Jump to content
Dante Unbound: Share Bug Reports and Feedback Here! ×

Specters of the Rail: U2.1 - Nekros Changes


[DE]Danielle
 Share

Recommended Posts

The king of the dead has found new power in the dark arts. Take hold, Tenno. The shadows of his victims have evolved.

Please use this megathread to discuss the following changes that have been made to Nekros:

Desecrate:

  • Desecrate is now a toggle ability! Energy (or Health if you use the Despoil Augment) are consumed on Desecration.
  • Corpses that enter the Desecrate radius will be eligible for desecration. The first corpse 'heats up' slowly for a couple seconds and then the rest occur in rapid succession (like popcorn).
  • Each enemy desecrated will now cost 10 Energy (or Health if the Despoil Augment is equipped). This is affected by Efficiency Mods.
  • Health orbs are no longer guaranteed drops from desecrated corpses. They are now tied in with the chance for additional loot drops.

Shadows of the Dead:

  • The number of Shadows spawned has been reduced to 7 and is no longer affected by Mods. This is a necessary change for performance on all platforms. To compensate for this, Nekros now spawns stronger Shadows prioritized by heavy unites killed with Shield multiplier and draw aggro more heavily.
  • Shadows now live until they die with Health decay over time that is affected by Duration instead of Strength.
  • Shadows of the Dead can be recast while active to spawn new Shadows to replace dead ones, and refill the Health/Shields of the current Shadows.
  • The Shield of Shadows Augment has been reviewed to maintain efficacy with these changes.

Other:

  • Changed Nekros’ Despoil Augment to reflect his Desecrate changes.
  • Nekros’ Shadows of the Dead Augment - Shield of Shadows - now displays current % damage mitigation as a HUD buff.   *Please note that the % scales with power strength.

 

As always we thank you for your feedback! :community: 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It'll be interesting to see if Nekros' build needs to change at all. It seems that efficiency may be more necessary than before, in solo at least. Duration won't be as heavily necessary for SotD - though it could help to keep that the same too. Power strength? Might as well keep that the same.

Okay very interesting, Nekros' build really won't need to be changed much to make use of his new skillset. I'll placeholder this message and get back once I've tested it.

 

EDIT:

Okay it appears that you definitely need 175% efficiency to maintain Desecrate without a Trinity if you aren't using Despoil, since it drains energy so fast. That's very disappointing, since you could do a lot more with the old version of Desecrate.

Power Strength is, of course, important for Shadows of the Dead. Actually it's a necessity to make them worth summoning, and they do still die fairly easily. However, I have had them effectively body-blocking the excavator on Hieracon up until around 1500, so that's definitely an improvement on before. Still not profoundly strong, but that may just be my bad build.

Power Duration is again, important for Shadows of the Dead. With 166% duration, my shadows don't appear to die very quickly which is handy considering they're supposed to block objectives from enemies.

Power Range isn't particularly important any more. You can run around as Nekros so much with Desecrate active that you can Desecrate a lot more without a Range build. Try to keep the Range around 90%+ though, just so you aren't having too much trouble, and you might want even more range if you're going for a long run, to keep your distance.

 

Overall, I think that a dual Desecrate/SotD build is now possible for mid-tier enemies, but it begins to drop off in effectiveness around level 80 enemies. You'll still need to build entirely for power strength and duration for a proper SotD build, or efficiency/range for a sustainable Desecrate build. When you're built for one or the other, there appears to be a real improvement over the previous Nekros, so good changes overall.

Edited by Dark-Vortex
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Dark-Vortex Call me crazy, but from what I see narrow minded have just became survivability mod in despoil builds.

other than that, yay, I'm slightly happy. And will be very happy if it'll turn out that health conversion is still viable choice.

