Specters of the Rail: U2.1 - Nekros Changes

[Gurpgork]

16 minutes ago, Serien5 said:

My experience with him is different, using Despoil with Health Conversion and I find him very tanky.

But why would anyone get Health Conversion if they weren't playing Nekros? Other than this one mediocre Warframe, it's a useless mod. There are far tankier Warframes who use mods that are far more useful for builds on nearly every Warframe in existence. 

18 minutes ago, Serien5 said:

Don't really need my energy pool, so you can also run Naramon shadowstep with him, which makes almost everything easy mode.

Or I could run Shadow Step with Saryn instead of Nekros, so I could have her fantastic debuffing and DPS. 

19 minutes ago, Serien5 said:

I will agree that he needs a lot of very specific mods to make him this so-called "endgame viable", but many frames and builds do.

How many Warframes need a 10 rank mod that is only useful on them and at least one augment for their builds to work? 

This might be excusable if it was common practice for Warframes to need multiple mods that are only good for them, or if it made Nekros extraordinarily powerful to compensate for that, but neither of them are true. 

[Eostara]

5 minutes ago, Gurpgork said:

But why would anyone get Health Conversion if they weren't playing Nekros? Other than this one mediocre Warframe, it's a useless mod. There are far tankier Warframes who use mods that are far more useful for builds on nearly every Warframe in existence. 

Or I could run Shadow Step with Saryn instead of Nekros, so I could have her fantastic debuffing and DPS. 

How many Warframes need a 10 rank mod that is only useful on them and at least one augment for their builds to work? 

This might be excusable if it was common practice for Warframes to need multiple mods that are only good for them, or if it made Nekros extraordinarily powerful to compensate for that, but neither of them are true. 

Health Conversion is also good on Oberon, as well as Equilibrium on him and Excalibur, and Oberon is one frame off the top of my head that also benefits from an augment in his build. If you want to solo at all with Limbo, he also benefits from an augment. Frost as well. And Saryn, since you mentioned her. Quick Thinking is pretty essential on Loki to help dramatically with survivability.

Many of the Corrupted mods are also essential to specific builds on specific frames. Meaning if you want to do a certain build on one frame, you will need that one mod.

But this isn't about playing other frames - if someone wants to play Nekros, I'm saying how I do it and enjoy it a lot. That's all. 

[Nhemin]

You wouldn't use Health Conversion unless you had a way of ensuring more health orbs dropped.  Otherwise its not active all the time or most of the time.  Making it a terrible mod slot and a huge waste of mod points for a lot of other frames.  Nekros benefits from it the most due to ensuring there's a steady stream of health orbs.  Shield of Shadows USED to be good but they nerfed it so now its less viable for late game.

For other frames you just equip flat armour mods, health, or good syndicate mods that synergize well with the given frame.  Meanwhile Nekros can't afford to do that because he needs SO much energy efficiency, health conversion, equilibrium, cast speed, health, energy, power strength, etc.  

Again, people always miss the point with Nekros in that SOOOO many other frames are just flat out better than him, have a way easier time with their builds and require WAY less polarity slots and mod points.  I have to have almost all my slots with polarity on them AND maxed out mods to EVEN SOMEWHAT make him viable.  Nekros just needs too many different mods to become viable as his cast animations are really long, his energy pool is trash, and his health/armour/shields are all poop as well.  He really doesn't have anything going for him to start out with. 

I will never bring him on a sortie ever because he is just so god damned squishy even with Health Conversion.  He just doesn't have any good utility outside of Terrify which has a syndicate mod that you don't want to bring because Frost and Nova can do this anyway WITHOUT wasting a mod slot.  Mag and Ember can CC as well, so can Oberon, Rhino, Loki, Inaros, etc, etc, etc.  

See the pattern here yet?

Edited August 24, 2016 by Nhemin

[Voluge]

The health drain would probably be alright around 2-2,5% without being affected by duration mods, however the biggest problem I have with his shadows right now is that they don't scale too well with power strength, their health and damage scaling is based on the old values which you would notice if you compare now and then with the same power strength. With other words, the extra 100% damage and 100% extra health they gave nekros shadows don't scale with power strength, almost as if this new nekros ult encourages you to not use it. The shadows already die too quickly by themselves, making them ridiculously short lived with the damage they take from enemies or when nekros got his SoS augment.

[Nhemin]

Nekros has always been a subpar frame.  People claimed to have tanked really well with him but they were liars.  You can kinda tank a bit when you are in a 4 man premade with Shield of Shadows before and in non sortie level missions.  The moment your shadows went down or you hit a nullifier, poof, insta gibbed.  

