Nidus Evolved - A Solution to Open World Woes

[dragonbrndovakin]

Introductions!

As of the time of writing this, I am an MR13 Nidus main playing on PC, I also go by Ya boi PHAT on discord

On Ps4 I am MR14 (if memory serves) and spent the majority of my time there playing Nidus as well, with a combined 1000 or so hours between both platforms

Keep these things in mind when gauging my experience, I personally believe I'm quallified to talk about these things, but others may not, so I figure I may as well put this info here to avoid unnecessary assumptions

 

Things in bold are to make sure that even if you're skimming through, most of the important bits will still be seen, sorry if it gets excessive in some sections, feedback on the post formatting is appreciated

 

"Nidus is really good tho?"

While nidus is in a very good place right now balance wise, and is lower on the rework priority than a frame like nyx, he struggles to find use in low enemy/very spaced out environments, such as railjack and open world mission types (less so in railjack, more on that a bit further down), while this isn't very problematic at the moment, I believe as new content distances further from the standard mission format nidus was developed in, that nidus will begin to age very poorly, I also believe that nidus has a lot of potential that hasn't been fully utilized in terms of his infested theme

As such, I would like to suggest a group of changes and features that would greatly improve his depth, allow him to be useful in all current and future content, without taking the spotlight from more specialized frames, and while still retaining the beloved Nidus-y traits we've all grown to love (parasitic link shenanigans, larva zooping, horde stomping, etc)

 

"So why is nidus bad in open worlds and railjack?"

In open worlds, enemies tend to be highly spaced out, and in much smaller groups than traditional missions like the mot survivals Nidus favors, due to this, it is difficult to gain stacks, since larva won't have enough range to group everybody up when they're so far apart, and due to fewer enemy spawns (and in the case of deimos and max alert orb vallis, many cc immune enemies) nidus will be hard pressed to get enough stacks to truly shine, particularly struggling to maintain enough stacks for his passive, which is a key part of his survivability

In railjack, the only times you encounter enemies are:

Boarding crews, which you won't even see if you and your crew are good enough at blowing up ramsleds, though when they do hit, the enemies are a good source of stacks, generally yielding 10 (sometimes even 15 in higher levels) or so starting from 0

Crewship enemies (spawn in very low amounts)

Base objective enemies (spawn more than crewship enemies but still aren't great, plus can kill you easily if you aren't careful/don't have stacks from the previous 2 mentioned enemy groups)

Despite this however, I don't think railjack is a problem for nidus, given that you rarely do combat on foot anyway, and don't actually need to fight the enemies, open worlds and heavily spaced out tiles however are a big problem for our lovely infested lad

 

"How can we combat this?"

Well, I have a *very* simple solution to the problem

Health Siphon: Allow nidus to hold 3 to channel his health into stacks at a rate of about 1 stack per 100 health, 10% health lost per second, stopping at 2 health, while being immobile in the process, in a pose akin to Banshee's Soundquake, this ability would cost 1 stack, so that nidus still has to put a little effort in to get the ball rolling, health drain/s and stack gain scales with power strength and efficiency respectively

Note: normal functionality of his 3 would remain, and be accessible by tapping 3 just as it is now

 

"Wouldn't that be a bit broken? and wouldn't it make Virulence kind of irrelevant?"

Very unlikely, Virulence would still be far superior in missions with lots of enemies, in addition to the fact that nidus is completely vulnerable in this state, on top of bringing himself closer and closer to death each second

 

Note: a method of maintaining health during this ability will be touched upon later, as I believe it is still very much beneficial for Nidus' effectiveness in higher level content

 

"Ok, cool ability and all but what's with the talk about "depth" and "underutilized themes" at the start of the post?"

So, Health Siphon is pretty sweet, and benefits Nidus a lot. but I have some ideas to take things a step further, and ensure Nidus will remain relevant and interesting through any future content, or at the very least incredibly easy to maintain should his raw numbers fall out of favor, as well as adding incredible customizability to his kit, while also heavily adding to his theme as an evolving infested hive master

 

"Wouldn't you have to pretty much remake him from the ground up for that?"

Not at all! Nidus' abilities and stack mechanics combined with his infested theme are a perfect foundation to lay the bricks of my ideas without sacrificing the things about him we've all come to adore

 

Introducing: Evolution, a Ravenous redesign

Ravenous has always been the one ability in nidus' kit that has been widely agreed upon as "meh", and I myself have always had very mixed opinions about it, so let's jump into that

 

"What's wrong with Ravenous?"

