A virulent plague, a mutated warrior, the “I just wanna stay here and grow my infested garden” frame - Nidus!
Release date: 2016-12-22
Passive: The Infestation dwelling within Nidus mutates rapidly when used against his foes, fueling his abilities and yielding various symbiotic benefits.
Virulence - Rupture the ground with a damaging fungal growth that steals energy from each enemy it strikes. For every five enemies hit, the Infestation mutates, multiplying its destructive force.
Larva - Spawn an Infested pod that erupts with tendrils, latches onto nearby enemies and pulls them in.
Parasitic Link - Bind to a target with a parasitic link. For allies, both the host and Nidus gain increased Ability Strength. Linked enemies take the damage inflicted on Nidus.
Ravenous - Gluttonous maggots swarm nearby enemies, feasting until they burst with Infestation. The maggots benefit from Mutation and each enemy consumed adds to the Mutation stack.
Acquisition: Main blueprint is acquired from The Glast Gambit quest. Component blueprints are acquired from Rotation C of Infested Salvage on Oestrus, Eris.
Community question: With the release of Dante, it got me thinking about using these weekly threads as a way to discuss newly released frames, not just old ones. Whenever a new frame releases, they would get the next upcoming thread, after which the queue would resume. Thoughts? I was also thinking about possibly re-making a thread if a frame receives a substantial enough rework, so far I got lucky with both Hydroid’s and Inaros’ reworks being timed perfectly with their queue spots, but that won’t always be the case.
Oh, Nidus! I loved the heck out of this frame when he released, his stacking mechanic was completely novel and the levels of damage he could dish out were very impressive. Sadly, he hasn’t kept up with the rapidly escalating pace of gameplay and enemy levels and it’s been a while since I last used my infested friend.
The key problems with Nidus is his absolute lack of any defensive strip as well as slow power growth. With the introduction of Helminth he did get a way to combat at least one of those issues, but his kit is so synergistic that it sucks to have to give up one of his abilities just to make him playable at high enough levels. I really wish he had some way to deal with highly armored enemies build into his kit. As for his stacks, they wouldn’t be nearly as unbearable if not for the spaghetti code restrictions of only being able to gain stacks one at a time. What I mean is, even if you hit a giant ball of enemies with Virulence that had 10 maggots in it, instantly giving you enough mutation to get to 100 stacks, you still have to wait for the counter to sloooooooowly count up. It’s not just visual either, that counter’s number directly correlates to the power of your abilities. I don’t know how hard it would be to make it update instantly, but it would be a gigantic QoL to Nidus that would make his gameplay far less clunky. He’s a really fun and well designed frame, I wish he got those small touch ups that would enable him to really flourish once more.
makes sense to make threads for currently “hot” frames. as for nidus… i really wanted to like him, but there is nothing that screams “infestation” in his kit, it’s just bland and boring stack grinding. wish they’d give him a full rework or atleast revisit infestation with another frame.