Kuva Lich 1.1: Feedback Megathread

[Lazarow]

After playing more of Kuva Lich I wanted to give more feedback and suggestions.

1. When murmur meter is full and all requems are known, unlock an assassination node to fight the lich. And/or playing in a squad raises the annoyance level for all liches not just the player's lich who picked the mission

Current flaw: When farming with a squad for murmurs the annoyance level does not go up for my lich when another player selects a mission. This makes lich anti-squadable as when I do know the requems I have to run mission to get annoyance level up and then there is a good chance the order would be wrong and then I have to waste more time to raise the annoyance level just to try again.

Still balanced: The lich will still come after the player if annoyance level is high and poses a threat during missions on affected nodes.

2. Improve the thrall spawns

Current flaw: I had to run a spy mission twice to get enough thrall kills to have that node rid of lich influence, it is not like I could have sped through the mission as it did take a few minutes to do and thats good enough time for them to spawn. First run I got 2-3 thralls and second run I got 3-5 thralls(lich also spawned so may converted some). My point is that it is not the players fault for the lack is thrall spawning and the player should not be penalized for running the same mission again for something the game is responsible for.

[kapn655321]

I'm getting 1 shot from his grab very often. Can't say that's very enjoyable.

[Neurohax]

After getting all Kuva weapons and repeating a couple to max their damage percentages, Patch 27.2 broke me.

Prior to Patch 27.2, I could casually murmur farm solo, thanks to the abundance of added Exterminate missions. I could hop on, run an Exterminate/Sabotage/Spy/Capture mission and draw it out to the max number of thralls. Most planets (really all but one) could be run without hitting the mission types with defense objectives or timers. Patch 27.2 "reduced the chance of Exterminate missions", which means either grouping up or going full throttle Solo Tryhard Mode is required. And for what? To fuse a 32% Toxin Bramma with the 36% one I have? Woo... 39.6%! Now to repeat the entire process 5 more times! It's borderline tolerable when you can make a little progress over a long time with low effort and moderate fun, but this change makes the process higher effort without a significant reduction in time and (subjectively) less fun.

And there's still no way to walk away from a Lich.

First Lich today post 27.2. I finished the same mission types I would have prior to 27.2 to reach a Requiem reveal, but I'm at half the murmurs needed to get a Requiem revealed. So, I'll wait until it annoys me to the point of actually grinding this weapon out and then never engage with the mechanic again. For now, I guess Phobos is just dead to me.

General Lich QoL suggestions that shouldn't be too difficult to implement and would be hard/expensive to exploit:

• Add Kuva Weapon Upgrade and Kuva Weapon Valence Randomizer items.
  • Can only be applied to level 40 weapons.
  • Can be Cephalon Semaris items, requiring 130,000 standing each.
• Allow Liches to be dispelled with a time or resource penalty.
  • Lock out Kuva Larveling spawning for 3 days or charge 500,000 credits, or both.
  • Justification (story-wise):
    • Set up a situation that angers the queens, like a Sabotage mission with a data mass that sends a false status report, where the data mass is a crafted item.
    • Or ask one of the syndicates for help, requiring max standing and syndicate credits.
    • Or ask Cephalon Semaris for help. He says he can trap the Lich in a special section of the Sanctuary if you synthesize it, he lures the Lich to mission, scan Lich 5 times, buh bye lich with no reward.

Suggestions that would improve casual Lich hunting:

• Completing a node doesn't clear it, but reduces murmur and drops by 50% on subsequent runs.
• Allow the Lich to retake 1 map node per logged in day. Or every 2 days.
  • Only applies to the newest planet.
  • After the Daily Reward you get an "I'll take that! Thank you!" taunt communication and a random clear node returns to Lich controlled status.
• Slightly more involved: Add a craftable Lich Beacon gear item that draws the Lich to another planet the next time you run the mission.
  • Equip beacon -> Enter Normal Mission A -> Deploy beacon (or autodeploy it at spawn) -> Complete Mission A -> "I see you" taunt animation when you get back to the orbiter -> Return to navigation and find the Mission A node is now Lich controlled.
  • Crafting time can be something like 24 hours.

