The psychic, mental manipulator, strongest minion frame - Nyx!
Release date: 2013-01-29
Passive: Nyx gains Thrive in Chaos whenever enemies within Affinity Range are afflicted with Confusion (from Radiation status effect or Mind Control), increasing her primary and secondary weapon Critical Chance by 40% per enemy up to a maximum of 200% from 5 enemies.
Mind Control - Nyx seizes control of a target’s mind, compelling them to fight for the Tenno cause. Controlled enemies have increased Radiation Status Chance. When Nyx shoots them, they also have an increased Damage Multiplier.
Psychic Bolts - Nyx unleashes a volley of psychic bolts that track and strike nearby enemies with telekinetic precision. When enemies are slain, additional bolts scatter to new targets. Striking foes weakens their defenses and transfers a portion to Nyx.
Chaos - Nyx releases a devastating psychic pulse, disorienting enemies in a wide radius and forcing them to turn on each other. Confused foes lash out at random factions.
Absorb - Nyx draws in and contains the damage dealt to her and the damage confused enemies deal to each other then converts it into a devastating radial blast. Following the blast, she enters a brief invulnerable state and gains a Weapon Damage boost proportional to the absorbed damage.
Acquisition: Main blueprint can be purchased from the Market. Component blueprints can be obtained from defeating Phorid on assassination missions that appear during an Infested Invasion.
I don’t really like Mind control, the enemies you would want to use it on most are eximus and they have overguard preventing it from working on them. They’re usually dead as soon as their overguard is broken too.
Psychic Bolts propagating is a nice update, still seems a little weird that it is a timed armor/shield strip. Doesn’t exactly strip overguard, but any amount of overguard transferred to Nyx will block damage from bleeding through when it breaks.
Would be nice if Chaos could proc Radiation on eximus units for Nyx’s passive, and to make it consistent with other warframe’s status based abilities. Not terrible for CC, especially if you know how enemies attack.
Absorb not draining energy for every hit was a needed change, and assimilate is also pretty good too, especially if you use your melee/copter to move around.
I do think the update for Nyx has been good overall, especially the changes to psychic bolts, and the updated assimilate also has the niche uses making it very useful for certain content.
The relics for Nyx Prime are permanently available inside of Railjack.
I really like post-rework Nyx and she can do pretty much any content nowdays but imma be honest, I’m still not a big fan of mind control or absorb.
Mind control takes way too much effort to setup for too little gain, even if you ignore the victim sometimes stumbling into the nullifier and wasting it. Absorb is boring to use and doesn’t do that much compared to regular weapons even in a best case simulacrum scenario with a good buffed MC enemy active. Assimilate is, as it has always been, just an invulnerability toggle and nothing more and that’s not even that necessary nowadays when she’s sucking up armor and overguard from the numerous eximi enemies.
…but her other abilities and passive make up for it so it’s not a huge dealbreaker. A fallback invulnerability ain’t bad to have and you can always subsume sth like Nourish or Roar on her #1, it goes well with her high strength and duration stats.
Speaking of armor sucking, I really like Arcane Battery on nyx, you can easily maintain over 1k energy without Flow. She doesn’t really need it but it’s always fun to see
Even before her rework I pretty much ignored Absorb, or chose that to helminth off. Agreed that mind control still takes too much in order to get a good subject for it—I always use a bullet hose with her, and still, it’s very tricky to just wear down the Overguard on a quality target and make it vulnerable to Mind Control.
Nyx is an easy pick for all content, and I think in the illustrious position of “best warframe” (tied ofc). I started running Decoy on her for Circuit, and it gives her perfect object defense alongside of Chaos. Mind Freak turns her minion into a murder demon.
Lots of other things like Assimilate getting a jump which opens slam builds…
Ironically Trinity is probably my favourite of the two returning Warframe queens, lol.
“For all content”
Welllllll… it’s important to keep in mind (ha!) that Chaos can slow down a defense mission. Not as egregiously as long range Wisp/Limbo, but she DOES do it, and her new passive means that she really wants to cast it.
I gotta say, I was very surprised by how much better Nyx feels to play after the rework. Getting a new passive, having her bolts spread on kill, removing the extra energy drain from Absorb and making her Mind Control less derpy really did wonders for making this frame less clunky to play! She has a really strong and versatile kit now that can be build in multiple ways, including going all in Mind Control and it actually not being terrible! My ancient Nyx Prime has some incredibly cursed polarities on her from the ancient (and terrible) builds I used on her back in 2017 and now I actually have a reason to go fix those!
