Specters of the Rail: U2.1 - Nekros Changes

[Rebellis]

12 hours ago, (PS4)salovel1991 said:

I tried H3dshots build and got obliterated. 

What level?

At the end of his video, enemies are at lvl 118 and he's doing just fine.

[(PSN)salovel1991]

Just now, Rebellis said:

What level?

At the end of his video, enemies are at lvl 118 and he's doing just fine.

Level 40.. But I've found it was likely my play style. Not being used to extra health being taken by desecrate. 

[RafaelFuchs]

3 hours ago, F4talFr4me said:

Cant we just have 1 freaking awesome customizable unit that works like Spectras? but its undead.. or something? make it unique and scaling or somet. they already nerfed SoTD to oblivion now anyways.

I enjoy the personal army aspect of it. It's great getting a full squad of heavy gunners, bombards or bursas tearing everything apart. 

[(PSN)salovel1991]

2 hours ago, Airwolfen said:

10 energy a body is hardly a lot especially when modding for efficiency (a thing pre-rework Nekros build as well) and I personally do not even notice that the skill is turned on. It drops more then enough energy orbs and health orbs to keep it going indefinitely.

Yes, they took away the amount of shadows you can have but was it a complete nerf into the ground kind of bad? Do you not see what you got back for it? Bombards, Napalms, Heavy Gunners, Bursas, Nullifiers, Techs and Ancients. all with double their Armor and Shields. Raised aggro and the ability to keep them around as long as you wish or dispose of them by letting the decay set in and recast for a new higher leveled crew.

Nekros as he is now takes all that is wrong about scaling in this game and amplifies it. If the enemy cant kill your spawned units because of the armor scaling, the decay will.

Yeah but they had double health and shields before. Armor is not buffed by the ability either. The shadows still die to fast and is an eximus, scorch, or napalm hit your shadows they die incredibly fast. 

[weezedog]

It totally has useful utility. It's completely useful for quick-CC'ing heavy units or obnoxious units. Is that Corpus Tech or Heavy Gunner getting fully spooled up and putting out some heavy damage? Soul Punch 'Em. That heavy bombard chain knocking down your squad, Soul Punch him. That MOA lifting up it's leg getting ready to knock everyone down, Soul Punch it. So I'm not sure what you are talking about when you say it has no useful utility. 

[F4talFr4me]

No..please..no more reworks of skills. they done enough damage already.

[Burnthesteak87]

1 hour ago, weezedog said:

It totally has useful utility. It's completely useful for quick-CC'ing heavy units or obnoxious units. Is that Corpus Tech or Heavy Gunner getting fully spooled up and putting out some heavy damage? Soul Punch 'Em. That heavy bombard chain knocking down your squad, Soul Punch him. That MOA lifting up it's leg getting ready to knock everyone down, Soul Punch it. So I'm not sure what you are talking about when you say it has no useful utility. 

You're right, it has its use, but it's different from being a tool with synergy with other skills.
It's just like an anonimous placeholder with some random utility.
It's not a tool made to work in a specific way. It's a "lazy" decoy.

And don't forget that knocking back enemies pushes their corpses out of Desecrate's and Shadows' range.
It's totally counterproductive.

Edited August 22, 2016 by Burnthesteak87

[(PSN)ManOfFailures]

1 minute ago, F4talFr4me said:

No..please..no more reworks of skills. they done enough damage already.

Are you saying that all reworks have been bad?

[Gurpgork]

4 hours ago, Airwolfen said:

Yes, they took away the amount of shadows you can have but was it a complete nerf into the ground kind of bad?

Our army is 35% of the maximum attainable size it was before the change. So while the ability isn't useless now, per say, it's vastly weaker than it was before, when it wasn't even a top-tier ability. 

4 hours ago, Airwolfen said:

Do you not see what you got back for it?

What we got back for it were a bunch of QoL fixes that the ability needed and deserved without a catastrophic nerf to the maximum potential damage output of the ability. Shadows of the Dead deserved every single buff it got and none of the nerfs.

4 hours ago, Airwolfen said:

Bombards, Napalms, Heavy Gunners, Bursas, Nullifiers, Techs and Ancients. all with double their Armor and Shields.