Brainstorming some fun extensions of this:

• Even more involved: Beacon above is deployable in the planetary junction of the controlled planet. Activating the junction console deploys the beacon, causing the Lich to spawn. In my epic version, the Lich taunts you (little animation window thingy) then teleports into the specter's area. The force field separating the player and the specter area doesn't drop, so the player is safe. Lich attempts to attack the force field, then taunts you when it fails. "Maybe you need a demonstration... on your friend here!" The specter stands up, starts glowing and getting all particle-effects-y, and finally launches itself into the Lich (ala Neo at the end of The Matrix), big sparkly explosion, no more Lich.
  • Orrr... big sparkly ball around Lich collapses to reveal the original Kuva Larveling.
    • Another special effect around the larveling and there's a spoiler-mode-aged person.
    • S/He apologizes and says they were trapped in a nightmare until the queens woke them with kuva, but that awakening was... you see the parallel.
    • You now have an ally similar to the Lich ally system, but instead of attacking enemies, they buff friendlies. Or they find you through transference to your warframe, making a duplicate of your current loadout to fight with you. There are a ton of places to go from here - good Kuva troopers allied to your new friend spawn in, new friend can transfer into enemies, subplots connecting the Lotus and the Queen, lots of options.
    • Or they can buff your Kuva Weapon by 3%. Wait a sec... that's the exact opposite of epic! Yeah, that's the current reward for going through 100x the work. Kidding, but only kinda.

My points: Casual solo play is no longer possible. Engaged play isn't particularly fast. It's mind boggling that you still can't dismiss a Lich when there are tons of low effort options. If you're going to force me to replay the star chart 10 times to level a single weapon, at least let me choose the mission types.

[Marzoval]

I'm a new player at about rank 9, and randomly stumbled on the Kuva Lich quest when I decided to interact with some larva enemy. Initially I thought, "cool, more content". But that quickly soured as I researched what the whole thing was all about, and of course attempting to tackle the grind myself. Now I've been very much enjoying the Warframe grind. It feels rewarding, and there's a sense of freedom with what I want to do at any given time.

Kuva Lich is not that at all, and it's completely draining my enthusiasm for logging into the game. 

It's simply punishing to know that in order to get rid of the Kuva Lich, I need to force myself to take on the grind I would otherwise spend on things I'd rather do, especially at my current rank. And when I fail the attempt, the freedom to do what I want in the game gets sucked away further. Things like fissures risk stolen rewards, and sometimes robbed of good platinum trades. Having a resource boost to farm resources is defeated when the extra resources I gain is stolen.

And in order to get them back I have to risk shutting out more of the star chart by doing what I simply have no desire to do. This kind of forced grind is an absolute turn off for someone at my level. I really want to opt out of it so I can get back to what I want to do.

[Weeaboo_Slayer]

the amount of forma needed for all the kuva weapons is NOT ok
I think we need 85 formas to fully rank the kuva weapons, imagine going 85 times to hydron to level all these weapons?
I can't believe some people complaining about going only to hydron everyday and defending stuff like this

[Nactra]

Hello, i vanquished my first Lich yesterday and want to share my experience so you can see what i liked and disliked.

to preface this i would like to say that my impression of Liches is positive and i will engage with this loop more in the future. To me it's a step in the right direction for an endgame.

Also, i enjoy playing solo. 

Murmur farm:

the murmur farm didn't bother me, it felt like regular mission but with special targets to kill with a cool move. I liked the pace. My skill was finally put to action sometimes as i started dodging, strategizing, trying to find calm to recover mana etc. I am at a gear level that gives me 1 to 3 secs TTK on most ennemies. Napalms and other non-bullet weapons became real threats i had to deal with and required some thought to not die instantly.

i finally started to see the ennemy AI at work, and while it could be better tuned i had some intersting situations and had to be more aware of my surroundings which is good.

i enjoyed the gameplay on maps where i could focus on dogfighting. However reaching Lich lv 4-5, interception and defense became tedious. Defense i had to wait forever for the objective to regen, interception i failed to solo beacause of my gear choice at the time.

however it has been a few hours and i'm already a lot more efficient at lich level gameplay. After a few repetitions it risks becoming just another farm instead of a challenging gameplay loop. I am worried about that. I did one lich mission on Public and it was immediately trivial, which is not okay in my book, i want to feel some heat in this game, and not by nerfing myself for no additionnal rewards.

