I would like some guidance regarding Hirudo

[Ice00047]

Hello everyone. This is my first time posting in the forums despite playing for quite some time, so if this question has already been asked i apologize for being the broken record. Just trying to figure out what is going, if this is how things are now or if i am messing up somewhere with my approach.

 

Let's get this out of the way: i love HIrudo. I absolutely love Hirudo. I found the weapon that i am fully comfortable with and as is my habit (i admit that this is a fault in me) i stuck with it and tried to make it work for everything, even things resistant to Puncture damage. I did the same with my warframe. I fell inlove with the aesthetics of Atlas Prime, changed the coloring on it, subsumed blood altar onto it to help with team healing if needed (i am almost exclusively a solo player), and stuck with it. When i find my comfort zone, i tend not to step out of it without great difficulty. Atlas (and Nidus before whatever they did to him that stopped him from being able to stand in front of bullets and giggle) and Hirudo have served me well in every single bit of content i have run them through. Level 200 enemies of any faction? Melt them, like butter. Survivability? Hirudo aside, my Atlas's current ability set allows me to survive all situations i have tackled so far. Am I making things unnecessarily hard on myself by forcing myself to walk a specific path when other warframes could accomplish more much more easily? Yes, and i know this. I am what i am, i love that gorgeous prime bastard and i love my blood-sucking pokies. They are all i use, for the most part, barring some dedicated experimenting with some other weapons and frames that quickly passed.

 

Here is the issue i need help with: I hunted down my Lich the other day to be done with it and be able to get myself a Sister. He appeared during a mission and, fully confident as i was in the past when facing my Liches (i had a hiatus of a few months, came back shortly after Sisters launched), I plowed right into him......... 5 mission revives, countless blows, and TWENTY FIVE MINUTES later, my Lich escaped to Saturn Proxima and i had to reassess some things. 1, Hirudo's lifesteal was not working on the lich. I was not healing (my current build has my crit chance at 105% and my crit multiplier at 10x) when i hit the Lich, and only the Lich. 2, those 25 minutes i mentioned were spent exclusively hitting the Lich. The shields were depleting about as fast as a terminally ill snail crawling across my screen, and when they depleted the armor was a little easier but not by much.

 

Why? What happened? What changed? Are Liches just stupid powerful now? Is Hirudo a terrible weapon to use against them? Was it a bug? Do i need to change something in my approach? Is it normal that Hirudo's lifesteal does not work on Liches? Do Liches require a different approach now than simply attacking them head-on? Do they have weak points now or something? 

 

Any insight that could be shed would be most appreciated. 

[Xenotater]

Afaik liches were not made harder to kill, but liches do tend to have randomized resistances/immunities. It could be that your lich was, unknown to you, resistant or immune to the primary damage type your Hirudo was modded for. I'd recommend checking the lich screen to see if this is the case.

As for weapon limitations, Mods can make anything work, and Hirudo certainly isn't a bad weapon to begin with. If you have a certain style you like to play and have the patience, there's nothing stopping you.

[(PSN)Unstar]

My best guess is what Xenotater said: that it might be a resistance or immunity thing.  It seems unexpected!  But if you were doing low enough damage, that might explain why you weren't healing, since the healing is a percentage of your damage done, which could end up being zero.

This is probably only slightly relevant, but with this new update several melee mods were made less powerful, and you may be using them on your weapon?  But that would only lower your damage a bit, it doesn't seem like it would explain this.

Depending on your build, one contributing factor might be the high armor of Liches and their "resistance" to status effects (the maximum number of procs for them is 4 stacks for most statuses).  So if you normally depend on procs like Heat or Corrosive to get through armor, it may not work as well here.  If you're looking for an alternative, I believe there's very little that the mod Shattering Impact doesn't work on, and Hirudo has impact damage so it should work.  Maybe this will help?

