Kuva Liches: What's Wrong & How to Fix Them

[(XBOX)HollowCube987]

There is very little reason to keep Converted Liches. Vanquished Liches give you their extremely powerful Kuva weapon, and you can trade Converted Liches to other tenno. But what about the player that befriends and keeps every Lich that they best in combat? When you die, there's a chance that a random ally Lich will spawn in and assist you for two minutes before despawning. One idea I had was to have the allied Liches spawn in like specters.

When you recieve your daily tribute, you also recieve lich spawn beacons based on how many converted Liches you have, your Mastery Rank, and how many Lich beacons you currently have. The Converted Lich Count And MR will be maximum values, while the Current Lich Beacon Count would be how many you get daily.

Examples:

(A MR7 player with 8 Liches and 0 owned beacons get 7 beacons)

(A MR8 player with 7 Liches and 0 owned beacons get 7 beacons)

(A MR8 player with 8 Liches and 4 owned beacons get 4 beacons)

With this system, used beacons are replaced daily, but only up to your maximum holding cap that depends entirely on your MR and current amount of owned Kuva Liches. This encourages players to convert more liches and get higher mastery ranks to hold more beacons.

These beacons combine certain asspects of Air Support charges , Assassin beacons, and Specters. You put them in your Gear wheel, and set it down on the floor. After a short but noticeable pause, a random Lich that you converted will spawn at the placed beacon and fight with you until a certain amount of time passes, then it despawns. Each player can only have one converted Lich out at a time, and there is a 10 minute cooldown between beacon uses.

That was a LOT of info I just released onto the world and this post took hours to create typing one letter at a time with an Xbox controller. If anyone has any questions or feedback, don't hesitate to respond.

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

Forget the Daily Tribute part

just make the proposed Lich beacons be craftable in Foundry. No usage limit.

Same as any other Specter.

[(PSN)Maunstre]

I agree with the user above - forget the daily tribute part of the beacon system and just have it craftable. Have it cost Kuva (thematically appropriate and connected to the rest of the Lich system) and have the beacon itself be a reward from your very first converted Lich since the Lich summoned will be random from your pool of converted Liches. Limiting beacon charges by MR wouldn't feel right, since if the costs are appropriate, the limit will create itself and, let's be honest, a Lich isn't that great of a specter. It's nice when they show up, but they only hang around for a few minutes (and will continue to only hang around for a few minutes with your beacon system) and at some points are an actual hindrance rather than a help. A 10-minute timegate per useage feels very extreme, especially in a game where the average mission time is 5 minutes. It would be better to just have the Lich be a permanent until death specter like other specter gear summons. If the "vanishes after a set time" would have to be maintained then I would either make the specter single-use per mission as a "make it count" incentive or bring down that time gate to maybe 2 - 3 minutes, tops. But, personally I would go with "permanent for full mission like any other specter"; the only reason they aren't permanent right now is because their spawn chance is random after you die once in-mission. It's probably meant to imply that your Lich has a sense of personal agency. If we're going to involve beacons, they should stick around because we are "asking" for their help.

Plus, right now the MR gate to Liches is only MR5 (but you have to be MR10 to auto-socket Ayatans, or MR8 to access the Helminth system, which is a whole lot more powerful and complex than Liches. ??? why). People shouldn't have access to Liches at MR5, but that's another conversation.