About the lich itself:

having to fight it several times is fun. Having the option to endure it in order to let it spawn more thralls is fun. This is great. 

What worried me is the difficulty being static. Here is what i would change about the game to make lich real endgame:

-bonus elemental dmg is not random but progressive for each lich. The bigger the bonus the harder the fight. I'm not talking only stats, but also more mobility, skill required etc, i.e the more lich you hunt the more threatening the lich gets the stronger the weapon.

- include negative mods in the game. They take a mod slot, they are useless/self harming, but they give access to better rewards according to mission difficulty. Running those trolls modes on lich hunting results in huge payout.

 

edit: as i feared, my second lich was trivial and my 3rd lich will probably be boring. It has to be harder and harder and have better and better rewards to be endgame.

 

[Yousho]

We *NEED* to be able to get rid of a lich we don't like. Twice I've accidentally spawned on out of instinct with a weapon I have no interest in. 
I'm not wasting another 3 hours of my life. 
Start respecting your players time, please. 

[Weeaboo_Slayer]

I was in a Defense mission and my lich appeared in the last wave, while I was fighting him i killed the last mob and the mission ended with him alive, I couldnt kill him.
I don't know if this is intended but I think the defense missions need to end when you end the confrotation with the lich too.

[BlackCat500]

Yeah, I've also on several occasions given birth to unwanted liches and made them feel saddened with parental neglection their entire lives.  The larvae just look too similar to other grineer units and you can finish them as soon as they drop low on hp, making accidents very likely if you are conditioned by the thrall grind to auto execute anything that has been downed.It is an avoidable mistake for sure, but not a pleasant one, especially if you are just playing idly at late hours without putting much thought or attention into it, or doing your 20th extermination mission to get the right weapon and at some point just not focusing anymore. Again, not really a major gripe of mine, just kind of bothersome when it actually happens.  I do love the feeling of finally taking down a lich, but it's actually more of a relief than a feeling of accomplishment. If I am to think of constructive criticism as to how to improve liches, there's definitely a long list of things that no doubt have already been previously described or already thought about by your actual team, but I'll mention them regardless:

1. "I can wait forever, Adversary. But I won't." Yes, you will. This is my biggest problem with liches and why they feel so disconnected from the rest of the game. It is fine for them to have their own missions (they should, it makes matchmaking for lich hunting easy and allows for fast progress), but I really want their thralls and the lich themselves to ambush me and force me into a corner during normal missions based on their aggression and lich level on their controlled sectors, albeit at an at least halved rate. Additionally, any defense objectives should be paused during the time a lich appears because they're likely not scaled up to the lich's levels.

 

2. Thrall grinding is an exterminate mission within another mission, often exterminate within exterminate. It is for that reason why it feels so basic. It's fine for when (like in point number 1) they appear randomly to attack you, but you are specifically going to lich missions just to find a few. What if you modified existing mission types for the "alerts" for lich missions just a tiny bit so they would adhere to the theme? For instance, blowing up a reactor gives you a larger amount of progress on a murmur and aggression level than killing a thrall, but thralls don't have to necessarily appear in that mission. Instead, you will recieve some special voice lines for things you do inside said missions that tie it to the context of the lich. For example, a humorous lich going "(Pouting) That's fine...I didn't need that thing anyway." I'm not good at scripting lines, but I know you guys are.

 

3. Add the tie-in for railjack. This would also further facilitate a feeling of belonging into the same universe as the rest of the game to railjack, although this by far shouldn't be the only link it would give railjack a little push as well.

 

4. Now, calling them Kuva liches for other factions would probably be lorebreaking, but I would like to see corpus and infested liches as well. If I were to make any suggestions for monikers, I'd probably go with bounty hunter/debt collector for corpus and primordial for infested. Moreover, I want these to be active at the same time. Were they all to be level 5 I'm sure they would collide in terms of territory control, so my suggestion would be that in those cases, you make sure they can both be on the same planet but on different nodes..and if a node is chosen by two at the same time, make it a crossfire mission. Three at the same time I don't think would work so I'd recommend not to break that part.