Before, I'd get all of those units, too, by virtue of the sheer volume of minions I could summon, and I would additionally get units like Butchers (which actually have preposterous damage output) and Shield Osperies (a fantastically useful unit), and I wouldn't get penalized by losing the number of heavies because of it. 

Also, the ability does not multiply armor. And while the shield multiplication was a welcome buff, it doesn't make up for the lost Shadows, especially because it's worthless against the Grineer and Infestation. 

4 hours ago, Airwolfen said:

Nekros as he is now takes all that is wrong about scaling in this game and amplifies it.

That was true before the change. In fact, this was more true before the change, when you could rival the number of enemies on the screen while also outscaling them. 

Edited August 22, 2016 by Gurpgork

[Gurpgork]

30 minutes ago, (PS4)pastard323 said:

Are you saying that all reworks have been bad?

The ones that Nekros got were bad. Desecrate became more convenient in exchange for being less useful, and SotD got flat-out nerfed. 

[ZiltoidiaAttacks]

SotD is better now.  Each minion is tougher, does more damage, and draws aggro off of defense targets and nekros himself.  Also, you can make them very op with power strength increases.  Soul Punch should have an additional effect that if it finishes off the target, the body explodes and does damage to nearby units, other than that, its fine.  Also, desecrate should turn corpses into a small AOE goo puddle similar to infested moa's spit attack, but smaller.  Have it slow and do a little DoT.

Edited August 22, 2016 by FatsackTony

[Gurpgork]

1 minute ago, FatsackTony said:

Each minion is tougher, does more damage, 

That's not true. The damage multipliers haven't been changed since the last Nekros rework in U15.12. We used to have more Shadows that were just as tough and did just as much damage. 

2 minutes ago, FatsackTony said:

Also, you can make them very op with power strength increases.

They can be very strong, but they're not OP, for a fundamental gameplay fact of dungeon crawlers (which Warframe at least somewhat wants to be): enemies have high HP but low damage, while players have high damage but low HP. This makes it easy for players to kill enemies and enemies to kill players, but it makes it very difficult for enemies to kill enemies. And this is especially true because of Warframe's broken armor scaling. At high levels, even with the damage multipliers, the damage output of Shadows of the Dead suffers. Yes, it's powerful, even at those levels, but by that point, the Shadows are mostly just useful as a brick wall for enemies to shoot at. 

[ZiltoidiaAttacks]

Those all sound like opinions

 

[F4talFr4me]

12 minutes ago, FatsackTony said:

Those all sound like opinions

 

no. they are stats that you can see in game. a nerf is a nerf.

[Wakeoflove]

On 8/21/2016 at 2:38 AM, WASPGOD said:

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

 

On 8/21/2016 at 3:45 AM, (PS4)salovel1991 said:

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

See? Here are some people who are saying "MOAR SHADOWS!" which seems to simply be for the sake of having more than 7. I can't imagine a reason other than that given that if the point is for the 7 shadows not to get wrecked with the percentage of damage they take from shield of shadows, the solution would simply be to buff their hp so that they have the hp equivalent of the many shadows one would have had before. So for people to still be fixated on not liking 7 shadows, it seems to simply be a "7 does not an 'ARMY' make!"

If the point is to have more damage, then again, that's simply a matter of buffing the damage of the 7 shadows so they are equivalent in damage and health to what we had before.

On 8/19/2016 at 10:21 PM, Eldritchkitty said:

My main issue is the health decay and inadequate compensation personally.

The only issue I have with shadows is the health decay.

1. we were told they would live until they die and that basically meant we didn't need to build for duration anymore, which wasn't true. There is a health decay that is directly tied to duration, so we've moved our spam button from desecrate to shadows of the dead, which to me seems to be a net progress of just about 0.

2. The health decay means that there is still a duration on shadows of the dead, but the timer indicator is now no longer conveniently on our power bar for easy monitoring but follows our minions around in the form of their health bar. And since each individual minion has a separate health bar (they do not all share one "minion" health pool.) depending on how much trouble one or more minions may have gotten themselves in to compared to the other minions means that your timer is never quite accurate or the same for all minions, which means even more spam4.

