Nyx Reimagined - a Nyx full ability redesign for 2020

[NovusKnight]

Nyx has for a very long time been a frame I love, hate, and hate to love all at once. I have always been partial to mind control as a videogame mechanic. Unfortunately, Nyx isn't in a very good spot. The way the game has evolved led to her falling off quite horribly. Some of her selling points are literally made better by other frame's, adding insult to injury.

my proposed reimagining of her kit is all about making her more mechanically interesting and unique, while offering more to the team and bolstering her capabilities. Some themes and abilities are unchanged or slightly adapted, but some things are new.

 

 

the themes i intended to go with are a mixture of controlled chaos / entropy, using an enemy as a puppet - as opposed to fodder, like Revenant does - and buffing her support of her team and her solo sustainability in the process. I also attempted to make her minion require a little bit of thinking to use, as now you have incentive to either keep it alive, or kill it at the exact best timing.

 

Passive: SEED OF CHAOS: Enemies killed under the effects of Chaos restore 25 shields and health to Nyx and her minion.

 

 

Ability 1: DISCORD 

target: Any individual foe

duration: Infinite

effect: Causes the enemy affected to be enslaved as a personal minion. this minion's attacks mark foes with Chaos, an effect exactly like current Nyx's chaos, turning enemies on one another like radiation does, without the proc. minions are immune to player or ally damage. 

minion damage increases with every enemy attack on an enemy tagged with Chaos and over time. Higher power strength increases how high, with duration reversely increasing speed (higher duration, shorter time needed to passively reach the max damage).

minion receives a 100% movement, attack, reload, and special ability (eximus, summons, special attacks) cool down reduction, increased by strength, ensuring constant firepower to suppress enemies. This on top of the actual damage increase can multiply damage output immensely - in the 1000% ball park of DPS increases with decent nodding,possibly more, which is no longer dependent on your guns to reach, and which requires no recasts.

holding to un-cast, or enslaving a new foe, causes the original minion to explode, releasing all received damage over its lifetime. This damage is amplified by the damage buff, and in essence is her current 4 in new form - turning melee minions into, essentially, a heat-seeking remote detonated landmine.

 

 

this overhauls her 1 in a way that makes it somewhat competitive with Revenant's 1, where a single minion is intended to get more useful stuff done than revenant's several discardable ones. Infinite duration encourage finding a specific enemy and not sacrificing it, but the lack of invulnerability means you need to have some tact in keeping it alive, through synergies and her passive. It makes the ability useful in a few ways depending on how you mod her, from a long term super strong minion to short term kamikaze tactics.

 

Ability 2: PARANOID WHISPERS

target: AoE entered on one enemy.

range: Decent, not gigantic. No bigger than Antimatter Drop, i would say.

duration: 20 seconds base.

effect: enemies affected by Paranoid Whispers are inflicted with Chaos and lose their armor and shields, and turn hostile towards everything. Upon dying, each heals everyone on the team (minions, sentinels, specters, etc) and nyx by 1%, affected by strength. Evidently, this can actually generate very constant healing if you mod for massive range and everyone is nuking things around you - in a way, similar to Equinox's Mend, at a much lesser range.

this ability is a recastable, more useful version of psychic bolts that synergizes better with DISCORD. This gives your minion a lot more targets to charge damage from, especially noticeable if your minion has an eximus aura, or grenades, since the frequency at which these are used is much higher and can often hit many enemies at once - plus it makes sense to enslave the best foes.

the healing aspect of this ability is quite low and requires a lot of energy, recasts, and modding to compete with actual healer frames. Rather, it is a good way to keep your minion healthy, since it combines with her passive, so a single nuke that takes out five enemies restored 5% of your minion's hp. It... Works, i think. You can also support your team via armor/shield stripping, if you spam this, and overall there aren't that many scenarios where using this is a bad idea.

 

 

Ability 3: GRIM PUPPETRY

target: Large AoE. Think Molecular Prime.

duration: 40 seconds.

effect: Every time one affected enemy perishes, all affected enemies lose 2% of their total HP - this scales with strength.

this ability snowballs in late game, where high enemy density becomes the norm, and can quickly depopulate an area combined with DISCORD (buffed) and PARANOID WHISPERS. between one enemy with massive damage and firerate mowing them down, their own friendly fire, armor being stripped, and tenno thrown in, it takes mere seconds for this ability to reduce a large amount of enemies to very low health - with high power strength and range, possibly enough to guarantee the deaths of all affected. At 2%, you would need 50 kills, but at 5%, 20 kills would result in everything tagged to die. This is gradual, so enemies effectively start dropping like flies the further this goes on. Combined with some abilities like Spores, this is simply nasty, and does a great job supporting Nyx's team. 

It further synergizes with her passive and her 2, by hastening the flow of direct and indirect kills. A successful total 100% damage threshold of this ability would instantly kill several enemies, resulting in a nice burst of hp to everything and everyone. Groovy!