 

edit:
ok, first impressions after test run (earth dark sector excavation, 1,7k, solo and melee only). I used exact same build I was using before change and I'm rather content. (for reference, build is: P.cont, P.flow, t.fortitude, vit, health conv, equilibrium, despoil, c.terrify)
Flow of gameplay is much better, you don't have to spend half of time being locked in animation. This was to be expected and is much welcome.
Health orb reduced droprate is very visible, though to my suprise keeping health conversion buff up is easier than before, but energy income (equilibrium) is way lower, so you can't afford to spam terrify at will. 
This is directly tied to shadows.

Displaying their count and and provided dmg reduction is a nice touch. But there is no indication of their state on screen, and as such you never knew when to recast. I ended up either overcasting skill and completely draining my energy pool or seeing them expire, and in the end feeling like returning to not-casting them at all and using that energy on terrify or even soul-punch.
Decaying health mechanic is interesting and much more engaging than simple timer, I don't have any issues with that(other than "duration will be removed" statement which was false advertisement). But stopping, localizing one of summons and checking it's health is too distracting and simply a no-go in combat. There needs to be indicator of their hp on buff bar (like %hp of their total health pool. Not most precise but enough to evaluate when to heal them and when that would be outright waste), it is way more needed than displaying dmg reduction (which is flat reduction anyways and can be easily evaluated by looking at shadows counter, and as such it's indicator is redundant).
Another issue, which was expected to be a problem is that they don't move fast enough. While I wouldn't expect them to run fast enough to keep up with the tenno, it becomes a problem when you move to another objective and shadows stay 3 tiles away, and block timer to summon new ones. This could be easily solved by teleporting them to you when none of them is closer than.. let's say 50m from casting location.
I can't say anything about shield of shadows augument in new edition of nekros, I ditched it quite some time ago in favour of health conversion, and never ran with full str build, so I wouldn't be able to evaluate how much that changed.

Please remember, those are just first impression from just a single run. But I think I'll rather enjoy new nekros, even if I still won't be taking him to high level content. Or at least won't be thrown away from him because of changes.

Edited by 5HV3N
Link to comment
Share on other sites

What is the new drop chance of health orb drops? That's very important to Despoil/Equilibrium Nekros builds.

EDIT: After trying it out, Despoil got very bad. With a large power range, you can't see how much your allies are killing and if they suddenly decide to kill a lot of enemies, your health takes a dive without much warning. Hard to tell when to turn the ability off in order to stay alive.

While I do really love the ability to kill things and not just pressing 3, this health orb stuff ruined my build and my ability to use Nekros on the missions where he was my preferred frame, such as Tower Def.

Edited by JustSomeDude7
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Definitely looking forward to giving this a good firm shake for feedback.

That 10 energy/health per use is pretty awesome. Will have to see how the health orb drop change affects those long survival runs with the augment.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, [DE]Danielle said:

The Shield of Shadows Augment has been reviewed to maintain efficacy with these changes.

Can we get more details on this? Specifically how we can increase the dmg reduction now that power strength doesn't affect # of shadows.

Very important for tank nekros!

edit: Also, what about shadow A.I.? They reallllly wander off, and now with recasting just healing the existing shadows that's even more of a problem. Not to mention if you are going room to room and your shadows are 4 rooms back and you can't respawn them.

Edited by Vuli
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Can we get rid of health decay? You guys removed the duration on the ability, but added it right back in another form and it even scales off of duration, why? The shadow's health drops based on a percentage as well, so its still basically a duration. Why not just leave duration as a number, and NOT have the shadows just die over time? Or why not just actually remove duration all together? 

Edited by armedpoop
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Shield of shadows did not change, It needs to change. Going to do some testing, I still think we should have a 10 man army with eximus units due to sorties, maybe that was added in and we don't know, give me a few hour's 

A FEW HOUR'S LATER

Here are my findings 

Alright, here is what I was able to muster 

SOUL PUNCH - Stayed the same, I personally wanted soul punch to do something with other abilites and have a bit more CC such as knokcing down nearby enemies, maybe heal nearby shadows? 

