. 4. His ultimate sucks. It's only useful for the augment, and the augment is only useful because of the stack generation issue. The maggots cause enemies to stop and flail (the opposite of what you want generally speaking), and the heal over time barely does anything in this generation of Warframe. There are so many extra things it could do that fit with the virus/Nidus theme, like inflicting constant Viral procs on enemies in the field, pausing Link timer while you stand in it, giving you a heal that scales with stack count, etc. The recent Kullervo augment that allows his storm to be moved when he uses Wrathful Advance shows DE is aware of how limited static field abilities are, so I'm hoping something similar can be done with Nidus.

First mission (Alchemy): Some enemies are invulnerable until throwing the appropriate amphor on them, except eventually too many immune enemies are leftover and 1-2 Blitz Eximus continuously hit you with that insta-kill ground blast. It's just very annoying. Second mission (Defense): DE definitely learned their lesson from Duviri Circuit defense, right? Nah, objective is made of wet tissue paper. RNG frames, no way to defend the objective, no way to crowd control unless you lucked out on frame choice. Finished the mission with barely 150 or so HP on the defense objective, only won due to killing the Rogue Eximus Voidrigs and being able to use my own melee. Third mission (Assassination): I had Eclipse on for 75% DR, 1800 Armour, Adaptation, and I got instantly smashed from 3340 to 114 HP in 1 hit. Tell me you want me to use gating mechanics without telling me you want me to use gating mechanics. Also, losing 2 energy per second plus 2 Liminus draining your energy in an arena that you're forced to stay in is questionable. I finished it and felt annoyed and uninspired, especially for the defense mission. I feel like no matter what frame I picked for this week, I was going to struggle in the defense mission, and I had to use gating mechanics to survive against the fragmented tide. Inflating numbers are probably the most boring and frustrating way to increase difficulty. Next to draining player's energy at every opportunity.

I would because shards can always be swapped onto the frame you choose from the selection. With reactors and catalysts (namely catalysts) they're used up permanently and due to the unlikely chance for repeats in selection availability I'd expect to be burning at least 1 catalyst and 3 forma every week to make whatever arbitrary weapon selection work in Elite AM.

34 points: archon shards needs to go 37 points: 50 Vosfor - absolutely terrible First problem, these are supposed to be endgame rewards. You get a good amount of archon shards relatively quickly, and most players attempting this gamemode likely already have full sets of tauforged for their favourite frames. They can be moved around on frames so collecting dozens of them is unnecessary. They cannot be sold for platinum. Endgame rewards should always be useful, or at minimum things that can be liquidated for platinum. Examples: Arcanes. x3 Forma Bundle. Umbra Forma. Orokin Catalyst. Orokin Reactor. Things like Archon shards and focus lens (the latter of which thankfully are not reward candidates) eventually become increasingly valueless. An unacceptable trait for endgame rewards. Second problem, the rewards don't accurately reflect the difficulty of the randomised items. 34 point threshold should be legendary melee arcanes only. This bracket is already difficult enough due to forced choices. However, the difference between 34 and 37 is massive. 34 allows using 1 self-selected weapon or frame, meaning you can always reliably take at least 1 of your most powerful item with you. 37 requires complete adherence to the randomised selection. 50 Vosfor is a joke. There is absolutely no reason to shoot yourself in the foot for 37 points when you can get the value equivalent of 50 Vosfor by doing literally any Steel Path mission for 12.5 minutes. For 37 points you should be given the choice to pick x1 of any legendary arcane in the game. In fact, you should have the choice to pick from a list of many rare or useful rewards, see my example above. And yes, you should be able to pick your rewards at the highest tiers. Forced equipment is one thing, finishing the slog and then being "rewarded" your 20th Tauforged Yellow Shard and then 50 Vosfor after that is just a kick in the nuts and gives me many reasons to not engage in the new "content". I'm actually one of the few people not against the forced equipment, I get that it's supposed to be a borderline inaccessible gamemode that serves as a cheap and easy way to force players to burn forma and reactors/catalysts on stuff they'd never otherwise use. But when the rewards are crap and also laced with more RNG, it's just a slap in the face.

