Ogundiety

I would say the OP had a point, if you needed to do fishing, mining, or similar. Since you absolutely don't, not so much. Personally I like the silly divergences. My friend hates them and would never touch them. I expect to get to the end of nightwave level 60 since I have been staying current, he will get his umbral next week, and I wouldn't be surprised if he made it to 40- all without worrying about keeping up with the daily, or doing the ones he finds unfun. But by all means keep up with the persecution complex. My only wish would be if you could get the umbrals you missed 6 months down the line or so ( but only the ones you missed, so staying current would be a mild advantage, but no path to infinite forma), primarily for new players.

Since I was not playing solo, I could not bring up the menu, at all. I had no interface control whatsoever. There was absolutely no key combo which did anything.

Can confirm, still a thing. Dying does take you out of it, but you cannot even tell your teammates to let the guys kill you because you are unable to chat or /unstuck (because your chat dialogue screen is inaccessible).

I feel like it was fairly unambiguous. The timeline is Empyrean ( new war buildup), New War, more new war additions, then the second faction liches ( and that is when we will get changes), and then moving into Paradox. No real dates given as it is fluid, but I feel like it fits for the second lich faction to be part of the new war mid rollout, be it corpus, sentient, or amalgamation. So my personal guess is late Feb/March, with the goal of Paradox by Summer ( probably won't happen).

Baruuk is a beast for liches ( assuming you have put in enough forma to be functional). Lull hits the lich to give you breathing room, the daggers keep you at 90% DR, and his exalted weapon will demolish the liches. You might have to change up your damage type if they are immune ( resist typically does not matter as he can put out far more damage than their entire health bar in under a couple seconds, not just the 1/3rd required). Magis elevate/repair are very helpful. Acceltra is excellent, as is gram prime. Make sure you go with corrosive as it gets an innate bonus to the liches. Stay away from slash procs, all status effects, and anything with a horrible damage falloff or you will end up being grabbed trying to keep in max damage range. Nezha works well, rhino, Oberon ( built for immortal), gara, anything that can take a hit. Stay away from Loki ( incidental aoes), limbo (no value in rifts tricks), or any frame that is squishy- until you feel comfortable, at which point do as you like. I have heard tale of Octavia being excellent, and Titania being functionally immune, but haven't used either, really. And finally, if you disagree with this and can explain why, you are probably right for yourself- but this was aimed at someone having problems.

Pretty much as the title says. Kuva lich captures stop all thrall spawns (and of course, lich spawns) for the rest of the mission. The 'workaround' for this is just not to capture a lich until the extraction, though a lot of people don't understand this (and it's going to be more of an issue going forward with the ability to banish them). This isn't an urgent issue, but it would be nice to be fixed.

