(PC) Kuva Liches / Parazon / Kuva Weapons / Etc. Feedback

[Inryatt]

Just a very minor thing, but one of the possible names for Kuva Liches is 'Puta', and while it may have been unintentional, that word in portuguese and spanish (maybe other languages too?) is (kinda rude) slang for 'prostitute'. Just thought I'd let you know! 😛

[(XBOX)Nightseid]

5 minutes ago, Inryatt said:

Just a very minor thing, but one of the possible names for Kuva Liches is 'Puta', and while it may have been unintentional, that word in portuguese and spanish (maybe other languages too?) is (kinda rude) slang for 'prostitute'. Just thought I'd let you know! 😛

I have always heard it used as to refer to a female dog in spanish.

[Yoruno]

So i noticed spoiler mode now has mercy animation which is nice, or maybe its a bug?

Problem is there's a big delay between pressing button and the mercy happening.

 

For requiem mods as a whole, imo the main bottleneck of the grind was right at the start where people had absolutely no mods to start dealing with liches. it could've been alleviated a lot by giving people a full set of "flawed" requiem mods with just 1 charge in some sort of mail telling you kuva liches are now a thing after TWW quest.

Kinda like flaw mods that we were guaranteed to get at the beginning.

Edited November 8, 2019 by Yoruno
adding requiem mod feedback

[GrimMyfanwy]

I made a more detailed post here, fearing this would get lost in the bulk of this thread This is the revised post: The flaws of the Kuva Lich system: What can be done?

OK, so I gave it a week, defeated 11 liches, and feel I have delved deeply into the system enough to give feedback. I'll try to offer solutions and not just criticisms as well as keep things concise but there's a lot to go over.

Liches

Minor issues

• Personalities: there are only two. Don't get me wrong, they are very well done, both with the writing and voice acting, but after the first two, it just feels like I am fighting the same character over and over. This ties into a major concern, which is farming. The only real solution is write and VO more possible personalities.
• Abilities: Maybe it's just my rolls, but it seems like I have only seen 3 power sets for the liches, which just reinforces the feeling that these are not different enemies, just the same one over and over. Maybe deversify the abilities and tie them into the personality so their abilities also reflect who they are not just what they can do, of course this would mean the addressing the first issue on this list.
• Conversion: This choice is utterly lackluster in it's benefits. They hit like wet noodles, they only show up for a minute or two, and never when you need them. Of the five times I have had them spawn in my mission, three of them were as I hit extraction and well after I completed the mission objectives. Best solution I can think of is use the mechanics established with the landing craft. Have us select an active ally, and use a long cooldown consumable to call them in a mission when needed. Have them scale like cosmic specters or better, since they will only be active for a limited time.
• Extra weapons: Eventually you are going to have players with more weapons than they need, and if you want this lovely system that you crafted to still be viable after this point, you need to let the players do something with these weapons other than vendor or destroy them. I would suggest melting them down for kuva the same way we get endo out of Ayatan sculptures.

Major Issue (Just the one) 

• The Grind: It was fun the first 5-6 times. hunting them down, finding  their weaknesses, etc., but now, it's just a chore. there's absolutely no variation in the gameplay. All I have to look forward to is 4-5 hours worth of gameplay to clear them. Add to this the RNG of the Kuva weapons and to be honest, I don't want to do it anymore. of those 11 lichices I have faced and defeated, 4 of them (FOUR!) have been Kuva Khoms, 2 Kuva Krakens, and then a Seer, an Ayanga, Twin Stubbas, and Sheldeg, and an Ogris. My first Khom roll for bonus was 51%, so not even the new Valence Transfer is worthwhile to me since my next highest was like 31%, so of the 100 hours I have put in since the release a week ago (I'm retired so I have a lot of free time), more than a third of that has been clearing liches just to try again. I just created a new lich, and guess what, it's the Kuva Khom... again! I can't even buy him off or try again, I am forced to do the same thing all over again with not even a chance of a reward I can use, just to have another chance at what I want. Do you realize how disheartening and frustraiting that is? At least with things like relics or boss farms you don't know that you failed to get what you want until after you have done it. This is being told that you failed before you even started and then told if you want another try you have to do it anyway. We need a way to buy off the liches, just like we were given a way to consign kubrows and kavats. Any way would be a move in the right direction, be it paying them off in kuva to leave you alone, a once per week get of of lich free card, or a special mission that resets it.
  Look I understand that RNG is a major component to viablity in a game like this, but nowhere in this game is there as horrendous a grind as getting these weapons. Maybe I'm an outlier with my RNG, but I have played this game for over 10,000 hours over the past 6 years, I am not one to let bad odds or long grinds discourage me, but my most recent lich having the Khom again made me want to shut the game down and delete it. You could point to things like the Lato and Braton Vandals, or doing Infested Salvage for Nidus, but those things only take about 20 minutes per try, this RNG is hours  per attempt. The best thing I can think of it that either you make it so that once you obtain a weapon, you can not have that weapon occur again, either until all weapons are obtained (allowing those that wish to improve thir weapons with Valance Transfers do so), or you create a vendor where you can trade in a kuva lich weapon for a different one but with the bonus damage being random and at the minimum level, so that those who wish to do it for the mastery can stop, but those that wish to get the best weapons can continue using the valence transfer.

