Dev Workshop - Kuva Lich Changes Coming Soon™

[Violet_Xe]

I'm praying that this trading lich thing is a joke. If it isn't i'd much rather it be limited to clans and or credits only. This would make it much less toxic and scammy. Even then it might turn clan chats into a trade chat. If possible I'd like to reverse it and use the bounty hunting system I suggested but I'll see how this turns out before throwing a fit.

[Raqiya]

Whoohoo, SLAVE TRADE!

[Fire2box]

5 minutes ago, Violet_Xe said:

If it isn't i'd much rather it be limited to clans and or credits only.

it'll just be "okay you can verify I have the lich you want but before the trade processes you have to give me ____ amount of plat". Of course the payer could be scammed, but that's the system DE's setting up albit unintentionally. 

[DesertEagle1280]

Keep in mind, depending on your definition of "design intent" that keeping that may be part of the problem.  I understand you want a system that encourages revisiting/continual play (because nightwave apparently isn't enough chores), but antagonizing players with exponential RNG in the name of longevity is not good design.  If you tell me "play for hours to get a reward" and the reward is a 25% seer when I already have a 45% seer of the same damage type - that is not a reward, that is bad design.  My (and others) proposal of having the valence transfer give 100% guaranteed progress towards better element % keeps the "grind/rinse-repeat" that you seem to want out of this system (the logical conclusion based on what we've seen) but also gives players a guaranteed reward that will be worth something at least.  

I honestly am being more vocal about this patch than I've been in the entire 3ish years I've been playing off/on due to believing this system has so much potential, if it can be implemented in a player-positive way.  Giving bad/pointless rewards is not player-positive, and that's what I want fixed

[Ferbsol]

rivens 2

[Doppelhan]

5 hours ago, NinjaKitsune56 said:

You do realize you can see the bonus percentage in your Kuva Lich page, right? If it's a "bad roll" you can always Convert them, more meatshields are always welcome.

@NinjaKitsune56 But they’re not really good even as meat shields. They stick around for like ten seconds and do almost no damage.

There’s really no reason to bother converting them as of now. 

[Fl_3]

All changes are good changes, but why are the rewards so weak?

Towards the end my Lich had control zones that covered over half of the planets in the system, but all I got was a duplicate weapon and the resources/mods it had taken from me.

A Warlord with its own army of loyal thralls and that's all we get?

A Kuva Lich, born from Kuva, powered by Kuva that doesn't even drop Kuva, or much of anything else for that matter.

How long is it going to be before this system is abandoned by DE and they move on to the next exciting, innovative, evolving grind?

 

[Ramflare]

21 hours ago, LSG501 said:

No change to the necessary wasting of 5 forma for full xp from kuva weapons due to them going to rank 40 for no real reason.... funny that....

Mastery has little meaning by the time a player is at the point of collecting kuva weapons. DE isn't forcing you to race to mr30 within a week of every new update.

It's certainly not "necessary" to use 5 forma but I really appreciate the option to get a little extra capacity when I really like a weapon.

Besides, there is a reason; weapon exilus mods, rivens and primed mods. Put them together and you'll end up putting 5 forma into a good weapon anyway.

[Accaliah]

@[DE]Bear the trading is silly, lore wise and gameplay.. just allow us to sell the lich contract to the stalker or pay the lich off or something. i mean because of us they got immortality.

bleh or make it so you cant get the same weapon in a row untill youve gotten one of each weapon then it starts over khom, seer, ayanga, ect, ect..

or better yet, just make the larvaling have a base model of the weapon your lich will have when you kill it, eg if its a kuva seer, he has a seer, kuva khom, duh: khom. kuva hammer, just a jat kittag or something... seriously. 

[Nasair]

I haven't started any liches yet. The grind seems high compared to the grind reductions I'm used to seeing on old content, like PoE/OV.

[Swagernator22663]

So you telling me that i can buy myself a lich with any ephemera i want, for plat ? Finally a wallet warrior like me can enjoy this lich system.

[CheeseGromit]

My few thoughts having finally gotten rid of my first Kuva Lich.

On the whole it wasn't a particularly satisfying experience.

I got annoyed by the chatter every time I logged in, a lot was due to repetition of the same lines of dialogue.

