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Kit Update suggestion for Nekros


Zoh_Veldae
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Nekros, even though being an old Warframe from back in update 10, has kept a good degree of relevance through updates. However, I feel that he needs a bit of polishing on his kit. These are my suggestions for a kit update on the Warframe Nekros in order to bring him up to today's standards.


1- A New passive ability.
Right now, the current ability is barely noticeable and completely obscured by popular mod choices. To make this aspect of Nekros fit better on his kit, here is my suggestion: 

New Passive Ability: Doom
    Every few seconds, a random nearby enemy is Doomed do death, gaining a unique mark hovering above them. Doomed enemies will be revealed in the radar to all allies and take 100% extra damage. Only 1 enemy can be Doomed at a time and the ability will have a cooldown after the Doomed enemy is killed or Nekros moves too far away from them. Boss enemies cannot be Doomed.

This will keep in line with Nekro's theme of a death bringer and provide a degree of team support. This style of effect will also synergize with the following suggestions for Nekro's kit.


2- Additional effect to Nekro's first ability "Soul Punch"

Being a "bullet type" ability, Soul Punch should be kept as simple as possible. The current effect does little more than just scatter enemies around, so something more substantial should be added to it. For such, this is my suggestion:

Soul Punch
Add an effect to instantly kill enemies that are at 50% health or lower. If the killed enemy was Doomed, the mark will immediately refresh cooldown and Doom another random enemy.

Currently, this ability sees little to no use in most situations, even with its Augment Mod applied. This will incentivise players to use the ability not only for a killing blow but also to effectively use the new passive suggested.


3- Raise Armor Reduction of Nekro's second ability "Terrify"

The current 20% reduction is getting quickly outpaced by other Warframe's ability who can easily remove more, if not all, and with less effort. This is without mentioning the "fear" effect making enemies run around aimlessly and harder to hit properly at times. As a change, this is my suggestion:

Terrify
Increase base Armor Reduction to 50% and have Doomed enemies additionally be Disarmed.

This increase will compensate for the moving targets and not overtake other abilities more dedicated to Armor Shredding while also including synergy with the new passive suggested.


4- Nekro's third ability "Desecrate" is ok as is

Nekro's 3rd ability Desecrate is fine as is. Just add a little effect to synergize with the new suggested passive.

Desecrate
If a previously Doomed enemy is Desecrated, they will be guaranteed to drop a Health orb and an Energy orb.


5- Change completely the mechanics of Nekro's fourth ability "Shadows of the Dead"

Currently, Shadows of the Dead is used very seldom, only for either minions to distract the enemy or damage reduction via its Augment Mod. And even in those cases, the fact that it brings exact copies of enemies can sometimes work against the player. Some enemies like Ancient Infested Healers and Grineer Bombards are preferred targets for Shadows due to their capabilities directly aiding the player by, respectively, healing allies and disrupting enemies at range. However, there are many enemies that either serve no purpose other than distractions or outright encumber the players, such as Nullifiers whose Fields actually block your own attacks or Ancient Infested Disruptors whose protective aura serves no purpose against anything that's not a Warframe. To solve these problems, the ability should instead use a standardized selection of possible Shadow Minions, regardless of who the player kills, and work on a resource based system of "souls" to be gained via killing enemies, thus also allowing the player to adequately keep track of the number of minions they have at their disposal to summon. Elaborating on this suggestion further:

Shadows of the Dead
Whenever Nekros kills an enemy, they will harvest their Soul, displayed on a counter in the lower right corner of the HUD where several other ability counters are used. Killing light or medium enemy units will yield Lesser Souls while killing heavy or Eximus units will yield Greater Souls. Activating the ability will spend these souls (Minimum of 3 Greater Souls [Less if fewer are available] while remaining slots use Lesser Souls) to summon Shadows. The type of Soul determines what type of Shadow gets summoned:
Lesser Souls - Will randomly summon either Ranged Lesser Shadow or Melee Lesser Shadow which work as light units with Ranged or Melee attacks respectively
Greater Souls - Will randomly summon from a list of Eximus-like Shadows:
    Healer Shadow: Essentially an Ancient Infested Healer. Since that type of enemy is one of the most desirable for allied use, one of the Greater shadows should use it, giving access to that type of support in any type of mission.
    Aggressive Shadow: Heavy unit that mainly attacks with strong ranged attacks, but occasionally will strike nearby enemies with melee. Will perform the traditional "Ground Pound" move most heavy Grineer units use.
    Quick Shadow: A swift melee shadow that moves in fast, performs evasive dodges and can use the traditional grappling hook attack to pull enemies towards themselves for speedy melee attacks.

