Bristoling
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Posts posted by Bristoling
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And all of this said the leveling process... kinda... isn't that... important... really... It's a pretty limited portion of how much time is spent in a frame.
I absolutely agree with you on this point, but most game developers don't want new players to pick up a frame and start losing life because they are using cracked mods and their freshly market bought Braton 😄 I mean it all depends how it is actually handled. Anyway your idea is quite interesting, and anything that reduces the number of "must have" mods would be a great help to the frame.
QuoteI've thought up a loooooooooooooooong list of things that I would change about Nekros over the years, but I'd honestly take anything at this point. Anything that makes him feel more fluid, less passive, and more useful.
So much this. I don't know, maybe even give Shadows of the Dead some kind of "exalted weapon" treatment, where you could put companion/weapon mods to enhance damage or their status chance or something. Probably a nightmare to code and implement, but just throwing and idea out 😆
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Thanks for responses guys.
Wyrmius, I agree that Nekros is "survival loot frame", but let's be honest, if you do long survivals you don't bring Nekros for extra Orokin Cell or other rare drops 😄 only for life support. So he essentially just extends the time before you need to start using capsules while not really doing anything else much, and like Sasuda brought up, more often then not you are just sitting there waiting for Desecrate to do its work. Rescue, Exterminate, Sabotage, Spy, Assassination, Capture, Interception, basically anywhere where you don't sit in one place like Defense and Survival, your Desecrate will be just leaving loot behind you as you bullet jump to the objective - and you will be constantly out of range of Shadows. And even for Defense, Nekros doesn't contribute in offensive or defensive manner, and is even a hindrance once your team starts shooting your Shadows. So there's 1-2 mission types where he can be actually useful (Survival and Excavation for extra power cell drop).
I agree with you Sasuda that Nekros is too passive. Get your 3 to work in the background, and press your 4 every 30-60s, never use 1 since it doesn't do anything above level 40, and only cast 2 as a panic button since you need that energy to refresh your 4. So yeah, you end up using pretty much only 2 abilities where one is a toggle and second one is only used once a minute or so.
One thing I don't agree with you is putting Despoil's mechanic into Desecrate, and that's because when your frame isn't level 30, the chance for extra drop is rather low, and you won't be able to sustain your health pool while leveling Nekros.
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TL:DR
Nekros is a bit under powered and only good for extra life support like some kind of additional Smeeta kavat, his tanking capabilities are restrictive/weak (you don't see them in Index for example). Also, has trouble killing in long endless missions which he needs to do to cast his 4th, which in turn makes him squishy once his (not his teams) kills per minute go down.
Let me start this by saying that the overall theme and look of Nekros is great, and I like the frame a lot. However, I think there is a lot of wasted potential and some of the design choices prevent Nekros from being a great frame. Anytime I play as Nekros, it feels like I'm only there to provide others with some extra life support in Kuva Survivals or a tiny bit extra loot/healing in the Void so they can gather more Argon crystals. While everyone else is buffing the team offensively with damage or attack speed, providing extra defense like healing, crowd control and extra armour, or just straight up killing everything in sight, Nekros is just there to... bring more loot and life support. Playing Nekros feels like playing a weak support frame rather then master of life and death.
There's a couple of problems with the Frame that are apparent to me:
1. Mod space hungry: He requires a Syndicate mod (Despoil) in order to function, a Simaris mod to be able to have any survivability at all (Health Conversion), another Syndicate mod to be able to survive in higher levels (Shield of Shadows) and Equilibrium to have enough energy to feed his 4th ability. This is 4 mods for the frame to just be able to keep up in survivability with the rest of the squad. Since you want a good amount of power strength for your 4th ability to be actually useful, this means you need to use either Blind Rage/Transient Fortitude + Power Drift, which locks another main and exilus slot. Add in Vitality, and the only 3 mods left for customisation are an aura slot and 2 main slots. You might want to use either Continuity or Range reducing your choices even more.
2. Costly: The current cost of these required mods on the market is: 12+p for Despoil, 15+p for SoS, 60p for Health Conversion and 20p for Equilibrium. Add 30p for one of the corrupted mods and you need to spend minimum of 130p to have a decent working build.
3. Not as great of a tank as other frames: You could say that Nekros is a tank and his job is to provide loot and life support, which kind of is true. But, the cost of getting Nekros to be able to tank is very high while other frames can just press a button to get free 90-95% damage reduction or thousands of extra hit points, no augments needed. Not to mention, his defences aren't as reliable and he can be easily taken out by just bad luck. You could:
- get ragdolled a few times in a row and your Health Conversion armuor will go puff if there are no health orbs nearby
- have a leech eximus behind a wall, draining your energy so you can't cast your 4 when its about to expire
- you can't be mobile since being outside of range of your Shield of Shadows means you're going to die very quickly in higher levels
4. For 20 minute survival missions, which is a "standard" for majority, you don't need Nekros. For missions longer then 20 minutes (1 hour or more), Nekros needs to be able to survive in the first place. But since Nekros doesn't have any ways of scaling damage, and he requires actual kills (your teammates don't count) to cast his Shield of Shadows, it's easy for him to hit a wall when suddenly his tankiness can no longer be sustained.
