Kuva Lich Feedback

[Flying_Scorpion]

Positive feedback:

 

Generally I'm happy with the Kuva Lich system. It seems to be working well. Please keep the content difficult and ignore those who want you to nerf the hp of the thralls or make the bosses easier. I, and I'm sure many other silent players, are tired of the game being trivialized by overpowered weaponry and underpowered enemies. So this was a step in a good direction, thanks DE. 

1. I really like that there are some tanky enemies in the game now to warrant using the peak damaging combinations available to us. Enemies that require the damage of a juicy meta weapon/riven, or multiple warframes working together to take it down are a welcome addition to the game: for example when a Nox, or a Bombard gets buffed up to becoming a Kuva Thrall - they warrant marking them and getting the rest of the team mates over to help take them down. Thralls in general are awesome.
2. I'm not sure if I am correct, but it seems like it's not possible to apply status affects to the Kuva Thralls. I'm not sure if I am in support of this. It might prevent certain ways to cheese this content, so it might be a necessary way to keep it challenging. But I felt disappointed when I expected my slash/viral weapon to deal good damage and instead...it didn't do shhhh all for damage. I switched to a crit build instead, which is a little less interesting to me. I like playing with status effects - even the non-meta ones like cold damage. It's just more fun to me to experiment with the different ingredients (the damage types) and create my own recipe of status effects and elements. It sucks a little bit that I can't do that with the Kuva Thralls.
3. Requiem Relics are easy to obtain. Getting a guaranteed one every hour seems fair. The hardest part about this is that it takes awhile to build up a stockpile of mods to play with on the kuva liches, but each mod is good for 3 uses and that also seems fair to me. Players are trading, buying, and selling these mods with eachother so there's some nice in-game market activity happening with these mods and relics. 🙂
4. Joining a group of players and sticking together in a party to hunt kuva thralls for murmers is easy and enjoyable.
5. The amount of murmers needed to unlock a requiem/word seemed a bit high to me at first, but to be honest, if it was lower, players like myself would blow through this content really fast and we'd be bored again. So I'm alright with this. Hunting Kuva Thralls for murmers is actually quite rewarding in it's own right, as the gameplay is high level against high hp enemies that deal a lot of damage - just overall it's fun gameplay that matches high level Warframes/players. 

Some bugs:

1. Reward screen for requiem relic doesn't indicate if you already own a requiem mod or not. This has lead to me accidentally picking a mod I already owned instead of picking one that I didn't own. (not sure if it counts as a bug but it's really should be changed to be consistent with other relic rewards).
2. Kuva Larving - I get the message "You have been selected for the queens" and I see the image pop up on the bottom right of my screen of the Kuva Guardian. But sometimes (often times actually), I don't see a marker on my mini map to indicate where the Kuva Larving is. I have run around killing every enemy I find sometimes and I still don't find the Kuva Larving. This confuses me. Am I doing something wrong?
3. Kuva Liches going invincible. Is this intended? I've noticed a number of missions where the kuva lich becomes invincible and the health bar becomes grey. I don't know why this happens.
4. Kuva Lich animations freeze during suplex. Sometimes they stand there not moving while the player is floating in the air during the suplex and the player does the animation of being thrown to the ground. Then the Kuva Lich continues fighting as normal. It's hands just don't move during the animation.
5. Kuva Thralls invincible. Sometimes the Kuva thralls go into the "down" state where you would normally be able to execute them...but there is no way to interact with them. You just have to sort of ignore them and move on.

 

Edited November 3, 2019 by Flying_Scorpion

[Malak-al-Maut]

To add to the positive feedback, I'm very happy with the Kuva Lich system.  Especially when compared to the void relic system.  I would really like to see this replace void relics.  Hunting liches is much more fun than farming relics.

[Argenex]

Just wanted to add that I like the kuva lich system as well and greatly enjoy the tougher enemies on planets and nodes

that I rarely ever visit or have needed to visit in years. However here's the issues I see with it.

1. There really needs to be a better explanation of all the workings of what you are doing, what has always bugged both myself and my friends with Warframe, is new content is pushed out, but there is little explicit details on what to do with that content. Not to mention most of the time with Warframe, you are forced to rely on the wiki... I mean if you really care about your game and your players why force them to rely on a fan-created website outside of the game just to figure out what the hay is going on? In the case of the Liches, my friends and I had no idea that it was worthwhile to stab your lich when you encounter it, nothing in-game really lead us to think that. (you can fully unlock a requiem if you get the right one, I've managed to be very lucky and land the first 2 in one go!) Which this leads to point 2;
2. Because of this lack of information, it created a divide of people new to the Lich stuff, versus those who were already deep in it, of arguing during missions, often vehemently for one reason or anything. "KILL your lich so mine can spawn!" coupled with a few curse words... so the very poor way it is introduced to the player, created conflict with players.
   • The divide is now growing:
     • There are many posts going back and forth both here and on reddit as to what you should and shouldn't do. Players are being confrontational, instead of informative both in game and out of game.
     • Liches were updated now due to a large amount of players not stabbing their lich, so that another player can bring their health low 3 times and they will take off.
       • I've actually seen a player scream at the rest of the group for attacking his lich...

So pretty much, this needs to be addressed as information dissemination about how best to deal with your lich, obviously hasn't passed to the general populace of most players. As well, both sides of the arguments for stabbing your lich and against stabbing your lich, make valid points, but it is also hard to tell what is confirmation bias and real fact.

Is the intent of introducing new content systems to confuse, frustrate, and create havoc between players, or is it to add vibrancy to an existing community for enjoyment?

I would love to believe it is the latter, but time and again I feel dubious whenever something new is pushed out.

About the system itself;

1. It SHOULD reap more rewards for testing the lich with a stab, it sort of does, but since it also depends on a base of RNG, like having your lich actually spawn, it often doesn't feel rewarding and feels just as slow as simply grinding out the murmurs.
2. Maybe in the tutorial part of the lich UI, it should suggest that you mercy your lich no matter what and list what the outcomes are even if you fail.
3. Is there a total thrall spawn limit per mission? I often see people doing their best to rush to the exit, but I hang back and while 2 people are sitting in the exit I manage to get 3 more thralls to spawn while they sit there. They leave, come get thrall, then go back, and rinse and repeat. I mean if we are all there for murmurs and liches, it would be nice to clarify what all we can get and maybe folks will focus more on maximizing that potential.
4. Is there a lich spawn limit per mission, or is it purely random? (I have seen 3 liches back to back after each person attempted)
5. Does someone else's lich on the map keep another's spawning? (Seems so, often after I've suggested someone make the attempt, afterwards another lich spawns.)
6. How many thralls will a lich convert, while it's on the map? What is the cap of that, I suspect that some of the people who ignore their lich are attempting to farm thralls. It would be nice to know if that is more efficient (Doesn't appear to be from my point of view currently.)

 

Warframe has boatloads of content, much of which is actually hindered by RNG forcing players to repeat the same content until they can't stand to think or look at it anymore.

Because of this, it has created a whole generation of players who really want to maximize their time and efficiency, can you blame them? Imagine being a more casual player, they really will want to get the most of their time because of the giant glacier wall of grind that stands before them quite often.

Since this is the case, why not utilize that and improve information delivered to the player that helps them operate more efficiently, instead of delivering obtuse information that they are forced to research and dig out.