Lich system annoyances with ways to improve

[HunterDigi]

First off, I don't hate the system as is now, it did get significant improvements since launch and I have probably 50+ liches by now, got all weapons, ephemeras and a few weapons I maxed to 60%.

Still doing a lich every once in a while, so I guess I kinda like it. I'm also looking forward to corpus liches.

I want to bring attention to some annoyances that the system has in the hopes that it gets improved upon further.

1. Lich doesn't anger/spawn on nodes it doesn't control, a problem for friends/recruiting.

If my lich is on Earth and my friend's lich is on Pluto, if my friend starts the mission we both get murmur but my lich gets no anger and will never spawn on Pluto, therefore I will remain behind on the lich progress significantly as I also don't get a chance to guess symbols or their order.

This makes coop with friends feel discouraged because our liches rarely meet on the starchart so we have to play missions in turns so that our liches get angry and spawn.

Some ways to mitigate this would be to have the lich start on the planet the thrall was killed on (which would also mean certain planets would be easier to matchmake in), or simply allow liches to get enraged (and even spawn) in any thrall mission to remove the worry about planets&nodes entirely.

 

2. Knowing all 3 symbols there's no way to directly attack the lich.

You have to wait for it to attack you which can take several missions.

 

3. Defeating a lich prevents thralls from spawning, screwing over everyone else in the squad.

This seems more like a bug though, but regardless, it shouldn't be a thing.

 

4. Getting a specific weapon to drop from a larving is too repetitive.

I have a separate topic on this: 

 

[xombob89]

Yes fully agree with all points. 

One that annoys me most right now is the fact you cant anger your lich in other peoples games, so Ive started hosting my own and playing mostly my own maps which sometimes makes the rest of the squad angry as well as my lich lol. And I hate doing that, I want it to be fair to everyone but if I let them choose maps often someone keeps doing it so quickly I never get to choose myself.. Making my own lich killing process last forever. 

Now, if there was a way to force spawn your lich after you know all words, this wouldn't be as big of a problem anymore. 

Also the way you choose your kuva weapon right now is honestly abysmal, doing same map 30 times to get the right one as described in the other thread you pointed. 

Maybe once the corpus liches come, we start seeing improvements in the grineer ones as well. 

Edit: Oh and Ive also done maybe 30 + liches by now so I do like them but theres so many things in need of improvement. 

[DenGraaSumpPirat]

Great post HunterDigi

I would like to add some of my own thoughts on the issues with the Liches. It was mentioned on the last Devstream that the gameplay loop of Liches is being worked on, so I hope we can get a revamp that revitalises this aspect of the game.

1. Anger
I think that if the Liches had a “network”, it could resolve some of the issues. The Lich will gain anger when doing murmur missions on a planet it doesn’t occupy, and spawns when anger is above 90% (to aid his/her ally), whereas it could spawn at 75% on planets it does occupy (placeholder numbers). A bit of added dialog from the Lich would tie it in, and have it “make sense”.

2. Lich spawn
As it has been alluded to a couple of times, it would be awesome to be able to attack the Lich’s command ship. Or simply to be able to craft a beacon to summon it. Another option could be that anger doesn’t go down after an attempt on the Lich, when it is level 5.

3. Dead Lich = no thralls
A quick solution to this could be that the remaining murmurs are bestowed when the Lich is defeated, as the thralls in theory have “nothing” to fight for.

4. Getting the desired weapon
I wholeheartedly agree with this point. I myself spent over a week trying to get a Nukor (which rolled 25%, so that was time I could have spent farming more weapons for valence fusion). While trying to get that Nukor I ran nothing but missions to get the larvling for hours every day.
Making use of planet specific weapons seems like a good idea to me. To widen the pool of possible missions, this feature could be made specific to Steel Path. It would make it a lot more convenient to get the desired weapon, if the pool is 5 pistols rather than all 16 Grineer weapons.
Perhaps also reinstate the previous feature of not being able to spawn the same weapon twice, if the larvling is not merci killed.