It seems like the biggest selling point to getting a Lich is vanquishing it for it's weapon. This can be very polarising right from the start. Did you get the weapon you wanted / a 'good' weapon, great you're probably happy. Otherwise your disappointed and potentially just wanting to get rid of it as fast as you can to start another.

I obviously read to much into dev stream comments and thought there might be more of a puzzle element to defeating a Lich based on their lore. The phrases on the requiem gave additional hope to this idea. Disappointingly it looks to be just another rng / grind system.

I also found dying on unsuccessful attempts unsatisfying. I think a lot of this was because it felt out of my control. I was almost never going into the fight feeling prepared with a combination of requiem mods I thought might be correct. It was just pure trial and error.

I kind of hope I'm missing something here.

So, personally I'd like to see a lot more player control in the system. I'd like to be able to choose when to challenge the Lich. I'd like to see more depth in the requiem mod system.

[DesertEagle1280]

5 hours ago, NinjaKitsune56 said:

You do realize you can see the bonus percentage in your Kuva Lich page, right? If it's a "bad roll" you can always Convert them, more meatshields are always welcome.

Right - we can convert them, A. if that was useful; and N. After we go through hours of grinding for murmurs, and assuming we have the requiem relics - why force us to grind for 100% wastes of time.  It would be like forcing you to own a non-prime before you can build the prime, even if you have all the prime parts.  It is not player-positive to force me (or any other player) to waste their time.

[Spawnbold]

Just give us a reason to do the grind in the first place.
If you got all the weapons at >40% there is nearly no reason to do the lichs again!

ANYTHING would be appreciated, but only getting duplicates, or even worse duplicates with lower stats is crushing...
Those are not something you do in 20- 40 missions like the normal missions, the litteraly take hours FOR NOTHING!

[Numerikuu]

22 hours ago, [DE]Bear said:

TRADE YOUR LICH - If you have a Converted Kuva Lich, you may trade them with another player, who may be looking for a specific Kuva Lich Weapon or Ephemera. This system will be coming soon, including the use of a brand new Dojo Room inspired by the early ‘War Room’ design from the King Pin System!

Trading is a nice idea and all, but it doesn't solve the issue about getting a lich with a low stat version of a weapon you already have. Nobody else will want to trade for it as well. So now you're stuck grinding for half a day to get rid of a lich that is of no use to you or to others, and whose weapon is just going to sit in your foundry gathering dust and cluttering the screen.

I suggest two things to make said lich/trash weapons useful, instead of being a dud and huge waste of player time:

Valence Infusion: Infuse your chosen weapon with another of the same type and element, gaining a small % increase to its base elemental stat.

Valence Diffusion: Break down your weapon of choice into Kuva. The weapon is destroyed in the process.

[LSG501]

1 hour ago, Ramflare said:

Mastery has little meaning by the time a player is at the point of collecting kuva weapons. DE isn't forcing you to race to mr30 within a week of every new update.

It's certainly not "necessary" to use 5 forma but I really appreciate the option to get a little extra capacity when I really like a weapon.

Besides, there is a reason; weapon exilus mods, rivens and primed mods. Put them together and you'll end up putting 5 forma into a good weapon anyway.

The issue is if you don't want to use the weapon, not if you do, you're being forced into adding 5 forma if you want to get the full xp which most will... which is a waste of our forma if all it's goof for is mr fodder..  

Exilus mods, primed mods and rivens...really that's a bit of a stretch for a reason for adding a 'forced' 5 forma into a new weapon to get the full xp. 

Considering DE keeps going on about power creep and still used that reason for not adding reload speed to the exilus mods, that doesn't really sound like the reason to me... however selling forma for plat does....

[Nasheim]

To be honest, even with the upcoming changes, the grind is going to be borderline soul crushingly time consuming and boring.

Please disallow generation of duplicate kuva weapons until we have all currently released kuva weapons owned or at least give the larvling the weapon it will have as a lich so we can opt out on getting duplicate gun (insert number here).

Please allow Valence transfer to improve the elemental bonus slightly on every transfer until we hit the maximum of 60%. Nobody wants a dozen or so duplicates of the same gun but with weaker stats uselessly cluttering up their armory.

We tenno may love playing Warframe, even if we're whiny little brats about it sometimes, but we do have lives away from our PCs, you know.

[Callback]

On 2019-11-11 at 5:28 PM, [DE]Bear said:

Greeting, Lich Hunters!

