Extensive Lich Feedback

[(XBOX)Synthet1c Angel]

The Old Blood update dropped fairly recently over on the Xbox One and the things I'm bringing up here are things I did not see mentioned in the 26.0.8 update notes. I'd like to talk a little about my experience with the Lich system and ways that I think it could be wholesomely improved for the better. I'll be sure to header each important part of the topic so you know when I'm talking about a different aspect.

Pre-post edit: This one really got away from me, I didn't think it'd be so big. As such I've included this quick reference table of contents in case you wish to find a specific part as well as a TL;DR at the bottom.

Table of Contents

1: Murmurs

1.1: Grind.

1.2: Why is Grinding Bad?

1.3: How do we improve this?

1.4: Why improve this?

2: Liches themselves

2.1: Character and Personality.

2.2: Tithes and Starchart control

2.3: Leveling and bullet sponges.

 

 

1. Murmurs

Requiem murmurs are a fascinating concept, the idea that a Lich's own underlings are the source of their downfall is neat, however the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. For a start, let's discuss the grind associated with murmurs before delving deeper into the system.

 

1.1: Grind.

The current system for Murmurs requires a player to kill a total of 40 thralls to learn their first requiem. The next requiem requires a total of 65 kills, and the third requires 90 kills. These are not cumulative, and the 40 kills for the first requiem do not contribute to the 65 for the second. This means you need to "mercy" stab 195 thralls in order to learn all three requiem mods. The cap for thrall spawns in a mission is (Approximately) 15 but on average, you're likely to see around 8 to 10 depending on the mission type and how quickly you blow through it. Being generous and assuming 10 thralls per mission, that's on average 19.5 (we'll round it to 20) missions you need to run in order to learn all 3 requiem mods. Of course, this isn't actually the case, as many of the nodes owned by your Lich will in fact be "endless" mission types, and these are terrible for thrall spawns as they're treated much like sortie or syndicate missions, in which the mission is not endless. In defense missions you have 5 total waves, and you're at the mercy of RNG to spawn you thralls which in my experience, has to led to one, and rarely two thralls per wave. Interception has a single round, and in the last interception I ran, 3 thralls spawned for the entire round.

It is also possible to gain requiem murmurs by testing requiem mods on your Lich. This actually grants 10 murmurs per use of the requiem mod and thankfully doesn't expend the charge on the mod. However, each failed attempt to kill your Lich, will cause them to level up, possibly granting them new resistances or immunity as well as giving them control over more of your star chart and giving them a large health and armor boost.

 

1.2: So why is grinding bad?

Warframe is a game full of grind and that's totally fine, it's how the game is meant to be, so you may be wondering why needing to run 20 or so missions is a bad thing, considering you ran 30+ Oxium farms for your Vauban Prime or something. Well, here is why. When compared to many of the other grind related tasks in the game, the Lich system is a system that DE intends for players to keep interacting with. This is made obvious by the fact the Kuva weapons have random stats, can be transferred into one another, the ephemeras that drop from Liches on rare occassion. Kuva Liches are, in essence, another resource for players to farm. Now I understand that it would be a pretty boring system if players could just spawn and kill several Liches in a single day (Some do, but more on that later.) However, given how many layers of the Lich system are locked behind a heavy grind, I feel a few improvements are in order. Currently on top of murmurs the Lich system requires players to grind Kuva siphons/floods to get requiem relics, it then requires the player to grind requiem relics to get the mods they need as well as requiring them to actually grind their own lich to figure out the correct order. This level of grind is acceptable to me when it only has to be done once (Like building Vauban Prime), but when it is a system you're intended to interact with repeatedly, it becomes incredibly tedious quickly.

 

1.3: How do we improve the system without turning it on its head?

I have a few ideas for how to improve the murmur system to make it more engaging, not necessarily less of a grind, but a more worthwhile grind. I'll expand on each idea below the TL;DR list.

• Make the murmur system cumulative.
• Have Thrall Spawns be more prevalent.
• Have Lich territory mission rewards contribute towards murmurs.
• Leave murmurs as they are but have them tell you the correct order.

A: Make the system cumulative.

