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Dev Workshop - Kuva Lich Changes Coming Soon™ PART 2


[DE]Rebecca

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These proposed changes are a step in right direction but more is needed to integrate lichs into the game!  Please add the following:

1.) Thrall death squads in regular missions so we do not have to stop progression in main game and play the island of game mode lichs have become.  The lich level can determine the thrall level (so high level mobs in a lith relic possible).  This also encourages coop play as more players in game would have more chance to spawn.  Let's face it, thrall death squads make a lot more since than a syndicate death squad (who we sometimes work for).  

2.) Allow lich to spawn in any mission, the same as stalker.  He says he is the hunter, but he is actually the prey.  Allow lichs to spawn in any mission and wreck havok.  Lochs are isolated from main game, they need to be integrated.  

3.) When lich spawns, please make lich spawn on top of hunter player.  Backtracking the entire mission is not fun and makes playing fast frames more desirable.  

4.) Do something different for converted lichs.  With progressive kuva weapons, less reason to convert the big guys.  If there was a way to customize them and use as specters (resource dump, could be common resource +kuva to build), it would be better.  

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11 hours ago, Pana-bot said:

The punishments you're proposing seem too harsh, I'm gonna speak mainly on losing your weapon, say , you're a more casual player, you have your single, high power gun, you play alone, you miss the sequence, your only weapon gets taken...what now?

You end up with no means of actually dealing with the lich, and sure this maybe isn't a very general issue but nevertheless will affect someone in a negative way.

 

I agree they're too much, but they were just illustrations of what stakes really were. What if when you fail a stab, instead of taking something trivial like a revive, they took something valuable, like your companion? Or stole your Syandana, as a trophy for kicking your butt? Or put the warframe you used out of commission (heck, that could be the moment they tear off the warframe's head and mount it to their armor - you can't even use that warframe until you recover its head and repair it). 

Facing a Lich with 5 warframe heads swinging from its belt might make you hope you got it right this time.

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DE... i had now a 5hour farm again for a extrem bad weapon damage roll of 34%. The crazy thing about it, i was farming for 4hours straight Murmurs WITHOUT that the lich showing up even ONCE ! Which means i had all 3 mods unlockedm, Lich Lv1, without a single hint for the combination, missed 3 combinaitions in a row AND had to fuel the Lich "annoying bar" again for another hour... 5 .... Hours wasted in total... you cant be serious! Its extrem tiring, unrewarding and insanly frustrating, pls for the love of this game, nerf this Murmur grind and ask yourself the most important question again, for any future change, "Is this fun?". 

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Some suggestions on the upcoming changes for this.

1. Instead of showing us what weapons the lich will spawn with when you down a thrall, give us an option to change the lich's weapon instead. In a lore standpoint, it doesn't make sense that the tenno will be able to see the future and know exactly the weapon the thrall would gravitate towards once he/she becomes a lich.

2. Make ephemara's token-based instead of rng based.Let's say you have to kill 5 liches with a cold weapon to get the cold ephemera.

3. Give us the option to retain the element of our current weapon on valence fusion. if my old weapon came with electricity, and the new one came with fire. I think it makes sense that we be able to choose between electricity or fire on the fused weapon if we do valence fusion. That, or allow us to fuse the weapon's elements to get combined elements (e,g corrosive, blast, etc.)

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8 hours ago, Ham_Grenabe said:

Or put the warframe you used out of commission (heck, that could be the moment they tear off the warframe's head and mount it to their armor - you can't even use that warframe until you recover its head and repair it).

No. I disagree with this one.

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9 minutes ago, Stickman949 said:

Think about it, if the lichy were to decomission your warframe, and you want to use it for... i dunno, railjack, how can you get it back when the grind is SUPER DANG LONG.

You don’t. You use something else.

I did think about it. People have mentioned several times that the Lich needs real stakes / needs to be a threat.

But apparently not in any way that is inconvenient or actually threatening. It doesn’t have to be any particular thing, but it should be painful: permanent wound that halves your health, or prevents you from regaining health in a mission, until you kill your Lich and learn the secret to healing it. Shutting down your frame so you have to finish the mission in operator mode. Tearing off a piece - like your Warframe’s arm - so you can’t use two-handed gear, and have to repair the frame to take it out in a mission again. Scrambling your controls. A cold proc that won’t go away. A rad proc you can’t shake  

Liches could be straight up monsters, instead of goofballs. 

 

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3 hours ago, Ham_Grenabe said:

You don’t. You use something else.

I did think about it. People have mentioned several times that the Lich needs real stakes / needs to be a threat.