(TLDR: Parasitic Vitality doesn't help solve any of Nidus's issues and does the opposite of making it more boom or bust, and this is a huge misstep.) As someone who has almost exclusively played Nidus since 2017 (with a bit of an affair with Kullervo), I want to give my 2 cents on Parasitic Vitality (PV) from a design perspective. When talking about augments, it's necessary to point out that augments take up a mod slot and therefore need to be competitive with whatever else could have been in that slot. Parasitic Vitality is somewhat unique in that it is mutually exclusive with other Vitality mods, so less weight can be put on the opportunity cost. That being said, I think PV is an interesting idea but taken completely in the wrong direction. PV gives Nidus the ability to have tons of health, but at the cost of essentially constantly being required to be tethered (or you die). In other words, it just conditionally makes him more tanky. If you're level capping using his passive then this mod is even more useless. The problem I have with this is that this mod doesn't bring anything new to the table for him, and doesn't solve the inherent issues of Parasitic Link. Parasitic Link's effects have always been amazing, both in solo and co-op. The problem is that it's too conditional and janky to rely on. If you're fighting a boss solo and there are no other enemies around, you can't link. If you are playing pubs and link to an ally, your link is guaranteed to be broken when they rush to another room. PV just makes these issues even worse, because if you don't notice your link is broken, you are even more likely to die. Having to constantly check if my link is still on an ally, or track the health of the enemy I just linked to, on top of checking when my link duration is, and then worry about keeping enough enemies nearby to link to, is just really annoying. It's micromanagement that doesn't add any value to his playstyle. This issue is excaerbated in pubs if all the enemies are just instantly killed by others and you're just desperately trying to build stacks (this is more of an issue with his Mutation stack mechanic in general). I was really hoping when Parasitic Link did get its augment it would be something that addressed these issues, but instead it just makes Nidus even more tanky, at the cost of regular Vitality. This is extremely disappointing. Having 20k health is fun for 60 seconds, and then the management of keeping it up constantly kicks in and I realise I would much rather have had QOL with Parasitic Link instead of more health. I will give two concrete solutions to make Parasitic Link much more user-friendly and require less micro without changing its power level: Solution 1: Parasitic Link no longer requires a target, it instead automatically acquires a target in range as long as any duration remains, and will automatically reacquire any valid target when it can if the original target either becomes out of range or dies. Single tap will enable enemy acquisition mode, hold-press enables ally acquisition mode, but will target enemies instead if no allies are in range. This doesn't make Parasitic Link any stronger, it just makes it less annoying to use and more reliable. Solution 2: Add a new augment for Parasitic Link: Parasitic Servitude. This augment would add a new mode to Parasitic Link. Press-holding the ability would create a Nidus clone (pretty much same as WuClone or deployable Spectre) that is tethered to you using your Parasitic Link. It has the same health pool as you and uses clones of your weapons but does not cast abilities. This would finally allow you to use ally link functionality in solo play, and give you a way to reliably have PV up. Additionally, it's a way to have offensive Parasitic Link up without worrying about allies jumping out of your range and de-tethering you. For balance reasons, if the clone dies, the Parasitic Link would instantly be cancelled. Thanks for taking the time to read.

The arsenal UI reflects the augmented health value with ability strength factored in so ability strength is clearly intended to affect it, but in testing (at least in simulacrum) the bonus health per stack is always 4% (regardless of actual AS, at one mutation stack I gain +26 max hp, which is 0.04 of 650 - Nidus's health value at rank 30). Edit: Since this already isn't working, it's also worth ensuring the fix accounts for Parasitic AS value being evaluated after the existing multiplicative AS increase on AS when linking to allies. (example assumes rank 30 Nidus Prime and does not account for internal rounding) Expected outcome with 269% AS + Enemy Link @ 100 mutation stacks: 650 * (1 + (0.04 * 2.69 * 100)) = 7644 HP Expected outcome with 269% AS + Friendly Link @ 100 mutation stacks: 650 * (1 + (0.04 * (2.69 * (1 + 0.25 * 2.69)) * 100)) = 12,347 HP Expected outcome with 269% AS + Friendly Link @ 300 mutation stacks w/ Abundant Mutation: 650 * (1 + (0.04 * (2.69 * (1 + 0.25 * 2.69)) * 300)) = 37,042 HP Just for fun: Expected outcome with 408% AS + Friendly Link @ 300 mutation stacks w/ Abundant Mutation: 650 * (1 + (0.04 * (4.08 * (1 + 0.25 * 4.08)) * 300)) = 64,934 HP Linking to a rank 30 Inaros Prime in this context should give him (before any of his own mods): 2415* (1 + (0.04 * (4.08 * (1 + 0.25 * 4.08)) * 300)) = 241,256 HP