I don't know the difference in health/armor/damage between "normal" units and "heavy" units to know if 7 heavy units makes up the difference for our former ability to summon many more normal minions, and personally I'm not so sure I care how well my shadows kill, I like that they seem to be relatively beefy and draw agro so it frees me to do the killing and helps protect not only me, but my party or my protection objective.

I just strongly object to having to micromanage them because of health decay and not having a little health bar on my screen for each minion so I can keep an eye on them and KNOW when I need to recast vs randomly spamming 4 because I really have no way to know. Which is why I would much rather have a normal, tried and true power duration on my bar than this convoluted complexity of each minion having their own health bar+decay+how much trouble they got in to+how much trouble I got in to with shield of shadows damage link+me trying to mentally count for an estimate of when I need to do it again/having to aim at a minion to see their health bar as a gauge of when to recast.

 

Oh, but a suggestion did just come to mind. I realize that some times one might want to leave their minions where they are, but refresh them, perhaps taping 4 for recast will simply heal minions where they are and pressing and holding 4 will summon them to your location. Just putting that out there.

[(PSN)salovel1991]

2 hours ago, Wakeoflove said:

 

See? Here are some people who are saying "MOAR SHADOWS!" which seems to simply be for the sake of having more than 7. I can't imagine a reason other than that given that if the point is for the 7 shadows not to get wrecked with the percentage of damage they take from shield of shadows, the solution would simply be to buff their hp so that they have the hp equivalent of the many shadows one would have had before. So for people to still be fixated on not liking 7 shadows, it seems to simply be a "7 does not an 'ARMY' make!"

If the point is to have more damage, then again, that's simply a matter of buffing the damage of the 7 shadows so they are equivalent in damage and health to what we had before.

The only issue I have with shadows is the health decay.

1. we were told they would live until they die and that basically meant we didn't need to build for duration anymore, which wasn't true. There is a health decay that is directly tied to duration, so we've moved our spam button from desecrate to shadows of the dead, which to me seems to be a net progress of just about 0.

2. The health decay means that there is still a duration on shadows of the dead, but the timer indicator is now no longer conveniently on our power bar for easy monitoring but follows our minions around in the form of their health bar. And since each individual minion has a separate health bar (they do not all share one "minion" health pool.) depending on how much trouble one or more minions may have gotten themselves in to compared to the other minions means that your timer is never quite accurate or the same for all minions, which means even more spam4.

I don't know the difference in health/armor/damage between "normal" units and "heavy" units to know if 7 heavy units makes up the difference for our former ability to summon many more normal minions, and personally I'm not so sure I care how well my shadows kill, I like that they seem to be relatively beefy and draw agro so it frees me to do the killing and helps protect not only me, but my party or my protection objective.

I just strongly object to having to micromanage them because of health decay and not having a little health bar on my screen for each minion so I can keep an eye on them and KNOW when I need to recast vs randomly spamming 4 because I really have no way to know. Which is why I would much rather have a normal, tried and true power duration on my bar than this convoluted complexity of each minion having their own health bar+decay+how much trouble they got in to+how much trouble I got in to with shield of shadows damage link+me trying to mentally count for an estimate of when I need to do it again/having to aim at a minion to see their health bar as a gauge of when to recast.

 

Oh, but a suggestion did just come to mind. I realize that some times one might want to leave their minions where they are, but refresh them, perhaps taping 4 for recast will simply heal minions where they are and pressing and holding 4 will summon them to your location. Just putting that out there.

My statement was under the assumption that they are not going to give our shadows more health. They already said that they were going to do so. But, yes, I wanted more shadows for shield of shadows. As now in it's current state I can't be bothered to baby sit them so I just took off power strength and shield of shadows because they die fast either way. 

[(XBOX)Prime Pedestal]

Before the last update I didn't really play much Nekros as I didn't find him particularly engaging and what experience I did have tended to involve me sat in a corner working my way towards a repetitive strain injury whilst my team slaughtered everything. Now however, he is fast becoming my favourite frame to play, and whilst he may have a few minor issues (namely in regards to his shadows) his rework by far the best that I've seen. 