Now he's even less viable because Nekros has to sacrifice so much to get back up to his former strength.... With less shadows and even more energy problems than before.  

I really don't get why DE doesn't want the "pet class" to be viable late game.  Meanwhile Loki can go invisible forever and break the game and Ash can spam ultimate and kill everything on screen in seconds.  

#balance

[Misgenesis]

So i hopped on Draco with Nekros and did 40 minutes. What exactly is wrong with it? Barely more than 2 ever died and i didnt even have to heal repeatedly. It does its job as fire support and distraction quite well.

I can see why they added the health decay, it makes perfect sense.

[Eldritchsqueaker]

2 minutes ago, Misgenesis said:

So i hopped on Draco with Nekros and did 40 minutes. What exactly is wrong with it? Barely more than 2 ever died and i didnt even have to heal repeatedly. It does its job as fire support and distraction quite well.

I can see why they added the health decay, it makes perfect sense.

Draco is super easy though.

[Eldritchsqueaker]

4 minutes ago, Nhemin said:

Nekros has always been a subpar frame.  People claimed to have tanked really well with him but they were liars.  You can kinda tank a bit when you are in a 4 man premade with Shield of Shadows before and in non sortie level missions.  The moment your shadows went down or you hit a nullifier, poof, insta gibbed.  

Now he's even less viable because Nekros has to sacrifice so much to get back up to his former strength.... With less shadows and even more energy problems than before.  

I really don't get why DE doesn't want the "pet class" to be viable late game.  Meanwhile Loki can go invisible forever and break the game and Ash can spam ultimate and kill everything on screen in seconds.  

#balance

Well at least they're planning to give Ash a rework. I agree though, they just nerfed an already subpar frame. 

[Nhemin]

 

2 minutes ago, Misgenesis said:

So i hopped on Draco with Nekros and did 40 minutes. What exactly is wrong with it? Barely more than 2 ever died and i didnt even have to heal repeatedly. It does its job as fire support and distraction quite well.

I can see why they added the health decay, it makes perfect sense.

.... Draco is low level survival now... What's your point?  Any frame can do that easily, its nothing to be proud of.

Go to high level survival and try it and then come back and let us know how it went.  Spoilers: not well.

Nekros has big mana issues now on top of a subpar ultimate COMPARED TO OTHER FRAMES.  People somehow keep missing that key point.
 

[Misgenesis]

Draco past 30 minutes is high level survival, what part of 40 minutes dont you understand? Its a perfect environment to test out builds just before all builds start to fall off past the level 50 mark.

And how exactly do you compare a summon ability to other ultimates? 

Edited August 24, 2016 by Misgenesis

[Noble_Cactus]

3 hours ago, Eldritchkitty said:

While the tone might have issues, DE's silence on this matter has been pretty discouraging. I can understand people's frustration but we shouldn't let it get the better of us. 

 

That being said... DE I am disappointed in you for letting out such a half done rework. I'm not sure what the cause of this all is, from the buggy state of SotR, buggy frames like Titania.. There has just been a drop in quality control as of late. I hope you can understand why so many people are upset over this. 

You might not have been around long enough to know, but DE has been doing this for -ages-. Literally years.

But sometimes, they will listen. And they'll actually do an alright job of fixing whatever needs to be fixed. See: Bows, Shotguns, Desecrate, various bug fixes.

Too bad Nekros has to keep rolling around in the dumpster, though. I can't believe they didn't at least reduce his casting animation for Shadows. Soul Punch is also an archaic 1 ability; as per the trailer, what if it could raise additional minions? As in, you Soul Punch an enemy, enemy gets debuffed, if enemy gets killed within x seconds they're raised as a zombie. Reducing the ragdoll effect would be nice, too. Maybe it could just cause the enemy/everything behind it to crumple, ala the trailer, so your teammates won't have to go chasing the Bombard that just flew off a railing. If nothing else, at least it will be novel.

Slow on Terrify should also be baseline. As others have pointed out, having enemies run away faster than normal when you want to kill them is just counterproductive.

Increased energy pool and reduced cast times are the least they could have given Nekros.

Edited August 24, 2016 by Noble_Cactus

[Gurpgork]

3 hours ago, Serien5 said:

If you want to solo at all with Limbo, he also benefits from an augment. Frost as well. And Saryn, since you mentioned her.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing that he benefits from an augment. It is, however, a bad thing that he depends on an augment. It's also a bad thing that he depends on an augment and a ten rank mod that might as well be an augment and has horrific cast times.

