Specters of the Rail: U2.1 - Nekros Changes

[CaustiCat]

People are simply getting tired of being ignored. When Volt was about to receive his rework there was A TON of feedback from the community which got mostly ignored in the end (except of reverting the changes made to Speed since they were truly horrible). What result did it yield ? Energy drain and reduced movement speed while carrying Shield by Volt made this feature a total waste of time and resources since it's so bad that not a single Volt player is using it + damage capacity on Discharge that breaks its CC feature even after 1 second in certain situations and rarely lasts longer than half of it's duration in normal encounters. 

You don't agree with me that people are getting tired ? Analyze the steam charts: 

http://steamcharts.com/app/230410#1y

In 2015 we had 4 major updates (15,16,17 and 18), we got 6 new warframes and a crap ton of new stuff and changes concluding with awesome "Second Dream" quest which attracted a ton of new players reaching the peak in February 29 right before the "Sands of Inaros" update. But you may ask "why the all time peak in 2016 if it is so bad ?!". Let me explain:

The old and the new players alike got hyped after experiencing SD and introduction of Focus system and awaited more awesome stuff that was promised to us in "year of quality", that's how you can explain the peak in February 2016. What steam charts represent after February 29 is exactly what we have since 2016 began. It's been over 8 months right now and we still can't even get one full major update as a whole.
We still are being forced to get into Archwing more (even nobody want's to), we MAYBE will finally get some proper pvp hosting since the last update mentioned something about it and we still are stuck with broken Focus System (yes, that great thing that was meant to be a end game goal to pursue that is useless in 90%). 

What do we got in 2016 then you ask ? 

1. Cats,
2. Tenno handball, 
3. Sprays from TF2.

Again, before you burn me alive - look at the charts. Look how fast the playerbase drops after each new update and that new peaks and getting lower with each new update. The weekend isn't even over and we are already dropping. That should be something to think about.



But now back to the main subject. Is SOTD so strong that it requires health drain scaled with duration ? I doubt that when I think of other 4th abilities like Nova's Molecular Prime, Rhino's Stomp, Loki's Irradiating Disarm. Hell, even Inaros 1st ability has way more team utility and CC potential than SOTD.  

Removing health drain on shadows would simply act as QoL change since it's a pain in the &#! to keep tracking your shadows hp and don't try to imply that it would make SOTD broken in terms of min/max builds. 

Remove the hp drain on shadows and most likely implement a cap on Shield of Shadows augment so that people won't cry for nerfs. 

[(PSN)salovel1991]

1 hour ago, BulletsforTeeth said:

In a way, I can forgive this one being a little on the sloppy side, considering the veritable mountain of quest that's coming up.

I'm sure it'll be very informative. They really messed up shadows though. Whatever they did with the coding counts them as hostile to Vauban's Bastille now. Funny in a way watching purple shadows die trapped in a bastille..

[RealPandemonium]

Unlike other reworks where it took time for people to figure out an unclear nerf/buff situation, the Nekros changes are pretty much a straight nerf by the numbers.  We can only hope that DE figures this out and does something about it, though that's a long shot.  

[(PSN)salovel1991]

5 minutes ago, RealPandemonium said:

Unlike other reworks where it took time for people to figure out an unclear nerf/buff situation, the Nekros changes are pretty much a straight nerf by the numbers.  We can only hope that DE figures this out and does something about it, though that's a long shot.  

I'm hoping that they work out something now that Titania is out of the way. She looks fairly decent but could use some tweaks from what I've watched of gameplay. Maybe they'll release the tweaks together before Nekros p. 

[Guest]

6 hours ago, (XB1)Big Man JAZZ said:

I feel like Nekros's shadows of the dead change was a nerf.

The seven shadows now  are much better about holding agro than the 20 ever did .

 

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

14 hours ago, hazerddex said:

maybe they are fading out because people are acaculy figuring out how to build nekyros just saying

That or they just don't have the energy to keep fighting the good fight, knowing they will just be ignored.

[(PSN)salovel1991]

21 minutes ago, (PS4)Minago2 said:

The seven shadows now  are much better about holding agro than the 20 ever did .

 

I've not noticed any changes to aggro. They shot my shadows a lot then they shoot them a lot now. 

[(PSN)salovel1991]

6 hours ago, NeithanDiniem said:

Have you ever run with 4 Nekros players that had 20 shadows each? Typically no, because you rarely see more than one Nekros in a team, but had you you likely would have seen an increase in performance issues. They alone were not a cause for issues, but they attributed to the pile pretty much. Now that his 4th ability though is more focused in his game play compared to his desecrate, Nekros is more viable as a general play frame compared to just a farmer. This means more people playing Nekros over all and more chances for multiple to appear in a team. If each of them not only were able to spawn all of their shadows shadows but keep them alive indefinitely, that could add to the types of things that could strain a game engine. Cutting back of things that slow down an engine is never a bad thing.