His desecrate brings a good support role to the team with health and bonus resources and the changes mean I call kill things as well which is good for everyone, well, nearly everyone. He's not quite as tanky as he used to be now we have less shadows but my trusty Vaykor Hek takes care of my health for me so no big deal really. Can't wait for Nekros Prime later on :)

On a side note argon drops are ridiculous... helping a clan mate farm some and 3 exterminates and 25 minutes of survival later we finally had the 2 he needed. Please have a look at improving them?

[Thyriell]

My thoughts exactly. Finding him very fun and definitely more powerful to play post rework, personally it's probably one of the best reworks done so far.

 

[Matt89Connor]

On 20/8/2016 at 1:11 AM, NocturneOfSolace said:

You stopped short of fully making them great 100%

Can we make Soul Punch an ability that isn't poopy now? It's damage is extremely low(even with high power strength), it has no useful utility, and the enjoyment of watching an enemy go flying is a novelty that wears off quickly

yes, the problem is in soul pounch,is a bad power, i use only when i reloaded because not stop the reload .... terrify needs a change because in the time beetwen the cast and the enemies to start to run it's too long, and an addition: reduce this DECAY 

Edited August 23, 2016 by Matt89Connor
adjust edit

[Gurpgork]

15 hours ago, Wakeoflove said:

See? Here are some people who are saying "MOAR SHADOWS!" which seems to simply be for the sake of having more than 7. I can't imagine a reason other than that given that if the point is for the 7 shadows not to get wrecked with the percentage of damage they take from shield of shadows, the solution would simply be to buff their hp so that they have the hp equivalent of the many shadows one would have had before. So for people to still be fixated on not liking 7 shadows, it seems to simply be a "7 does not an 'ARMY' make!"

If the point is to have more damage, then again, that's simply a matter of buffing the damage of the 7 shadows so they are equivalent in damage and health to what we had before.

Even if the damage and health multipliers get buffed fairly to compensate, there are still two big advantages (other than Shield of Shadows) to having a larger army. 

The first one is simple: Support units. In the previous incarnation of Shadows of the Dead, pressing 4 would give you a massive sample of the enemy faction you were fighting. You would get plenty of heavy units like Techs and Bursas and Bombards and stuff like that, but you would also get Mine Osperies and Sapping Osperies for the Corpus's absurd area denial, or Shield Osperies for their self-explanatory buff to your army, or Butchers, which actually have fantastic damage output. And so on and so forth.

Now, if you get a Shield Ospery, you have a full 1/7 of your army not attacking, whereas before, you'd only have 1/20 of your army not attacking. Today, you lose 14% of your damage output, while before you would only lose 5%. 

The other reason is a bit more complicated, and I'll use diagrams and stuff to explain this, but the second reason is the fundamental advantage of having more bodies. _{It is time to put my MS Paint skills to the test.}

All of this is assuming that none of the units shown have any AoE capabilities whatsoever, and is not taking damage calculations into account.

Spoiler

Here, in Figure 1, there are 7 Shadows and 10 enemies. 

Spoiler

And here, in Figure 2, the line of sight of each enemy to each Shadow is shown. 

In Figure 2, the first and seventh Shadows in the row get focused by multiple enemies. Meanwhile, the Shadows can attack a maximum of seven enemies at a time. This means that not only can all of the enemies can attack all of the Shadows while the inverse is not true, but it also means that the enemies can focus fire on some of them. As a result, the ones getting focused will die much more quickly. Also, when one Shadow dies, the entire army loses 14% of its damage output.

Spoiler

Figure 3 here has doubled the number of Shadows to 14. 

Spoiler

Note how in Figure 4, the enemies can't attack all of the Shadows at the same time.

Here, not only are the Shadows on the end of the row not taking any damage at all, but they are also free to focus fire the enemies at the end of the row, similarly to Figure 2. Furthermore, these Shadows are much more expendable, since each one is only worth 7% of your damage output as opposed to 14% as in Figures 1 and 2. 