As said earlier, this isn't a pleasant situation to be in for the players. Personally, with 40(43? I lose track) liches under my belt, and I'm sure there are people with lots more, I tend to do everything up to the actual kills in groups, dropping to solo when I have a kill code (unless I'm with friends). There are two situations where I won't stab my lich, though. 1) when I am going to kill/convert it. This one seems blindingly obvious to me but seems to baffle a lot of other people. When you are going to kill the lich, you are going to stop spawns completely for the mission, including the conversions (yes to the person upthread, liches will infinitely sit there and convert, as long as there are other npcs- so disruption, survival, etc, but not exterminate since that mission type is NPC-limited). So if my lich spawns in, and I 100% have a kill code, I will tell my team stopping from killing it so they can feed off the thralls, since killing it would not allow any other liches to spawn, nor thralls, for the rest of the mission. I dearly hope this bug is fixed sooner rather than later, but the thursday hotfix absolutely did not change it. 2) If it is near the end of the mission (sub 30 seconds of survival, or similar), and I just got my 3rd code, so the next mission is a guarenteed kill for me. This one is also pretty obvious. I will do it sometimes anyway if it's near the start of the mission, but this is the case where it's directly harmful to do so to myself, so I may do it if I'm asked politely even in the last brief bit, but usually as long as you say (in party) that you just got your third code and don't want to waste the rage, people seem fairly relaxed about it (as they should be). I can totally understand people who don't have a lot of gear/setups to take out liches not wanting to do it. Unless I'm sitting on a kill code, it's honestly kind of a wash for me personally, so I am happy to help farm thralls (and all things being equal, unless I have an active code to test for ordering purposes, it's not really doing me any good one way or another), and a lich in a mission absolutely gives more thralls than not. People getting freaked out/bent out of shape about what is, usually, relatively neutral is the strange part, to me. Missions just aren't that long, generally, and unless you have all 3 of your codes, you're still getting murmur. Stop flipping out about it, even 'very long' missions are usually under 7 minutes (since survival caps at 5 minutes, disruption doesn't give any thralls after the 4th node is completed/failed, the 5th wave happens, etc), queue up for the next one. You almost certainly could use the murmur. Personally I prefer to do these with at least one friend in the group, taking turns on who pilots (so I can avoid the likely scenario where my lich shows up and I have to stab it 100% blind, which is just not useful other than to get it to jump to another planet with possibly better mission types). That way the person who is done with code 1 can pilot till they get their test, then a person testing codes 1 and 2 (for positional data if nothing else) can test, letting anyone sitting on 0 codes or 2 where they know the position but not the third code can just be around for thrall killing, as that's the most efficent way to do it with a geared group. I've seen/read/heard the arguments that you want your lich to show up nonstop every single mission, and the problem is that isn't actually more efficent, time-wise. It's not dramatically worse, it's just slightly worse, and the whole thing isn't worth getting so worked up over.

If the lich spawns and is not engaged, it is almost certain to show up on the next mission. Pleae don't wade into the holy war going on about who is wasting who's time with killing or delaying lich killing.

Worth noting that no exalted melee has a stance bonus. They all cap at 60. That said I completely forgot it existed, though I did think about her guns. Could use some love, yup. I do think that it is a touch unfair to say that DE is entirely uninterested in fixing it, just because it has been a stretch of hotfixes. They cannot be anywhere near done with them ( many very broken things right now, for a given value of broken).

As an addendum to this- they have more restrictions on what mods you can put on them (weeping wounds/blood rush at the very least, and I think other mods as well), the melee ones have no stance bonuses (so capped at 60 instead of 70+) and the ranged ones do not have an exilus slot.

Baruuk's serene storm is in a terrible place right now. The heavy attacks are all knockback-o-riffic, unlike the normal combos where you can choose push or pull, heavy attacks are strictly push, and this makes trying to hit a cluster of enemies with a heavy attack will happily bounce them everywhere else, fairly randomly. Building up combo is an exercise in futility, with 1.2 meters (this is shorter than any other weapon- fists and sparing weapons are 1.25, valkyr's claws are 1.7, etc) and a knockback attached, a 60 degree block angle (tied for worst with a number of weapons), so I suppose it's good that you couldn't do anything useful with the buildup. The midair attacks (with aim glide in forced melee mode) don't have any of the waves attached, either. Add to this impact not being a particularly useful proc type (and they are strictly impact), not doing any more damage than similar other weapons, and the still-present difficulties getting in/staying in serene storm (grendel is a fresh hell for this, because they can be touched by lul, not yet slept, and absorbed, and you get zero restraint eroded), and it's a problematic exalted. I don't think adding combo count to the range is the solution here, either. It would trivially hit 12x near instantly due to being able to go through walls, but then what would you do with a 12x combo counter? It's not like you can spend it on anything, and your only option would be to add in gladiator mods and try to work with that. I'm not sure what the fix is for this- I was using ripkas mostly for a while, but as the crit mod for that is currently broken I have defaulted to gram prime for the moment.