But apparently not in any way that is inconvenient or actually threatening. It doesn’t have to be any particular thing, but it should be painful: permanent wound that halves your health, or prevents you from regaining health in a mission, until you kill your Lich and learn the secret to healing it. Shutting down your frame so you have to finish the mission in operator mode. Tearing off a piece - like your Warframe’s arm - so you can’t use two-handed gear, and have to repair the frame to take it out in a mission again. Scrambling your controls. A cold proc that won’t go away. A rad proc you can’t shake  

Liches could be straight up monsters, instead of goofballs. 

 

Here's the problem with the discussion, the more you've paid the easier a Lich would therefore become.

If you have one frame partially disabled, then if you paid for another slot you could just switch.  Have a constant debuff, just mod to account for it or choose a frame that synergizes.  Maybe the Lich scrambles your interface, well then you're going to alter your loadout to address this.  The bigger issue is that the jump in Lich levels effectively means they go from challenging to bullet sponges, and if that's the case a permanent disability combined with 2-3 immunities would mean a battle that you couldn't effectively fight without punishing grind.

 

I do appreciate that the Liches right now are less about challenge and more about sponge.  What I would propose is not a reduplication of the Zanuka hunter (if you haven't been caught in a while, that is a similar debuff condition to what you're suggesting that is only a mission long), but something more akin to Raathum.  Each Lich had six specific missions with a priority target mini-boss to slay.  Each mission had a random debuff like the sorties, and would give you one weakness or strength.  This information would allow for Liches to be somewhat mysterious, and to have specialized missions required to learn about them.  Now if you encountered a Lich without any knowledge it'd be a gear check, to try and figure out the elemental damages which worked.  

To maintain the long duration of the content, you'd need grind.  The issue is murmurs currently make that grind transparent and less than fun.  Let's turn the idea on its head with a new NPC and faction.  The faction works like a syndicate, but they require requiem echoes.  The requiem echoes replace void traces as drops for cracking requiem relics, and you can only hold the same amount of them as void traces.  Thralls spawn as a high level target in all missions on the planet under Lich control, and act as a priority target while allowing for Corpus/Infested thralls by virtue of Lich corruption rather than having the Grineer everywhere.  The idea here is that you grind regular relics, and get void traces.  Requiem relics then need to be collected.  You enrich the requiem relics, get both parazon mods and echoes, and trade these in to the syndicate to unlock which mods are required to kill the Lich.

Now that the grind is present, what about the Liches themselves?  Let's maintain the current thralls and random relic drops, but Lich influence can't be removed from a planet.  This becomes an immense inconvenience if a common planet is under their taxes.  The Lich can be hunted on these worlds, but instead of the current Lich kill failure=higher levels you have the Liches drop echoes after being stabbed with the incorrect parazon mod and be resurrected stronger.  The resurrected Lich gains more planets, but instead of more levels the missions to learn about them have higher level enemies.  The goal here is to remove the ability to ignore a Lich, without breaking other aspects of the game.  This would mean that Liches would start at about level 70 with 2 immunities (x0), 2 damage resistances (x0.5), 1 weakness (x1.5), and 1 flaw (x2.0) to make them a challenge to gear balance for and so they have enough durability.

So, what we have is a grind that is capped by collected echoes.  This is capped by requiem relic drops.  This is capped by siphons and RNG drops from thralls.  The reason this is better than our current system is that it allows for brute force attempts, offers challenges to make Liches easier, and makes running requiem relic missions doubly awarding to hide all of the grind.  Those who want the Lich to have a big impact can have their influence spread fast, and have thralls spawning on regular missions acting as a priority target, while public groups get rewarded for killing the thralls by potential requiem relic drops.

 

My proposal makes the Lich something not just a hand wave to solve.  It keeps the grind, but hides it through more integrated rewards and removes the roll of the dice for mod order.  Even more significantly, it bundles all of this up for the other factions such that the syndicate can be used as a tutorial giver and narrative glue to explain why the other faction have access to kuva.  DE gets to meter progress via the siphons and low drop rate of thralls, while increasing play time despite making progression less about guessing.  Players get random challenges, with the recycling of content being acceptable because the thralls become a higher leveled priority target to spice the missions up.  It's thoroughly better, and will never be implemented.

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I'd like to echo the complaints about murmurs/grind winding up on a content island that makes this a solo experience. 

Also, while I feel displaying the larvling's offered weapon type is a great QoL addition, it feels like it'll just become something players will be quit/reloading the same missions over and over and over to get the desired weapon on.  I realize that you don't want the player to necessarily just "pick" the weapon, but a gameplay loop that descends into quit/reload (as with Railjack drops) isn't the most pleasant one.  Better than not having it though.

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I am not talking about the grind. The grind needs to be thoroughly better regardless, but I am talking about the engagement with the Lich itself.

The only memorable thing about a given Lich is that sometimes they have funny names. Might be nice to remember one because you did your training montage and fought your way through to get payback for (insert actually damaging event).