[Ice00047]

I normally have no status focus on Hirudo at all. I have 2 mods and an arcane that cater to nothing but attack speed, and i rely on the sheer number of red crit hits i can belt out in the space of a single second to melt through my opponents. I don't remember my former Lich having resistance to puncture damage, but after reading both your responses, that seems to be the only plausible answer. It would make no sense otherwise, short of a major bug. 25 minutes of straight punishment to that thing? No. The hardest fight i had ever been in prior to that took me 5 minutes from the start of the mission to when it ended, and it was against that original strain Infested boss from Eris. I will go take a look at the resistances it had and go from there.

 

Thank you both for your feedback

[Fallen77]

Seriously guys... it's nice of you to answer php, but at least read the patchnotes to not feed false infos to those in help...

Lich and sisters now have adaptive resistances. The more you hit, the less damage you do.

You can try to wait a little to let the resistance go down.

People have been advising nyx to remove all defenses.

And generally look into damage buffing frames.

[Traumtulpe]

13 hours ago, Ice00047 said:

[...]

As already mentioned, Liches have received a new, special, damage reduction with the latest update. Infamous for reducing millions of damage down to two digits (or less!). Because of this, life steal mechanics (recovering a percentage of dealt damage as health), like the Hirudo's, are essentially null and void against them. Melee has also been heavily nerfed, though this should not make much of a difference compared to the DR.

That being said, If you can't beat your Lich in ~2 minutes, you are doing something wrong. To assess where your mistake lies, you might want to show us how you mod your Hirudo, the abilities and resistances of your Lich, and how you play. Getting grabbed by your Lich (which seems reasonable to assume you are), should be avoided, the same goes for letting their shields regenerate.

As for the Liches abilities, is it an impact Lich by any chance? A Liches Iron Skin can be stupid powerful, if you make the mistake of attacking it while it absorbs damage.

[taiiat]

9 hours ago, Ice00047 said:

I normally have no status focus on Hirudo at all. I have 2 mods and an arcane that cater to nothing but attack speed, and i rely on the sheer number of red crit hits i can belt out in the space of a single second to melt through my opponents.

i'd strongly recommend doing the opposite. it'll make the Weapon stronger overall, against all Enemies.

if you're currently running Elementless as it sounds like you are - this is at minimum reducing your average Damage by a factor of about 3, up to a factor of in excess of 16!
you'll want some Elementals. even the wrong Elemental Damage Types is still a hell of a lot more Damage. but the general purpose type would be Viral/Fire. a couple of those being Status Elementals and if you have the left over space for it, also having Melee Prowess, would go a long way.
to even further capitalize on that, Condition Overload would be a natural thing to pair in.

 

in short, big Crit Stats do look amusing, but if you don't have much Damage to Multiply with those Crits, well then it's still not much Damage. the general rule is that it's better to have a modest amount of Damage Multiplication in half a dozen different ways, than a huge amount in one or two ways.

 

 

the Liches/Sisters still have some adjustments to make them extra durable in most scenarios, so that probably won't be the ticket on its own. but it should still be a big difference.

[Ice00047]

3 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

As already mentioned, Liches have received a new, special, damage reduction with the latest update. Infamous for reducing millions of damage down to two digits (or less!). Because of this, life steal mechanics (recovering a percentage of dealt damage as health), like the Hirudo's, are essentially null and void against them. Melee has also been heavily nerfed, though this should not make much of a difference compared to the DR.

That being said, If you can't beat your Lich in ~2 minutes, you are doing something wrong. To assess where your mistake lies, you might want to show us how you mod your Hirudo, the abilities and resistances of your Lich, and how you play. Getting grabbed by your Lich (which seems reasonable to assume you are), should be avoided, the same goes for letting their shields regenerate.

As for the Liches abilities, is it an impact Lich by any chance? A Liches Iron Skin can be stupid powerful, if you make the mistake of attacking it while it absorbs damage.

So, i checked the information you asked about. My lich had strictly poison based abilities, being sired by Atlas Prime, and none of his abilities were damage mitigation or healing. He was weak to radiation (which i thought was a lie because he was giggling at my arca plasmor), resistant to cold and viral, and immune to toxin. 

