Kuva Lich 1.1: Feedback Megathread

[Ham_Grenabe]

I was wrong, in the Kuva Lich dev thread, to say that knowing you could upgrade your weapon -- having a deterministic grind -- would be enough. I just completed a lich this evening (farming for a larvaling with a new weapon, and then running steady lich hunting missions from about 7:30 p.m. to about 10:00 p.m.) for a Kuva Bramma. Looking back, here's what I thought about it:

The Good: it was very nice to be able to see the weapon and choose whether you want to kill that larvaling. And the Bramma is fun. 

The Not So Good: it's still really disappointing to see a weapon come up with a low percentage. You know you're either gonna need to score another really good one (costing 3-5 hours of play), or a BUNCH of bad ones (costing 3-5 hours of play each), to make it useful. I just got a 30% Kuva Bramma. I kept it because it's new and a bow.

I then made a new lich, which has a 25% Ogris. I don't have a Kuva Ogris yet, but I'd rather throw this one away than bother trying to build on it. I strongly suggest you put weekly Lich-Be-Gone on "do it now" priority. 

The Bad: the murmur hunt and guessing game is just as frustrating and tedious as it ever was.

The Take It or Leave It: not being killed on a requiem failure is neutral. I think the team addressed the symptom, but didn't understand the reason for the objections.

 

Bottom line: I think I'll ignore my current lich in the hopes that Lich-B-Gone will be coming sooner rather than later. 

[EinheriarJudith]

1 minute ago, Ham_Grenabe said:

The Not So Good: it's still really disappointing to see a weapon come up with a low percentage. You know you're either gonna need to score another really good one (costing 3-5 hours of play), or a BUNCH of bad ones (costing 3-5 hours of play each), to make it useful. I just got a 30% Kuva Bramma, and my current lich is a 25% Ogris. I'd rather throw that Ogris away than bother trying to build on it. 

 

The Bad: the murmur hunt and guessing game is just as frustrating and tedious as it ever was.

when DE first launched kuva and rivens, i had said that it would have been nice if you could craft or upgrade weapons with kuva. ill say it again here. Kuva weapons should be upgraded with kuva. not random stat upgrade, not stat locking. a straight up upgrade like using Kuva as XP.

on the subject of murmur, i wont reinstall WF until that patch rolls out and it is favorable. one of the behaviors i dislike about warframe is DE tries to make people into zombies.

[Ham_Grenabe]

Just now, EinheriarJudith said:

when DE first launched kuva and rivens, i had said that it would have been nice if you could craft or upgrade weapons with kuva. ill say it again here. Kuva weapons should be upgraded with kuva. not random stat upgrade, not stat locking. a straight up upgrade like using Kuva as XP.

on the subject of murmur, i wont reinstall WF until that patch rolls out and it is favorable. one of the behaviors i dislike about warframe is DE tries to make people into zombies.

I'm not uninstalling or anything, but as I appended to my post (right after you quoted it), I'm going to ignore Crappy Ogris Lich until I can dispel him. If he steals stuff in the meantime, so be it. 

Incidentally, I agree that Kuva should be used to upgrade the weapons. We use it to build some frames and weapons anyway, might as well use it to upgrade. 

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

Here's your feedback.

Would it have killed you that anyone who had a litch more than two weeks and no progress on it get a free reset?

I might have i don't know some relevant feedback but ive spent all day grinding off a lich that i did not want to bother with just because you couldn't be bothered. is the new system good? S#&$? dunno. Cause i can't try it out yet...

[Hyohakusha]

The murmur grind needs to be reduced. 30/60/90 is not okay. You think you're 2/3's of the way done, you're not, you're only half way. That just comes off as being deceptive and artificially extending the grind. Not to mention that many of us still remember the one patch where the total murmur count was supposedly reduced, only for that portion of those patch notes to be edited a few days later later to "clarify" that they never actually were. And it was done after another patch dropped, when no one would bother going back to read over those older notes. That was deceptive and shady.

30/50/70 would be more reasonable, though even that is only roughly in line with what it was supposedly in the first place. Having actual hard numbers from you guys would help a lot instead of having to record everything ourselves, and could easily be dropped in a Dev Workshop or Patch Notes. The slight RNG element to the total thrall count needs to go as well. It should always be what it should always be without any variation, and enemies should always give a set amount of progress. The lich stab attempt "bonus" is another sticking point. It does not give a set amount of 10 thralls worth of progress. There is an RNG element to that as well. After 30+ liches it's closer to 4~8 than 10 from what I've recorded.