I know I am frustraited right now, and if my feelings have bleed through my post, I am sorry, I really am trying to give constructive feedback here, and not just rant. The core of the system is sound, but what made the system work in Shadows Over Mordor was the variety, and the Kuva lich system just doesn't have that, and with the RNG for the weapons as it is now, it lacks the most vital component for a replayable system in a game: fun.

Edited November 10, 2019 by GrimKonstantin
Added link to full post

[Braneman]

Friendly Kuva liches need a better way to spawn, my friendly Kuva Lich came in during a defense mission and literally couldn't say his full introduction line before the mission ended and we were on the score screen. When he did show up before, he showed up for less than thirty seconds for a boss fight where I don't think he actually did anything before going away again. I have seen him all of three times ever, he has basically never been all that useful when he does show up and I don't even know out where I can look at him so I can at least show his funny name to my friends.

[Haenohalanodien]

With all this kuva liches ephemeras grind Digital Extremes is more like Perfect World/Digital Extremes.

[Drachnyn]

The Kuva ogris claims "dealing greater damage per shot" but it actually does just a bit more than half of the damage the regular ogris does, Without any sufficient upsides (still trash crit stats) it's actually weaker than the normal ogris.

[Zendadaist]

Kuva Liches are supposed to be personal, but honestly they feel more like they're solo. As in, the whole Lich gameplay aspect (aside from perhaps cracking open Requiem relics) feels very anti-team. It's imposing on your team to do -your- missions because they can't do much with your Lich unless you decide to die to it (and who likes having to die and use a revive in order to progress a mission?), and they don't get anything out of it either.

I play warframe these days to play with my friends, because I've seen and done everything the game has to offer. Lich content is therefore something I'm just not doing because it will mess with my friends' game play and I'm bored of soloing.

[dimerapis]

Kuva weapons should be selectable.

Kuva Lich being constrained for a very long time, the only reward you can get is a Kuva weapon and a random ephemera.
Kuva weapons are random. RNG is not necessarily bad, but adding RNG to long-term restraints is not preferable.
You should be able to control the type of weapon as well as control the elemental type in the Warframe that currently handles Kuva Larvling.
That way, each player will play for the weapon they want. I think that there is no waste in the game play if you make a mechanism to rank up each time you elemental damage.

Even if you restrain the player, you just run away.

[OmegaVoid]

I would like to suggest a change to the present Valence mechanism.

Valence currently offers only a chance that any new Kuva Weapon might be useful. If/when the damage bonus on a player's existing Kuva Weapons is higher than average, any new weapon will more likely than not offer no improvement. My expectation is that many players would at some point just give up.

I feel the goals of longer-term replayability/regrindability and player satisfaction would be better served by something like this:

• When Valence is used, the bonus damage type shall be a 50/50 chance between the damage types of the weapon being upgraded, and the donor weapon.
• The bonus damage percentage of the weapon being upgraded shall be increased equal to: the bonus damage percentage of the donor weapon divided by 10, rounded down, and multiplied by 2.
• When one Kuva Weapon has reached its maximum damage bonus, Kuva weapons of that type become available for Valance with other Kuva Weapon types. In this case the bonus damage percentage of the weapon being upgraded shall be increased equal to: the bonus damage percentage of the donor weapon divided by 10 and rounded down. Bonus damage type remains a 50/50 chance between the damage types.

