Specters of the Rail: U2.1 - Nekros Changes

[Surtur]

Sadly nekros will continue to face a few problems

Desecrate only generates loot and at best can be described as kind of supporting with the health orbs, and doesnt do anything else to enemies besides remove their bodies for loot (I stilll think it should be removed as an ability or heavily changed, like combined with terrify)

Shadows do and will continue to face the problem of enemy scaling, where their health scales exponentially compared to their damage. Enemies dont need much damage to kill us, but they get insanely tanky. It comes to be that a shadow cant kill its weaker equivalent because its damage scaling isnt high enough because it is just an improved version of the same enemy that cant kill itself. Best we cna hope for is that the rebalance scott is working on (for enemies) will address these issues

 

I also will continue to plead for a new nekros ult where he gets his own unique summons instead of bad AI enemy corpses. 

[F4talFr4me]

DE are deleting my posts. they dont like freedom of speach, negative critisizm, DE can do no wrong as they are a perfect company. that gives them the right to sweep problems under the rug and hope nobody sees it. disgusting.

[Irritable_Sloth]

Well now... 

I'm not saying he needs a total overhaul on Desecrate and Shadows of the Dead, that's why I love Nekros, I love loot and having minions at my command in every game I play.  I'd like to see that he keeps his current abilities, I just want Shadows to be improved upon since it's so horribly weak.

Also the Exploding shadows idea was pretty cool, Urlan.

And I don't mean to call you out or anything, Dumpins, but back before the rework, having nine or more shadows often caused a lot of network lag for the user and other players so that's why they had to limit the number of minions.

Edited August 26, 2016 by The_Mighty_Sloth
forgot something?

[IRVoidGuru]

so after a day and 2 mod changes from my old build to a new, i love it . ill miss my 18 shadows that i worked my a$$ off to get but , the new changes let me keep strong shadows up for longer. a possible change ( got this from the video you showed for the prime ) make soul punch save the soul of the enemy you hit as a permanent shadow in each new batch ( obviously scailing lvl up ) to alow nekros to pick and choose his shadows based on the last 7 soul punched enemies. 

[Dragon-V0942]

3 hours ago, The_Mighty_Sloth said:

although I do approve of limiting the number of Shadow minions because of the preformance issue.

This has actually been tested and proven to be a false reason, as the "performance issue" still remains.
See here...

 

[Dragon-V0942]

5 hours ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

So your telling me the seven shadows limit was for nothing?

We are also being hinted at from their lack of response to us, that not only is it all for nothing...  But they have no idea and are not listening to us, maybe even purposely ignoring us so that they don't have to bother fixing their mess.
Until we get some sort of answer and proven otherwise, it's my belief.
Look at the amount of posts about this issue, and how many responses or replys from any official DE employee have there been? none...

[EnderDDT]

Am I the only one who notices a duration nerf on Shadows of the Dead?  The old ability lasted a base duration of 30 seconds (unless they died) while the new duration is for 34 seconds due to HP decay, but that "due to HP decay" means that any damage they take factors into it. If they take anymore than about 10% damage, then you are looking at a duration decrease. Considering how much damage they can take, even if you aren't using the augment, and my experience is that this is pretty consistently a nerf. As in, my old shadows were often at half HP or less when they died from duration. That translates to about half or more of the current duration just gone. And worse than it just being a nerf on duration, it is a nerf on consistency. I can't know when any individual shadow is about to go down without staring at it or just trust that they will make it the full duration because the combination of HP drain and random enemy targeting makes knowing current HP impossible.

I would honestly prefer the duration back, at least then the shadows could tank better without randomly dying on me due to multiple forms of HP loss. It would also let me predict their expected duration better so that using them would be far less an issue of guesswork.

The new shadows seem to be far more deadly, even despite their reduced numbers. I also understand the issues with reducing clutter and, so long as the numbers can be worked out to keep the augment working (not sure how they are now), I think that having fewer of them but more powerful is a good trade off. The one thing I miss is being able to summon shield-ospries and the like. It is a small thing, I admit, but allowing me to get them would be nice.

I would also like to suggest that shield-giving units be counted among the "heavy units" for the purpose of Shadow's rez priority. I actually preferred to rez them when I played a shadow build in the past, but now I don't get that option.