If he had always only been able to spawn 7 shadows people wouldn't be saying this was a nerf, because overall the strength of an individual shadow has gone up. People attribute the nerf to the AI for the shadows making them not respond well to enemies and it still evens out in the end. 10-15 shadows that were weaker still roughly damaged enemies the same as 7 that are stronger. You had to specifically build to be able to get 20 anyways, so having to build specifically to keep the 7 you have alive longer is now the priority. Now while healing you are replacing any that died as compared to before where you could neither heal nor replace.

All in all it falls to a few people that used Nekros for his ultimate before the change got too used to how it worked then, and now it is more viable for overall play in general without being over powered. They can make tweaks to help perfect it as well as use feedback from data collected on usage to see if they could up the numbers, but I largely feel that this change was the right step to take from what we had before.

The only instance I've noticed in strength is having more heavy units. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, (PS4)salovel1991 said:

I've not noticed any changes to aggro. They shot my shadows a lot then they shoot them a lot now. 

In the past running T4 Mobile  defense solo was a death sentence for my nekro ,being mainly that I had too stay in one place defending a terminal.

The fact that I was exceptionaly squishy didn't help the fact that I was relying on shadows AI that some how was taken from the  minds of three year olds hopped up on sugar and a shoe to watch my back.
 

Regardless of the numbers of shadows or min maxing the build, death was waiting for my nekros in t4 md or some missions in general due to pet ai.

 

I don't know what they did ,but now the shadows seem alittle too good too the point I don't use my ember prime anymore.

 

So far been steamrolling bout every mission

Edited August 21, 2016 by Guest

[(PSN)salovel1991]

44 minutes ago, (PS4)Minago2 said:

In the past running T4 Mobile  defense solo was a death sentence for my nekro ,being mainly that I had too stay in one place defending a terminal.

The fact that I was exceptionaly squishy didn't help the fact that I was relying on shadows AI that some how was taken from the  minds of three year olds hopped up on sugar and a shoe to watch my back.
 

Regardless of the numbers of shadows or min maxing the build, death was waiting for my nekros in t4 md or some missions in general due to pet ai.

 

I don't know what they did ,but now the shadows seem alittle too good too the point I don't use my ember prime anymore.

 

So far been steamrolling bout every mission

My shadows run across rooms constantly.. To the point I took shield of shadows and additional power strength off. I got tired of baby sitting. Like cats they're gonna do what they want no matter what I do. I actually just let them die now... 

[Dragon-V0942]

Mag, Trin, it doesn't matter.
Us that care are likely not going to buy into the prim access for Nekros....  But everyone else will, I'm sure of it.

Us posting isn't even grabbing their attention.
Nothing about this was even mentioned in the last stream.

I don't want to give up but I know this is futile.
My favorite play style with my favorite frame with 20 shadows is gone.

All it takes is just a simple mention of "performance reasons" and everybody silently and moves on.
Everybody else believes that maybe DE knows what they're doing... but considering how we thought that expanding the void tracer cap to 120 so that barely any is wasted when maxing out a relic would be decent enough, but then everybody say that it's to prevent stacking when new relics come out.  And then some of us thought that DE might actually know what they're doing... BUT then it now scales with rank and I can now carry 850 of them.

...  I think it's safe to say that we give DE too much credit sometimes and not enough tough love.
So don't let this stick. I'm sure they're looking at this far too much on paper then in gameplay.

[aerosoul1337]

Even the shadow number is fixed at 7, it still causes "other" players FPS drop, and even worse than it did.

For my experience, it seems to be CPU loading instead of GPU.

For a 4 men team game (with max game setting), my FPS drops a lot (120->50) when a team mate has his shadows. Even they are very very far away (i can't see them at all).

And fps returns back to 120 when his shadows expired.

But when I play Nekros myself, my FPS seems very stable. (This reminds me a bug that blade storm caused other players fps drop like crazy.)

Anyone has similar experience?

 

Edited August 21, 2016 by aerosoul1337

[RafaelFuchs]

I'll attempt to make an all Nekros group and see what happens. 

[Waspyeh]

I agree with everything on here. Im not going to post my feedback because what has been said has been already said for me.

but what i want to see happen

REMOVE CAP of 7 shadows.

REMOVE THE HEATH DECAY

[aerosoul1337]

8 minutes ago, RafaelFuchs said:

I'll attempt to make an all Nekros group and see what happens. 

I really want to know the result.

Make sure they are fighting not idling.

