Weekly Warframe: Nyx

The easiest frame to farm in the early game. I got Nyx by accident! My first built warframe, my second frame, and the frame I did the Second Dream with. That’s why she always wears the Scar sigil.

In the very early game, Nyx is marginally better at spy than Excal, which is why she was my go to spy frame. It might not be obvious to new players, but Mind Control works on cameras! Not especially useful except in that early game before you have a weapon with punch through to shoot cameras through glass—or before you even know that’s possible!

Psychic Bolts is her star ability, able to 100% strip armor at a lower power strength than any other frame—and again, achievable at a level where you might be doing that before you know that 100% strip is a totally different thing that 99% strip. Pacifying Bolts is surprisingly strong, as it stuns enemies after you strip all their defenses—and that means they’re going to be dead if you want them that way.

Mind Control got a bit of a nerf with the eximus rework and is the main reason I always pair bullet hoses with her, rather than big chunk damage weapons. Because it’s necessary to wear down the Overguard on high value targets before mind controlling them, and you don’t want to overshoot and just kill them. This ability works on some things you wouldn’t think of trying. While very handy on liches and sisters, Zanuka is the best example! Nyx makes the Alad V fight stupid easy in the early game, because controlling Zanuka means Alad gets no healing, and in fact Zanuka happily attacks Alad! Mind Control wants tons of duration but doesn’t need any strength. Strength does affect the target’s damage buff, but that’s not worth modding for.

Chaos, paired with Nyx’s passive, is her main way of staying alive aside from Parkour—and staying alive is Nyx’s main problem. Chaos wants a ton of range, but requires no power strength. A shame enemies affected by Chaos can’t perform finishers on each other!

Absorb is essentially a trap unless you have its augment, Assimilate. With Assimilate, Nyx transforms from the lowest survivability frame in the game to the single strongest tank—albeit a very slow moving one. It makes her literally 100% invulnerable to everything except nullifiers and falling off the map… and ledges. She can’t jump up a ledge in Assimilate. Assimilate Nyx demands the use of Twin Basolk with Rift Strike or Dual Daggers with the Amar mod set to enable quick movement around the map. Adaptation builds up while Absorb is running, FYI.

Uniquely in my experience, Nyx is not great at the early game, but shines in the late game once you’re on the Steel Path. DE’s stats showed this too—with the release of Steel Path, Nyx’s % use jumped up a LOT. I wouldn’t be surprised though, if that has fallen again now, as it seems DE wants every frame to be able to armor strip. That said, Nyx is great on steel path because the things she excels at: Armor strip and crowd control are important again on the Path. In the early game enemies are too easy to kill to need those things.

Nyx’s abilities can’t really all be modded for at the same time, meaning that for me, I’m always replacing Absorb (which needs tons of efficiency and energy) with some other survival ability. Pillage and Defy are my typical go-to’s.

My loadout for Nyx is typically Synapse, my Gaze Kitgun, and Azothane built for heavy attacks. Nyx can’t stand toe-to-toe with enemies so Amar-teleporting into an enemy’s face with the Azothane heavy attack means they’re going to bleed out while knocked down and never touch her. Pennant also works for this.

Nyx has become my Archon killing Queen. I use any other frame for the first two missions, switch to Nyx for the boss fight with Laetum and Phenmor and Praedos in hand. I frontload the two guns with headshots to build up the incarnon meter, and operator/drifter sling my way through a map. Once at the archon, I go into Absorb (with Assimilate), activate any one of the incarnon guns, and go to town.

I don't die. I am not useless and because I've been doing this since the beginning of the New War, I have the pathing down for my operator/drifter sling dashing. It's just efficient for me.

Despite not having used her since 2017 or so, she's still my most played frame on my profile. I may or may not have pretty much mained Nyx in my early days (along with my friend playing Frost, we were the duo CC kings back then). I played with her Prime briefly, but by that point I finally had some actually good endgame weaponry and the know-how how to mod them properly, so CC became less relevant to our success.

My biggest modern days grip with Nyx is Absorb. It's a horrible ability and it's augment is a complete crutch, turning it from unusable into usable but painful to utilize. It pretty much forces you to run pure black energy just to be able to see anything and disables the mechanic that makes Warframe so fun to play, parkour. Replace it with a different, not horribly clunky survival ability and Nyx would likely go back on my "fun frames to play" list.

I personally find mind-control the most fun ability nyx has. There is just something hilarious about a Butcher or scorpion that just goes absolutely ham on his former allies.

But yeah apart from the fun factor it's not really useful for anything.