Dev Workshop - Kuva Lich Changes Coming Soon™

[Eklectus]

1 minute ago, MarrikBroom said:

i"m conflicted since on the one hand I hate 'oh hey you guessed wrong. You lose a revive.'

On the other I like the fact the liches have a way of handing us our ass and i love the animations themselves.

Including the time I literally got grabbed by the face and flung off a cliff. that amused me even though I was annoyed.

I wouldn't call a scripted instadeath anything close to a challenge. Imagine if that was the same approach for any other mission. Spy: Vaults have to be done in a specific order and if you don't guess the right order, the mission fails. Pick three parazons for a Defense and if you guess wrong, you won't be getting your rotation rewards. So on and so forth. That's about as unsatisfying as it is to fight a Lich.

I just finished pumping my Lich full of lead, so much so that he's down to one knee and doesn't even have the strength to get back up. But after shanking him with my AssCreed blade, he's suddenly got the strength to break a full-stacked Nidus in two. As so many people have said it at this point, the game keeps suggesting that every time we kill these guys they're always coming back. The way the devs talked about them on reveal suggested the same: These guys just won't die, no matter how many times you kill them. Rebirth is supposed to be the whole shtick surrounding Kuva. Yet we've got the exact opposite thing going on (we won't die, no matter how many times the Lich kills us).

If they really want the "challenge" of an instant death on an incorrect attempt, let us get a chance to avoid it with a Quicktime Event like the game they borrowed from did it.

[Sliv]

Nice to see the liches getting some love !

The suggestion I would like to make isn't related to them, but to the valence transfert.
The valence transfert helps us keep our progression on this or that weapon, which is a problem far older than the kuva weapons. Whenever a new variant of a weapon/warframe/sentinel (prime, wraith, vandal, prisma, ...) arrive in the game, those of us who have invested ressources and time (potatoes, formas, exilus adapter, ...) in this item are given the choice to either ignore the new variant or start from scratch. And if you do reinvest ressources in this item, you end up with a downgraded version in your inventory that you don't know what to do with.
Here is my collection (missing a bunch of deleted items) :

My suggestion is to allow formas/potatoes/exilus... transfert to the new variant by sacrificing the old item.

Edit : That oooor giving base weapons their own riven disposition so they stay relevant, like for kuva weapons.

[Joltyboi]

i have a brilliant, easy and simple solution which would make a good chunk of people happy with hunting liches

revert. the dumb. lich murmur feature break that you keep calling a "bug fix". (i refuse to ever call it a bug)

a lot of people were happy with that change, it made hunting liches with other people worth it, and helped speed up the murmur progress, but people arent mad with you because theres no reason to do them with other people, theyre made at you breaking this feature because it was helpful, adding a replacement, unless its just as good at giving us murmur progress as this was, isnt going to do anything, make lich attempts reward everyone in the group murmur progress again, but have the murmur progress everyone else gets 5x instead of 10x, keep the 10x for the person who mercies the lich

[Kracken]

7 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!

um... HOW can we get weapon/ephemera from a converted Lich ?!

[EinheriarJudith]

7 hours ago, [DE]Bear said:

• 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.

 

• Dont allow dupes to even spawn until all weapons have been gotten. allow lich to spawn with same weapon you have equipped.
• this should have been released right at the start. i had to dissolve them because end of mission fissures are counting defiled mods as non defiled mods.
• you wouldnt have to do this if the system didnt have such a terrible grind. how about fix the grind?

as many have said, lichs should be killable without the corrects mods which results in them reviving until you have the correct mods which kills them permanently. lichs should also drop requiem mods, and requiem mods should have increased charges.

[Ascythian]

One of the problem with Lich's imo is that they are not as permanent as they should be.

 

The Turtles have Shredder, Tom has Jerry, Rick has Morty. Stalker is a good example of what a Lich should be more like imo except less emo. A pop-up cartoon villain that stays with you for a long time until the day of reckoning many moons later where still you can let them live after a final battle so you can continue to fight them again for other rewards and to build up your own personal storyline, a lich that could even take part in other quests

[GhostJF]

Can we have something like QTE to avoid death when guess wrong Requiem MOD.

Even in "Shadow of Mordor" still have chance to escape that enemy you can't defeat

I don't think get kill is "fun part" to player... let alone you always need to try many times to find correctly arranged. I even wonder can anyone kill KuvaLich below LV5

[Eklectus]

6 minutes ago, GhostJF said:

I even wonder can anyone kill KuvaLich below LV5

You can. You just have to be lucky. Because playing Russian Roulette is called skill now and that's the kind of challenge vets need.

[Trentiel]

Hey, weird question.

When combining Kuva weapons, can we get a choice of which name we want to keep? At this point I don't really care about the stat bonuses, I just want to replace the stupid name I got on my first Drakgoon. Aftekk Hekomlp... just isn't very cool. How is that even pronounced? Is it He-kom-lp or like Heck-O-M-L-P ? I didn't realize how stuck I'd be with the name before I put all this work into it.

Like a little set of toggles. A choice of names, and a choice of element bonus. Bofore you complete the fusion process.