 

 

Ability 4: PHANTOM PAIN

target: your minion.

effect: damage redirection, up to 90%, multiplied by 25 times.

this combines with Nyx's passive and her 2 to grant her incredibly strong defenses, similar to how her Absorb augment works... Except it now involves some thought and can't be kept on forever. your taking comes from a mix of damage reduction and constant regeneration, and both are linked to your minion.

you can absolutely walk into explosions, but your minion is the one taking the real punishment. You either play efficiently enough to keep it alive - and in turn you stay alive - or it dies, and you suddenly lose your damage reduction, which can get you killed. This can be used to your favor though, because this damage also adds up to the stored nuke effect. You see, this ability, used correctly over extended time periods, condenses all damage you redirected to your minion, multiplied it by 25x, then multiplied that by whatever the minion's damage buff is - so in late game, your minion can easily outdamage a Antimatter Drop after some build up and caution on your part.

or, you simply play it safe, and enjoy the incredible combination of CC, self healing, constant hp debuffs on enemies, and damage reduction - now without being super slow by her augment.

[(XBOX)SirMilkfiend]

I REALLY like some of the ideas here but I think it would work better as a new frame with a different theme. That passive is far too little 25 health to a minion with possibly hundreds of thousands health will never be felt. Maybe replace with a heal based on max health or where every kill adds a few seconds to your active abilities.

[NovusKnight]

that's 25 per enemy that dies under the effect of Chaos, which the minion itself, plus Nyx herself, can apply en masse. Add nukers to the equation, and you are easily looking at +200hp every other second, with the occasional burst when someone nukes a group. It's actually a pretty strong passive, if you think about it 😉

[TeCoolTenno]

I think 25 isn't a very good number - being too high for Nyx and too low to the minion due to differences in enemy-player scaling

imo it should be like flat 10 to nyx herself, and 2% of the killed enemy's health to the minion

 

Or move the passive to paranoid whispers ("Enemies killed under chaos restore health to the minion") and add this to her 1: "Nyx shares a percentage of healing her minion receives"

Then give her another passive

Edited May 27, 2020 by TeCoolTenno

[NovusKnight]

On 2020-05-27 at 12:06 PM, TeCoolTenno said:

I think 25 isn't a very good number - being too high for Nyx and too low to the minion due to differences in enemy-player scaling

imo it should be like flat 10 to nyx herself, and 2% of the killed enemy's health to the minion

 

Or move the passive to paranoid whispers ("Enemies killed under chaos restore health to the minion") and add this to her 1: "Nyx shares a percentage of healing her minion receives"

Then give her another passive

While that is true, do remember that the minion is also fully subjected to team buffs that add damage reduction, or healing. yes, on her own it would be insufficient to infinitely keep a minion alive (though it SHOULD last a very long time later on) but on a team with something like an Oberon, or a Trinity, it would be a piece of cake. if anything, we could change out the Mind Freak augment to add something like a 1% lifesteal from player weapons healing the minion. its effects are pretty much included in the ability as-is.

[AltairFerenc]

First, I'm always happy to see someone caring for nyx.
Second, what you did to mind control is almost perfect, it would just need vauban level scaling to be perfect
Third, everything else is basicly a new frame
Her second doesn't need much change as it is rn, what is a must is a better targeting, mind controlled and chaos effected enemies targeting the hit mobs and the number of bolts increasing with str and not removing the debuff when recasted, that's it and ability is perfect. 
Chaos needs some bigger tweaks for sure, as well as absorb if not completly redone
But literally scrapping 3 out of 4 abilites for a rework? Even wukong only scrapped 2 at best(because 1 of those became his passive)
Your ideas are not wrong or anything like that ofc, but you completly went with the source of her name being a night/darkness goddes and forgetting her theme is psychic, might as well just do a little more work replacing the 1st one too to make a new frame called nox or something.

I don't want to seem harsh or anything, these are just my thoughts, I see you put a lot of thought into this and it is good, but not necesairly nyx anymore.

[z3us32610]

For an initial rework the idea behind this build sounds really interesting.

[Teridax68]

Changing the invincibility on Nyx's 4 to damage redirection I think is brilliant -- Absorb has always stuck out like a sore thumb not simply because the ability on its own is clunky and essentially impossible to balance, but also because it has very little interaction with the frame's mind control element. Not only would damage redirection gate the ability in a more organic manner, it would also add an extra dimension of minion management, with Nyx either sacrificing her army for survivability, or intentionally drawing damage to kill the targets under her control. I also like the idea of combining Chaos and Mind Control into a single ability (or, in this case, an ability and a half), as the two effects are very similar in purpose.

[Crewell]

I want Nyx to receive a fix (mini poetry). I don't know if she needs the full rework you've hinted at here, or just subtle changes.

1. I agree Mind Control needs a complete redesign/replacement. Right now it ends up being a troll ability to keep waves from ending.

2. I like the old version Psychic Bolts that did damage. I think an enemy seeking missile is fairly unique to Nyx. I think take the current Psychic Bolts and add back a significant damage (maybe 750ish base) part to it and it would be a good ability again.

3. Chaos is pretty much the only reason Nyx is even played. I don't think it needs to be altered much. Maybe make the players invisible to those affected by Chaos.

4. Absorb, the ability that should be really cool except it isn't. I think the Assimilate augment needs to be built in. Then make the Augment allow for 100% movement speed. Warframe is a game about moving around fast so this ability at it's base is the antithesis of that.

[(PSN)ForNoPurpose]

2 hours ago, Crewell said:

1. I agree Mind Control needs a complete redesign/replacement. Right now it ends up being a troll ability to keep waves from ending.

I literally just recorded a clip of a defense wave ending with a target mind controlled.

Please understand the frame you are suggesting changes too.

 

Edited May 29, 2020 by (PS4)ForNoPurpose