 

5. Before letting you start (solo) or accept (party) a lich mission, ask the player if they are ready or if they still need to change their parazon setup. Maybe this is just me, but when I grind away mindlessly over and over I so often forget to make any changes whatsoever, sometimes multiple missions in a row.

 

6. Add up to two randomly generated attendants with completely random abilties of one element each (not necessarily the same element as the lich! however, from the same ability pool) that may come to the lich's aid or ambush you randomly as well. They shouldn't drop anything unique, nor give much more murmur progress than an ordinary thrall, but be almost as strong as a lich and also fight alongside the lich if not randomly encountered by themselves. They don't need many designs or voice lines, but they need to look distinct from normal mobs and the lich. As soon as one of them dies, generate a new one to take its place. There needs to be more variety and more ambushing, the liches and their thralls need to be more threatening!

 

7. Add a little bit more variety to lich skills (say, randomize between 2 abilities on each non-mobility spell slot, rather than having the same abilities all the time. It's not much but trust me, it will make liches that much less monotonous) and add at least 2 or 3 more personality types and a few lines more for each. It is insanely boring to hear the same voice lines all the time, hence many people are smashing that mute button on things like cephalons. Honestly, I should have written this higher up the list, because this one is actually surprisingly important to me.

 

8. Reduce kuva weapon base damage by 20% and increase the base damage by (NON-FORMA-BASEDMG / 40) each level beyond 30 and let the mods and weapon element scale with that so that you end up with the exact same damage at level 40 as you had previously at 30. (I hope my maths on that one is right, but at the very least you get the idea, right?). It feels incredibly unrewarding to have to forma a weapon 5 times, when 2 or at most 3 times would have been absolutely fine for maximum performance already because your mods just don't cost enough to warrant needing the extra levels past 34/36. Mastery is not motivational at all. However, getting a weapon to peak performance is. If the weapon isn't at its highest damage until you have absolutely maxed it out to 40, you'll be craving those levels that much more. I promise, that is one hell of a motivator compared to just a very very meager amount of mastery.

 

9. As mentioned before, add a little bit of a break where you can't finish a larva (2-3s?), maybe a slightly visually different model for larvae and a more distinct effect to them. I don't care if we can't choose the weapon that they spawn with like some people want, I am absolutely fine running grineer missions until the right larva pops up...but it's a problem if my brain is too dead by that point to realize I am about to stab the wrong guy. This one should be well within the scope of a hotfix, provided you reuse some assets.

 

10. Personally, I've never encountered one there so I don't know if that's possible, but would love to see lich and thrall encounters on open worlds. Preferably with a large battalion of enemies and dropships while pausing the current objective if there is one. I would find that very thrilling. At the very least, I would love to see lich hunting missions like the starmap ones as bounties for open worlds, which would tie them into the system as well and give me more of a reason to come back to open worlds again.

[Raskol]

Been doing liches quite a bit lately. The whole system isnt perfect but its much better then when it first came out, theres 1 thing that drives me crazy tho. Even when knowing all 3 requiems failing kill attempts due to wrong order.

My idea here would be: after unlocking all 3 requiems a special "Lich assassinate" mission would unlock with guaranteed lich spawn

Grinding for all 3 murmur takes a lot of time anyway (2-3h). Having to wait for lich to randomly spawn and fail the attempt on top of that is extremely annoying. The assassinate mission could be some multi-stage exterminate/mobile def/sabotage or anything with lich spawn at the very end.

[(XBOX)KnightSlayer411]

The first mistake was to include the relic system with this. It has become something so TEDIOUS and BORING to farm relics, refine them, not getting the mod or getting the other mod you don't want, AGAIN and AGAIN. Just for then being out of traces and relics and have to go back to the same tedious and repetitive missions in order to try to get the relic you need and get enough void traces which aren't sufficient because you get barely anything and even less if you run solo.

It is EXHAUSTING, like a really bad day of working in a really bad job.

