Dev Workshop - Kuva Lich Changes Coming Soon™ PART 2

[[DE]Rebecca 184,050]

Lich 1.1: Dev Workshop + ETA:
 

Tenno!

Welcome to a 3-part workshop covering Kuva Lich changes. We have already talked about changes in 2 major batches: At the end of 2019 both in our Devstreams and our initial Dev Workshop on November 11th, and at the start of 2020 on our first Stream of the year. This workshop aims to better summarize the on-couch thoughts into what’s being implemented and why.
 

The 3 parts are as follows:
1. ETA
2. Can / Can’t Expect
3. Bigger Picture. 

Part 1: ETA!

First and foremost - we were going to ship these changes today but are giving ourselves until next week for more testing. Expect this next week on PC… and maybe even PS4 + XB1 (with Switch soon)! 

Part 2: What you can and can’t expect!

You can expect: 

2020 Kuvision

The birth of the very first Kuva Lich came just over 3 months ago to the day (October 31 2019)! A copious amount of Additions, Changes, and Fixes have been made in these 3 months; each one of them touching the surface of feedback, but not fully reaching all the way into the depths. Today, that changes! 

If you watched Devstream #136, the 2019 Player Survey showed us that out of the 27,000+ responses, the Kuva Lich system was the 2019 addition that was enjoyed the least. Many players voiced that the Kuva Lich system got progressively less fun the more time and energy was devoted to it. While finding the line between repetition and progress is one Warframe has struggled with since its first day, Liches highlighted some issues we aim to address while walking that line.

The Kuva Larvling Who Lived

Starting from the very beginning of Kuva Lich conception brings us to Kuva Larvlings. Kuva Larvlings will now play a key role in determining your future relationship with your Kuva Lich.

• A downed Kuva Larvling will now display an icon of the Kuva weapon that its birthed Kuva Lich will possess!
  • This allows players to decide upfront if they want to pursue that weapon by finishing the downed Kuva Larvling, or to ignore and attempt another Lich.

Spoiler

As an added benefit to completing the mission even if you choose NOT to kill the Kuva Larvling, a downed Kuva Larvling will grant 100 Kuva on End of Mission.

 

Breaking Your Back for Knowledge

• Your Kuva Lich will no longer kill you when you fail a Requiem guess, nor will they attempt to break your back. The Parazon stabbing animation will play but the UI will show whether it was a success or failure. Upon receiving a Requiem fail, your Kuva Lich will laugh at you and leave, leaving your back and dignity intact! There is no longer a failure loop here for the Requiem flow. 

Valence Transfer Infusion

• First introduced in 26.0.6, Valence Transfer was designed to address owning duplicate Kuva weapons with different unique innate damage bonuses. Giving you the ability to replace a Kuva weapon’s innate damage bonus (plus investments like Forma, Focus Lens etc) with one from another Kuva weapon was a good start, but we can push this even further!
  
  Valence Transfer now also boosts your Kuva weapons innate damage bonus. Examples:
• Your Kuva Kohm with 25% damage can be infused into your 40% weapon, to make it 44%

• Your Kuva Kohm with 40% damage can be infused into your 25% weapon, to make it 44%

• Your Kuva Kohm with 25% damage can be infused into your 44% weapon, to make it 48.4%

Your Kuva weapon duplicates now offer a gradual progression towards a “perfect” Kuva weapon, which would reflect a 60% damage value, if you choose to pursue this path.

Other Changes you can expect:

• You can expect the Chance of a Lich having an Ephemera to double. 
• Converted Liches will stay longer, do more damage, and actually use their abilities! 
• 2 more Weapons entering the Kuva Fold!

What you can’t expect is the ‘Lich be-gone’: We have removed the prototype for this for now, because rather than not fixing the core loop and just letting a Lich be banished, we intend to focus on the core loop first. Since duplicates are now opt-in and have value for a min-maxer, there’s less of a reason to dispel a Lich. 

Part 3: Bigger Picture Items

The major questions remaining to be answered include Kuva Lich + Railjack, and other faction Liches. Until we complete Part 2 of this workshop, we won’t have much to discuss on this front, but stay tuned! 

Thank you for reading - see you soon, Tenno!
 

[Bryuf 457]

Sounds really great! I especially like that you didn't decide to add the so-called 'lich-be-gone' as it really undermines the whole process and shouldn't be needed if the rest of the loop is good. I'm also happy that the back breaking is over, that was one of the most tedious aspects in my opinion, although the animations were pretty cool tho.

I'm excited to see what new weapons are in store!