Also it seems like there aren't nearly as many hp orbs or other loot dropped as before. I looked it up and before you had a 60% chance of conversion to a HP orb and then a 90% chance to get more loot (which was most often just ammo, but still). Failure just meant you tried again for that 60% till you got it, leading to a near 100% extra HP orb rate and to a near 90% bonus drop rate (random chance meant that some stuff inevitably timed out on you). Before I would have to try again a few times to get everything, but now stuff just disappears and gives me nothing. Not even a HP orb consolation prize. The HP orb drops are enough to keep you going if you use the augment, but the cost is such that you pretty much have no choice but to use the augment. It should be noted that if you are desecrating more than 5 things per second than the cost is actually higher than it was before. In fact old Necros would usually wait till there were a lot of dead things to start desecrating, sometimes converting as many as dozen bodies in one use. In certain mission types and at certain levels large piles of enemies can happen a lot. This seems to be leading to some new sustain issues. I cannot be certain at this time if his new sustain problems are due to the cost per desecration or simply the reduction of drops. My guess is reduction of drops, but while I can't be certain it does seem obvious that sustain is a new problem for him.

I would suggest changing Desecrate to a flat 100% bonus HP orb rate and a 90% bonus loot roll rate. If this 100%/90% split between HP orbs and loot rolls seems excessive than I would suggest just removing the ability to count cut parts as multiple bodies. As interesting as that whole "slashing weapon" interaction may be, I think the ability to consistently get a full 90% bonus drop rate is far more valuable.

 

[Laidain]

Honestly neckros is only good with his augments.He needs his augments to be viable. 

[Vali]

The health drain really needs to be strength or efficiency based, duration on a Nekros build has pretty much no benefit aside from terrify. 

There is still a lack of synergy between Soul Punch and Terrify. Maybe give Shadows a % of Shield/Armor bypass under the effects of Terrify to compensate for the lackluster AI. Soul Punch could be used to create a single eight Shadow which has higher damage and health multipliers than the other 7. 

[Crashen]

Honestly i would prefer terrify made enemies cower in place and open them up to finishers. Make an augment (or baseline) called Soul Reaping that causes enemies killed whike terrified to restore energy.

The sad thing is that with the exception of desecrate, anything Nekros can do, Inaros can do better, with more synergy.

I drew some inspiration from Inaros but didnt want to just copy-paste his abilities, but its kind of hard when he is Nekros 2.0.

So what i would do i guess is make Nekros still reliant on health orbs for sustain, but gain energy from finishers/kills/ability synergy, as a reverse of Inaros.

[Demon.King]

I just realized while doing the Eximus Stronghold sortie that Nekros shadows of the dead does not count Eximi as kills, and cannot spawn units from them as a result.

Is this intended or a bug? Because it's quite problematic. I'm not asking for SotD to spawn Exmi units if that's a problem, only to count the base unit for spawn.

Edited August 26, 2016 by Demon.King

[Fomiru]

You used to summon Eximi units in the past with SotD, but now killing one doesn't add to your pool at all.

I feel like, as you suggested, be given the base unit instead to our pool of minions.  Nekros is a lot of fun, but this is holding me back from bringing him to some Sorties.

[ImmortalGrump]

Sounds like a bug to me.

[Fomiru]

Can confirm this as well, I notice my own rig chugging a bit with more than 1 Nekros in a team, much more than it used to when we had 30+ shadows.  I've even made some friends games crash, Nekros affecting PC performance should really be looked into.

[NightmareT12]

16 minutes ago, RedDustySword said:

Sounds like a bug to me.

Not summoning Eximus is intended I think. But DE should try, if possible (because I have no idea how coding works) to add the base units to the pool -- otherwise SotD is useless on certain ciscumtsances.

[(PSN)A_SimpleName]

As a quality of life change, please don't deactivate Desecrate when entering a Nullifier's bubble. It's a pain to have to reactivate the skill each time. Desecrate doesn't do any buffing or damage, so I don't think it'll affect much in term of gameplay. The skill is essentially a passive.    

Edited August 26, 2016 by (PS4)A_SimpleName

[BOLDRapture]

" Make Nekros Great Again 2016" I wish they never reworked him if the only fun part about him got taken out back and killed. Maybe DE can hit 4 and revive the old Nekros.