Nekros has a tremendous problem where he has to spend so many mod slots making up for his significant shortcomings that he doesn't have any left for building on his strengths. 

3 hours ago, Serien5 said:

Many of the Corrupted mods are also essential to specific builds on specific frames. Meaning if you want to do a certain build on one frame, you will need that one mod.

What, like Overextended? Blind Rage? Transient Fortitude? Narrow Minded? Fleeting Expertise? Because I use at least two of those on literally every Warframe. But I only use Equilibrium on Nekros. That is the problem with Nekros needing Equilibrium. 

Edited August 24, 2016 by Gurpgork

[Therril]

Let this be a response to all those nekros change haters.

SotD never got nerfed. It got changed to be more dynamic and durable in exchange for the amount of clones.

Fewer clones but more damag and health plus the ability to heal and teleport your clonea.

So please, stop these rants complaining how you cannot show of your army of shadows. You now have an elite guard around you instead of cannon fodder.

[Noble_Cactus]

1 hour ago, Nhemin said:

-Give Nekros the energy pool and syphoning that he deserves!  5 health per enemy kill passive?  Cmon, really?  Do I look like a high health pool frame to you?  I already get decent health orbs WHY do I have a 5 health passive when my health pool is trash and I have Energy problems? Give me both, give me energy, I don't care but there NEEDS to be some way to fix this frames energy issues without me having to spec massively into efficiency which ruins my power strength/duration build completely.  The syndicate weapon options for this frame as well which give energy aren't even that good.  So I'm kinda screwed on all fronts. Meanwhile everyone else is running around with Heks and Tigris Sancti's blowing S#&$ up.  Or just make it so Despoil now gives more energy orbs.  Or fear refunds energy per enemy feared, or Soul Punch syphons energy per enemy hit, JUST GIVE US SOMETHING so that we can spec into survivability and power strength without losing our ability to cast stuff.

 

Maybe having an enemy die near Nekros would not only heal him a little but also temporarily increase his max health and/or energy pool? This gain would stack up to a certain amount, to be determined by whatever would be viable for long Defense missions. Granted, this would mean that he'd just have a high hp pool in static defense missions. But given WF's current design, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, really?

Also agreed, Creeping Terrify should be baseline. I understand Terrify in its current state reflects how other RPGs implement Fear debuffs, but it's counterproductive in a shooter to have to chase your targets up and down terrain after you've CCed them.

Something needs to be done about Soul Punch. I don't know what, though. Enemies killed within x seconds of having been hit by a Soul Punch rez as zombies, ala the trailer? Soul Punched enemies are added to the Souls list and are given priority when summoned? Remove the bowling ball ragdoll, but knock down/crumple enemies in a line? Apply some sort of curse debuff that procs health leech, minion healing, or something else? Anything to make it more interesting, since it's a very archaic ability.

13 minutes ago, Gurpgork said:

I'm not saying it's a bad thing that he benefits from an augment. It is, however, a bad thing that he depends on an augment. It's also a bad thing that he depends on an augment and a ten rank mod that might as well be an augment and he has horrific cast times.

Nekros has a tremendous problem where he has to spend so many mod slots making up for his significant shortcomings that he doesn't have any left for building on his strengths. 

What, like Overextended? Blind Rage? Transient Fortitude? Fleeting Expertise? Because I use at least two of those on literally every Warframe. But I only use Equilibrium on Nekros. That is the problem with Nekros needing Equilibrium. 

I wish more people like you were around a few years ago. It's reassuring to see people who understand this game's backwards design at its ugliest.

[Nhemin]

13 minutes ago, Therril said:

Let this be a response to all those nekros change haters.

SotD never got nerfed. It got changed to be more dynamic and durable in exchange for the amount of clones.

Fewer clones but more damag and health plus the ability to heal and teleport your clonea.

So please, stop these rants complaining how you cannot show of your army of shadows. You now have an elite guard around you instead of cannon fodder.

Fewer clones = fewer targets to body block for you as well as less bang for your buck on Shield of Shadows not to mention less damage overall.  They degen quite fast if you don't have duration mods but speccing for strength and duration means you get less efficiency which you NEED on this frame as his energy pool is garbage and ability costs extremely high.

Have fun running out of energy.

[PsychoticMarik]

Hey isn't that just fantastic.

My previous post has been removed.

I guess DE really do have some seriously thin skin. Nothing I said was going too far, but hey they dont listen to actual feedback, so why should I expect them to even so much as tolerate a post calling them out even a little bit eh? I suppose expecting them to advertise honestly and actually act on feedback is too much?