Thus, a player with a potatoed and Forma'd 25% Magnetic Kuva Karak getting a 22% Heat Kuva Karak would be able to upgrade the 25% weapon to have a 29% bonus which might be either Heat or Magnetic. A small improvement in stats.

Or, a player with a potatoed and Forma'd 32% Radiation Kuva Chakurr getting a 60% Radiation Kuva Chakkhurr would be able to upgrade the 32% weapon to have a 44% bonus of Radiation. A bigger improvement, from a very lucky drop. The fact that the upgraded weapon in this instance would have a lower bonus than the donor weapon is offset by the fact that it can still be improved further, by hunting more Liches.

And (I'm assuming 60% to be the bonus cap) a player with a 60% Toxin Kuva Brakk getting a 45% Radiation Kuva Brakk could use the new weapon to upgrade their Kuva Shildeg, if they so chose. Or use Valance for a 50% chance of changing the 60% Toxin Brakk into a 60% Radiation Brakk. Or put a Catalyst and Forma in the Radiation Brakk, and have two Kuva Brakks with different bonus damage types.

So many options! So many reasons to keep hunting Liches!

A system like this would ensure that a player vanquishing a Kuva Lich would never get an essentially useless weapon drop, until they owned (at least) one maxed-out Kuva Weapon of every type. It would be a long road to that goal, but every success along the way would be an encouraging step closer.

Many thanks for your work on this update. I'm enjoying the Lich system so far, and hopefully with a few tweaks it will become a feature loved by all!

[SableSonata]

With a little more experience with the system, here's the Feedback, from the beginning of the system:

Getting Requiem mods is pretty terrible.

• Only survival and rescue fissures available.
• Requiem mods are uncommon drops instead of common, meaning you have to upgrade the relics for a decent chance.
• Requiem relics use void traces to upgrade instead of kuva, as you would expect. 

Getting murmurs is annoying.

• Thralls only spawn in special Kuva Lich missions.
• You cannot farm thralls without a literally-unkillable enemy potentially spawning in at any time.
• Farming murmurs means you're not making any progress anywhere else in the game.

Liches vary wildly in difficulty.

• For example, a Heat-based lich will frequently stand perfectly still while making pillars of flame that deal very little damage, allowing you to get 10+ seconds of easy headshots.
• A Radiation-based lich can instantly-kill most frames with their abilities, not to mention radiation procs resulting in instant death because players deal 50k damage per second but have less than 5k effective health.

Lich weapon choice is completely random.

• Leads to tons of useless duplicates that you have to spend hours getting just so you can roll again. It's already frustrating having a 40% duplicate rate by the 10th lich, I can't imagine how bad it will be once I have only 2 or 3 weapons left to get.
• This ultimately kills the fun of the entire system. To grind for hours to get rewarded with what is essentially a "Please play again" is not fun.
• Kuva Larvling weapon does not reflect their weapon as a lich. Kill a Larvling with a Karak? Lich gets a random Kuva weapon instead of a Kuva Karak.

 

SOLUTIONS:

• More requiem fissure mission-types.
• Either make requiem mods common, or make the relics upgrade with kuva instead of void traces.
• Allow thralls (but not liches) to spawn rarely in any Grineer mission.
• Work on balancing the liches various abilities (Radiation procs are a big no-no).
• Now that Larvlings need to be mercy-killed to spawn a lich, give them a weapon that signifies what they will get as a lich, so players can simply seach for a larvling with their preference instead of having to grind for 3-4 hours to get rid of a bad lich.
• Larvling has a Karak? Lich has a Kuva Karak.
• Larvling has a Seer? Lich has a Kuva Seer. 
• Etc.

 

 

[Leon-Darkheart]

ok i made today another lich and got the kuva tonkor

Can someone explain me why this weapon even exists?

No im dead srs, just look how they compare

- 5% higher crit chance

- 0.2 seconds faster reload

- 7% higher status chance

- 24 more explosive damage

- 16 less impact damage

- + random element (in my case poisen 31%)

 

In really sorry to repeat myself but the weapon isnt even "much better" than the normal tonkor and for 2 hours to get this weapon, i feel like this is a joke. the weapon is here (in german) praised for the faster reload. 0.2 seconds faster? are you joking??? Make it 1.0 or 1.2 seconds from 1.5 so it "IS" really faster AND you can feel its faster but right now it feels like DE is joking here.

[waynethepain]

Dupe kuva weapon drops are cancer.  Please fix.  Thanks.