There also needs to be a way to get rid of unwanted liches. You very easily could accidentally stab a larva you didn't want to, or just realize that burning 2-3 hours for a +2% increase to elemental damage just isn't worth it.

And that's probably the biggest point of contention. Yeah, the weapons are good, but being effectively locked into doing the same crap over and over again just for one weapon, or a small increase in bonus, with the murmur grind being what it is just isn't fun. The hardest part about grinding out a lich is not falling asleep.

When we can use them on our Railjacks, that will help a little, but ngl, as soon as I get a Hind (just finished getting a Bramma), I'm going back to ignoring the system as a whole. The murmur grind is just too much of a mind-numbing slog for what we get out of it.

Edit: After spending an hour doing minute and a half Cassini runs trying to get a Hind, I blanked out to the point where I didn't even realize I stabbed the stupid larva on accident until I got back on the orbiter and the lich popped up. It has a useless Tonkor I don't even need. Alt+F4, I'm out.

[Ham_Grenabe]

That would have been nice to let us dismiss current liches. However, even had that happened, I can say that there are only two substantial changes to the system:

1)  you now see which Kuva Weapon the Lich will have

2) you can incrementally upgrade a gun if you grind more copies of it

Those are substantial improvements, no argument. But the grind to kill or convert remains exactly the same. Once you’ve picked your gun it’s just like every Lich.

[Bakaguya-sama]

Not dying for not having the right combination feels make me feel better about this system already.  

Dying might not really matter in warframe, but it's still demoralizing. My only problem is that it took so long to put this in place.  

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

honestly i think what weapon you get should have just been based on where in the star chart you get your lich to spawn. Make the lich spawns rare instead of the weapon so you atleast no where to go to get what you want

[BPTheFirst]

PLEASE let us abandon a lich we dont want, because in Warframe, everyone prioritizes speed and a misclick can happen, leading to a lich they dont want because they were trying to speed run a farm. First day of this update and happened to me already, offering me a weapon i already have, on the same element, and worse %

[Thrymm]

The framework is much better, with the ability to choose to pass on a larvling, and the ability to upgrade with duplicates.  This is a good start, it makes the reward framework much more livable by removing major rng and time wasting issues.

Getting rid of the foolishness with the lich killing you for attempting to unlock the right combination is good.  Honestly, getting rid of stuff like that is just good housekeeping.

The actual lich encounters themselves, obviously, are unchanged, and they really need it.  The lich encounter itself consists of a murmur grind that can only be described as grind---nothing is gained from it except tiny progress toward the end goal.  Please consider a more skill based option, even if it is more puzzle solving, such as blurring/scrambling the runes and having them become unblurred/scrambled as the murmurs are obtained, potentially letting a player figure out what they are sooner, rather than incrementally filling a circle, then gaining a full rune at a time.  This would speed the system along as a person got more familiar with the runes, and allow them to solve at a potentially greater rate.

After this comes the rune mod relics(requiem), which are a quite unrewarding endeavor in that any non-mod reward from the relics is a significant time waste in comparison to any other activity a person could expect to do at that level of play.  Riven mods are pretty much always welcome, but the kuva payout is not nearly high enough for an actual relic unlock mission and the amber ayatan star is a complete waste of our time.  Please consider other rewards, such as rune mod shards(get a few, turn them into a rune mod).

Or, frankly, don't have these rune mods expire in the first place.  We're already running a dozen or more missions per lich, plus leveling the weapons.  Maybe we just don't need these to expire--or consider letting us recharge them in some way.

So in summary, good start by streamlining the reward system and getting rid of one of the more hackneyed gameplay issues, let's hit the other gameplay issue next!

[Kainosh]

I see Lich battle was not improved in any way?

No AI additions. No Lich body type expansions....   Meh.  

 

So i cant get a melee Lich that can fly....or a Lich that is super slow and tanky, with only one weakspot.... Or a very high detection range Sniper Lich that operates only in Plains and can blow your head off before you even notice it and relocates after every parazon poke?

Because that is what i expected when you say "Randomly generated enemy"....It must be different every time, right?   Like riven challenges.  Some are so harsh that people even sell/abandon.  I want Liches to be like that.  

A challenge. Not a Grind session.      

 

Right now, if you remove Grind, there will be nothing left.  Only a slightly tough Heavy gunner with weird name.

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

"I take your coin as easily as I take your life. Your power. Your joy."

