Reflections on Nyx [Bolts and New Powers]

[Quistris]

Never posted before, never really cared to? Don't like getting involved on forums.

But I care about Nyx. Nyx was either the second or third warframe I ever picked up. And the first one I genuinely fell in love with. It was her own personal flare and, as a mythology wonk, the history and association of her name. I was so delighted at this unvaulting and fully expect my now-in-progress Nyx Prime to end up as my most used frame (Nyx is currently my number 2, behind my starter).

A lot of people have said a lot of things about her, there's been a lot of both very ambitious and very hopeful concepts bandied around about the fact that - while I think Nyx performs adequately enough - she's clearly behind a lot of her peers in terms of performance.

What I took from the latest devstream is that the devs are mostly interested in working on her number 2, with balancing/math changes to all the other powers. Given that, in the perhaps vain hopes that one of the devs will see this and that it may help them, here are my thoughts along the lines that they laid out. I don't pretend to be developer, or to know how Warframe, the piece of software, is laid out, or how easy or difficult any of these might be to implement.

In them, I've tried to make sure that none of the suggestions move Nyx away from what she was: a hybrid control/debuff caster frame, with a heavy emphasis on disrupting enemy fighting formations and effectiveness rather than either protecting or bolstering her fellow tenno. I state this because it colours my entire thought pattern, and could be useful in understanding why I suggest some of the things that I do.

 