 

[Waspyeh]

It appears to be true. This has happened to me serveral times

[RafaelFuchs]

Performance wasn't affected for me at all. CPU use only went up by about a 5% average (from 7% to 12%). Memory use went up a fair bit (~0.5gb). I did not track my GPU though. I didn't see a need to since my frames stayed at the 60 I locked it at. 

Specs:

i7-6700k @ 4GHz

8GB RAM 

GTX 980

 

Sidenote, I was the host and as they were all being summoned in, usage spiked for a moment, but dropped back down. We managed to summon them all in about the same time (less than 10s apart). 

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, PCs anything short of a gaming rig probably get slaughtered by that increase. However, I never made a 4x Nekros group before the change. So, I can't compare it to anything other than normal game-play. 

Edited August 21, 2016 by RafaelFuchs
Adding random thoughts. Don't mind me.

[(PSN)Shaun-T-Wilson]

Same on ps4 shadows seems to drop frame rate when in use, it didn't drop when i had 19 of them :(

[(PSN)salovel1991]

If they removed health decay honestly, as someone on the side asking for fixes, 10 shadows would be adequate enough. 

[Rebellis]

20 hours ago, Snowbluff said:

He was capable of being just as tanky before the nerf, it seems.

Being able to heal your shadows makes SoS's damage reduction much more persistent than before.

Those periods of vulnerability in between casting are basically gone.

[Eldritchsqueaker]

2 hours ago, Rebellis said:

Being able to heal your shadows makes SoS's damage reduction much more persistent than before.

Those periods of vulnerability in between casting are basically gone.

Except for the part where you need to pump power strength way up, lose efficiency and the only bandaid solution is exceedingly expensive. 

[F4talFr4me]

11 hours ago, (PS4)DesecratedFlame said:

That or they just don't have the energy to keep fighting the good fight, knowing they will just be ignored.

+1 to this. i give up. they ruined Nekros and they wont fix him before prime is out or at all. ever. it made me think they would at least put real effort into Titania, seems she suffers almost as bad. if not worse. DE are losing touch of the playerbase and the game.

[BulletsforTeeth]

I think all we could ever ask for is for DE to at least look at our ideas. Probably not the numbers, but what in the hell could be wrong with, say, turning off shadow health drain for 3-4 seconds, unaffected by duration, upon taking outside damage? 90% of suggestions put numbers in as mere placeholders, and yet, DE only ever seems to read the title, at best. I get it, I get it, they do not need to listen to us, they don't need to look at these forums even. But what harm could come from replying to one every once in a blue moon, even with a non answer, just to acknowledge the effort some of us put into suggestions? What harm could come from actually giving suggestions a good looking over? If they do, nearly none of us ever see it, unless it's to do with a bug, announcements or hostility, even the CM's are utterly silent it seems.

They make all these megathreads and claim it's to better listen to feedback, but more and more it seems those are where good ideas go to die and get buried.

Edit: I do not intend to point fingers, or seem accusational, but this is just what it looks like from my pov.

Edited August 21, 2016 by BulletsforTeeth

[aerosoul1337]

5 hours ago, RafaelFuchs said:

Performance wasn't affected for me at all. CPU use only went up by about a 5% average (from 7% to 12%). Memory use went up a fair bit (~0.5gb). I did not track my GPU though. I didn't see a need to since my frames stayed at the 60 I locked it at. 

Specs:

i7-6700k @ 4GHz

8GB RAM 

GTX 980

 

Sidenote, I was the host and as they were all being summoned in, usage spiked for a moment, but dropped back down. We managed to summon them all in about the same time (less than 10s apart).

My PC spec is similar to yours.

i7-4790K, GTX980 SC, 16GB RAM.

I can run 400+ FPS for solo runs if I do not cap game FPS.

But when I join a team (as a client) with Nekros' shadows, my FPS is lower than 60 when those shadows are fighting.

400->50 is a huge difference, and it's CPU not GPU load I guess.

To be honest, the lowest FPS I have encountered was 80 for 1.5 year with this PC.

 

And note that, this problem could be host related.

For testing you should not cap FPS at 60.

Have you tried play as a client yet?

 

[hammerheathen]

19 hours ago, BulletsforTeeth said:

Also, I'd reckon the posts are thinning out because people are just flat out tired of trying. If DE doesn't want to listen, they don't, or give half &#! non answers.

I love DE, the devs are great, but they almost never listen to feedback unless it's the same exact feedback for half a year.

This is the sense that I get when interacting with some people, it's pervasive but not everyone is right out saying it. DE's not listening right now, they deflected on the stream when asked about the focus they want in the game.

I'm kinda just watching to see what happens honestly. Too their credit they don't look like they've slept since SoTR.