There was a lot more I could have said, and I certainly could have been less kind about it as well.

This post is next no doubt. If accusing DE of appearing to be a dev team thats only out for a quick buck is dev bashing despite the fact they falsely advertised Nekros changes in their own dev stream to generate hype(not to mention the fabrication that is Nekros primes trailer)then we've got big problems.

I called a spade a spade.

 

Edited August 24, 2016 by PsychoticMarik

[Nhemin]

27 minutes ago, Misgenesis said:

Draco past 30 minutes is high level survival, what part of 40 minutes dont you understand? Its a perfect environment to test out builds just before all builds start to fall off past the level 50 mark.

And how exactly do you compare a summon ability to other ultimates? 

You look at what each ultimate does and how much DPS it S#&$s out in a given instance.  Ash can blow up a screen full of dudes (even high level ones) in seconds.  So can Saryn and Ember (though maybe to a lesser degree).  They can spam their ultimates as well. Nekros cannot. He also heavily relies on the AI to do his damage for him which has always been subpar.  

Other ultimates like Rhino, Frost, Inaros, Limbo, Loki provide a REALLY good CC as well as a tiny bit of damage.  They basically trivialise the enemies and let your team wreak havoc.  Meanwhile Nekros sits there with his thumb up his &#! with an extremely expensive ultimate THAT REQUIRES YOU FIRST TO KILL STUFF (no other frame has this requirement to cast their ultimate) and then demands that you continually spam it to keep your shadows topped up.  Meanwhile your energy is suffering the whole time because you NEED to spec into power strength and duration to keep the shadows alive.  Meaning you have little to no efficiency.  

If you go into efficiency, you have weak shadows.  See the problem?  They have NEVER addressed the main issue with Nekros which was his survivability, his energy pool, his need for SOOOO many different mods to make his abilities good, as well as his dependency on Shield of Shadows to even become viable.  

Meanwhile other frames are viable from the get go and get better as you get more mod points and polarities.  Nekros doesn't get this.

[Nhemin]

23 minutes ago, Gurpgork said:

I'm not saying it's a bad thing that he benefits from an augment. It is, however, a bad thing that he depends on an augment. It's also a bad thing that he depends on an augment and a ten rank mod that might as well be an augment and he has horrific cast times.

Nekros has a tremendous problem where he has to spend so many mod slots making up for his significant shortcomings that he doesn't have any left for building on his strengths. 

What, like Overextended? Blind Rage? Transient Fortitude? Fleeting Expertise? Because I use at least two of those on literally every Warframe. But I only use Equilibrium on Nekros. That is the problem with Nekros needing Equilibrium. 

^ everything that was said in this post x10.  

Nekros just requires TOO MUCH to become 'decent'.  Its always been a problem and continues to be so.  The only issue that was addressed in the "fix" was that we can finally stop having sore fingers from spamming Despoil.  But now our mana suffers and then we have to rely on YET ANOTHER AUGMENTED MOD to fix this issue which takes away our already small health pool.  The mod dependency of this frame is ludicrous compared to all other warframes.  

#makeNekroGudPlz

[Misgenesis]

Well theres your issue, you shouldnt compare it to abilities SotD is not. Especially pure damage oriented ones. Bladestorm is widely known to be wildly overpowered and is being reworked. 

Of the other frames you mentioned only Loki really trivializes content and content trivializing abilities need to and should go.

Its a support ability, not pure damage or CC. Fire support and distraction, the latter which it does better. It increases a whole squads survivability.

But i agree on it being really inefficient on its own. It should get its heal cost cut in half if not more.

[Buzkyl]

1 hour ago, Therril said:

Let this be a response to all those nekros change haters.

SotD never got nerfed. It got changed to be more dynamic and durable in exchange for the amount of clones.

Fewer clones but more damag and health plus the ability to heal and teleport your clonea.

So please, stop these rants complaining how you cannot show of your army of shadows. You now have an elite guard around you instead of cannon fodder.

 

Let's see

 

They have more health but the draw more aggro, meaning they're under more damage. With SoTD augment they also take more damage on behalf of Nekros due to the fewer number. Doesn't take into consideration that thier health is also being chipped away constantly even out of combat. While Nekros can heal the hsaodws he has no way of monitoring thier health so you're actually recasting SoTD even more than you did before

[Noble_Cactus]

26 minutes ago, Misgenesis said:

Well theres your issue, you shouldnt compare it to abilities SotD is not. Especially pure damage oriented ones. Bladestorm is widely known to be wildly overpowered and is being reworked. 