TERRIFY - It's ok, I would slightly increase the reduction to 25% and duration to 30 or get rid of duration completely since nekros is not very duration based, maybe increase the range to 25m? with POSSIBLE synergy to buff shadows and you, it is good but I think it needs a little something to spice it up

DESECRATE - Hmmm, I like it, Preferbly, 5 base energy cost, since nekros is a squishy frame, I would like to have the chance to make a health and energy orb have a slightly higher chance to appear with desecrating corpses being faster

SHADOWS OF THE DEAD - So the health drain, heres the thing, many nekros masters out there use Shield of shadows, we use the extra health they get as the damage mitigation,with the base health they have as being "there health" and the extra health being the mitigation. With the drain, it complicates thing's and kills them quicker. Aditonally, in sorties when there are eximus everywere, we can-not make shadows very easliy so we need eximus units to protect us. We can-not have eximus but NYX CAN. I also think a 10 man army would be a good compromise with a 90% cap mitigation. If for some odd reason, the health drain has to stay(Which I'm very much opposed), and reduce the health decay to 0.5 per sec and make the recast cost 5 energy per shadow instead of 100

Edited by Wolfnrun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, armedpoop said:

Can we get rid of health decay? You guys removed the duration on the ability, but added it right back in another form and it even scales off of duration, why?

I saw that too, shame, guess the idea to remove the duration didn't go through. I guess its instead a more thematic duration?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, armedpoop said:

Can we get rid of health decay? You guys removed the duration on the ability, but added it right back in another form and even scales off of duration, why?

If the health drain per second is a value and not a percentage, the Shadows actually last pretty damn long as levels go up (in response to enemy damage). If it is percentile... then I'd rather it was duration refreshed on recast instead of my Shadows weakening every second.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

Health orbs are no longer guaranteed drops from pilfered corpses. They are now tied in with the chance for additional loot drops

If Desecrate won't drop Health Orbs 100% it's a terrible nerf.

There's no more sense into using Equilibrium and Health Conversion.
To be precise: this change is making Nekros less effective with few corpses to Desecrate (thus way more in difficulty in high level fight) and moderately effective with a lot of corpses.

For God's Sake, remove the "Rolling Loot Table" feature and make it just an healing utility skill for Health Orbs.

Nerf Health Conversion instead than Desecrate. That's what I'd prefer.

■ PS:
Observations:

► Nekros HC Tank is way more viable in Defense-like missions and big fights, but it has really low sustain in small fights, due to the change to        Desecrate . Viable in big fights, less viable in small fights.
► SotD is pretty solid atm. Even with the Health Decay(which Imo it's not a problem), Shadows are durable and draw aggro finely.
Despoil is mandatory. 10 Energy for a corpse desecrated with maybe a chance to drop anything is a ridiculously imbalanced cost.
     I'd say to make Despoil baseline on Desecrate, refund it and throw in another Augment.
► I'm always more convinced that Desecrate should lose its factor of "Rolling Loot Tables again".

-     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     

■ PPS:
Observations after days of testing:

► Shadows deals ridicle low damage.
    Not only, they stay undercover while degenerating life, so I don't really understand what's the point of Shadows taking cover. It's always been a problem.      Now it clashes with the Degeneration mechanic, which personally I like cause forces Nekros to work to sustain them.

Edited by Burnthesteak87
Link to comment
Share on other sites

In more larger maps such as excavation the shadows of the dead don't do a great job (or even put a little effort) at following Nekros as he goes to a different part of the map. Can we have it so that when the ability is cast it not only heals the shadows but it also teleports them to Nekros? I know this might be a little far fetched but that'd make things much easier.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, RavenCorella said:

So, uh... It seems the Shields of the Dead augment didn't change :/

We used to have 18 shadows, each siphoning 6% of damage which was over 100%, now the max you can get away with is 42%. RIP.

The DR capped out at 90% with 15 shadows.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...