[Thoughts Regarding Liches and Comparing to Shadow of Mordor]

Alright, so it's been a few days and last night I started trying to go for killing my Lich. Got all the murmurs needed, found out what mods I needed, started running fissures. And then I started running out of relics while everyone kept getting ayatan stars. And then I started running siphons and floods, and getting the exact same relic each time, with none of the mods I need. Warframe RNG tends to operate in extremes for me, it took me 30 Ropalolyst runs to get a single Wisp BP, and I've gotten more weapon exilus BPs from requiem relics than I have requiem mods. So going through all of this has firmly solidified my opinion that I very much dislike how requiem mods drop right now.

I think it would be a very very good idea if we were able get requiem mods by themselves by doing Kuva Lich specific missions or something. Gathering intel, kills their thralls, whatever. Hiding a necessary part of the process behind fissure RNG adds so much potential time to the process and by god it is demoralizing when you've played two hours and you've still got only one requiem mod needed to kill your Lich. Take them out of relics, make them much easier to acquire. But making them easier to acquire would thus make Liches easier to kill, right? It sure would, which brings me to my new ideas for Lich structure.

The orc captains in Mordor you kill would occasionally come back to fight you, that's probably where the bulk of the Lich idea came from. You could keep killing them, and until you saw a new captain take their place, you could never be sure if they stayed dead. And I think that is what the Liches need to act more like. Make it so requiem mods are only needed if you want to be 100% sure that that Lich stays dead, or convert them. Make it so there's a chance, let's say 25% right now, that when you kill a Lich in a mission, that they drop dead without you needing to go through the requiem hassle, and whether or not they do actually die, they give up their stash of your stolen goods. Maybe they tell you after the mission's done that your attempt failed, maybe they surprise you in another mission, either way works for me. But that's just for killing them. Converting them is another matter, but I'm gonna go over my big suggestion first before I go into that.

A Lich hierarchy would be interesting, I think. A big map of targets on a hit list. Right now, let's just say it's five. Four captains, one commander. Introducing more than one Lich at a time would definitely mean needing to depower Liches as they are now, and honestly that's fine. Make the Lich structure a revolving door, most orc captains in Mordor were only a few steps above standard cannon fodder in terms of strength, they could still be instantly killed by at least one method in your arsenal in most cases. Make it so Kuva Siphon/Flood missions just create Liches naturally on completion, rather than having to specifically hunt down one enemy in a mission. Make the Liches feel like they're cannon fodder who clung to life and have a vendetta against you for treating them as faceless goons. The captains are the lower ranks, the ones who can crash your party and maybe match you blow for blow, but are quick to kill if you exploit their weakness. Commanders would be ones who've proven themselves against you and have assumed control of their own galleons and all that, requiring actual tactics to overpower and finally defeat, or convert to your side.

Conversion should absolutely not result in your Lich turning into a randomly occurring ally with the AI of a normal specter. Converted Liches should have their own space on the Lich interface, likely with only a certain amount of slots in your roster for them. From the interface, you could command them. Tell them to harvest resources, have them act as extractors. Retrieve a specific resource with the caveat that it'll take a longer time than normal. Have them embark on missions to gather intel on other liches, learn their requiem mod requirements in the process, stuff like that. Make it so there's a beacon in your gear wheel to summon a Lich to you in battle, where they stick around for a limited time or until they get killed. If they get killed, you can pay a kuva cost to revive them. Pump kuva into them for experience if you want to power them up quickly or something. In this proposed structure, converting would seem rather overpowered, right? Since you don't need requiem mods to kill or convert, you can just convert Liches all the time. But what I think would be cool is if you convert a LIch without using the requisite requiem mods, they only have a certain amount of time or actions you can give them before they die. The time spent is certainly not wasted, you can have a Lich on a timer go gather intel on another so you can add a permanent one to your list eventually, and I think using requiem mods on both kill and conversion would be perfectly acceptable in a system where mods are at least slightly easier to get than they are now.

Since Kuva weapons are now transmogrifiable, I certainly think being able to kill Liches far faster wouldn't hurt them at all, and of course you wouldn't be stuck forever with Liches you've permanently converted. If you're done with whoever you've got and want to make room for the hottest new models or whatever, you could just kill them from the menu and get like, I don't know, a chunk of kuva back or something? Seems reasonable enough, especially if they're decently leveled.

 

That's about all I've got right now, though on a closing note I do think that to really get the most out of the LIch system, the core combat of Warframe may have to be updated and overhauled. None of us want Liches to be just red Sergeants, and status immunity isn't exactly a compelling feature to them. As to how they should operate, I don't honestly know. Warframe isn't a third person action game with Arkham combat, and of course the orcs operated perfectly well in that particular system, so, I'm not sure. Iterate until a happy spot is reached, if nothing else.