[AshenHaze]

Do Liches have to kill a player for missing mods they didn't farm for? Why not count just a failed parazon attempt as the victory, having the Lich run out after the failed attempt and adjusting itself os it's stronger the next time you two fight? It just feels oddly cheap that they just get a free kill on ya. Yea, I know that you have a ton of revives but it's at a level of more "obnoxious" than "challenging".

[MJ12]

11 minutes ago, Leon-Darkheart said:

ok i made today another lich and got the kuva tonkor

Can someone explain me why this weapon even exists?

No im dead srs, just look how they compare

- 5% higher crit chance

- 0.2 seconds faster reload

- 7% higher status chance

- 24 more explosive damage

- 16 less impact damage

- + random element (in my case poisen 31%)

 

In really sorry to repeat myself but the weapon isnt even "much better" than the normal tonkor and for 2 hours to get this weapon, i feel like this is a joke. the weapon is here (in german) praised for the faster reload. 0.2 seconds faster? are you joking??? Make it 1.0 or 1.2 seconds from 1.5 so it "IS" really faster AND you can feel its faster but right now it feels like DE is joking here.

Running the numbers, the Kuva Tonkor is actually a lot more dangerous.

That 5% higher crit chance sounds negligible, but because of crit scaling, combined with the moderately higher base damage and the elemental bonus, that adds up.

On average, a standard Tonkor running point strike + vital sense (and you would run both because it's a crit focused weapon) has a 37.5% chance of dealing normal (1x damage) and a 62.5% chance of dealing critical (5.5.x) damage, for an average of 3.81x normal damage.

A Kuva Tonkor with the same mods has a 25% chance of dealing normal damage and a 75% chance of dealing critical damage, for an average of 4.375x normal damage.

This means your average per-shot damage has increased by 15% from the crit chance bonus alone.

Similarly, a normal Tonkor puts out 35.3 rounds per minute, while a Kuva Tonkor puts out 40 rounds per minute, which is another (multiplicative) increase of damage by 13%.

And then you have the +24 base explosive damage (the reduced impact damage is kind of negligible because you generally are using the Tonkor against multiple targets at once, and the impact damage hits only once), which is a 3.7% increase in base damage.

Multiplying these together, the Kuva variant has increased your average damage per minute by nearly 35%. That's a pretty significant upgrade!

And then you get into the additional elemental damage which can increase that damage output even more. Assuming the additional elemental damage is treated as modded damage and doesn't get used for calculations by elemental damage mods, and you're running a Tonkor build of Serration + Split Chamber + Point Strike + Vital Sense with 4 90% elementals, that means your total elemental damage output goes up from 180% to 211%, another 11% increase in damage output.

So your total sustained damage output has increased by nearly 50%. This is a pretty decent chunk of extra damage output.

That said, this brief discussion segues neatly into one of my issues with the Valence Transfer system. The system doesn't always give you a benefit because a Lich can spawn with a duplicate weapon that has inferior stats to your current one. There should be two options for Valence Transfer-the current one, which copies the stats of an identical Kuva weapon, and a 'disassemble for upgrades' one which lets you consume a duplicate weapon to boost the elemental damage percentage of your current Kuva weapon slightly-let's say by about 10%.

This way, you can always max out a Kuva weapon's elemental bonus with 4 duplicates, which seems like a large but reasonable and plausible amount of grinding.

[Neo3602]

Hey I don't know if this has already been mentioned, but my Kuva lich that I converted that has the Kuva Shildeg and when he spawns into a mission to help me he just follows me around not doing anything even if an enemy right next to him he does nothing.

[DArthurVaderian]

Query, Can converted Liches use their abilities when fighting alongside you? If not, why???

[Zayin]

I think there needs to be a time-out or repel condition for players who have no intention of stabbing there lich.

[Kalsarag]

Echoing everyone else:

Duplicate weapons are worthless because more often than not, if you got a very good instance of a weapon, you are never going to Valence transfer since you're more likely to get an inferior weapon than an upgrade.

You are going to end up wasting your own time having to clear a lich you don't want and it is a frustrating thing rather than rewarding because of the lack of control on what the weapon can be. It is not fun or rewarding in any many to fight yet another lich with a  brakk or karak if you already have a very good instance of either. An inferior weapon has no purpose and trading is just not worth it as likely your recipient isn't going to want said lich at all meaning you're stuck with it until you get rid of it. This is a pest, not an adversary.