[(XBOX)KnightSlayer411]

Oh and the fact that you keep lying to us, the liches that you showed us before were nothing like this. You keep lying to us DE, that's not right

[Yperkeimenos]

The single biggest problem i have with the Kuva Lich is that once created, either by accident or on purpose, i can't play Sorties because it steals my rivens. Unless i deal with it , i risk loosing my precious rewards  which is kind of dissapointing because eventhough i've lost interest in hunting it, i can't play properly unless i kill it. This is tedious and diminishes the fun for me. It would've been much better if sortie/prime rewards were excluded from being stolen by the Lich.

[Redlove108]

So I finally got a chance to play with the lich system and really test it out by taking out a couple liches. Thus far, the gameplay loop with the liches is good and I do enjoy it. However there are few minor things that should be looked over again:

-The liches definitely feel more end game, something you should deal with after doing the Sacrifice and clearing out the starchart. I would dread the hell a new player would have to go through to get rid of their lich without all the high end gear they would need (formas, orokin catalyst/reactor, specific mods, etc). Mostly because these liches start at around lvl 50 and if you fail a couple of times their rank goes up and they can be over lvl100.

-Accidentally spawning the wrong lich has happened to me more than once and usually in the flurry of combat. Either I accidently hit X or somehow I managed to do a finisher with my melee weapon which triggers the lich to spawn anyway. This needs to be fleshed out more, particularly on the lore side cause.. why is a warframe even jabbing it with a parazon? What makes this particularly enemy more special than others that warrants this. Is it just to spawn a lich? That seems counter productive to the Tenno's goals "Yea let's make a stronger enemy on purpose!" Solve this and you might have a way to tweak how lich are spawned.

-I'd like to be able to engage my lich in melee combat. Right now you just gun him down cause if you try melee, he will grab you and kick the S#&$ out of you. Maybe if there was some realtime action sequences to counter his grabby hands would be good or button mashing to break free of his initial grab. To balance this you could also have the lich deflect the melee attacks much like the Prosecutor, except in a more thematic way, a quick little cut scene of the clash and the lich shoving back the Warframe. I'm sure there's other ideas that could be suggested, but in the end I just like to beat him with my swords!

 

I think that's it for now. I really do hope more is added to this, in layers. Maybe one of these liches can become a "kingpin" which requires 5 murmurs and can have liches serving under him. So that what was shown in the dev stream about these guys being something you deal with over the course of weeks can be true. In this scenario killing said liches would tell you what slot does a murmur goes into (ex: Ris in slot 2) while killing thralls still reveals it as normal. I think this would be cool to have it scale up in some way.

[Mad5cout]

Here is the bottom line regarding Old Blood and Kuva Liches.

You all took the most complained about part of the game - the absolutely broken relic and trace system/economy - and created an entire update around it without fixing even one of the issues people have with it.

1.  Trace takes too long to farm - to farm enough trace to refine a radiant takes 10x as long as farming the radiant relics themselves.  You slightly alleviated this with radiant drops in ESO but requiems don't drop there.  So, here we are grind trash relics for trace again.
2.  I have 9348759028370 relics I will never be able to crack open.  Let us use our foundry to take ___ relics and make ____ trace.  The economy of this system is so out of whack and people have been complaining about it for literally years and nothing has been done about it.
3.  Between grinding to obtain one specific relic, farming the trace to radiant it, and then taking ONE roll at it take about 4-5 hours of gameplay and has a pretty healthy probability of failing to get you what you need.  I know this game is about grind but that is a stupid amount of grind. 


This is why people stop playing.  When rewards do not match the effort it takes to get them, people just go play something else.

 

[kctek21]

Please DE, for the love of sanity, add the ability to abandon liches back in the game... why it was removed in the first place is beyond unreasonable, as if rolling the weapon we get from a larvling was the only reason we'd want to abandon a lich.  😐

[Redrum_Wraith]

Please please please for the love of a deity allow aborting a mission to cancel accidental conversion or a larvling, I just spent a stupid amount of time farming the same mission over and over and over for 1 kuva weapon that never came only to completly screw it all up by accidentally converting a larva, now I have a lich I don't want to contend with.

I say aborting because that will stop people checking for ephemeras or stats and basically save scuming to a good lich roll, please meet us halfway on aborting a mission to remove an unintended lich spawn.

PS, yes I'm very salty right now and needed to vent, sorry.

