Nyx, Upgrade #100246030893, Warframe's MK ULTRA

[CrownOfShadows]

Alright, let's talk about Nyx once again.

Her 2 is good. Armor strip. Awesome. Double the targets with her augment, sure.... ... . .....

Her 3 is good. The chaos is better than radiation and is a top-tier defensive mechanic with augment, although it needs a lot of range and duration.

Her 4 SUCKS. Her 1 SUCKS.

Wait, I'll elaborate, even though the people who will want to argue won't care about the details. So I went full strength on her, 400% strength, which combining with the augment for her 1 gives an ally with ~1500% dmg increase, or if you're in a relic with 2x str that's ~3000% dmg increase. Sounds good right? Wrong. It does damage, yes. Tickle damage. It draws some fire, yes. It still struggles to kill anything, even when you clear the overgaurd of a blast eximus and conscript them, amazingly... still not good. Give me a 3000% damage increase and I'll show you what good is son.

Ok, her 4, absorb. Doesn't scale with range or duration, just str. So I went full str on this too. With a full primed energy pool, sitting in absorb for the full duration of my energy bar in high SP, just soaking up dmg, then BOOM.... oh nobody died? Oh actually nobody even took significant damage? Oh they still have 25%-75% of their shields? Yay. This ability is so bad that when deciding whether to helminth over her 1 or her 4 it's always her 4 for me. What? There's some secret build that makes this amazing? Oh by all means, tell me about it.

If I sound irritated, it's because I am. She got dev attention a while back but that feels like it did nothing, and I have a bit of a soft spot for Nyx because I cleared the original starchart with her a lifetime and ago. To be clear, she is not even in the top 5 of my list of frames needing urgent work, but I was playing her again and got deeply irritated and so here I am, posting for posterity. One day, about 6 years from now, after I'm dead, she'll be fixed, but this post will be in the archives and will have contributed nothing. But I'm doing it anyway, ok?

Fixing Nyx without changing her abilities:

Allow me to suggest several new augments for her 1, because she has SOOOOO much room to mod that we can fit another augment no problem right? (this is sarcasm):

1. Augment #1: Can be cast on up to 10-15 enemies. This should at least put her on par with Nekros and provide sufficient distraction to keep her alive. Suggest they last a bit longer or that they have a renewal mechanic so you don't have to spam your 1 just to stay at max. Maybe their attacks add time to their duration timers or something.
2. Augment #2: Use Nekros' redirect damage - these allies take damage for Nyx. It's a cheap duplicate ability, but hey, at least it would be useful. You could tweak it to make it more interesting.
3. Augment #3: Enemies turned ally give Nyx overgaurd or overshields per attack, or hp / armor. As long as they are hitting enemies, she is pretty safe. Details TBD, figure out if you want her as a shield user or a tank or a hybrid and go from there.
4. Augment #4: Enemies turned ally gain the ability to receive a secondary weapon (like rescue subjects) (or even switch it up and give them a primary or melee or archgun???), thus enabling them to do actual damage (probably replace the current augment of +500% with this, as it's a direct upgrade and we wouldn't want both available at the same time now would we? Or make them mutually exclusive).
5. Augment #5: Enemies that this new ally attack have a 5-10% (or something) chance to likewise become an ally, up to a cap. Thus they can infect others with their newfound allegiance. I will say that for this to work well we would need to address the issue we've known about for 26 centuries now: clearly indicating this is an ally to the whole team. IDKY this is so freakin hard (we literally have an ally marker we can slap on them as a ghetto solution) but it needs to happen, like cmon son, it's not 1994.
6. Augment #6: These newfound allies benefit from Pack Leader (& hey and maybe other companion things too. Give us a reason to use Shepherd?)

Alternatively, just make some of this standard rather than an augment, your choice. Speaking of, a few QoL tweaks to the innate ability:

1. After a converted enemy recovers and is no longer an ally, either they die or they have no armor/ 25% shield.
2. Ability can be held to cancel all
3. Something juicy? Give them warframe abilities, ala Sisters & Lichs, I mean, we can basically call down a Sister or Lich and have them outperform and outlast these converted enemies, right? am i RIGHT??? Or even drop a specter that will be Wisp or Citrine or something. Right? RIGHT???? So maybe make them as good as or better than that. (This rather highlights the central issues with this ability, but if there are 10-15 of them... well that's a different story now ey, that's more specters than you can drop - therefore... it would be a decent ability)
4. Something else juicy? Enemies will rush towards any console within 5-30m and hack it for you (based on range?). Maybe hold this ability to activate. I mean, they actually know the codes after all, right? RIGHT??? What's a telepathic slave for if not to hack into their own computers for you.

And Absorb. No augment suggestions for this, just tweaks:

1. No per/second cap. WTF (but check your framerate exploits beforehand)
2. No max cap either, this is enemies we're talking about, not warframes, they aren't hitting 500 million damage or -2.1 billion, why cap it? It's not like somebody is going to mod their way around it, ever. Actually it's the most balanced damage spectrum you could possibly wish for, so make it actually hit plz... which brings me to...
3. Instead of 0.05% how about 50%? Too strong? Ima ask for a receipt on that. Look, worst case scenario: you actually kill everyone around you. How bad would that be? Compare it to other abilities like Mirage 4 or Mesa 4 or Saryn 4 and then tell me again why I can't kill everyone around me, and they get to keep moving like normal and at bigger range. If anything sacrificing mobility and all weapons and all other ability casting and well... everything....  shouldn't that make me more powerful... or does Nyx just get to suck as a warframe forever?
4. Guaranteed base damage, what do you want, 100k? Better to scale it with enemy level if you can, and a secondary scaling for time held, the longer it's held the better the base damage. This way you can't abuse it by spamming it and you are actually guaranteed a reward for holding it longer, go figure, why would anyone reward that? It's not like I could be doing insane damage other ways or anything.
5. Applies knockdown, for those times when it still isn't going to kill anything and you're about to die anyway. Alternatively, applies chaos.
6. Something juicy? Gain armor per amount absorbed, duration based on the time the ability is maintained x2-x5. So when you're done you have a crap-ton of armor based on how long you were in it. Make it overgaurd or overshields instead? Sure, whatever.
7. Something else juicy? strips armor on everyone impacted. Scale it with time held if you want. (Still would suck compared to other options because it has to be held but hey, at least you can kill these fools afterward now)
8. Something else juicy? heals Nyx to full hp 5-10 seconds after it ends (I'm opting for not immediate heal so there's still a little danger, i think that's probably healthy)
9. Something else juicy? applies 5 random elements to everyone impacted, priming them for you. If you want to scale the # of elementals based on time held to avoid spam abuse, fine
10. Something else juicy? converts all impacted enemies into allies, with damage and duration based on how long the ability was held. This seems very on-theme.
11. Something else juicy? all impacted enemies have their armor stripped and applied to Nyx (kinda like we wish we were Hydroid) or their shields. Or their armor is stolen and converted into overgaurd. Or their shields are stolen and become overgaurd. Or both their armor and their shields. Or.... they suffer damage based on their own armor (the greater their own armor, the more hp % they lose). All kinds of possibilities.
12. Something else juicy? Any enemy killed by this ability has all it's power transferred to either Nyx and/or any mind controlled enemies, buffing them (and in the case of mind-controlled enemies refreshing their timers). This would be pretty healthy when it comes to gameplay; Nyx has no self-buffing.

Or some combination of the above.

Thanks, see you 6 years from now. Or actually I won't. But hey, at least you might be playing Nyx and having a good time.