[Thoughts Regarding Liches and Comparing to Shadow of Mordor]

So I've played a good chunk of The Old Blood update, haven't killed my lich yet, but I've played and seen enough from other players to have formed a solid stance on it. Honestly, I was expecting the Lich system to be fairly rough starting out, ala Plains of Eidolon, and that it would be steadily iterated and improved on over time. To that end, I am begging DE to not give up on this system, it has so much potential and they just have to stick with it and refine it.

I played Shadow of Mordor again tonight, both to refresh my memory of just why I enjoyed the Nemesis system and to complete it. After I wrapped up the main story missions I had left, I found myself just...screwing around with the orcs for an hour without even realizing it. Pitting them against each other and cultivating a hierarchy you control at your leisure is fun, and I think that's one way Liches fall short right now. By themselves, they're just another boss, albeit an unusual one. Of course, making more Liches right now would absolutely be a problem, given how time consuming and grindy it is just to take out one. To that end, I think Liches could use some definite scaling back, though that would depend on if there's ever any plans to let players have a full hierarchy of Liches to deal with, or if they don't want to take too much from Mordor.

Either way they go about that, there is another unique aspect of Mordor's orcs that I think they should definitely look at, and that's the randomly occurring missions they can generate. Orc captains can go on recruitment drives, duel other captains, have a grand feast, hunt beasts, execute prisoners, and a few other varieties I can't remember off the top of my head. Looking at those, I think it'd be great to have unique mission types specifically for Liches, rather than just have them spawn if you piss them off enough in their territory. Have them try to convert standard troops to thralls, have them celebrate a great victory, execute Corpus prisoners, what have you. The most important thing is to give us the option to utterly ruin their plans and humiliate them. Decrease their power, give us a chance to lower their threat and make them go into hiding for a time. Or, you could just run into those missions and end up killing them outright. Well, not exactly, in this current iteration, but maybe you should.

It was pointed out to me that it's strange that Liches keep telling us about how we kill them but they just keep coming back, and yet every time we try to kill them, they kill us and leave. Liches aren't actually Liches as it stands, without the right Parazon mods they can't actually die. You can lower their health and they'll stagger before regenning, but once they spawn they will only despawn if you have the Parazon puzzle right or if they break your spine. So I think it shouldn't matter if you have the right Parazon mods on or not, if you stab them in a mission, you get that stab on them. If you have the right mods, it continues as normal and you can keep fighting them. If you have the wrong or no mods on, you stab them, they die, and at mission end they declare how futile an attempt that was as they gain experience towards their next rank, maybe brag about fresh cybernetics or something. Point is, having an undying enemy actually show off how undying they are certainly helps to get the point across.

And that brings us to Requiem mods, relics, and murmurs. I think everyone's pretty unified on murmurs being absolutely too much as it stands, about 50 per mod reveal, I think it was? That could use some trimming. Maybe reward murmurs as part of those special Lich missions I talked about above, wink wink cough cough? Shadow of Mordor did have a few ways to gather intel on your foes, after all. I'm not sure how I feel about the new relics, just like I'm not sure how I feel about Requiem mods being consumable. I'm not sold 100%, but I don't hate them just yet, so I don't really have a solid opinion or suggestion for them. What I do have an opinion on is that Liches should initiate conflict.

Syndicates are constant third parties and known allies to the Tenno, it seems natural that Liches would go after them. Maybe have LIches attack one syndicate every day, change their missions up a little, maybe offer bonus standing or standing free of negative consequences, I don't know. Just something different. Maybe an assassination node where the LIch always hangs around, at least until Empyrean launches, just so you have a constant, reliable location to fight them at?

It's late and I'm starting to ramble, I just have a lot of thoughts about the system and I hope it makes sense to someone. I really enjoyed Mordor's Nemesis system, but the difference between it and Warframe is that Mordor was built around it, whereas the Liches feel like an add-on, as is. Like an island of content that's separate from the rest, as Steve talked about at Tennocon. It has the potential to be something more, I just hope they feel it's worthwhile to keep up with it. I also have thoughts for possible Corpus and Infested nemeses, but this post is huge and those aren't particularly relevant to Liches right now.

 

EDIT: I didn't even touch the weapons, oops. That's kind of another thing altogether, but again, comparing to Mordor, the runes orcs drop correspond to the power they had when you killed them, so...incentive to have your LIch at full power before "harvesting"?