[Poor_Yurik]

As many lich-related features (and their future changes) have been unclear and many of us have played a lot of the system already, I can say my biggest complaint by far is how useless converting liches is. This is exacerbated by how it was impossible to know that early on without trying it. You also never know if a future lich will be a much better convert than one you've found early on.

Unluckily for me, my very 1st lich had an amazing name (Mind Fakr) and I converted it, but knowing what I know now I feel like I made a huge mistake as I've realized how great their weapon roll was -- and how the name on it would have been perfect.

I would greatly appreciate the ability (even for a kuva or plat cost, or let me release them back as a hostile lich if I don't have another active) to vanquish a converted lich and get their weapon. A tenno would have zero qualms about killing a lich for personal benefit, converted or not, and it makes no sense thematically to be locked out of that option.

[kyori]

8 hours ago, [DE]Bear said:

• 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!

WEAPON RNG REDUCTION - So it can still mean that we can get duplicated weapons 5 or more times in a random row, just that it is not twice in a row? If yes, then it is just a tiny slight improvement.

RECYCLE YOUR REQUIEM - Ok, this is good. Because people are wondering what are all those defiled mods doing in their inventory.

TRADE YOUR LICH - We can only trade converted Lich? That will mean an unavoidable hours of grind to get it converted. So that means it doesn't solve anything. 

 

I already suggested to Rebecca as to why not create a new mod (which replaced the amber stars in requiem relics) that will let us get rid of the Lich the first time we encounter them, but at the cost of not getting their weapon or ephemera. This way, the grind is down significantly.

*Or revert the last hint back to 50 murmurs? That may help.

You must understand that this is not normal grind in which we can try again in minutes. If we get a duplicated Kuva weapon, we can only try again in HOURS. 

*I know there are fanatic players that already done 50-100 liches but you must understand the majority of players are not that fanatic. So please don't base the review on those players.

[Joltyboi]

1 hour ago, Kracken said:

um... HOW can we get weapon/ephemera from a converted Lich ?!

i think they mean a larva you "converted" into a lich, either that or you can trade converted liches and whoever you trade it to can get the things the lich had, so you trade a converted lich to another player and they get that liches weapon and ephemera, if it had one

[Joltyboi]

24 minutes ago, Poor_Yurik said:

(Mind Fakr)

XD, this and such egg are the best lich names ive seen, ide wanna keep him converted just in case they ever DO actually make converted liches usable, like having them be like over powered specters but giving them a cooldown like archguns or even having them be one use per mission, but a permanent edition to our inventory instead of being consumable 

[b4timert]

Almost 50% of my 17 liches had duplicate weapons and I never had 2 of the same weapons in a row, the not 2 of the same in a row sound nice on paper but it merely make it 1/12 instead of 1/13 that i get a duplicate. or it change from  to 7.69% to 8.33% i get the weapon i want.its not even a 1% improvement.

Also don't make liches tradeable it will make getting rid of bad liches even harder if no one want your bad lich or when new kuva weapons get added.

[-CM-Hekovashi]

Alright, how about NO to lich trading? Allow us to dump lich that we don't want, right after it spawns, with some kuva cost in there (5-10k for example), that way you can get weapon that you wanna faster plus you won't make rivens 2.0. Sounds good to me.

[Kraitharch]

Lich system made me abandon WF and start playing Destiny 2. Thank you.

[Kracken]

32 minutes ago, Joltyboi said:

i think they mean a larva you "converted" into a lich, either that or you can trade converted liches and whoever you trade it to can get the things the lich had, so you trade a converted lich to another player and they get that liches weapon and ephemera, if it had one

That would mean the currently Active Lich. I fear that it would also mean a possibility of storing those somewhere which would cause a drastic increase of them in search for better stats and ephemeras.

the only possibility i'm thinking of right now - is that traded converted lich could be "re-activated" to allow the player to vanquish it.

[(PSN)MJ-Cena7]

Please keep Lich to lich trading no plat no mods nothing else you trade a lich for a lich 

[Jivy]

make it so instead of dying when attempting to mercy it just make it stun you please DE its not good design wise and makes people not want to play that part of the game

[Teridax68]

As much as these changes are likely to bring improvements, literally none of them address key player concerns with the Kuva Lich system:

• Getting duplicates is going to feel bad regardless of whether it's the immediate next Lich, or the one after. If there were changes made to avoid duplicate weapons on consecutive Liches, why was this not extended to all Liches until the player obtained all Kuva weapons?
• Why are Requiem mods consumable in the first place? It's nice that we get to recycle Requiem relics, but that still doesn't justify the existence of relic farming in the Kuva Lich system.
• Trading Liches may help in getting rid of duplicates, but is also going to push players to pay Plat just to avoid the inconvenience of dealing with duplicates, which I find less than ethical.
• The problem with making the Kuva Lich system "more rewarding and unique" is that its very design, and the current intent behind it, is neither. Players aren't disappointed with the Kuva Lich system just because it's grindy, they're disappointed because DE promised an entirely different Kuva Lich system in what was clearly an entirely fabricated gameplay demo in Tennocon. If DE truly wants to make Kuva Liches "more rewarding and unique", the entire way we approach them needs to go back to the drawing board, so that we get what we were promised, rather than a compilation of grinding mechanics we've already seen before.

