Overview: Push horror into the minds of enemies, steal vitality from the fallen and force the slain to rise as your puppets – if this sounds good to you, check out Nekros! Parts drop from Lephantis in the Orokin Derelict assassination mission.

Prime: Nekros prime is currently vaulted, so consider asking friends and clanmates if they have his relics, check the trading channel to see if people will sell his parts or simply wait until an unvaulting event.

Special: Nekros regains health whenever an enemy dies nearby. The frame can also produce a steady stream of health and energy orbs, along with ammo and normal loot drops.

Pros: Extra loot (and health orbs) via Desecrate, able to summon recent kills (and gain buffs from them) to support or defend.

Cons: Can feel quite fragile without certain mods, relies on guns and minions for damage.

Powers: Strike foes with Soul Punch (1) dealing damage and launching a ghostly afterimage ragdolling those in a column behind the target. Use it is a crowd control or apply the Soul Survivor augment to instantly revive a targeted ally. As an extra effect, targets stuck by the punch are marked, and if they die during or shortly after being marked, they’ll rise again as a shadow from Shadows Of The Dead (4) or if you’re at the shadow cap, heal existing shadows.

Send nearby enemies fleeing with Terrify (2) causing them to attempt to escape Nekros for a brief period and reducing their armour. The Creeping Terrify augment further debuffs foes, reducing their speed while affected. If you want to replace an ability using the Helminth, this is probably the best choice.

Desecrate (3) is a toggled ability that drains energy to consume nearby corpses, producing health orbs and potentially an additional piece of loot. Note that this power does not prevent Energy gain while active – and the Despoil augment can make it cost health rather than energy, making it basically free. You can do some interesting things with this power – try it with Equilibrium to double dip on health and energy orbs, add Arcane Energise and Arcane Pulse to magnify your gains, try Health Conversion to gain significant armour or put Synth Fibre on your pet to let yourself consume health orbs without taking damage.

Shadows Of The Dead (4) calls forth seven foes out of the last twenty you killed to serve you in battle. They’ll fight, provide buffs and take fire for you, but their health will decay over time, meaning you either need to heal them or periodically re-summon them. The Shield of Shadows augment will cause each shadow to take status effects and a percentage of incoming damage for you – with a high power strength, you can reach 90% damage reduction. Shadows will be coloured by your energy – try to pick something that allies will find easy to identify, so they don’t waste time trying to kill your pets!

Opinion: Bonus loot, crowd-control and bullet-sponge minions make Nekros a fairly effective frame, welcome in most squads for the greed factor alone – who doesn’t like extra rewards? Since he generates extra loot drops, he can be extremely useful in excavation and survival missions, increasing the power and life support capsules available whilst being durable enough to survive high level enemies. That said, the slow cast speed of Shadows Of The Dead (4) is a drag, and he lacks in raw killing power. In short, building Nekros will pay dividends any time you need resources, and he makes an interesting “support” choice in higher difficulty missions.