Wow. That one lich quote sums up DE's entire business ethics all by it's self.

[ShortCat]

The biggest turnoff was and still is Murmur farm.

Currently Lich shows not frequent enough to fully take advantage of the word guessing game - it is not uncommon to unveil the first word without seeing your Lich even once. A stab is mostly just additional Murmur, that shortens the whole hunt by several misisons. There are not enough Lich encounters compared to possible word combinations.
I would suggest to increase the chance to meet your Lich. This would increase Murmur progress on failed stabs as well as offer more chances for a right guess. If necessary, I would also welcome higher Lich lvls.

[hungryghost84]

Liches should spawn in any mission you are in which will make us more than happy to go all out to get rid of them. Right now they only spawn on specific nodes makes them more like a chore rather than a constant threat. I think their lvl too need not be capped at 5. It should go a little higher for more threat. Make em furious, make em SCARY. Then it will force people to actually think about murdering them, rather than them being a kuva weapon dispenser. 

[SardethWynn]

Lich system needs 2 more changes, to make this something I would actively pursue 

1> Better match making: One player has a beginning Lich the other has a max level, Fighting high level mobs right off the bat is kind of off putting.
(Example: lvl 115 enemies to get Murms and clear nodes? Go into Survival hoping to do 15 minutes and usually everyone is heading to the door at 5 and you get extracted with them.)

2> Stop Using LUA as a starting sector, please. This tile set makes something already grindy to begin with even more of a chore with very little feeling of, "Yes! I made it furious so now it will start spawning"

Just my thoughts

[Bryuf]

Overall update has some great QoL and cool new weapons.

The not-dying-when-stabbing makes the gameplay a lot smoother and less tiresome but it feels lacking. You stab your lich, they don't die and then they just disappear, poof. Some new voicelines or the like would be great to actually make it clear that the lich dies when stabbed and then gets rebirthed later with more power because it doesn't feel like that. It feels like they just vanish, almost as a glitch. Something to make this little interaction more meaningful and intense would greatly help.

[Guest]

Getting larvlings on Sedna, is kind of being counter-intuitive.

I don't want every lich, to have Saturn - Cassini as their birth place.
So often, do I visit Sedna instead, to achieve a new nemesis.

Most of the nodes there, however, take quite some time to go through (in comparison)
And a node that I usually visit on Sedna, is Rusalka.

This sabotage mission, ends up 90% of the time, without a larvling even.
You get the screen flicker each time.
Telling the player, one will soon show up.
But after going to the exit, and backtracking, it never spawns one.

Only once in a blue moon, will Sedna - Rusalka, spawn a larvling.

Edit:

And after a run on Cassini, where one also refused to show up, it hit me:

Maybe the spawn rates on Sedna could be more tuned, to be a guaranteed spawn?
Sedna - Adaro also had no candidates (but did flash the screen), showing up.
Part of reducing the grind, includes trying to get the correct larvling.

At this very moment of writing, it is a grind in it's own right.

I've been spending over an hour, searching for a non-duplicate.
Every time, the wrong weapon.
Or just simply, no larvling that spawns, in the first place.

For those with endurance:

Multiply the following video, over a timespan of at least 2 or 3 hours.
Then imagine, this is what prime time would look like...

Spoiler

 

Literally.
No exagerration.
Nothing but this, hours on end.

[Ham_Grenabe]

1 hour ago, SardethWynn said:

Lich system needs 2 more changes, to make this something I would actively pursue 

1> Better match making: One player has a beginning Lich the other has a max level, Fighting high level mobs right off the bat is kind of off putting.
(Example: lvl 115 enemies to get Murms and clear nodes? Go into Survival hoping to do 15 minutes and usually everyone is heading to the door at 5 and you get extracted with them.)

2> Stop Using LUA as a starting sector, please. This tile set makes something already grindy to begin with even more of a chore with very little feeling of, "Yes! I made it furious so now it will start spawning"

Just my thoughts

To the best of my knowledge, and per the wiki, all endless modes in Lich nodes are one rotation only. I mean, you can stay in a Lich survival, but as far as I know there's no point to stay after 5 minutes because thralls stop spawning and I assume Liches won't spawn either. 

Is that assumption incorrect?

[DebrisFlow]

The listed changes are surely all very welcome but they are still only scratching the surface of the dissatisfaction feedback, in my opinion.