Edited January 29, 2020 by Bryuf

[Abraxas 334]

C'mon, guys. Please, do something about grinding murmurs. It gets old after managing to do the first Lich...

Also, the forma sink and forced repetition to level the weapon to the max is a bit too much.

 

Sorry for the negativity. I was just hoping that these two aspects wouldn't get ignored...

[Drachnyn 7,333]

Very good and necessary improvements for the core lich loop, we will have to wait for their integration into their game so they arent just a very distant island.

vor 19 Minuten schrieb [DE]Rebecca:

You can expect the Chance of a Lich having an Ephemera to double.

An improvement sure but still RNG, when the initial goal for ephemeras wanted to have them achievement based.

Also:

Currently killing thralls outside of your own lich nodes does not give you lich aggro, which makes Lich hunting with friends a lot slower. Can we get that changed so liches get angrier outside their own nodes and can also show up?

Edited January 29, 2020 by Drachnyn

[Above 1,260]

Thanks DE

Edited January 29, 2020 by --Q--Above

[Frost_King 367]

These look lovely, with railjack I figured the lich thing would be left behind.  One thing I would like to see is more random personality's/voices than the really smart female and the goofy male.  So, I'd like that, maybe people around the office can compose their own random lich personality and voice it?  Get it all wibbly wobbly modulated.  It would make each lich seem more, unique.

[enemystand 391]

Quote

Valence Transfer Infusion

• First introduced in 26.0.6, Valence Transfer was designed to address owning duplicate Kuva weapons with different unique innate damage bonuses. Giving you the ability to replace a Kuva weapon’s innate damage bonus (plus investments like Forma, Focus Lens etc) with one from another Kuva weapon was a good start, but we can push this even further!
  
  Valence Transfer now also boosts your Kuva weapons innate damage bonus. Examples:
• Your Kuva Kohm with 25% damage can be infused into your 40% weapon, to make it 44%

• Your Kuva Kohm with 40% damage can be infused into your 25% weapon, to make it 44%

• Your Kuva Kohm with 25% damage can be infused into your 44% weapon, to make it 48.4%

Your Kuva weapon duplicates now offer a gradual progression towards a “perfect” Kuva weapon, which would reflect a 60% damage value, if you choose to pursue this path.

thanks, i was waiting for this

[D1videdByZer0 298]

There are still some major issues with Liches not dying EVEN after killing them with all 3 correct verses. This bug is for me and many other people that were (or currently are) afflicted by it a major hurdle and needs some serious addressing.

Besides that it would be nice to be able to farm murmurs indirectly, without special Kuva missions... such as there being a much lower chance each mission for a Thrall to appear (maybe at a rate of 1 every two regular Grineer missions), or to have some sort of rare item pickup that adds murmurs (and can thus also drop from Corpus and Infested).

[(XBOX)Skippy575 4,386]

Seeing what weapon the larvling will have before you create the lich is a good start, but the murmur grind and the 5 forma for complete mastery needs addressed. Please don't forget to look into that.

[Godzilla853 793]

what about the 5 forma per weapon for all of the kuva weapons that seems a bit extreme when they do not get a buff like the paracesis. Maybe make them do extra damage to grineer with with each forma we put in. 

[Arkennstar 493]

I think these are all very good steps in the right direction.

Although despite the fact that this might be an unpopular opinion, I rather enjoyed the fact that the lich could kick your ass if you got the sequence or mod wrong. All that needed to be done was remove the death from it. Please leave the "back break and toss aside" move. As was rightly stated in the devstream that announced the lich system, we tenno could use some ass kicking once in a while. We're too powerful and undefeated for our own good. Just dying to it was just a step too far and needs to be removed.

[Morisabeau 262]

Now IMAGINE faces of those who were buying 60% kuva weapons for over 2k plat. HAHAHA

[(PSN)LoneWolf_001 179]

I like all the above!

However, are you planning on adding more damage types to the RNG? Impact and Magnetic are kinda sad "bonuses." I'd also be up for a random gimmick to make them a bit more unique.

I look forward to the update.

[DrLego 115]

This is crazy! The ability to see what weapon a larvling will have when converted!?! Actual progress on kuva weapons!?!!? 2 MORE KUVA WEAPONS!?!?!?!?!?!

I love what I have read.

[LuckyCharm 3,603]

Hmm, its still. No from me. The grinding for rng based cards over and over from the relics already has soured it for me, and its still grind, on grind, on grind. Im not seeing anything to fix that part that has me and probably a lot of others turned off

[GrowthProfitGrofit 175]

These sound like great changes to improve the experience for the more normal players!