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On 2020-02-03 at 5:15 PM, Grey_Star_Rival_Defender said:

Kuva Lich screen, bottom right corner, TUTORIAL in all caps I think.

Thank since new fixes and quality of life lich related  in i will check it out. I still would insist to have something with more screaming indication for new players. 

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1 hour ago, spicyframe420 said:

Thank since new fixes and quality of life lich related  in i will check it out. I still would insist to have something with more screaming indication for new players. 

The tutorial serves its purpose for how to deal with a lich. As for warning players about creating one, uh, yeah that still needs to be implemented.

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I really liked the changes, definitely an improvement, but there's something that bothers me with how the overall system works, when the Lich System was first introduced, the idea that you guys presented was that the Liches were lasting arch-enemies of the Tenno, an enemy that you would build a connection with, but as it stands right now, the Liches are just cattle, the system incentivises the player to kill as many Liches as possible to earn the rewards, that's kinda counterintuitive with the first premisse of Liches. But how to solve this issue? Well, I have an idea, why a Lich is limited to have only one weapon? Why can't you acquire more than one weapon per Lich? I think that you could get the weapons without killing them permanently, and when you acquire his weapon, he would just switch to another one. 

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On 2020-02-03 at 7:08 PM, Ham_Grenabe said:

But apparently not in any way that is inconvenient or actually threatening.

 

There is a difference and a balance between what can be felt as stakes without wounding the experience of the players. Your suggestions of maiming or destroying the frames are good lore wise, but an absolute hassle as a game mechanic. Take for example the thing of making a fram unable to use 2 handed gear, that means no primaries, dual wield weapons or 2 handed melee, other than a few exceptions that may be too much grind or a plat purchase at this point, single handed weapons that could damage a lich don't really come to mind, but I don't know about all the useful weapon and stuff so I can be wrong.

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2 hours ago, Pana-bot said:

other than a few exceptions that may be too much grind or a plat purchase at this point, single handed weapons that could damage a lich don't really come to mind, but I don't know about all the useful weapon and stuff so I can be wrong.

Kitguns are pretty OP and are all one-handed, "usable" melee weapons would be gunblades, glaives, daggers, rapiers, possibly whips and single swords, maybe even some special animations for using just one weapon from a dual sword.

That said, getting a permanent debuff like losing one of your arms on nothing more than random chance would be a horrible idea.

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To clarify: it's not a permanent debuff (at least, the damaged warframe thing). You finish the mission, run the frame through the foundry, fix the missing arm / missing head / whatever. Frames are biomachines, they can be fixed, and Ordis knows how. But the lich put you there and cost you something real. If it disabled your warframe so you had to finish the mission as an operator, that's a serious punishment. If it rendered you unable to use a two-handed weapon for the rest of the mission, that's a major blow.

Still, on second thought, maybe it would be better if the lich seriously messed up your fashion frame until you killed it. Maybe they steal your syandana and wore it around their neck. Or put an unremovable stripe of garish color on you as a mark, showing they can play with you any time they want. Randomize your colors and you can't fix it until you defeat them. Perhaps cause a clipping issue with weapon grips, or forced you to use the default skin and colors.

In fact, yes. Each of those could be the result of a failed stab. 

People would go beast mode in the pursuit of revenge.

 

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Nice changes thus far, as for additions to Part 3, i'd like to suggest thinking about the following:

1) Add specific Lich Nodes in Railjack

Add a specific node on Earth/Saturn/Veil Railjack missions where your Lich would be 100% of time time (similar mission as the commander bosses on galleons).

The Earth node would be a Lv 1-2 Lich's ship, Saturn node a Lv.3-4 Lich and the Veil node would house the Lv.5 Lich. Also, the thralls that spawn on these nodes would be worth 2-3x more murmer value than a normal missions thralls.

2) Larvlings

Killing a Lich Larvling with a primary weapon would mean that they can only birth with a primary weapon. Killing them with a secondary they could only birth with a secondary weapon and a melee with a melee.

This would help lessen the RNG a slight bit as now that we have even more weapons addded to the possible pools, the same situarion will occour pretty quickly where people will bet bored of farming larvlings running a mission 20-30 times to get a larvling with the specific weapon they are farming to aquire/upgrade.

3) Parazon

A. Hovering over the "Known requirements" says the name of the requiem, can we get this effect on the history list on our mod screen too.

B. If we attempt to kill the Lich, but the mod we have equipped is one of the 3 needed mods, but in the wrong order, give it an indication so that we know it is needed, just in the wrong order. EG: glow yellow = succesful, red = failed, glowing (like peculiar mods) = wrong order.

 

 

 

Also: what happened to Peculiar mods? Wern't we going to get more added into ESO as time went on?

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