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Give Other Frames the "Nidus" Treatment


malekas
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Almost everyone agrees, Nidus is one the best designed frames out there. All of his abilities have synergy with each other, they're powerful, and serve a purpose. But this doesn't come without the restriction of having to build up stacks first. He's powerful (with work) and durable (with weaknesses). A lot of people are calling him the new standard that other frames should be held up to. And I agree. It's a breath of fresh air to see a "caster" type frame stay powerful past lvl 40. So, how can we apply this new standard to the other "caster" type frames?

 

(Example)

I love Mag, and although her rework pointed her in the right direction, it also left her feeling weak and overly reliant on equipping certain weapons. So, let's give her the Nidus treatment.

 

Her "strength" will come from the shards that Polarize creates. These shards deal next to no damage with Magnetize, so let's re-purpose them. When Mag walks near the shards, they will attract to her much like vacuum, and swirl around her.

 

Pull - Simple. The more shards that are swirling around Mag, the more damage it deals.

 

Magnetize - The damage absorption could increase in proportion to the number of shards. I would also like to see the damage absorption take multishot and crits into account (This is vital because without this Mag gets shoehorned into needing certain weapons), and have a way to detonate it early.

 

Polarize - It no longer deals damage, but at 200% power strength will strip all enemy shields/armor. Also creates the shards which are key to this rework.

 

Crush - Expends all shards to deal significantly more damage. Also, Mag should be immune to projectiles during the animation so this ability isn't suicidal.

 

What about other frames? Any ideas how to make other "caster" frames more powerful in the same way Nidus is?

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While I can say it'd be nice to see damage casters made interesting/scaling, I'm hesitant to say I support it.

Nidus was designed from the ground up with Snowballing/"increasing-his-own-damage" in mind.

However, this is not the case with other frames.

Other frames were designed to be a certain strength, and this strength would be increased by mods as enemies increased by level across the starchart.

If the game itself now considers snowballing superior to Modding-base-strength, then that is a change that the game as a whole needs to address, rather than simply giving casters a bunch of reworks.

 

(and of course, this is all the way I see it / in my opinion).

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Honestly the Polarize shards would be fine with just a few small changes. Pull really ought to be able to move them so they can be moved into Magnetize fields; otherwise there's no way to make use of shards that land outside a field, short of trying to cast a Magnetize over that area. Would be nice if Crush also consumed them to gain the damage multiplier that Magnetize has, so it could maybe be an effective crowd clearing tool against higher-level targets with the right setup.

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6 minutes ago, NinthAria said:

Honestly the Polarize shards would be fine with just a few small changes. Pull really ought to be able to move them so they can be moved into Magnetize fields; otherwise there's no way to make use of shards that land outside a field, short of trying to cast a Magnetize over that area. Would be nice if Crush also consumed them to gain the damage multiplier that Magnetize has, so it could maybe be an effective crowd clearing tool against higher-level targets with the right setup.

The problem with that is moving her shards doesn't accomplish anything. They add virtually no damage to Magnetize. As they stand right now they're nothing but a waste of CPU resources.

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2 hours ago, PsiWarp said:

Just needs the Nidus Touch.

I can't believe I hadn't thought of nor heard these words uttered anywhere else.  It made me laugh.

Other frames also need (and presumably will eventually get) additional rank bonuses like Nidus has.  Saryn Needs extra range!!!!

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2 hours ago, malekas said:

Polarize - It no longer deals damage, but at 200% power strength will strip all enemy shields/armor. Also creates the shards which are key to this rework.

The only problem with this mag rework idea (and currently a considerable problem for mag) is that polarize does literally NOTHING to infested.  So, designing all her abilities to scale around her polarize would essentially gimp her even harder against 1/3 of the games major factions.  Another big problem with mag's current kit is that they designed it with the old nullifier functions in mind.  They changed nullifiers completely less than a month later, thus gimping the hell out of her kit against high level corpus.

While a lot of frames could certainly use some reworks along the lines of nidus (and this mag idea is pretty cool), not all of them NEED it.  Aspects and concepts in it can definitely be adapted to other frame designs, though.  Oberon could definitely use this kind of treatment, and given that his prime is expected this summer, it'd make sense for him to get a good rework soon.  He is very much a fast caster, and creating some sort of real, scaling synergy in his abilities would go a long way towards making him suck less.  His passive should also be burned in a dumpster fire and replaced with literally anything else.  (Quiet Shy made some great little jokes comparing Oberon and Nidus in her Nidus vid, worth a laugh.)  Chroma could maybe benefit conceptually in a way, but his problems are a whole other bag of worms seeing that he's not a fast caster at all.  (fire medic builds are pretty terrible, and everyone knows that).  His two most-used abilities are basically 2 sides of the same coin, and could be rolled together into a single button.  His other abilities are kinda meh, but the don't drag his kit down simply due to the strength of vex and ward.  All in all, his over-reliance on duration, strength, and armor leaves his 1 and the team effects of his 2 high and dry in the min-max world.  At the very least, he could use a real passive, and with his deluxe on the way, hopefully they'll take a good look at his kit as well.

I definitely agree that Nidus is one of the best-designed frames in a LONG time and DE has definitely set a new standard that players will expect to be repeated.  Probably the best part about it is the step away from using energy as the sole reagent for ability usage, and a passive that ties in perfectly with ALL of his abilities.  It's something a lot of players have been talking about for a long long time.

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