 

My Hirudo is modded as such: Grim Fury stance, organ shatter, blood rush, gladiator might, gladiator vice, sacrificial pressure, sacrificial steel, fury, and a riven that gives me crit chance crit damage and heat. Hirudo's stats are a 105% crit chance, a 10x crit multiplier, a 1.6 attack speed (not counting my 60% extra speed arcane), 11% status chance, and a total of roughly 1200 damage between Impact Puncture Slash and Heat. The smallest red crit i've seen is 14k, as of yet, and i hit very very fast. This same build is the one i have used for months, barring recently replacing Berserker with Gladiator Vice because of how they changed it (i thought of boss fights or single target situations and decided the new Berserker was limited if i had nothing else to kill, so i switched it out for something that would always be up and running in all situations). It has melted through anything and everything i have thrown it at, including all my prior liches. All of whom were sired by either Nidus or Atlas, all of whom were both sired by and defeated by Hirudo. and none of those fights took me even a minute.

 

So, since my lich did not have Iron Skin or any damage mitigation, was not resistant or immune to any of me equipped elements, and was Grinneer meaning Puncture should have had my back, i am struggling greatly to understand how the same build and weapon that fought all my liches and this same lich once before my hiatus with less than zero issues, went from being so effective to taking me 25 minutes of solid hitting. The disparity is terrifying. I went from warrior to annoyed toddler in terms of efficiency.... Do you see anything in my build or the patch notes that would cause that?

[Ice00047]

1 hour ago, taiiat said:

i'd strongly recommend doing the opposite. it'll make the Weapon stronger overall, against all Enemies.

if you're currently running Elementless as it sounds like you are - this is at minimum reducing your average Damage by a factor of about 3, up to a factor of in excess of 16!
you'll want some Elementals. even the wrong Elemental Damage Types is still a hell of a lot more Damage. but the general purpose type would be Viral/Fire. a couple of those being Status Elementals and if you have the left over space for it, also having Melee Prowess, would go a long way.
to even further capitalize on that, Condition Overload would be a natural thing to pair in.

 

in short, big Crit Stats do look amusing, but if you don't have much Damage to Multiply with those Crits, well then it's still not much Damage. the general rule is that it's better to have a modest amount of Damage Multiplication in half a dozen different ways, than a huge amount in one or two ways.

 

 

the Liches/Sisters still have some adjustments to make them extra durable in most scenarios, so that probably won't be the ticket on its own. but it should still be a big difference.

You are suggesting i turn my Hirudo into a hybrid of crit and status, instead of a dedicated crit build? I would have to sacrifice a hefty chunk of my current build to make it even remotely status viable. After seeing my current build in my above reply and my current stats on it, do you think i should change my build to a hybrid?

[LillyRaccune]

With the new update, when liches or sisters are level 5 they have insane magic damage reduction. And I do mean magic. Abilities don't work, non-crit attacks do zero damage, etc.

I use a "cheese strategy" right now. I put Saryn's Spore on them and hide and wait.

...epic strategy, right?

When I eventually run into a lich-sis that is immune to corrosive, I will be in so much trouble.

[(PSN)Unstar]

1 hour ago, Ice00047 said:

You are suggesting i turn my Hirudo into a hybrid of crit and status, instead of a dedicated crit build? I would have to sacrifice a hefty chunk of my current build to make it even remotely status viable. After seeing my current build in my above reply and my current stats on it, do you think i should change my build to a hybrid?

So here's your build:

Crit damage boost - 2 mod (3 with Riven)

Crit chance boost - 2 mod

Attack speed boost - 2 mod

All Damage boost - 1 mod

Elemental damage - (1 with Riven)

I can't talk about damage without talking about math, so please forgive me; I'll try to keep it abstract.  Basically, there's this concept called "The Difference Between Two Squares".  And in short, for our purposes, the idea is this: if you have only 8 mod slots to devote to making numbers bigger, then since multiplication is involved in calculating your DPS, you want to try to raise every number by roughly the same amount to maximize your DPS.