5. Elemental percentages
I may have been exceptionally unlucky, but a third of my Lich weapons have only had a 25% elemental bonus, and another third of them being between 26% and 29%. That is going to require a LOT of Lich hunting to get weapons to 60%, 8-10 Liches per weapon.
The valence fusion is a good concept, but works far better on Railjack armaments, as they require far less work to acquire.
A way to resolve this could be the ability to rank the Lich up beyond level 5, and by that increasing the weapons elemental bonus, perhaps by taunting/humiliating the Lich when it has been defeated, instead vanquishing or converting it.

6. Single-player incentivized
I find it very hard to find a squad where we can get optimal murmur progress, so I (and I know many others) tend to hunt solo. A way to alleviate this could be by increasing the amount of thrall spawns proportionally to the players in the squad, whose Lich is occupying the mission node/planet. This would greatly increase incentive to run in squads as the murmur progress could be quadrupled.

7. Lich gameplay loop in general
I find the loop to be a bit of a “time-sink” grind. The progress is very slow, bordering on being tedious, and I find it a bit hard to find multiple purposes to do, to make more of the time invested.
Getting additional murmur progress by killing the thralls summoned by a Lich spawn, also seems far too slowly paced, as it is often necessary to wait around for the thralls to spawn. This doesn’t harmonize very well with the very high paced gameplay that Warframe is known and loved for. A fix for this could be fewer thralls spawn with the Lich but them being more dangerous and giving more murmur (my thought is having something similar to The Gustrag Three spawn in aid of the Lich).
 

[HunterDigi]

 

13 hours ago, DenGraaSumpPirat said:

Another option could be that anger doesn’t go down after an attempt on the Lich, when it is level 5.

That's what happens currently which is why I prefer to stab them every time they spawn so they can reach level 5 ASAP so their anger doesn't degrade on subsequent stabs...

But the anger level is not very meaningful as it's just a chance-range for it to spawn, even when full it's not guaranteed to spawn and even when empty it can spawn, it's too wild.

The current spawn chances are fine if they could be manually hunted.

I don't really like the idea of a craftable beacon to spawn them but I guess better than nothing...

 

13 hours ago, DenGraaSumpPirat said:

3. Dead Lich = no thralls
A quick solution to this could be that the remaining murmurs are bestowed when the Lich is defeated, as the thralls in theory have “nothing” to fight for.

 

The best solution is to only stop thrall spawns if everybody in the squad defeated their lich.

 

13 hours ago, DenGraaSumpPirat said:

this feature could be made specific to Steel Path

That would make it annoying in a different sense because of how the larving spawns: you must kill X enemies within a certain timeframe after the screen-blink, which isn't something you can easily do with any frame (which you would need to be able to pick the element) without really specialized weapons, making it more stresful.

And people who didn't finish starchart deserve less RNG too :P

Maybe SteelPath larvings could give higher chances for higher elemental % and/or ephemeras or something like that.

 

13 hours ago, DenGraaSumpPirat said:

A way to resolve this could be the ability to rank the Lich up beyond level 5, and by that increasing the weapons elemental bonus

That sounds good but it seems a bit too much for them to start improving their weapon only at rank 5, maybe they could do that from the start with a specific % addition every rank (similar to the kuva drops from lich).

 

13 hours ago, DenGraaSumpPirat said:

This would greatly increase incentive to run in squads as the murmur progress could be quadrupled.

The lich being stabbed giving murmur to everyone else is a good incentive already, but the anti-incentive from not angering your lich is the issue, even if they gave 4x murmur it would still be annoying later on if you didn't have a way to spawn the lich... so all these only work nicely depending on the other things implemented, so we shall see what DE picks xD

 

 

And everything else I agree with :}

 

EDIT:
Oh, something else to add: We need a RJ-like "matchmake any node on this planet" for thrall missions to find people easier. I think they said they're adding this... but I hope that means it will matchmake only nodes I have lich on (unless they fix lich not getting angered in nodes/planets it doesn't control, in which case there should just be a "matchmake for literally any thrall mission star-chart-wide" aswell xD).