After the release of the Kuva Lich System in Update 26: The Old Blood, you have been providing us a lot of feedback on what you do and don’t like about hunting your personal Lich. While we have made many improvements over the past week, we have more to come. We are adding the following very soon, based on your feedback:

• WEAPON RNG REDUCTION - Your Kuva Lich will no longer have the same weapon twice in a row. While you may get a duplicated weapon down the road, your Kuva Lich will have a guaranteed different weapon than its immediate predecessor.
• RECYCLE YOUR REQUIEM - 4 Defiled Requiem Mods can now be Transmuted into a random, fully charged, Requiem Mod. This gives them some additional use, as well as helping you clean up your inventory.
• TRADE YOUR LICH - If you have a Converted Kuva Lich, you may trade them with another player, who may be looking for a specific Kuva Lich Weapon or Ephemera. This system will be coming soon, including the use of a brand new Dojo Room inspired by the early ‘War Room’ design from the King Pin System!
• MORE TO COME - We are looking at other ways in which we can make the Kuva Lich system more rewarding and unique, although there is still a lot of internal discussion surrounding the ‘hows’ while maintaining the design intent. More on this as it is finalized.

Monitoring, tweaking and balancing this new process is an ongoing effort, and we rely on your feedback to let us know what you think. Please keep your feedback constructive and succinct, making sure you give suggestions to systems you do not like, while detailing why you do like a system, should that be your opinion.

The hunt continues!
 

WEAPON RNG REDUCTION

Barely helps with what it does help with (Getting your final weapon increased from 1/13 to 1/12.  woo?), and does nothing to solve the real part players take issue with:  The bonus element.  What we want is RNG removed from being the sole factor deciding whether we get a strong weapon, and make it simply a contributing factor.  We want guaranteed progress, and we can accept a variable pace for that progress as long as we are guaranteed something. 

 

We want a method to use duplicates and low rolls to still increase the value of our main weapons up towards the maximum value.  Even if we're simply consuming a duplicate to add 5% to our existing weapon up to the maximum value, that's something.  That's progress.  That gives value to an otherwise worthless low-stat duplicate.  We have the same problem with rivens where you can invest a million kuva rerolling and still get nothing of value.  We need a fix for that system (locking number of stats/negative and individual lines), not a second system of massive time/resource sinks for potentially 0 rewards.

RECYCLE YOUR REQUIEM

Cool.

TRADE YOUR LICH

I kind of get it from a gameplay perspective, but only kind of.  We still need to go through the long process of converting a lich, which is fine and worthwhile for "valuable" re-sales.  But from a lore perspective it just compounds on the confusion of the system.

 

Liches as a whole need to be looked at again.  I'm not normally one to throw around the term ludo-narrative dissonance, but there is some serious disconnect here.

 

We knowingly and willingly use our parazon to "activate" the larvalings, allowing them to be turned into liches, who will go on to be a menace to the system.  We don't simply allow it, we directly enable it. 

It would make more sense if liches were more like death marks from a lore perspective.  Make it the worm queen's response to us raiding her kuva supplies in a special mission (where killing the larvaling is a natural part of the mission, such as if they drop a required key), so she revives the fallen soldier and sends them out to seek revenge.  This keeps the opt-in nature from a gameplay perspective, while being more of a Grineer response to us and out of our direct control form a lore perspective, instead of us actively choosing to create this thing.  Also it removes the random larvaling spawns from missions and allows stealth exterminates to function again.

 

Then, when fighting them, they don't act like liches or justify many of their voice lines at all.  We only killed them once as a larvaling.  They were revived a single time as a lich.  The next and only other time we kill them, that's it.  They die forever (or we don't ever kill them again and convert them instead). 

It would make far more sense for failed attempts to still kill the lich, but have them just continue coming back to life stronger each time.  The impermanence of death is what makes a lich a lich.  Not just a single rescue from near-death injuries.  Right now requiems aren't the secret spell to put a lich to rest, they just block them from magically countering our finishers despite being weakened through combat.  Makes no sense from a lore standpoint.  They really feel like they should be a "stay down" after killing the lich over and over, not the tools to enable us to take it down a single time at all.

 

And finally, with trading, we're now engaging in not only the slave trade, but selling them as game for other tenno to hunt?  That seems a little harsh.  Also it's currently unknown whether their requiem will reset or stay the same (so you can just tell the person you're selling them to off the bat), and how it would make sense from a lore perspective if it does change.