[thothsong]

Kuva Lich steals Gift of the Lotus blueprint.  Thanks for nothing.

[Sypha2]

My Feedback on Kuvalich farming:

1: Murmur fills way to slow.

2. When all Requiems are known and im ready to fight the Lich... it takes annoyingly many tries to even encounter him. Seems to have more in common with lottery than actual farming.

3.Instakill moves are always a pain in the b***..., Renders any frame with high hp/defense useless.

[CthuluIsSpy]

Some feedback - 

The grab attack the lich has is really frustrating to deal with. There is hardly any tell and it deals so much damage, capable of one-shotting the player at times.

Either remove it, or give it a more noticeable tell, like an aura. Play Dark Souls; usually when the boss has a big powerful attack there's a noticeable tell and a bit of time for the player to back off. Here its just cheap.

After unlocking all runes, please introduce a Kuva Lich fortress mission where you can assassinate the lich yourself, instead of waiting for him to attack you on a mission. You know, like in XCOM 2 : War of the Chosen, which also do the same sort of thing Shadow of Mordor and this does, except without as much grind.

Also, weaknesses don't feel like weaknesses. It doesn't feel like I'm dealing enough damage to the lich, even when I have the right elements. Again, XCOM 2 and Shadow of Morder do it better in that the weaknesses actually have a noticeable impact on the target.

[CthuluIsSpy]

Il y a 19 heures, thothsong a dit :

Kuva Lich steals Gift of the Lotus blueprint.  Thanks for nothing.

Wow really? That's some nonsense. Hopefully you'll get it back when you kill the lich.

[_Anise_]

I find friendly lich not showing when I need them the most and then just randomly showing up and messing up my attempts to scan kvat dna or showing up on a mission where i am trying todo something very specific to unlock a riven!! really need to be able to control when a friendly lich shows up or not!

also found the fastest way to complete lich's is doing it on public but most of the time I don't hit an open group I think because they are spread pretty far across the map. maybe consider confining lich's to a handful of systems so groups can be found more easily or merge groups on planets that match the set / enemy and mission types

 

 

[SebastianSommer]

The lich revision from before had helped in significantly reducing the grind for murmurs when playing in a group and made the allied liches less of a spectre npc.

The current issue I have is that it is taking too long for the enemy lich to appear since the rage meter build up is slow and the probability of them appearing is still based on chance. It would be more convenient if each time you identify a weakness for the lich, an assassination node will spawn randomly in their territory. That or just make them enraged more quickly.

I also feel that the allied liches have less of an impact in the game as they only appear when you don't need them. In my case, they finally appear when I'm almost finished with the missions or got downed on the ground. How about include a covert op menu in the dojo's crimson branch where you could send these inactive liches to planets for collecting resources / murmur knowledge against other liches? And if you play in these planet's missions, they will appear to help you from start to end like the syndicate allies.

A random thought here but ranking up the enemy liches doesn't feel like they are getting stronger except for raising their mission levels or gaining elemental resistance. They are still using the same abilities and motions when fighting against you. Why not add in additional modifiers from nightmare missions/sortie to add the challenge of fighting these end game opponents?

Regardless, thanks for adding in the changes for liches. Here's hoping that there will be more in the future.

 

[ReshyShira]

Getting stuck with a crap lich with bad stats really sucks, the grind's simply too high to accidentally get a bad lich with a useless weapon.  Even if all the weapons were stellar, most of the kuva weapons take too long by half to acquire.

Liches also don't really feel organic or intuitive, you have to go out of your way to seek them out and create them.  They're also rather annoying in nature, having a couple lines and generally being about as unserious as it gets.  They also only show up when you're actively seeking them out, and even then they usually don't show up very often.  Being capped at one lich also hurts a bit too. In general the liches don't feel all that threatening, sure they're dangerous purely by the numbers, but they don't really have a *presence* or the level of dynamic interaction that Shadow of Mordor had.

[AshenHaze]

Why do parazon requiem mods still lose charges?

Why is this grind required to get new mods required?

Why is there no way to do "personal research" and try to use existing mods in guesswork? Why do you HAVE to kill the thralls? Why can't I go after the lich if I do enough investigation to try and hunt them down?