[xombob89]

Also I think they should allow lich spawning on high level missions outside its control area to make it feel like more of a nemesis than what it is now. I mean, the stalker is a bigger nemesis to me than this guy/gal atm lol.

And I mean ANYWHERE (with some exceptions) where enemy level is 50+ like during a sortie or arbitration and on Steel Path nodes.

They arent too hard to kill especially in a squad so it wouldn't be much worse than stalker or syndicates appearing. Obviously though, they should make them unable to harm defense targets (or at least prevent them from one-shotting it) first. 

After all, lich is an optional thing you can opt in to, so you should be prepared to face it at all times. 

[Spectre-8]

On 2020-11-12 at 3:07 PM, HunterDigi said:

2. Knowing all 3 symbols there's no way to directly attack the lich.

You have to wait for it to attack you which can take several missions.

 

 

 

 

This is my only real complaint about the Lich system as it stands.

[rikimaru6811]

I think they are working on a Lich-RJ final confrontation, which may or may not fix your 2nd point

1st point makes sense in a co-op oriented environment. But Liches are your and my own personal nemeses, so I have no qualms about it. But I imagine spawning 4 Liches at once might be fun, it's like they also have their own game and others could join to co-op against Tenno lol.

3rd point, from what I've played months ago, the Lich automatically leaves after you've reached the thralls limit? So it might be better to finish the Lich off if you want to advance your knowledge on the kill words, else just kite around and reach the thrall limit and let everyone have their murmur

4th, you're going out of your way to look for a very specific thing, that did you expect? Might as well buy the weapons from Lich trading

[Oorel]

Getting the right larvaling is the worst thing right now in my opinion. Though disincentivizing coop is a very close second.

There needs to be some reduction in the pool of available items a given larvaling can have. A simple idea could be to split them up into smaller groups of 3 or 4 weapons that drop in some set of missions. You would have maybe 6 pools of weapons that are set as the drops for larvalings in a collection of missions, for example;

• Pool A for larvalings on Cassini, Adaro, Plato. Pool A contains Kuva Hind, Kuva Kraken, Kuva Brakk, Kuva Seer.
• etc..

Same system with way less trial and error.

The worst thing currently is that it only gets worse the more you are invested in the system. At the beginning you are probably looking to get all the weapons, then so many larvalings are acceptable, then once you only need one or two you can easily spend an hour running a mission to find the right weapon, I've done that a few times now, its what's keeping me away from farming Liches currently, though I wouldn't mind improving some of my elemental percentages.

[xombob89]

I want to revive this thread while waiting for Corpus Queenpins, in hopes that Devs take these suggestions into consideration. I really like liches as Ive said before but theres so many things in need of improvement to make it perfect and more fun as listed by the OP. 

Id like to also give another suggestion for the weapon selection during larva stabbidity stab: you could also tie the weapon you get to the weapon you used while killing the larva, like it is with warframe progenitors atm. For example, use shotgun = get shotgun, use melee = get melee. This was suggested by another forum user elsewhere. I think this would also be a good alternative to previous suggestions, but personally Im fine with anything that makes the system more sensible. 

[(NSW)Gamer-Steve]

15 hours ago, xombob89 said:

Id like to also give another suggestion for the weapon selection during larva stabbidity stab: you could also tie the weapon you get to the weapon you used while killing the larva, like it is with warframe progenitors atm. For example, use shotgun = get shotgun, use melee = get melee.

Honestly I think that'd make perfect sense! From the Larving's perspective, your weapon could be the last thing they think about while they get stabbed (Anybody get the license number of that Sword / Gun?!), so they could ask the Queens for a weapon type similar to what nearly killed them, to exact a more fitting revenge (Off screen of course, but for context).

Or in the male Grineer Lich's perspective, they just thought your type of weapon was awesome :)

 

But functionally speaking, it would certainly improve the odds of getting the weapon you want, so that you can actually plan for it to some extent. Ultimately, you would still deal with RNG, but at least you have some foresight.