So for example, let's say you do 1 attack per second and that attack deals 1 damage.  You have 4 points to distribute, how do you maximize your damage?  If you put all 4 points into attacks-per-second, you do 5 attacks per second for 1 damage each, totaling 5 DPS.  You get the same outcome if you do 1 attack every second for 5 damage.  But you get far more damage if you split the points equally between both stats: 3 attacks per second for 3 damage each is 9 DPS.  So this very simple example shows the benefit of equally distributing your stat boosts.

But this isn't just about attack speed and damage.  Because crit and crit chance also exist, and they are also multiplicative.  And so are boosts from elemental damage.  Right now you have multiple mod slots dedicated to boosting crit damage, crit chance, and attack speed, but you've left elemental damage low, so your DPS is going to be lower.  I hope I've explained this in a way that makes sense.  It might help cement it if you write out the stats for different builds and then calculate your own DPS; there are forumlas for this on the wiki if you need them.

I would generally recommend roughly 3 mod slots for Elementals so that you can get Viral + Heat.  Your Riven is already giving you some amount of heat, so depending on how much that is, I'd recommend removing 1 crit damage mod and then an attack speed mod (since you also have the arcane's speed boost).  If you have the Primed toxin mod, that will add a lot of damage, though not everyone has that.

 

Below is the snippet from the recent update about Lich adaptation:

Quote

Adaptive Damage Scaling Changes for Liches:

Throughout our boss design history, we have added things like diminishing returns and damage mitigation techniques like armor or damage attenuation. In the time since we’ve launched the Kuva Liches, we’ve made adjustments to how we handle player damage vs. Liches. We’ve done things like add allowing Status Effects and attenuate damage to try and create a balanced combat experience. Like many bosses in Warframe, Liches have some damage modifiers applied to them. 

We found a bug in the damage attenuation code, and have fixed it and polished the attenuation for Kuva Liches.

This system generally targets the scenario of very high damage things like the Void Rig’s Arquebex vs. a Kuva Lich, a scenario that is now possible due to the final showdown being based in Railjack. When we were testing this Voidrig Vs Lichout, our Liches barely lasted a second and we realized the damage attenuation code could use some review! We found bugs to fix and things to tweak to account for these new scenarios. Our only intention is to give you a fight that lasts more than mere seconds - happy hunting and may your teamwork and gear lead you to victory! We will be closely reviewing this to ensure we strike the right balance of a fight that requires teamwork and consistent offensive gameplay to beat, but also doesn’t feel impossible. Feedback is welcome!

I bolded the end because it sounds like this might be good feedback to provide in the feedback forum.  If you're genuinely shredding every other enemy in the fight and it takes you 25 minutes, that's good feedback to provide to DE.  While your build isn't optimal, in my opinion it's not so sub-optimal as to warrant what you experienced.  Many players will have sub-optimal builds, and lacking an optimal build shouldn't be this much of a barrier to complete content. (at least in my opinion)

[Traumtulpe]

2 hours ago, Ice00047 said:

[...]

I'd suggest modding for corrosive damage, using the primed toxin mod if possible, This is not to cause the corrosive status effect, but because the armor type Liches use is weak to corrosive damage, your Lich has no resistance to it, and it is a big numerical damage increase on top.

Previous Liches being a lot easier is to be expected, the special damage reduction only got introduced recently.

I would expect you to do a lot better when modding for corrosive, should that not be the case, try using a relatively weak gun with a good rate of fire. Supposedly, the higher your damage is at base, the more it gets reduced - even beyond making weak and strong weapons equal, to the point that you might deal less damage with a better weapon.

If you still have issues, debuffs that increase an enemies taken damage work after the damage reduction, for example Banshee's Sonar or Equinox's Rage. Liches can also be permanently slowed - by up to 95% with Gloom, making them trivial.