This one is rather self explanatory. Simply change the setting so that the 40 murmurs required for the first murmur, contribute towards the second and so on. Then the required murmur total would be 95. I'd be fine with the requirement being extended a little to say 120 (40 per) to make sure players aren't blowing through the content too quickly. But even 95 kills is quite a lot.

B. Have thrall spawns be more prevalent.

Again, very self explanatory, Thralls could do with having their spawn rates increased, especially on endless mission variants.

C. Have Lich territory missions contribute towards rumors.

Most mission types do not change when a Lich takes control of a node, so why can mission rewards not reflect the fact that you're doing it to fight your Lich. I mean, you're stealing valuable data in Spy and Mobile defense missions. You've got operatives raiding the ship for information and supplies in survival missions. You're defending an important asset in defense missions. It makes a bit of sense to me that I risked my neck hacking important consoles or defending a vulnerable operative/data store in my Liches territory in order to learn information about them and their weaknesses (Aka murmurs).

D. Have murmurs tell you the correct order.

Not a complicated idea to figure out, but given that you have to kill 195 thralls to gain information on which requiem mods to use, such a grind could at least be justified if I didn't then HAVE to play requiem whackamole with my lich for several missions.

 

1.4: Why improve the system?

Beyond the obvious answer of "To make it more fun and engaging." currently half of the system is ignored by the hardcore players. It's more efficient to collect all 8 requiem mods then to simply "brute force" your Lich. Someone much smarter than I am did the math and worked out it takes an average of about 19 attempts to brute force a Lich, and the actual attempts take like 2 to 3 minutes as opposed to an entire mission length. With brute forcing the combination being so effective, why bother engaging with murmurs at all? This is why the murmur system needs to be changed. I do not want brute forcing the combo to be nerfed, I think if players want to do that they should be able to. But for those who actually want to take out a Lich in the intended fashion, the murmur system needs to be changed.

 

2. The Liches Themselves.

Liches are a brilliant idea, on paper; the Grineer queen(s) using their magic voodoo juice to create functionally immortal soldiers designed to hunt you down is a really intimidating sounding idea. Generally the Liches are kind of lacking in personality and character, and I tend to find myself viewing them as little more than their weapon and the elemental boost. Beyond that they're simply an annoyance. The system is not particularly fun to interact with, and I've had my second lich sitting on the level 1 back burner, simply being ignored for days because I can't bring myself to repeat the days of grinding it took to kill the first one.

 

2.1: Character

Now, I'm not sure if the experience is the same for everyone but I believe Liches only really have two personality settings. That is "Male and Dumb" or "Female and Smart." which makes sense within Grineer lore, look it up. However, I read on the wiki that there is an entire quirk system that can have minor influences over how your Lich behaves, as well as giving them new dialogue. The reason I had to read about that on the wiki is because after several Liches I still hadn't encountered a quirk in any of them. My first Lich was a female who was very intelligent and spoke a bit like a robot, in very short terms. "Think. Adversary. Fathom me. Find me." etc. My second Lich was a female who was very intelligent and spoke a bit like a robot. Aka EXACTLY the same. I basically just got my first Lich again, but with a new element, gun and set of armor. To improve upon this I'd suggest making the quirks a little more active in their spawn rates, and while I know voice actors are expensive and time consuming, having more than one voice and default personality type for each gender of Lich would help too.

 

2.2: Tithes and Star Chart Control.

I'm not one of those people who is going to come and complain about the tithe system and having my resources stolen by the Lich, I don't mind it, in fact I look at it like the old "Saving money with mom." feature from the Gold and Silver pokemon games. The Lich stealing my resources is an investment in my future since I get them all back when I kill the Lich. That said I think we need to discuss the way tithes are handled and how the Liches take over the star chart in the first place. For a start, the Liches just instantly take over entire chunks of planets and if I'm not mistaken they tax anything you do on any node of that planet, even if the node isn't directly under their control. If your Lich levels up they just add new planets to their collection instantly and they never take them back again. I think there are a few improvements we could make to this system as well.

• Liches only tax nodes directly under their control.
• Liches gain control of planets and starcharts in a slower, creeping fashion.
• Liches moving into new planets generate invasion style crossfire missions.