[Tizodd]

After my initial knee-jerk, biased-filled, hatred of the rework, I'm actually enjoying it now.  The base health drain does need to be decreased though.

I like being able to keep useful shadows for long periods of time.  I do hope the cap gets increased a bit to about 10-13 shadows though (13 would be nice because of it being unlucky and stuff).  Especially since they didn't get a damage buff to offset the cap reduction.

Ideally, any type of duration should be removed.  Soul Punch should be used on shadows to get rid of the ones you no longer want to keep.  This would add synergy to his abilities and give the player some control over his minions.  Nekros Prime's in-game description is "Death's new master" iirc; if he's death's master, he should have more control of which enemies he resurrects and keeps alive.

[PsiWarp]

This is why I don't like bringing Nekros to Eximus Stronghold Sorties, even though with Despoil and Equilibrium Nekros is perfectly capable against Parasitic and Energy Leeches.

I recall seeing DE put a patch note line saying they removed Eximus Shadow spawning from SotD. Chances are slim that they would undo that change, but we should try anyway since Shadows are now capped and we can use any strong units we can get.

[Gurpgork]

I think a great change would be to merge Desecrate and SotD and give him a brand new 3. Make Desecrate spawn Shadows and health orbs and bump up the energy cost to 15-20. Buff the damage multipliers and remove the health decay. Make the new third ability a lifestealing DoT, and maybe even give it Terrify's armor melt in return for making Terrify stunlock. Give both abilities new augments. Then do something with Soul Punch. 

[Burnthesteak87]

1 hour ago, Demon.King said:

I just realized while doing the Eximus Stronghold sortie that Nekros shadows of the dead does not count Eximi as kills, and cannot spawn units from them as a result.

Is this intended or a bug? Because it's quite problematic. I'm not asking for SotD to spawn Exmi units if that's a problem, only to count the base unit for spawn.

It's been like this since forever.
Also Rathuum Executioners can't be summoned, but nobody seem to care.

[Godzilla853]

It was possible in the past and stopped because eximus units stack also this should also work with inaros.

[Noble_Cactus]

1 hour ago, Gurpgork said:

I think a great change would be to merge Desecrate and SotD and give him a brand new 3. Make Desecrate spawn Shadows and health orbs and bump up the energy cost to 15-20. Buff the damage multipliers and remove the health decay. Make the new third ability a lifestealing DoT, and maybe even give it Terrify's armor melt in return for making Terrify stunlock. Give both abilities new augments. Then do something with Soul Punch. 

Fun Fact: Desecrate was actually a life drain aura before it suddenly became a loot roller, before he was released. I can't find the original dev post, but it's buried somewhere in the archives.

My only concern about implementing something like that now is that it could infringe on Inaros' territory (even though Nekros isn't a tank). Maybe a health drain ability would also be tied to healing your minions?

[Gurpgork]

1 hour ago, Noble_Cactus said:

Fun Fact: Desecrate was actually a life drain aura before it suddenly became a loot roller, before he was released. I can't find the original dev post, but it's buried somewhere in the archives.

I'd heard about it. I will never understand why they changed that, because it's a fantastic idea, and would actually have some synergy with his kit. 

1 hour ago, Noble_Cactus said:

My only concern about implementing something like that now is that it could infringe on Inaros' territory (even though Nekros isn't a tank). Maybe a health drain ability would also be tied to healing your minions?

Making it heal your minions was the whole point of the idea for me. I should've mentioned that. 

Inaros and Nekros are kind of an interesting pair. They seem like they should be equal opposites to me; Inaros is more self oriented, while Nekros is more supportively oriented, but both of them use many of the same tools to accomplish their goals. For instance, they both have minions, but Nekros supports his minions, while Inaros's minions support him. 

Similarly, Inaros would use lifesteal for himself with the additional benefit of healing his allies, while Nekros would use lifesteal for his allies with the additional benefit of healing himself. 

I think Nekros and Inaros are different enough to justify them both existing, even if Nekros gets a lifesteal nuke. 

Edited August 26, 2016 by Gurpgork

[Wolfnrun]

This is a nightmare...