So, TL;DR: Having fewer Shadows means that there is a greater penalty for having utility units, since these will take up a larger percentage of the army and get in the way of having good damage units. Furthermore, we have lost the advantage of having more bodies to distribute the damage from both direct enemy attacks and Shield of Shadows, as well as much of our ability to have Shadows focus fire enemies. 

Edit: Also, you did say that people want more Shadows just for the sake of having more, but I think that's actually a valid complaint. Having a huge army of Shadows contributed massively to Nekros's fun factor, and isn't fun the fundamental reason we play video games in the first place? I'm just saying. These changes made SotD less fun and less useful. 

Edited August 23, 2016 by Gurpgork

[Ironlixivium]

4 hours ago, (XB1)AnnoyedHaddock said:

He's not quite as tanky as he used to be now we have less shadows

I have no idea what you or anyone else who thinks this is talking about. I mean, I have no idea whatsoever. Pre-rework when I played nekros I would die all the time even with my shadows up. With desecrate being a constant thing and shadows having so much aggro, a rarely die ever anymore, and despite not caring about nekros pre rework I'm very excited for nekros prime now, as he's a ton of fun to play. But seriously. I've been soloing survival missions with him like eris DSS and I have no problem going until the enemies are level 100 (where I can get one-shotted by moa goo that was aimed at my shadows, but only because my build has no forma, with nekros prime so close. Imo he's perfect now.

[(XBOX)Prime Pedestal]

12 minutes ago, Ironlixivium said:

I have no idea what you or anyone else who thinks this is talking about. I mean, I have no idea whatsoever. Pre-rework when I played nekros I would die all the time even with my shadows up. With desecrate being a constant thing and shadows having so much aggro, a rarely die ever anymore, and despite not caring about nekros pre rework I'm very excited for nekros prime now, as he's a ton of fun to play. But seriously. I've been soloing survival missions with him like eris DSS and I have no problem going until the enemies are level 100 (where I can get one-shotted by moa goo that was aimed at my shadows, but only because my build has no forma, with nekros prime so close. Imo he's perfect now.

Previously you could get 100% damage mitigation with his SotD augment as it would transfer damage taken to your shadows. Yes when the timer ran down you were very vulnerable but now you can only get 46% resistance as there are only 7 shadows. Because he now has more manoeuvrability with desecrate changes you don't notice the decrease in resistance much but he could take more of a beating before. It was just the whole standing still thing...

 

18 minutes ago, Ironlixivium said:

but only because my build has no forma

You've answered yourself here as to why you don't know what people were talking about.

[(PSN)B0XMAN517]

There's no denying that the chance to produce more loot has been reduced. Desecrate hasn't been turned into a nerf gun, but just the inclusion of health orbs into the drop pool is a reduction. Even the slower rate of desecration can be seen as a hit. That being said, I absolutely love the rework and see the aforementioned reductions as a worthy tradeoff for being able to move around while desecrating.. Before, my solo Nekros runs were usually find an area where my 6 is clear, fire a few Torrid grenades, and desecrate in one spot while hiding in my Huras Cloak. 

Now Nekros is my go to frame melee frame. He's almost too good in his current state. Slashing enemies to pieces and desecrating while I move to the next group is a godsend. I'll admit, when I heard of a Nekros rework, I got my torch and pitchfork ready. I'm happy to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by what DE has done to Nekros.

Edited August 23, 2016 by (PS4)B0XMAN517

[CheckMate343]

Health Orbs have always been in desecrate's drop table, and pretty heavily at that, in fact they actually decreased the drop rate of health orbs to bring Despoil slightly down from god tier.

Edited August 23, 2016 by CheckMate343

[(PSN)B0XMAN517]

40 minutes ago, CheckMate343 said:

Health Orbs have always been in desecrate's drop table, and pretty heavily at that, in fact they actually decreased the drop rate of health orbs to bring Despoil slightly down from god tier.

I was under the impression that before the rework, health orbs dropped independently and were not part of the enemies drop table. I seem to remember reading that in the patch notes, but I could be wrong (it wouldn't be the first time). Regardless I still think this rework was done well and I'm enjoying this "new" Nekros.