A. Liches only tax nodes directly under their control.

This may already be the case but in the limited experiences I've had it certainly didn't seem that way. It seems as though even if the Lich holds a single node, the entire planet is still taxed on mission completion. Given that liches can steal your sortie rewards and other valuables, this means you need to clear the ENTIRE planet of Lich influence, instead of just the node, and that's a lot of extra effort for one thing.

B. Liches gain control of the starchart in a slower, creeping fashion.

I feel that instead of simply having the Lich take over planets and nodes instantly and then not taking any more until they level up, it would be far more interesting and engaging if the Lich built up progress towards taking hold of new locations over time. This would need to be designed in a way that the progress meter only built while the player was online, so as to avoid the frustration of leaving the game only to come back to 90% of your star chart being taken. It could be implemented as such.

1. Player completes mission anywhere in the system
2. Progress Bar fills by X%
3. Player completes Occupied territory mission.
4. Progress Bar fills by XX%
5. Player clears last occupied node on planet.
6. Progress bar fills by XXX%

The amount of progress gained is determined by the level of the Lich and the amount of territory they own with higher level Liches gaining more territory faster the less they have, and slower the more they have. For example.

Lich level 1 + 7 nodes owned/1 planet = 2% progress on mission completion anywhere in the system, 20% progress on occupied mission and 100% progress on final occupied node clearance.

Where as a higher level lich with more influence would progress as such.

Lich level 4 + 25 nodes owned/4 planets = 1% progress mission completion anywhere in the system, 10% progress occupied mission nodes, 35% progress Final occupied node on a planet.

A higher level Lich with fewer nodes will progress faster, this means a levelled up Lich is utilizing more of the resources available to them to take over planets faster. Naturally there would be a point at which the progress bar would cap out, the Lich being unable to maintain any more control over territory (Preventing them from holding the entire star chart) and the bar would only uncap after nodes had been cleared.

C. Liches moving into planets generates crossfire style missions.

I feel like the Lich system would be even more engaging if, utilizing the system I posed above, when a Lich was making a territory grab on a new planet, the invasion window could offer up a new set of time limited missions that function similarly to the infested outbreak missions. Say for example your Lich invades pluto, a corpus owned planet. The corpus reach out to you and offer to pay you to help clean up the mess you've made. Once active the missions are time sensitive, and will expire after 1 hour. Running these missions could provide unique rewards such as parts for new corpus weapons/variants developed to counter the threat of the Liches that you've unleashed upon the system or even murmur progress as the corpus share information they've gathered on the Lich, as well as some of the usual invasion rewards. "But hold up!" I hear you cry, "what if the Lich takes over territory on a Grineer planet?" well, that's simple. The Corpus are constantly trying to take territory away from the Grineer and vice versa. A Lich moving into a system comes with things like the changing of personnel, movement of supplies and so forth. Seeing this as an opportunity the Corpus launch a strike against the system attempting to exploit the vulnerabilities for their own personal gain.

 

2.3: Leveling.

Finally I'd like to discuss the leveling system currently in place for Liches. I feel as though the current system is counter intuitive to the way in which liches are designed. Players are actively dis-incentivized to interact with their Lich until they've learned the necessary requiem mods as a Lich leveling up turns them into a bullet sponge (With levels 5s having potential to be on par with the Wolf of Saturn 6 Pre nerf) or simply not at all. Currently the Lich levels up by killing you in combat, one kill equals one level. Why is that bad? Well your Lich is going to start visiting you in missions pretty often once you make them angry and once they're visiting you a lot, you're going to be forced to deal with them at one point or another. A failed Lich encounter ensures that you're going to have a harder time with the next encounter as well as have more of your star chart tithed. This problem could be quite easily solved by having each level for the Lich require more interaction with you, giving them an XP bar and having them gain a little XP from fighting you in a mission even if you run away, or a lot of XP when they kill you. This would serve to stop Liches from quickly spiralling up to level 5 where they become a nightmare for all but the most advanced players to deal with. The gains made to health and armor could stand to be ever so slightly nerfed, so as to prevent the Lich from becoming a bullet sponge or impossible to deal with for lower level players who haven't invested loads of resources into weapons and builds.