• Passive: All Nyx's abilities come with a chance to make foes drop their weapons
  • I mention this because this, to me, has come to help sort of define what Nyx is about.The way she was spoken of in the devstream reinforces this, especially in reference to her handing out debuffs.
  • Debuffs are one of those things that I tend to like that a lot of people I encounter seem not to, generally on the basis of 'but why make them weaker when you could just be killing them faster'. At least to me, the strength of debuffs is about being able to handle enemies with more ease, safety, and with less risk incurred to myself and my fellow tenno. Its one of the many, many flavours of support, and is my own, personal favourite.
  • The entire feeling of messing with enemies runs fairly strongly through most of her kit, doubly so if you include augments, with one possible exception.
• Mind Control
  • It was mentioned in the stream that Mind Control was going to have its damaged turned up. While that's nice, I hope that the devs keep in mind the twin issues of armour scaling and the disparity between high-level enemies and high-level warframes. The fact that a high-level warframe might have around 1500 health and yet a high-level enemy might have around 20,000 health means that enemies (generally) do a lot less damage to players than players do to them. This raises a huge question mark over Mind Control's usefulness as a damage tool, as a well-geared frame will almost invariably be able simply to kill that enemy faster.
  • As it stands, Mind Control currently shines as a support tool, either for letting a group of tenno dump damage on a hapless enemy or to rob the foes of an important support or damage dealer to be dealt with after the lesser foes have been mopped up.
  • If it's desired that it serve as a regular addition to Nyx's weapon damage, there's going to have to be a very fine line walked to make the average enemy do an appreciable chunk of damage to their previous comrades before the tenno present wipe them out. I don't think it's impossible, but it's very much at the crux of Mind Control's ability to scale as a damage tool much beyond level 20-30 enemies or so.
  • One possible concept might be - if we are going to amp the damage - allow it to be cast multiple times, or possibly as a sort of 'charge' - much the way Hydriod's abilities do - so that singular or 'lower power' castings of it represent a much lower investment in energy, but also a much weaker result. 
  • If this is an uncomfortable amount of damage increase, it could be given further usefulness either as a control or a support tool (I'm getting more and more sense that Nyx is supposed to be a control/support (specifically, debuffing support rather than buffing) from the devs as they talk about her, so my thoughts are based on those assumptions) I can think of two ways to do this:
    • More Control:
      • Make the target of Nyx's Mind Control attract more aggro/hate. This would mean that damage became a more secondary concern, as the primary purpose of it would be to select an enemy who's face you really hated and get them to at once sow confusion among their foes and get killed by them, maybe inflicting some harm on their way down.
    • More Debuffing:
      • Attach a debuff to the target's attacks. Much like how an Ancient Disruptor empowers other corrupted, Nyx could grant her subject the ability to inflict problems on their former allies. Going with the current themes of Nyx making it harder for her enemies to actively fight, enemies struck by Nyx's subject could potentially be inflicted with a status effect.
      • Some random ideas for this are:
        • Dropping their weapon, much as if hit with one of Nyx's abilities. 
        • A Puncture-like proc that would reduce outgoing damage, representing perhaps their own morale breaking some. 
        • A Radiation-like proc that would make them fire wildly
        • A brief fear or cowering effect, making them run away from the subject of Nyx's mind control
• Psychic Bolts
  • While I have a lot of mixed feelings about psychic bolts, the current thought seems to be that it goes. Given that, I'm only going to briefly mention the idea of it staying in its current form
  • Current Form:
    • While I've heard the idea of scaling the damage up, I don't exactly like it. All powers that don't neatly scale with other factors (usually weapon damage) that deal damage tend to fall off with a small number of exceptions. It's possible this could be one, but I don't expect it will be.
    • What might be more interesting is if its base form was designed to be more like the current augment for it. Where the bolts did something beyond the elemental proc when they landed. A stun would be nice, as the augment, but I can understand not wanting to completely redesign that augment.
    • A possible alternative would be using them to cause either fear or blindness. The fact that Nyx has neither baffles me slightly, given her origin as one of the primeval gods of darkness and the night. Especially if on a shorter duration than the stun, it could still allow that augment to be useful as an alternative. Or, potentially, the normal version could stun and the augment upgrade it to fear or blindness. Either way, it offers a - to my best understanding of her theme as someone who doesn't have access to her dev notes - thematically appropriate alteration to the power to both make it a debuff and minimize the need to do additional mechanical overhauls. 
  • Replaced:
    • While the description in the devstream was a little vague, it clearly said, 'some type of debuff'. So, if not wanting to be done the Psychic Bolts way, here are some other ideas, revolving around the theme of her being a maven of the night:
    • Given that she's going the psychic/mind route with things, and she already has two radial skills, a more 'wave' or 'cone' like ability could make for an interesting change of pace, or perhaps a linear one (some examples of the sort of shape I'm talking about would be for Frost's 3rd power, or Hydroid's second, if you weren't moved with it).
    • An alternative shape might be in the form of Trinity's Energy Vampire (her second power) or Titania's Lantern (her third) with a single enemy acting as a 'focus point' that radiated around it. 
      • I favour anchoring it on an enemy because I feel it'd give Nyx a bit more flavour, be reminiscent of mind control, and re-emphasize the power of her disrupting the perceptions and minds of foes. 
    • Again, I'd argue for a fear, or perhaps a blind. However, if that's felt as being too far into the 'control' aspect and not enough of a debuff what I'd actually argue for doing is either reducing nearby enemy's accuracy by a substantial amount or 'silencing' them: IE: disabling them from doing anything other than weapons fire/melee attacks. 
    • From a thematic or 'look and feel' perspective, you could pitch it along the lines of a psychic miasma or haze, or maybe even call it something like 'Mental Dampening'. Visually, going with Nyx's general theme of 'putting things around enemies that my best friend on WF still can't seem to tell apart' you could have some sort of energy or runes either flowing around the enemies' midsection or attached to their head, perhaps as a sort of 'crown' like arrangement or maybe with encircling energy.
• Chaos
  • I don't have too much to say on this one. It's probably the brightest star in Nyx's current kit and I love it and the concept behind it to bits.
• Absorption
  • Absorption, I will admit, is the one power of Nyx's toolkit I don't get. I mean, I get it, mechanically, but it has always seemed oddly out of place to me compared to her other powers. There doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in replacing it, though (possibly due to player backlash, or maybe because of some thematic concept that the devs can see but I can't) so my notes on this are going to be fairly limited.
  • I will say, keeping it in its current form, I don't exactly mind it? It doing magnetic damage does seem to be a little bizarre, although I've been educated some on its history and why that's been done, but I'd still encourage a move away from that. :P 
  • As someone who uses her a decent bit, one thing that might be especially nice is if - given that Absorption seems to be there as a sort of defiance or survival move - if its knockdown when targets were hit lasted perhaps half a second longer, or was possibly turned into a brief stun, something to enable Nyx to have time to put her feet back on the floor and bullet jump back into the shadows to strike again. As it is, the enemies frequently recover in just enough time to be able to get in one or two got shots if they're not dead, which can be a liability at higher levels.

Those are simply my thoughts, given what was said during the last devstream. I hope that somehow DE sees them and that the prove at least somewhat useful. While I'm hesitant to say I main any particular frame least the pundit brigade leap on that, Nyx is one of the small handful of frames I keep coming back to, and the one I feel the closest personal connection with. Especially with Revenant popping up soon, Nyx's current toolkit is really showing both its age and some of its troubles, and now would be a great time to start tweaking her (no dis on Vlad. He interests me, and while I 100% don't feel like he's a replacement Nyx, some of his toolkit does currently encompass a number of aspects of Nyx's stronger powers). I think, if DE wants to push Nyx towards a more dedicated debuffer, push her as the game's mind-binder, then I'm all for it. But whether debuff, control, psuedo-tank, whatever, I really hope that in looking at her they look to reenforcing her personality and theme. If anyone has any questions or comments about this, I'm open to them, and am up for going more in depth on my thoughts on concepts.At the end of the day, I just hope DE sees this and finds this helpful. But either way, I'm still going to keep playing her.