One major change I would suggest (as someone who has already done the grind extensively) is a way to pull back the extreme end of single-lich loop. Personally I think it's all fine and good when you take 1-2 hours to kill a lich but sometimes it instead takes 3+ hours due to getting terrible luck.

One additional issue is that liches still don't tie into Railjack in any meaningful way.

My suggestion for improving both of these factors would be to add a Kuva Lich node in Railjack which is only accessible once you have 2 complete mod reveals or a level 5 lich. This node would have a guaranteed lich spawn for all players and increased murmur gain on completion.

Edited January 29, 2020 by GrowthProfitGrofit

[Ham_Grenabe 3,144]

Welp. I've been ignoring my current lich in eager anticipation of Lich-be-Gone, so that's a massive let-down.

The other parts are indisputably great. But, sigh...my current lich is a Kuva Kraken lich, and that gun is exquisitely lousy. Bleh.

EDIT: Can I suggest one additional feature (no, it's not Ditch Your Lich)? Can you let us destroy converted liches from the profile screen? Sometimes I neither want the gun nor the random lich (actually, I never want the random buddy lich, I just didn't want to waste weapon slots on killing the lich and then deleting their gun); can we just perma-delete them?

 

Edited January 29, 2020 by Ham_Grenabe

[(NSW)lord-yharim 23]

The only thing I’m going to say about this is 

 

 

YES

[TARINunit9 10,508]

15 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

The Kuva Larvling Who Lived

Starting from the very beginning of Kuva Lich conception brings us to Kuva Larvlings. Kuva Larvlings will now play a key role in determining your future relationship with your Kuva Lich.

• A downed Kuva Larvling will now display an icon of the Kuva weapon that its birthed Kuva Lich will possess!
  • This allows players to decide upfront if they want to pursue that weapon by finishing the downed Kuva Larvling, or to ignore and attempt another Lich.

  Hide contents

As an added benefit to completing the mission even if you choose NOT to kill the Kuva Larvling, a downed Kuva Larvling will grant 100 Kuva on End of Mission.

I like the changes in general, but wouldn't a more elegant solution (for us, probably not for you) be to have the Larvling wielding the weapon they will use as a Lich? As in, the Larvling spawns with the Shildeg in her hand trying to kill you with it, and if you turn that Larvling into a Lich that Lich will have the Kuva Shildeg

[DeLawrence 141]

I have a quick suggestion that I think could be implemented until next week. Have Kuva Lich death squads of 5-10 thralls spawn in normal missions/activities/fissures etc.

As long as you opted in to have a Lich, you should expect it to be annoying you, either by itself or by sending its minions after you. There's no point in "farming" Liches...they should be integrated into the game, as the custom enemy you envisioned.

[Madway7 3,230]

Perfect series of changes, hope it gets in without any random exceptions

 

Edit: Think I jumped the gun calling it "perfect", it's just with DE's shortcomings over the last couple of months this came off as a breath of fresh air (assuming there are no weird exceptions when it gets implemented)

Personally I don't dislike the murmur progress, yes, it's slow (and based on RNG to go faster), yes, it's boring (which would imply it needs a better gameplay loop ie, more work). But this at least fixes the main issue I had with Liches, which was that the gameplay loop revolved around an RNG fest, with this, it still would, but at least it would have rewarding side to it.

With the opt into a weapon you'd have a soft farm for the weapons rather than passing a really bad RNG gate you're stuck with for about 3 hours 

With the valence transfer change you can always work towards getting a higher bonus % rather than purely relying on RNG to get a higher one

And with the ephemera RNG boost, you're more likely to be able to complete your collection

 

Although I still wonder 2 things

1. What is the math behind the valence infusions?

2. Does it still overwrite the element with every transfer or is that optional?

Edited January 30, 2020 by Madway7

[(PSN)corpusbonds 972]

Well I’m excited. 

[Gaikki 172]

Wh-what? So I don't get punished for guessing wrong? Where's the frustration and fun in that? 

[Ham_Grenabe 3,144]

1 minute ago, TARINunit9 said:

I like the changes in general, but wouldn't a more elegant solution (for us, probably not for you) be to have the Larvling wielding the weapon they will use as a Lich? As in, the Larvling spawns with the Shildeg in her hand trying to kill you with it, and if you turn that Larvling into a Lich that Lich will have the Kuva Shildeg

More immersive, but their method is probably much less prone to mistakes and inevitable "but I didn't mean to get that gun!"

[JordieBG 44]

Will we also see the avaliable ephemera a lich has next to the weapon icon?