For context, my first Lich kill was against a level 5 Lich. I attempted to use my standard mission running kit and had no luck. I was in the end pushed to use an Eidolon Hunter Chroma (957) with a Tigris Prime built specifically for the Liches weaknesses, and I STILL had a fair bit of trouble getting through her health bars. Up until level 4, my Acceltra (6 forma, built for end game content) was working fine; I dread to think what it must be like for players who haven't invested as much time or forma into their weapons or frames.

 

TL;DR

Liches are fun but murmurs are way too grind heavy and the whole system feels underutilized. It could do with some subtle improvements as could the Lich system on the whole. It could all do with being just a little more fun and engaging of a system.

Edited December 2, 2019 by (XB1)Synthet1c Angel
General grammar corrections.

[(PSN)Firedragooner]

Hi,

Adding some thoughts. Probably nothing new in terms of feedback and ideas etc. Like the idea of the lich yet needs improvements and to be close monitored. Some points which after this short time felt a bit odd:

-> Nemesis? Serious? They way to short lived to be a Nemesis. First Lich was down after less then 6 hours play. Immortal enemy to hunt us down? Don't make us laugh, they sitting on their planet, maybe even one that isn't of any interest in the late game. (Three Liches just expanded when they levelled, correct me if they expand also just ignoring them)

To redeem on this, like a Shadow Stalker they should actively hunt you also on other nodes even maybe in presence of some high Grineer as soon they fuming or enraged.

-> Difference between, careful cleaning nodes for murmures or just stapping after first Mod is revealed. The first is just the slower version compared to the second quicker approach.

There shall be a difference. Like if you clean nodes, avoiding hand to hand combat, the Lich may not level up. A week later they come back with 'another sector aquired. Like this it would take a bit more of time. And feels less odd as an enemy, which expanse even facing 'sector' defeats. Maybe it is not technical possible to have a two way approach, either you take it slow and the Lich stays under the radar (in addition of the comment below) or you challenge, loose the hand to hand combat, the Lich gains power, expans the day after and mocks you. DE please (even in regards of political correctness etc) be a bit more mean with the threats of the liches. As for now they either funny or cute, but from a so called bad ass Imperium immortal old blood filled Meat pack, i awaited more of them in terms of 'threats'. 

-> To my fellow Tennos. Death in games? Com'on. Die, respawn, sleep and repeat. XD

Yet this mechanic with getting downed without a good visual/any reason feels odd.

Would it not be more coherent that our immortal returning nemesis could be taken down (all three healh bars) and simply 'die'. So during the mission we progress just with higher lvl enemies. Back at the orbiter a nice ' I m still alive' message from the nemesis will be there. Then the lich should level, learning out of the mistake in addition of a nice dose of Kuva. Which is more appropriated for the description of them (for my understanding). In addition the negative feedback of the parazon, not able to provide the 'coup the grace’ shall give the player regardless of murmures one complete reveal. It is quite boring to accumulate murmures and this might accelerate it without giving the sensation of ->Get in, stap, die, respawn and repeat.

-> The weapons and powers

With the idea above. They way to rigid and unflexible to fight an adversary (Tenno) with so many options and flexibility. And if we talk of a Nemesis, it isn't just a day job. So why not adding the possibility of growth and armament changes. So that all Lich will (if killed) drop his weapon and changes powers and weapon for a future confrontation. Yes, means one Lich should drop three different weapons and as for now it is easy to categorize them.

Let's be serious, after the first fight the Brakk or the Hammer proves useless against fast moving Tennos (Titania and a close combat Lich? guess enough said), then next time the Lich should come with something more powerful, rather sticking to ineffectiveness.

 

This said, there may be some other adds and maybe it is already on track in the DE machinery, next to a future (PS4) update, new Prime. Maybe it isn't simply technical possible or another reason.

Now for us the players: If you came that far in the Game to can have a Lich, then the mechanic will be not really a challenge since you should have enough loadouts or already one kick-ass build in addition to Clan members (pros, veterans etc) which can help you. If your solo then you know how to handle yourself.  And one other fact is already given and be stated multiple times (which i aligne) -> Just ignore, pay the tax and laugh at the silly threats. The tax system isn't a game breaker.