5. The visual clutter is very problematic especially for Prime variant. Not only you got your Shadows blocking your view and soaking up your bullets/projectiles, you also have to deal with your wings flapping around the camera as you move around. Your 4th ability which you need to use to have any decent survivability is a nuisance for your confused teammates, but also for yourself if your weapon doesn't have any punch through.
6. People enjoy extra loot and life support but hate your 4th ability with passion so more often then not you feel pressured into not using it, leaving you vulnerable.
7. You're only useful for Survival missions, anywhere else you are being carried by others or only there for that extra Argon crystal, Endo (arena) or Orokin Cell drop chance.
Those might not be the best solutions, but here are my ideas to improve his abilities to work a bit better together:
1. Soul Punch. The damage is Impact based, meaning it's one of the worse damage types, its single target, and damage itself doesn't scale well. It has an ok CC, but in a horde game such as Warframe you want something more reliable then a single target ragdoll skill. In my humble opinion, Soul Punch should be slightly reworked to synergise better with the rest of Nekros abilities. The damage itself could be completely scrapped since nobody is using it for damage, what could be done however, is stunning the target for base of 2-5 seconds (no ragdolling), and target's soul instead of being shot out could be just hanging behind the target. The soul could have -80% of the target's original armour value or simply take increased damage, and damaging it would deal proportional amount of damage to the target itself. Target who's soul has been destroyed are added to Shield of Shadow's pool of available summons, so that even if your teammates destroy it, you can summon them later. Souls would also be prioritised by your summoned Shadows, and with reduced armour this would work like marking an enemy for your Shadows to attack.
The augment is kind of weak considering it is highly situational and consumes all of the energy - it should also provide 1 second of invulnerability to the target per mod rank.
2. Terrify: The CC potential is great however, the high energy cost of 75 is really preventing this ability from being useful, since most Nekros players run around with 50-80% efficiency. Also, Nekros is geared towards being good in survival missions, so you don't want the targets to run away, you want to kill enemies in order to get more life support. The augment helps prevent that, however, it's yet another mod slot on an already stuffed build. To add insult to the injury, the armour stripping is only temporary, while armour removal abilities of other frames don't suffer from this. Having the armour stripping component be permanent or the cast time/cost be lowered instead would help making this ability much more useful in general. Creeping Terrify augment could also open up the enemies to finishers if attacked by Nekros, along with its movement speed reduction. This would help Nekros be able to still kill high level enemies so he can keep casting Shield of Shadows.
3. Desecrate: Pretty much the only ability of Nekros that prevents him from being a meme frame, and the only ability I wouldn't change, but if the frame cannot be buffed in other places because of how good Desecrate is, maybe reducing the extra loot chance from 22.5-54% to 20-40% would be appropriate.
4. Shadows of the Dead: Nekros's tank ability, requiring a big investment of power strength. While good, it has numerous downsides:
- Shadows can get in the way of bullets for both you and you teammates.
- Your team (and yourself) wastes their ammo trying to attack your summons, even while using bright energy colors (which again, doesn't help much when Ancient Disruptors are around).
- Their damage is pitiful in higher levels.
- The amount of power strength required to get 90% damage reduction is very high (+114%) compared to other abilities. Compare that to Parasitic Link (80%), Splinter Storm (29%), Shatter Shield (19%), and abilities like Iron Skin, Turbulance or Warding Halo that work well with no power strength invested,
- You need to actively kill in order to cast it, which gets harder and harder in long endless missions.
- Requires an augment to do its thing.
- While other frames have "press 4 to win", Nekros feels like its "press 4 to hang on".
Since they are technically Shadows, maybe player bullets and projectiles should go through them. Augment's bonus should be innate to the skill itself, and the augment should have some new modifier. For example, if previous skill changes gone through, then Augment further amplifying damage of your minions would enable new gameplay where you strip armour of your enemies with your Terrify and open them for finishers with he Creeping Terrify augment, mark a single enemy for your buffed minions to focus fire with Soul Punch, and actually play like a Necromancer who's dispatching enemies with his minions, not with his weapons only and help of other players.
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16 minutes ago, opticalwheel said:
I think I'm having the same problem, I start out in some kind of tunnel and all I can do is click the left mouse button, which does what looks like a void dash and then makes the sound you get when you fall in a pit or something. After doing this a few more times I end up in an empty room where there are some yellow diamond looking things I can click on to void dash around the room. I'm still in my warframe and sometimes my sentinel will stay at one of the diamonds while I go to the other ones. There's what looks like some kind of progress bar at the top with 5 segments that are greyed out. All I can do at that point is continue to dash around the room or Alt-F4
Same here, bugged.
Nekros feels like a weak support, not Necromancer
in Warframes
Posted · Edited by Bristoling
There's some serious effort and good ideas there, hopefully DE will take a look at Nekros at some point.
Well, I think it is fine as it is. As it is now, minions dps difference between level 30 and 100 is pretty much non-existent once your enemies are level 100 with higher armor, they might as well not attack at all. But them being healed constantly lets you forget about recasting them, which on one hand makes it slightly easier, but on another hand... well, you might as well remove his abilities and put them in his passive since there isn't anything left for Nekros to do apart from recasting Shadows and occasional Terrify while you revive someone.