 

If the trading were available while a lich were still an active menace it would make some sense lorewise, you would essentially declare a bounty on them and allow another tenno to deal with the threat.  And the lich may understandably shift their focus to the new tenno who has been running through their territory and killing their thralls. 

 

Or, otherwise, if we are keeping trading as something to do with converted liches, skip the hostile phase and make it just a tradeable weapon/ephemera.  Make the traded contracts essentially you calling in a final favor from the lich, requesting that they help to arm your fellow tenno by giving them their kuva weapon (and ephemera).

[Sintag]

Hey, so I'm liking some of these change, but this said I still have some burning questions.

1:  About dupes, can we extend it to three Liches out instead of just one?  This way I can at least have a chance at getting unique armaments without being stuck with Kohm, Ayanga, Kohm, Ayanga, for instance.

2:  Is there going to be a system that allows for Liches to de-spawn if knocked down, say, twice, without the Lich 'owner' attempting a Mercy?  Once would be too short a window, plus what if they're down and getting revived, but twice in a ow with no Mercy attempts should make it obvious 'hey, I'm not gonna hit them' and let them back off instead.

3:  Defiled Requiem fusion looks decent.  Please, do not lock this behind some limited-use item.  Thank you.

[MPonder]

@[DE]Bear 

Tennos becoming Slave traders selling Grinner's life just to be murdered, KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK.

by @Warfoki

[aquapollo]

Removing a lich bringing the same weapon twice really doesn't make the overall RNG of the weapon drops much less, I definitely feel like there should be some way to at least sway the chance of a lich having a certain weapon.

 

Also I really think when you don't have the correct requiem mod the lich should die in the mission then come back to life after then some of the voice lines implying that you've killed it multiple times would actually make sense and it would actually be more like a lich.

[Deshiel]

This explains why I got several reddit dms asking if I adopted my lich with the electric ephemera that I showed in a thread.

[ArcticSirius]

For ideas, I’d like ways to make the lich system feel more “lich-like” instead of failure or defeating them. Maybe add kuva missions with a mechanic for failed siphons giving vanquished liches a meter to return but stronger (better weapon bonuses [a chance to reroll for ephemera too?]). Something, that way they truly feel like a lich, something that comes back after you first defeated it.

[-MG-CephalonCinnamon]

I think the Anti-dupe system you proposed isn’t good enough, you can still get alternating dupes, instead make it so it picks from a pool of weapons and when you get a weapon it’s adds 1 of every other weapon to the pool and reset a weapons quantity to 1 whenever you get that specific one.

Then to help make the weapon bonus rng not painful, when you spawn a Lich make the % change of getting a weapon eg 1.5x when you have the regular variant equipped and when you have the Kuva variant make it a 2.5x multiplier. You could also make the base level of the node influence the % value so a sortie 3 Larvling would have a 50-60% bonus for example.

With these 2 features the rng would be less painful, and when you have everything you want you can slightly target your farm and try get your weapon to a better %.

Also a way to just trade liches without having to convert them first would be nice even if you increased the trade tax for that.

Another QOL would be to let us for a cost eg 1 million credits or a challenge eg lvl500 mission get rid of a Lich without having convert/vanquish them even if you put a limit of 1 discard per day or something like that.

As even with the discard you still have 13 weapons to farm and get to 60% weapon bonus (or if it’s a weapon with base elementals a different % for however you want to biase Status procs) and for all the elements you want to have so that is 13 * 40(different bonus %) thats 520 possibilities even at 2 a day that will take almost a year then consider you may want multiple copies of some weapons with different elements so that would bring you to over 1-2k possibilities. Even if you would be fine with 40-60% bonuses that would only bring that down to 500-1k. Seeing as for warframe this is some silly rng considering the time it would take to farm them all the some changes to reduce rng would be VERY wellcome.

 

CONCLUSION - the rng reduction needs improvement so that getting all the weapons you want and getting them above average % bonus would take a few months instead of years.   (Especially if you are planning to add more Lich (or amalgam *wink*) weapons down the line)

[Khantico]

On 2019-11-11 at 11:28 PM, [DE]Bear said:

MORE TO COME - We are looking at other ways in which we can make the Kuva Lich system more fun and unique.

fixed