I would like the option to change a lich's weapon to be something else, even at an extreme cost to myself. I value my time more than I do another Karak, and it takes 2 to 3 hours to clear a single lich. I want there to be the option to force the Lich to cycle the weapon it generated with to something else that I might not have. It doesn't even have to be cheap, or even stable. Many of us would accept a large kuva cost if it meant not spending 3 hours clearing to reset something we didn't like the result of; just keep the weapon the same. Call it a Kuva tribute, maybe?

Allow us to use Liches as specters. The converter system is a cosmetic benefit that doesn't really help us in a consistent fashion and killing a lich is often just flatout better because you can get a  reward you know the effectiveness of; you cannot compare, control, or otherwise rely on conversion to aid you. I would like it if I could take said companion liches and summon them, even if it requires resources. Maybe even create a menu specific to handling converted liches.

Just give us the ability to create spawn beacons and let us have the power to deploy them wherever. The in game fluff is that this is you "paying" the Lich to make it look like they're still working for the Queens.

 

Lastly. You are missing out on the opurtunity to let players do a 4v4. 4 Tenno vs their Liches in a team deathmatch. It is currently imbalanced by how powerful an individual lich is, but you can't say this isn't a challenge many players would like to partake in.

Edited November 9, 2019 by Kalsarag

[Sasquatchias]

Something I'd like to see to speed up the Murmur progress a bit would be having higher ranks of Thralls who give more Murmer Progression, but also have higher stats (along with possibly an extra ability from their Lich.) These higher tiers could start to spawn in as parts of the "final wave" of Thralls during missions, and perhaps they'd transition into more frequent spawns after a Requiem gets revealed.

[UNO168]

I don't understand why it is so hard to spawn a lich in co-op game? just make a reward window like defense mission and everyone have to choose to opt in or not for 10 sec, players that fails to choose are kicked and marked for afk boom kill 2 birds with 1 stone, or simply makes it a kuva egg so we can choose to spawn the lich or not in our orbiter

if players have to go solo to spawn a lich for themselves it's a design flaw, last time I heard warframe is a co-op game, also de plz respect urself stop releasing half baked product like this

Edited November 9, 2019 by UNO168

[vomder]

I'd like to see some variety in the Requiem fissures, instead of them only being Rescue and Survival.

[NeroAugustine]

What about if Valence had the option of transferring 10% of the elemental bonus from the sacrificed weapon to the new one, able to be done one time for each forma applied to the Kuva weapon (5 max).
So if you have a 40% Toxin bonus, and a 50% Heat bonus, you could sack the heat bonus weapon, and your Tox weapon would have an additional 5% heat bonus. Doing this five times could amount to something.

Also, slightly unrelated, but what about a single mod that ate all the remaining drain, when applied to a weapon, but each drain it consumed buffed the bonus it gave the weapon? It would get a lot of use on rank 40 weapons, I'm sure.

[Hayzemet]

let us dissolve extra kuva weapons into kuva, at least 7000

[DementedParadox]

   Hey I love using the Parazon but it doesn’t feel like I can use it much in the regular game. After using it for a while I realized that the reason for this isn’t because the prone rate for normal enemies is too low, it’s that all too often they’ll be prone just as I land the finishing hit in a melee combo or their health is drained to 0 by an elemental proc.
   I was thinking that maybe one idea for how to make the Parazon feel more present without affecting prone rates and thus mod balancing and such is that maybe when an average enemy is prone, they behave like a thrall when they are prone. This means that they are locked in a stagger animation and more importantly their health bar is locked for a moment and you have the choice of finishing them with mercy or you can wait out a short timer for them to die after a small handful of seconds. I believe that allowing normal enemies to behave this way when they are prone would allow a moment for players, or more specifically vets such as myself with weapons that mow down the majority of units, to actually register that they are prone and thus get to use mercy finishers more often without disrupting gameplay or balancing too much.
   It could easily be that the rate it is at is what was intended, but myself and many I have talked to say they really enjoy the Parazon and it’s flashy finishers, but wish it felt more useful when not lich hunting, and this was the best I could come up with. Granted I’m not a coder so I’m not sure how difficult this would actually be to implement but it does seem simpler than just upping the prone rate and disrupting the balance of how the Parazon, and thus the assassin mods connected to it behave. I hope that this feedback is useful!