The core gameplay of the system, that is the murmur grind, is overwhelmingly considered dull and boring (i bet that if you prepare a "word cloud", like that one of Devstream 136, but just considering the Lich system feredback, "dull" and "boring" would dominate the center of the cloud). This absolutely demands for some critical thinking on the nature of the "new" content that you developers have been pushing out recently. If players are labelling "dull" and "boring" a content from the first week of its release, and this content consists for ~95% of the same exterminate, sabotage and defense mission that have been served in the game from Warframe day 1, i would call it an educated guess that after so many years this content doesn't satisfy the audience anymore. People are asking for cutting in half the murmur requirements: you developers maybe just think that players want a faster reward, i suggest you to go deeper and think that maybe they are tired to play that same content at all.

The Lich system has been teased since a long time and players have been speculating by making comparison with other games since then: the general idea, if i reconstruct it right, is that they were dreaming about extensive duels with some highly skilled evolving enemy. What we got is a momentary appearance of a bullet sponge, a glimpse of a fight, between countless runs of exterminate, sabotage, defense. 

To resume, it's a double delusion: i) having to run the same old content for the most part; ii) not receiving the epic fights they were dreaming of (and maybe teased to)

I already proposed a solution in the first Kuva Lich Dev Workshop, i will post it here again in the hope that someone of you will consider it. -> Make the murmur discovery process also based on fighting the lich (as opposed to only downing it). Make us analyze its attack patterns, its defensive responses to certain attacks, its abilities usage, to deduct the correct requiem. For example, for every X times that we force him to repeat an action we get some murmurs: we have to shoot it in the back, to shoot its weapon off its hands, to make it charge us, to make it use a specific ability, parry its bullets/melee attacks, etc. This approach could be integrated in the system that we have now, shifting the murmur grind burden from mindless killing of the same basic enemies to longer, more engaging and truly unique nemesis fights. 

[Sohaya-]

The murmur grind is still mind numbing as heck. Props for the RNG reduction though.

[blackflashcannon]

suggestion @[DE]Rebecca
for failed parazon attempts, have the lich die, but ressurect itself in front of you as it leaves

[waterboytkd]

7 hours ago, Thrymm said:

After this comes the rune mod relics(requiem), which are a quite unrewarding endeavor in that any non-mod reward from the relics is a significant time waste in comparison to any other activity a person could expect to do at that level of play.  Riven mods are pretty much always welcome, but the kuva payout is not nearly high enough for an actual relic unlock mission and the amber ayatan star is a complete waste of our time.  Please consider other rewards, such as rune mod shards(get a few, turn them into a rune mod).

Or, frankly, don't have these rune mods expire in the first place.  We're already running a dozen or more missions per lich, plus leveling the weapons.  Maybe we just don't need these to expire--or consider letting us recharge them in some way.

I'm so low on Amber Stars that I've been thinking of running req relics to farm em...and that's not a great feeling. 😛 But, having a dedicated farm method for the stars isn't the worst thing ever. Maybe bump up the payout to make it feel better? Like 2-3 stars?

But in all seriousness, they do need to do something to make the req relic farm process better. One thought is: thralls (even a lich) could ALSO spawn into those missions, giving you a "double" farm. Another is that the rewards for the relics could be shaken up a bit. Weapon Exilus Adaptor is pretty feelsbadman, especially given the rare drop chance. Maybe an Umbra Forma blueprint? (now that they 'cracked the seal' on allowing these to drop in-game, I'd like to see them drop in more places) Or come up with more rare drop items and have the various relic types drop different rares, so we can add some variety to our farm. In my mind, something like Relics V and VI have Item A at rare, VII and VIII have Item B at rare, IX and X have Item C, etc. At this point, I'd be totally okay with Relics I-IV being vaulted, and 8 new relics being introduced that varied up the non-mod payouts (even if Kuva and Riven Shards stayed a constant on all of them).

But definitely would like to see Kuva payouts go up a lot. I would say 1750 would be the absolute minimum from these relics (half a Riven roll). 