[Ham_Grenabe]

All great ideas. The one thing I would love, more than anything, is for us to get either requiem or murmur information from missions where you're gathering secrets from the enemy: spy missions, interceptions, captures, even mobile defenses. It doesn't have to be a guaranteed "murmur drop" from every vault, but even a chance to drop say, the equivalent of 10 or 20 murmurs or getting you the correct placement of one reqiuem mod would be a) great from a QoL standpoint and b) great from a "this makes sense" standpoint.

 

Edited December 2, 2019 by Ham_Grenabe

[Argenex]

Personally, the worst part of the liches is the fact that the requiem mods are hidden within relics. Enjoy doing 10 runs of radshares and only seeing COMMON drops every goddamned time.

So now you're forced to grind void traces in a different method (probably not obtaining any rewards you care about, because you need the traces to rad the stupid requiem relics) Then do radshares hoping you get the mod you NEED.

At no point is any of that fun and frankly a needless grind-gate.

Oh and the constant duplicate weapon liches, also isn't fun. Out of 8 liches for me 4 have been duplicates. 50% of the time I am getting gipped and sucked into being forced to get rid of a lich I have no need nor want of.

Edited December 4, 2019 by Argenex

[(XBOX)Synthet1c Angel]

2 hours ago, Argenex said:

Personally, the worst part of the liches is the fact that the requiem mods are hidden within relics. Enjoy doing 10 runs of radshares and only seeing COMMON drops every goddamned time.

So now you're forced to grind void traces in a different method (probably not obtaining any rewards you care about, because you need the traces to rad the stupid requiem relics) Then do radshares hoping you get the mod you NEED.

At no point is any of that fun and frankly a needless grind-gate.

Oh and the constant duplicate weapon liches, also isn't fun. Out of 8 liches for me 4 have been duplicates. 50% of the time I am getting gipped and sucked into being forced to get rid of a lich I have no need nor want of.

The radiant relic grind isn't the most fun by any means. Duplicate weapons were addressed in the 26.0.8 update however. A new lich is now guarenteed not to spawn with a weapon the most recent lich had. 

[Argenex]

Yea, but out of 8 liches, 4 in a row are weapons I already have...

 

This is why I have said for years this and DE has never listened: SHUFFLE BAG.

[(XBOX)Synthet1c Angel]

1 hour ago, Argenex said:

Yea, but out of 8 liches, 4 in a row are weapons I already have...

 

This is why I have said for years this and DE has never listened: SHUFFLE BAG.

I mean, it's bad luck but that is the nature of RNG. The system isn't weighted towards any particular weapon type and the more of the weapons you get the more repeats you're going to see. 

[Argenex]

50% is terrible. A shufflebag system would eliminate that issue and not make players never do liches ever again, which many have firmly stated.

It would also lesson the burdon of the stupidly in-depth grind that exists.

 

Here's the real question;

Do you want your players to be rewarded for playing your game, or do you want to torture them with repetitive boredom so that they don't want to play your game?

Is the goal of warframe to have fun, or "just keep people busy"?

 

I personally am having a hard time locating where the fun actually is at this point.

[(PSN)yokai1235]

the murmurs are justhints you don't need them to kill the lich what would be Betteris to give a chance to get radiant requien relics and remove the unnecessary step of killingthe kuva larve with mercy kills it makes is harder to get the lich and underminds the entire idea of the grineer creating a nemesis that can kill you 

[Ham_Grenabe]

So you'd propose instead stabbing the lich up to 19 times to see what works by random guess? I dunno. I prefer to gather information so that I have some inkling of which 3 mods to use. I just want to gather that information from the things that, according to the game, contain lots of interesting information (like spy vaults and such), rather than killing 100+ enemies, 5 at a time. 

[(PSN)Bailiwick]

i really agree with the OP on this one, although if we had some influence over the weapons that dropped like, 'oh u killed an enemy with this weapon type before parazon? cool they'll just have an even better version of that'. so grenade kill? kuva tonkor, sniper kill? Chakurr and so on, if the reward is the weapon than we need to be aware of what weapon they have before we start the hunt OR have an influence over it altogether. if thats the real 'reward' we get for all the work(and Ephemera of course) then why cant we pick it?