If Nurgle is the god of not only death/decay, but also life, nature, and rebirth...

I believe you are projecting your vision of beauty and misunderstand life.
lest assume earth is the only place where there is life, 99.99999~% of living organisms are composed of weird ass parts and flagela and engulf their food to consume as they are still alive. you are looking at nature from a sanitized perspective. look at birth itself in our species, by the end the mother and baby (in nature) would be wounded blodied and covered in shit. nature is predatory and full of diseases.

If i remember correctly it's because the warp and the chaos entities are sensible with the state of the the materium.
The decadence brought by the perpetual war and the entire universe getting worse plays a big role on the appereance of nurgle and his realm.

It is beautiful by Papa Nurgle's standards. While you see a rotting corpse as death, the Father sees it as a beautiful place of life, as maggots crawl, and flies are birthed, while a multiplicit cornucopia of pestilent life is growing.
Nurgle loves life in all its forms, both big and small, no matter what others think of them. He accepts life how it is, and will accept and love you if you let him.

so what happens if the war ends and the universe recovers?

They have the majority of their pain dulled by Nurgle. It's still painful, but much more bearable with His blessing.

It changes in a less messed up condition.
The thing is that the chaos gods are shaped by the minds and the state of the universe.
For example, if a guardsman start to enjoy the thrill of battle, he is going to shape khorne in a more satanic and bloodlusty version of himself.
Another thing that shape khone is violent deaths that continues to happen in the warhammer universe.
And this is the same with nurgle only that now the guardsman is losing hope and see only the inevitability of death and devastation and the rot and diseases that his deceased body will spread afterwards.

I'm new to Warhammer lore, do their personalities also change according to the Universe's needs? Does Nurgle turn into more a normal asshole like a lot of other god entities in fantasy universes are if the universe changes? In Elder Scrolls, the Daedric princes only have the personalities they do because its their job

It is unknow.
I can tell you that during the early stages of the warhammer universe the chaos gods weren't as tangible as in the 41st millenium, dormient really.
The moment when the chaos gods started to become more invasive in the materium were when the eldar gave birth to slaneesh.
You know at the end it's possible that the chaos gods turn dormient again after the complete death of every living thing in the universe, until then the primordial truth of lorgar is the only rule that apply (wich says that chaos is inevitable because of the existence of living things in the materium).

They weren't really dormant, they were created during mankind's history by our awakening group consciousness. By 40k canon all the gods but the Serpent are among us now.

Good to know, i thought that the war in heaven started the shaping the chaos gods by destabilizing the warp and that they didn't become sentient until slaanesh appeared. And even there they weren't as active as we know now.
Tnx for correcting.

Guy on the left looks like a zaku

Most life is not pretty.

I'm just saying, a planet covered in fungi and disgusting moss is absolutely filled with life

This.
Bacteria are living organisms. Protozoa are living organisms. Nurgle loves *all* life, no exceptions. He just imposes a tyranny of the majority in the amount of love he gives - if you're one of the bigger things that can provide a nice, safe, comfy home for all those millions of little ones, then why aren't you?
So he'll make you the best home you can be for them, and if you accept it, the pain, the disease, the body horror, all of it, then he'll keep you alive and unwell until you die, as all living things do. But if you don't accept it, then fuck you, you can die sooner, you hateful asshole.

Basically, Nurgle is just as insane as all the other Chaos Gods.

ZAKUs only have one eye

Because the duality of the Chaos gods only exist in Fantasy, not 40k, where they are completely negative.

What I want to know is how a god of decay (a process of change) can also be a god of stagnation opposed to change.

Your sense of aesthetics is wrong.

Because decay is a change that comes about as a result of things not changing.

I see, you have no idea what decay actually does, like facilitating growth and change in surrounding ecosystems, spreading nutrients and allowing plants to grow.

Next you'll be telling me that the Black Death wasn't a massive motivator for change despite it being in many ways responsible for a lot of the way history went afterwards.

>but also life, nature, and rebirth

N A N I ?
A
N
I
?

If Nurgle represents stagnancy and is the arch-enemy of the god of change, why is he associated with Viruses, one of the most rapidly changing organisms in the world?

I wasn't talking about the results of decay, I was talking about the cause of it.

Decay itself is change, fuels change, and is caused by change.

Then let me present you with a question of my own.

If Tzeentch is truly the god of change, then why doesn't he stop constantly plotting, planning and scheming? He's always doing this, and through doing this, he is unchanging, as he is constantly in a state of flux, and therefore unchangingly changing.

If you've read 8-bit Theater up to the end, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Because he's the god of nature, and also despair. Shit won't look pristine until thousands of years have passed on an afflicted planet, and even then, it's his goal to drag planets into the warp where they remain stagnant/in the disease/parasite breeding stage.

Basically, at the current state of nature's cycles Nurgles shit will remain shit, so I've really got no clue as to why nothing good is going on other than change to seasons and lifecycles being tzeentchs thing, which would mean Tzeentch does some planetary terraforming and actually gets stuff to grow once Nurgles mushrooms have broken most of the death and decay down to harmless dirt.

Thing is Nurgle AIDS are almost exclusively spiritual diseases which are nothing like actual illnesses, so that really begs the question if Nurgle is a Nature god at all.

Truth be told. it's clear this needs to be addressed.

It's a kind of paradoxical situation. if he stops scheming for change, what does he do? Not dissing, just wondering how it'd work.

youtu.be/FyeoBm5QFnA?t=10m27s

>beautiful and velvety

Life isn't beautiful and velvety?

...

At the same time they are outside of time and beyond causality. So when they do change they've also always been that way

so as living saints seem to basically be the emperors version of warp demons (unbeknownst to them) shouldnt they get more powerfull near the warp and that make the inquistion start to go wait hang on a minute

While they have always existed and not existed in the warp, they were born in the Material at certain periods. For example, Slaanesh has always been there in the warp, even if he was born when the eye of terror was torn open.

It's less like a daemon and more like a champion, like the ones of Chaos. Of course, most saints don't become saints until after they are dead, and only a few have the whole FILLED WITH THE EMPEROR'S LIGHT thing going on.

Nasty ass nurglites.
Blood for the blood god.

Nurgle is honestly the most idealogically interesting of the Gods. Have fun with your boring bloodsecrator gorelords of the skull king.

Nurgle also gets presented as a god of stagnation which is how they can play him off Tzeentch.

Harder to build civilization and change things when you constantly suffer plague and famine.

I don't have a suitable reaction of for how laughable this suggestion is