Limiting the types of units summoned as Shadows will make the ability more consistent and using the Lesser and Greater soul system will help synthesize the more efficient enemy abilities while removing the risk of accidentally summoning something that does more harm than good.
The visual aspect of the Shadows themselves should also be limited to a few faction-specific models (if possible, according to the factions present during the mission) for aesthetic purposes. The models then should use a different set of animations to better distinguish them from existing enemies (I suggest the zombie-like animations of the enemies that appear in the "Chains of Harrow" quest). This will help players tell friend from foe with just a quick glance.
Additionally, to synergize with the new suggested passive, killing a Doomed enemy will always yield a Greater soul and the soul will always be harvested even if it wasn't Nekros dealing the killing blow.

 

Overall, this is a simple suggestion to update an old Warframe. He may not exactly need it, but it's always good to update Warframes before they start to become obsolete rather than only acting after the fact.

I won't mind if Digital Extremes uses these suggestions as they are or just as pointers for their own ideas. These are just my thoughts and they're worth what they're worth.
Thank you for your time and have a good one.

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I started a 2 part thread on nekros rework a few days ago. Not sure if I'm in line with all of your ideas but there are a few that peak my interest. Might I draw from some of your ideas to add to mine? You will be given credit for anything I use. I'm just trying to compile a comprehensive list of things that myself and the rest of the community comes up with that I feel would be a good change for the ol bone daddy. Kind of a melting pot of ideas if you will

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12 hours ago, Doomclaaw said:

I started a 2 part thread on nekros rework a few days ago. Not sure if I'm in line with all of your ideas but there are a few that peak my interest. Might I draw from some of your ideas to add to mine? You will be given credit for anything I use. I'm just trying to compile a comprehensive list of things that myself and the rest of the community comes up with that I feel would be a good change for the ol bone daddy. Kind of a melting pot of ideas if you will

Go for it. I'm not stupid enough to monopolize ideas that can help the game get better. I'll also check out your threads and give my own feedback.

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I do agree that Soul Punch and Shadows needs updated.  I do like your concept of a 'Soul Counter' that dictates the strength level of our Shadows.  It could create more consistency and control if done properly.  But then you added the "randomly" chosen aspect which then made me realize it's almost no different than what we have now.  Because what happens if I'm stuck with all cc and no healers but I would like a specific mix?  This defeats the purpose of control and consistency imo.

Someone awhile ago brought up an idea that I preferred:  Have a menu that is similar to Octavia's Mandachord when messing with equipment.  Except this menu is exclusive to Nekro's Shadows and you would have the ability to control what units are prioritized once you've killed them and max number of them that you want to show up.

Now, I would honestly like to take this concept of controlling what kind of Shadows we get with your concept of a 'point' system.  Conceptually, the 2 systems could definitely integrate together.  How it would work out and be balanced without being completely overcomplicated?  I'm not too sure as I have not put that much thought into it quite yet.  But the other, simpler aspect would be to keep the same system we have now but do the "Mandachord" idea that would allow us to prioritize units.  Quite simply, If we wanted 3 Arctic Eximus, a couple shield ospreys, and a couple of Bombards, the Shadow system would focus on this build.  In other words, if you had 20 souls killed and line'd up for your Shadow ability but was not this specific team--maybe you were missing 1 Arctic.  As soon as you kill that Arctic, it is immediately moved to the front of the line to match your 'prioritization.'  And the menu for choosing these units could be as complex as we get to choose for every faction or we choose based on categories.  So Eximus, Heavies, Mediums, and Light units or something simple like that which is what I would probably recommend.

Moving past the 4 ability and back to Soul Punch, I kinda like your idea and have seen similar concepts.  But I think it drastically needs to be tied into his 4.  Mainly, Soul Punch needs to have the ability to wipe out our own Shadows in case we need a quick way to refresh them, which there is none right now minus jumping off a cliff lol.  Also, this could create greater versatility by maybe creating greater damage potential in some ways.  Could go further by if holding the Soul Punch button then makes ALL Shadows explode.  This offers a unique, yet expensive nuking potential for Nekros.

As for Terrify, I just think they need to add the Augment in as part of the ability.  Set the base slow to 50% at lvl 3.  Then they could change the augment to do something fancy.  Something like "killing a Terrified enemy heals Shadow clones by 3% (Max)."

As for the Passive, I do agree it could use a little more but just to offer my perspective, this passive helps counter the affects of Despoil by cutting it in half if you are in range of a killed enemy.  I would like to see something like this remain but the range to be expanded just little.  Until Nekros' 1 and 4 are reworked or balanced better, then could we look at other aspects of his kit.

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