Thing is, it's not a horrible ability, it's just not nearly what it could be

It isn't a super useful support tool, as even with high power strength, the regen is only really enough to cover Nidus when he uses his 3 on an enemy

It isn't super synergetic with Nidus' kit, because while you do gain additional stacks by stomping maggots around and on enemies, I personally usually end up gaining stacks slower than I would've by just continuing to stomp enemies regularly and keeping the 3 stacks

It isn't a good dps tool, since maggots deal minimal damage outside of the explosion on death, which isn't spectacular either

It is a decent cc tool, due to the fact that maggots will run around the map and stunlock enemies, and ever more so if they pick up Wisp's Shock Motes, but due to how far they spread out, enemies can often get stuck in their spawn points, making things difficult sometimes in survival and defense missions

It also isn't great for defense and mobile defense missions and objective types, since the regen only affects living things, and allied AI tend to walk out of it frequently, unlike something like Wisp's Health Motes, which not only heal defense objectives, but also stay on targets after they leave the radius of the mote itself

All of these combine to make ravenous a very hit-or-miss ability

 

"So how can it be brought up to standard with the rest of Nidus' kit?"

The first thing, is to take away the duration, and create a large tumor in the middle (not unlike the ones in hive missions or deimos bounties), and make it health based, its health could also scale off of both strength and duration to make sure duration stays relevant (duration will have more effects but we'll get to those later)

Note: the tumors will be destroyable by nullifiers, and any buffs given by Ravenous infestation will be canceled while you're in their bubble

The next thing, is to make it so that Nidus can pump stacks into said tumor to make it spread the infestation, creating another, smaller tumor with less health further out, up to a maximum of 5 at base, after all, nidus needs something to spend all of his stacks on once he hits max (more ideas for that later)

I also believe that the infestation from these tumors should have built in enemy radar on enemies that step on the infestation *^{_{cough* zerg creep *cough*}}

And the final, biggest, most groundbreaking change, make the tumors and maggots modable

 

"Uhhh how are exalted maggots and tumors gonna work?"

They won't use normal mods, but rather a parazon type system, 4 mod slots for maggots (more on that in a second), 3 mod slots for tumors, all mods unlocked from the start, no capacity, no mod ranks

These mods will also be stackable, aka you can run your maggots with 3 of the same mod

This will allow Nidus to "evolve" himself and adapt to whatever mission he's doing, whether it be buffing and defending, speedrunning, crowd controlling, damage dealing, etc, but I am also being very careful to balance them in a way that nidus will not overshadow other warframes in those regards

This will not slow enemies as hard as Nova

This will not clear hordes as efficiently as Saryn and Equinox

This will not buff and heal allies as much as Wisp and Trinity

This will not defend objectives as easily as Frost, Gara, and Limbo

But Nidus will still bring enough to the table to be worth bringing as much as one of those warframes despite that

Bear in mind that I am not perfect, and will not be able to balance all of this, some warframes will be overshadowed by Nidus, either because of a mistake on my end, or that warframe simply needing some tuning themselves (in the future I may try to make reworks for other frames as well, but my experience currently pretains to Nidus over any other)

 

"What mods will be available? what kind of buffs will they give?"

A wide variety, I want Nidus to be adaptable, rather than being a jack of all trades kinda thing like Oberon, he'd be able to specialize for any mission type through modding

Note: this is an incomplete list, more may be added, be it by me, or my DE themselves if these changes are implemented, names and values are also heavily subject to change

Tumor mods

Spoiler

 

Abundant Growths: allows an additional 1 tumor per mod to be spread from small tumor nodes, these tiny nodes cannot spawn maggots

Could very easily be an augment as well

 

Chitinous Armor: standing on Ravenous infestation grants 20% base armor per mod, buff remains for 10 seconds after leaving infestation, scales with power duration

To give Nidus utility in defense missions

 

Nerve Stimulant: standing on Ravenous infestation grants 15% more movement speed, melee speed, and fire rate, as well as 20% reload speed per mod, buff remains for 10 seconds after leaving infestation, scales with power duration

To give Nidus a useful combat buff, and a utility buff

 

Reinforcing Masses: standing in Ravenous infestation grants 20% more base health and shields per mod, buff remains for 10 seconds after leaving infestation, scales with power duration

To give Nidus a survivability buff in places where Chitinous Armor wouldn't be as good

 

Charged Spores: standing in Ravenous infestation grants 2 energy/s per mod

To give Nidus a useful buff for power focused warframes

 

Consuming Tendrils: enemies standing on Ravenous infestation will lose 2% hp/s per mod

To give Nidus additional DPS when buffs are unneeded

 

Sticky Webbing: enemies standing on Ravenous infestation will be slowed by 15% per mod

To give Nidus a useful tool for interceptions and disruptions

 

 

Note: do not make summons from tumors or the tumors themselves affect Oberon's Renewal, otherwise the Oberon mains will be very sad

 

"Maggot" mods

Before we jump into the main set, I want to explain that fourth mod slot I mentioned, that is the slot for the "strain" of ally that spawns from the tumors, probably placed right above the middle slot like an aura or stance mod, here are the ones I've come up with, feel free to suggest more and if I like them I'll add them here with credit to you