[Steel_Rook]

Speaking purely for myself, I really like the Lich changes. I don't think they're enough given the launch state of the system, but this is a MASSIVE step in the right direction for sure. It does a good job addressing the bulk of the most egregious issues. Here's where I stand:

Kuva Larvlings: I REALLY like this change, and not just because it cuts down on the RNG involved in acquiring Kuva weapons. I still wish you guys had gone with the Token system from the Dev Stream, where we burn a Kuva weapon in order to be able to lure a Lich with a specific weapon. The current system still means grinding that one Exterminate mission on Starun over and over again until the right weapon spawns. However, that's still reliable of a sort, and it means one big thing: I can now actually tailor my Kuva weapon's damage type to the actual weapon. For instance, I have a Primed Cold Damage mod for rifles. I would like for my crit-based Kuva rifles to have Cold damage as well. Previously, there was no point trying to spawn Liches with Frost, because I was more likely to get a pistol or a shotgun or even a status rifle for which I might want something else. Now I can ensure that the weapon matches the damage type that I want. Meaning I might have to acquire new copies of all my old Kuva weapons to "fix" their damage types 🙂

Kuva Liches: Removing the backbreaker on a wrong Requiem sequence was a REALLY good idea. It removes an unnecessary source of humiliation which honestly improves the theme of the encounter. It also removes a potential disincentive for trying a Requiem sequence before you have all the mods figured out. Liches offer 10 Murmurs, if I'm not mistaken, so that right there ought to speed up the Murmur grind quite a bit if people aren't afraid of levelling up their Liches. It also offers us additional shots at blindly guessing the correct Requiem mods, or at least excluding some of them. Finally, it really does make more sense for us to KILL the Lich, only for it to keep coming back. I'd suggest reusing the Backbreaker animation, though. You know how the Grustrag 3 will approach downed players and cover them with their drones, making them impossible to revive? How about the Lich doing this to downed players? If a player - especially their owner - dies, have the Lich walk over to them, pick them up off the ground and break their back, making them unrevivable. Getting a humiliating finisher done on me when I've LOST the encounter makes a lot more sense than having that happen to me when I won.

Requiem guessing: I still feel the "guessing game" is handled poorly in Warframe. Again, look at the board game Mastermind and do something like that. Let players always check all three Requiem mods, then give us a tally of how many were in the sequence in the wrong place, how many were in the sequence in the right place, but don't tell us WHICH mods that refers to. Make it into a puzzle, have us deduce the correct response. It's OK as it stands now, but it's not really a "game." It's just guessing. Give it some ambiguity and some internal consistency to where players need to form and test hypotheses, exclude options and eventually be left with the only sequences which matches our previous attempts. You can do better.

Parazon UI: This change I REALLY like. It's pretty simple and straightforward and really should have been there from the start, but I love it anyway. Being able to see my previous Parazon attempts IN the actual Parazon Upgrade menu is very, very convenient. Previously I had to tab between two entirely separate screens with a third screen in-between, AND also remember mods by their icon since their names aren't always listed. Now it's all in one place, and I can simply match images to each other. That cuts down on a lot of irritation.

*edit before I forget*
Kuva Larvling execution: Please consider using the Lich execution system for Larvling executions. You know - the one where we stand over a downed Lich and have 10 seconds of deciding between Convert and Vanquish? Do that for the Larvling, with out choices being between "Ignore" and "Kill," and with the Kuva weapon displayed in the centre of the screen above the Larvling. Might also want to display the weapon for Lich executions to, actually, since I tend to forget what my Lich had after hours and days of hunting it.

[Aadi880]

Bug: Mobile defense objectives can be turned into thralls by the lich.

EDIT: Image of bug for those curious: https://imgur.com/HQtZckZ 

Following is a suggestion regarding the murmur grind:

Have the lich himself be the primary source of murmurs. Basically, fighting with the lich will slowly grant murmurs, with thralls being a secondary source. This would make murmur farming more engaging. Have the player play like a small minigame/quick-time event that will get progressively more difficult the longer he plays it. here's one simple example:

Player grabs the lich with the parazon string. Player plays a quick-time event that is reminiscent to the mining minigame from Open worlds: A circular meter with a rotating pointer. The player will have to press mouse 1 on the indicated area when the rotating pointer is over that area. Trick is: Every successful click makes the pointer faster. After 3 clicks, it will start changing directions. etc etc. If a click is missed, then the string is broken and the lich is free.

This minigame can only be played if the lich is in its downed state.

Upon the breaking of the string after the minigame, the lich shields are restored gains 100% extra shield capacity. Basically, make the lich harder to knock down if the player fails the minigame too much.

It can be a different minigame as well. This is just what I think. Another minigame could be timed strikes with your melee weapon whilst trying not to get cought by the lich's grasp.

 

[Ham_Grenabe]

3 minutes ago, Aadi880 said:

Bug: Mobile defense objectives can be turned into thralls by the lich.

 

 

 

Wow. Just...wow.