Oh, and while we're at it:

• Why is the amount of bonus damage on Kuva weapons random? What is the purpose of the elemental modifier? All it's done so far is cheapen what should've been a hard-fought reward.
• What is the point of the Parazon or Requiem system, besides RNG grinding? There is no actual gameplay to figuring out how to kill a Lich right now, it's just a matter of guesswork and farming Thralls, which is one of the key reasons why killing Liches feels so grindy.
• Being forced to die and level up a Lich when attempting to kill it, and not having the right Requiem, is causing a serious case of perverse incentives, where players are intentionally failing to kill their Lich when they spawn, which also prevents other players from spawning their own. Liches need to find a different way of leveling up, especially since we only actually kill them once (or twice, if we Vanquish them).
• What happens when we get all of the rewards? The Kuva Lich system as it was promised looked to give us endlessly replayable content in the form of a personalized enemy who'd keep coming back to oppose us, yet what we've been given is a system that is significantly grindier, but also only finite in its replayability, as there doesn't seem to be any reason to partake in the Lich system once all the loot is obtained.

Effectively, I think DE shot themselves in the foot with this Kuva Lich system, and it seems like many other players are of the same opinion. Instead of giving us quality content with long-term replay value, or simply what we were promised in the Empyrean demo, it feels like DE has given us the worst of both worlds, with a system that is both insanely grindy, yet ultimately only capable of providing limited additional play time. It's nice to tell us that the developers are incorporating feedback, but the proposed improvements don't really seem to actually do that, because they're clearly not addressing the core process of grinding a Lich, which is what players dislike. Worse still, they seem to want to encourage giving players duplicate Kuva weapons and pushing us to trade Kuva Liches as part of yet another engineered player economy, which I think is unhelpful at best, and at worst unethical and disrespectful of players' time and efforts. The Kuva Lich system as it exists now isn't just rough around the edges, it is a failure in design, and the fact that it differs so greatly from what was showcased a few months back has made players feel like we've been lied to. If DE wants to truly address player feedback on Kuva Liches, it's not going to be through minor improvements and side features, it's going to have to require an overhaul to how we engage this new enemy.

[Lokidus_Prime]

I really do not like the idea of being able to trade liches only after they have been converted.  This does not solve the issue where you're stuck with a lich that has a duplicate weapon with a bonus lower than all the others and there is absolutely no benefit whatsoever in wasting the time and resources to fight it.  I get that these liches are supposed to be your nemesis or whatever and not easily disposed of/traded away, but wasting mod charges to convert a lich to trade it away seems extremely counter-productive.  If converted liches remain the only way to trade them and if players are to be invested in them long-term, DE really needs beef up the rewards for successful Lich hunts to make the grind worthwhile regardless of what weapon/ephemera they have.  A handful of Kuva Weapons and Ephemeras alone are not rewarding enough considering the amount of grind and multiple layers of RNG one has to go through to defeat a Lich.  At the VERY least it should reward a good amount of kuva and forma, given the 65 or so you'd need just to rank all the kuva weapons for mastery.

[(PSN)TONI__RIBEIRO]

9 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!

Called it 🤓

[tomrair]

Well it's good to hear about those changes, but all that doesn't do anything to adress the fundamental flaw of the Lich system, and the reason why so many veterans are so disappointed: Instead of creating a system that at least tries to do a bit of in-game storytelling, DE has instead opted for a very "game-y", even arcade-like system that is just "kill x enemy units of type y to collect resource z". Why on earth didn't you integrate different mission types into the Lich system? Getting hints on your Lich from Spy, Capture and Rescue mission would've made perfect sense. You also could have made thralls into bosses that the players would take down in Assassination missions. But no, it's just another grindfest.

Hunting down the thralls for murmur is basically just like driving Pac-Man through the maze to get all the dots.

It's a game mechanic from 1980, not 2019. Using it means falling behind all the developements im game design that have been achieved since, and if Warframe goes any further into this Arcade direction, the game will die, since that would basically mean giving up on engaging the players' imagination.

[Circle_of_Psi]

3 hours ago, Sliv said:

Nice to see the liches getting some love !

The suggestion I would like to make isn't related to them, but to the valence transfert.
The valence transfert helps us keep our progression on this or that weapon, which is a problem far older than the kuva weapons. Whenever a new variant of a weapon/warframe/sentinel (prime, wraith, vandal, prisma, ...) arrive in the game, those of us who have invested ressources and time (potatoes, formas, exilus adapter, ...) in this item are given the choice to either ignore the new variant or start from scratch. And if you do reinvest ressources in this item, you end up with a downgraded version in your inventory that you don't know what to do with.
Here is my collection (missing a bunch of deleted items) :

My suggestion is to allow formas/potatoes/exilus... transfert to the new variant by sacrificing the old item.

Edit : That oooor giving base weapons their own riven disposition so they stay relevant, like for kuva weapons.

This

Steve please add this

[Circle_of_Psi]

Also how does the Trading work, if you are an Solo-Clan User?