Strain types and other mods are subject to change, more may be added by either me or DE, numbers and names are also heavily subject to change

 

Titan Strain: instead of spawning multiple infested, each tumor will summon a large juggernaut esque infested, targetting weakpoints of enemies like cephalites and bosses (including eidolons once vulnerable), they will also patrol the Ravenous infested, and attack any enemies in range, Titans have a 50% crit chance, 4x crit multiplier and 10% status chance

To give Nidus utility in Eidolon hunts and other weakpoint based boss fights

 

Bomber Strain: same as current maggots but with a few differences, instead of grabbing enemies and cc-ing them, they will simply leap at enemies and explode, stripping 20% of the enemy's armor, Bombers have a 20% crit chance, 2x crit multiplier, and 50% status chance

To give Nidus a tool against heavily armored enemies

Disabler strain: summons flying infested akin to deimos tendril drones, which will latch onto enemies, locking them in place and damaging them, Disablers also have a 100% status chance when grabbing, and an additional 20% status chance on each subsequent damage tick, as well as a 10% crit chance, and 1.5x crit multiplier

To give Nidus a useful cc tool, as well as additional dps

 

Symbiote Strain: Instead of summoning units, spawns clouds of locust-like infested, which will coat the arms and legs of Nidus and his allies (including AI such as specters and operatives), buffing them based on the equipped mods, buff lasts 20 seconds after leaving the cloud, scales with duration

To give Nidus an additional support tool when other strains wouldn't be useful or necessary

 

Each kill and kill assist by one of the summons will give nidus part of a stack

 

Summons have a respawn timer once they die, 5 summons will spawn from each tumor at any given time, with the exception of titans

Titan base respawn: 30s

Bomber base respawn: 5s

Disabler base respawn: 15s

Symbiotes cannot die and thus have no respawn

 

Summons will spawn at the level of the current highest level enemy, and have stats scaled accordingly, each strain can be modded for any damage type, but have a default element, elements combine as normal

 

Titan default element: puncture

Bomber default element: corrosive

Disabler default element: slash

 

Non-Strain Mods

Spoiler

Rapid Multiplication: reduces summon respawn timer by 3 for Disablers, 5 for Titans, and 1 for Bombers, per mod, Symbiotes give 15% reload speed per mod

 

Adrenaline Rush: increases summon movement and attack speed by 25% per mod, Symbiotes give 15% more movement speed per mod

 

Hardened Flesh: gives summons 20% more base health and armor per mod, Symbiotes give 15% more base health and armor per mod

 

Sharpened Claws: converts summon default element to slash, and gives 30% increased slash per mod, Symbiotes give a 20% slash increase per mod

 

Pointed Fangs: converts summon default element to puncture, and gives 30% increased puncture per mod, Symbiotes give a 20% puncture increase per mod

 

Dense Bones: converts summon default element to impact, and gives 30% increased impact per mod, Symbiotes give a 20% impact increase per mod

 

Flammable Appendages: gives summon 30% increased heat per mod, Symbiotes give a 20% heat increase per mod

 

Poisoned Talons: gives summon 30% increased toxin per mod, Symbiotes give a 20% toxin increase per mod

 

Conductive Hide: gives summon 30% increased electricity per mod, Symbiotes give a 20% electricity increase per mod

 

Icy Veins: gives summon 30% increased cold per mod, Symbiotes give a 20% cold increase per mod

 

 

"You mentioned more ways to burn stacks, and a way to maintain health while channeling Health Siphon, what's up with those?"

Expend Mutation: Nidus will stand still and charge the ability for a second, before releasing a giant wave of infestation and energy, dealing 1% of the enemy's health per stack in a 30 meter radius, scales with power range

This will give Nidus a use for building large amounts of stacks, and allow him to kill very large groups of tanky enemies, while also not being spammable enough to be broken

 

And for the Health Siphon: any enemies standing on Ravenous infestation in a 15 meter radius around you will be linked up to a max of 5 and have have their health drained to heal Nidus, as well as redirecting 50% of damage taken to them, scales with power range, each target linked will cost one stack, enemies in excess of link limit or current stacks will be unaffected and continue to attack Nidus

This would allow nidus to pull off Health Siphon with enemies around in higher level missions without the risk of dying immediately, while still leaving Nidus with a risk of death should he use it poorly

[Hearthwoodgamer]

A small augment idea to his link could be this. 

Hivemind: Link Augment

It cuts the base link range in half, but allows it to link to all allies/enemies in range. This means you can have both buffs at the same time, which will stack depending on how many allies/enemies are in range. So use with 3 of your friends around and everyone gets 3x the normal ability boost. Use in a massive group of enemies to become invulnerable and also hitstun a huge group.

[Luciole77]

wow...

primed wall text.