Umbra forma is not tradable. As far as I am aware, you can never have more than 3 umbra on a single account (as of now). Personally I think that it should be purchasable on the market by new players, up to the amount not available in game (so anyone who has never gotten any could, right now, get 2, then would have to do the nightwave for the third), with when the old source gets rotated out there being a signifcant delay (month? 2 months? longer?) before someone could buy it. Set the price arbitrarily high and strongly disincentivize it, but a method of acquisition is a good thing. As for why, it's because these mods are powerful, and one of the few meaningful limited systems of power right now. They are a very good carrot. They are not in any way required for any content, they are not easy to acquire, and you have to think deeply about what to use them on. Making them in any way grindable* would simply be equal to making them available on the market, and every good build would 'have' to have them. That's not what DE wants, especially as the new war is going to have a strong sentient focus of some sort, so this power increase is regulated. If they were to be unlimited, the big cost to using them (the huge drain) would be removed/negated, and it would be an across the board power increase, for content that doesn't require it- which is very bad for long term health of any game. Why don't you just have a cheat code to enable <x> or kill <y> with a simple console command- because at that point you're not playing the game, and that is a sliding scale that any serious game designer has to be careful about touching. For what it's worth, most truly min/maxed games where you can equip this and that and never die/kill everything effortlessly are the ones that fall off the map. Dark Souls wouldn't be a hit if you could make one build that could litterally do everything with no danger (and no 'if you play well then'), because that sort of game is deathly boring. Most speedruns in fact use arbitrary limits on power, either for laughs, jokes, or simply for difficulty spiking, on top of the actual timing. Also you use the term 'power creep', and do you not understand that is a problem that most (all?) games try frantically to avoid having? It is a terrible black mark on any game design, so it's a constant struggle to avoid new stuff obliterating the old stuff. It isn't something you want to have, and avoiding it is sort of the whole point, while trying to also have new and different things to do. *Should mention for completion's sake that they could put in a timegated mechanism for umbra forma that is different from nightwave, in theory, but it would amount to pretty much the same thing, and you'd complain about that as well.

Short and simple, Amalgam Rikpas True Steel got missed in this pass. True steel was 60%, amalgam ripkas true steel was 75% (and still is) and sacrificial steel was 88%. Now True Steel is 120, Sacrificial Steel was buffed to 220, this mod just got entirely left on the table/not touched. I'm sure it's just an oversight, just did not know another good way to communicate this.

I would like to make cases for the two times when it is - actively bad- to stab a lich. The first one is obvious. When you are at or incredibly near to the third code, and know the positions ( you are actively going to have a kill code the moment the mission ends), you are harming yourself by random guessing, because in the very likely situation where you guess wrong you will have to regain the anger you just spent. This is worse the lower your lich's level is, as well. You can easily be adding 4-5 missions of filler into your time. The other is if you are in a longer mission ( not 'long', but longer- survival vs exterminate/capture) and you gave a guaranteed kill code, especially if you are going to convert. In short, that kills spawns dead for the mission, so you are at that point wasting time of everyone else. Far better to announce to the group then ignore it as reasonable. Stabbing the lich blind ( knowing no code data) is not optimum in terms of time, but often your best course. Primarily, if your mission nodes are very bad, you can do this early to jump it to another planet. In addition, if you are running with a friend, you can try to get overlap by doing this. If you are running with a friend, taking turns on who pilots let's you avoid that situation somewhat (person 1 has no data, person 2 tests a few codes, then back to person 1 while person two locks in code 3, etc), and is I find far more efficient overall. It also let's you keep boredom at bay, and level up weapons comfortably because the other person has your back. After 6 rows of liches and 3 ephemera, I am personally taking a pause, probably, but I would be lying if I said that I had not enjoyed this journey ( last weapon was twin stubba, which is probably my favorite, go figure). I do hope that they lower the randomness more than has been proposed. One final note- try to run one or two requiem mod runs after each lich. Each one fully depletes one mod ( 1 charge of 3 mods ~=1 full mod), and if you do that or slightly more you will keep ahead of it. Trade for the ones you are short. Also talk in group, odds are others are looking for company/conversation /amusement.

Question- As of right now, you get the ephemera when you either kill or convert a lich. If you convert a lich, then trade it at the dojo, that means two people can get the ephemera? Or are we not going to be able to get the ephemera if we do a conversion going forward?