Of the other frames you mentioned only Loki really trivializes content and content trivializing abilities need to and should go.

Its a support ability, not pure damage or CC. Fire support and distraction, the latter which it does better. It increases a whole squads survivability.

But i agree on it being really inefficient on its own. It should get its heal cost cut in half if not more.

Well, look at it this way. Guess what else increases a whole squad's survivability? Spells that complete disable a horde of enemies' ability to do damage to your party: Stomp, Miasma, Radial Blind, Disarm, Snowglobe. The list goes on. Shadows doesn't scratch the CC potential of those abilities, and yet it's marred by a long cast time and comparable energy cost. For what Shadows provides, it should be a cheap, spammable ultimate that keeps constant pressure on chokepoints and around objectives. You know, how most summon/necromancer abilities work in other video games.

Ultimately, this speaks more about the game's current state of balance than anything. But considering the fundamental truth of "a handful of frames trivialize content due to their ability to circumvent nonsensical armor scaling or their ability to completely shut down enemies for long periods at a time, while other frames wallow in mediocrity" hasn't changed in over three years, I'm inclined to say that it's not going to change any time soon. So you might as well buff shadows to be a cheap, spammable soft CC that better forms the basis of Nekros' gameplan.

Edited August 24, 2016 by Noble_Cactus

[Nhemin]

2 minutes ago, Noble_Cactus said:

Well, look at it this way. Guess what else increases a whole squad's survivability? Spells that complete disable a horde of enemy's ability to do damage to your party: Stomp, Miasma, Radial Blind, Disarm, Snowglobe. The list goes on. Shadows doesn't scratch the CC potential of those abilities, and yet it's marred by a long cast time and comparable energy cost. For what Shadows provides, it should be a cheap, spammable ultimate that keeps constant pressure on chokepoints and around objectives. You know, how most summon/necromancer abilities are in video games.

Ultimately, this speaks more about the game's current state of balance than anything. But considering the fundamental truth of "a handful of frames trivialize content due to their ability to circumvent nonsensical armor scaling or their ability to completely shut down enemies for long periods at a time, while other frames wallow in mediocrity" hasn't changed in over three years, I'm inclined to say that it's not going to change any time soon. So you might as well buff shadows to be a cheap, spammable soft CC that forms the basis of Nekros' gameplan.

^ this

[Nhemin]

On 20/08/2016 at 7:04 AM, Redemptionist said:

 

Well, it would seem DE has already moved on to newer things, and so has the community. Nekros must be working as intended, judging by how none of the community salt feedback has been acknowledged, let alone followed up on. 

Your feedback is well worded, and remarkably unsalted, but there has been alot of that on this topic, and yet Nekros remains the way he is. Must be futile. Moving on.

I've pretty much given up on this game and DE.  The sheer amount of pain you have to go through in this game to get anything decent is getting ridiculous.  The grinding used to be bearable but now everything costs Nitain and grinding the right relics is becoming a pain.  Nothing in the gameplay has really changed or gotten more epic/better over the years.  Just same old grind and more cash shop.  

I had been waiting for Nekros changes FOREVER and am severely disappointed in the lack of GOOD changes that he received.  I keep checking back every big update but can't bring myself to play more then a couple of missions before I fall asleep.  There's just nothing actually new to the game and DE refuses to listen to the community and change the actual major flaws of the game (lack of actual passive trees, better ways to get mana/health back, enemy armour scaling, warframe ability scaling, end game content, etc).  
 

[Celaeon_]

as a man boy that has been playing nekros since he first came out his new iteration feels really nice compared to old school nekros,i much prefer it over how he use to be.

[the one thing i dislike is that the number of shadows does not end with a 5, 0 or an even number help me please]

Edited August 25, 2016 by Nightbane13

[Eostara]

2 hours ago, Gurpgork said:

What, like Overextended? Blind Rage? Transient Fortitude? Narrow Minded? Fleeting Expertise? Because I use at least two of those on literally every Warframe. But I only use Equilibrium on Nekros. That is the problem with Nekros needing Equilibrium. 

I don't use Equilibrium on Nekros. Actually, as I said, Equilibrium works well on Oberon as well - his 4th generates a lot of health orbs. I also stated many other examples of mods deemed "necessary" to certain other warframes, to make them usable later in the game.

I'm going to leave this conversation now though, mostly because I have no idea what most people in this thread are talking about. I have no problems with playing him in difficult content, and people are talking like he's the squishiest frame out there. So, looks like I have nothing to contribute here - I've said what I do; nothing more to be said. :)

Edited August 24, 2016 by Serien5
forgot to add