Personally, I've come to use a Tenet Detron. The alt fire works quite well. I also use Equinox with 95% Gloom, and about 130% Rage. Usually oneshots a Liches shields or health segments. This also works on the final showdown, oneshotting the Lich at rank two. If the Lich is at rank 5 for some reason (you want to convert it, for example), I just use the Necramechs Arquebex while my Lich is at 5% speed - not because it kills particularly fast, but because I just have to hold down the fire button and wait until the job is done.

Hope this helps!

[taiiat]

4 hours ago, Ice00047 said:

You are suggesting i turn my Hirudo into a hybrid of crit and status, instead of a dedicated crit build? I would have to sacrifice a hefty chunk of my current build to make it even remotely status viable. After seeing my current build in my above reply and my current stats on it, do you think i should change my build to a hybrid?

Unstar pretty much covererd what i would have ended up saying. finding space for two Elemental Mods, will easily about triple your Damage versus any Enemy. plus if you get the right Status Effects that can offer even more.

 

to come to your own conclusion, try this:

use the Scanner upgrade widget that will let you see the Health Types of Enemies you're looking at. take note of what Health Types they have, so you know what they'll be weak to. unless they are resistant to the primary weakness of their Armor Type, you should prefer to have Damage of whatever Armor Type they are weak to. because of the new adjustments to special DR, stacking tons of it won't be as effective as would normally be, but having some is a good idea. if a Lich/Sister is immune to what their Armor is normally weakest to, then go for Viral instead.

another option, always going for Viral and using an Ability of some sort (Sharpened Claws might work too but if other Enemies are nearby, may be inconsistent) to remove the Armor from the Lich/Sister.

use Abilities/effects which can help you deal more Damage, or CC the Enemy. so that you either deal more Damage, or reduce their capability to deal Damage.

[Ice00047]

10 hours ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

So here's your build:

Thank you very much for your explanation and the time you took to explain it to me, i found it very informative. I have rerolled my riven to now be a 180% melee damage, 100% toxin, and 95% cold, which gives me viral and a good damage boost, and i switched out Fury for the 60/60 melee fire mod that i cannot for the life of me remember the name of right now.... but i now have viral and fire on it, 105 crit chance, 7.5 multiplier. I will take Hirudo for a spin in an extended steel path survival for every faction and see how she performs with this new build.

 

12 hours ago, LillyRaccune said:

With the new update, when liches or sisters are level 5 they have insane magic damage reduction. And I do mean magic. Abilities don't work, non-crit attacks do zero damage, etc.

I use a "cheese strategy" right now. I put Saryn's Spore on them and hide and wait.

...epic strategy, right?

When I eventually run into a lich-sis that is immune to corrosive, I will be in so much trouble.

Very cheese indeed, but now that i think about it, you could subsume Defy (from Wukong) onto your Saryn and the first time you run into one that is immune to corrosive, you can wait for it to gather an army, pop Defy, have them dump all the lead (or plasma) in the world on you, and unleash that damage multiplied a few times back at them, including the lich/sister. I would assume you modded your Saryn for ability strength, so that would work great for you. In fact, i think i'm going to do that on Atlas and test that out.

 

10 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

Hope this helps!

I will remember your feedback and try it out ingame the next time i get a chance. Thank you very much for your time and help

8 hours ago, taiiat said:

Unstar pretty much covererd what i would have ended up saying. finding space for two Elemental Mods, will easily about triple your Damage versus any Enemy. plus if you get the right Status Effects that can offer even more

I will most definitely try out that widget and keep your recommendations in mind. Thank you very much

[LillyRaccune]

1 hour ago, Ice00047 said:

I would assume you modded your Saryn for ability strength,

Nah. I use Overextended. That combined with the Umbral mods gets me to about 100% strength. I also deleted Saryn's 4th ability, Miasma, in favour of Breach Surge 😻 . It gives me room control and is a nice, slow nuke under normal circumstances.

I rarely use Defy, but it sounds like a legitimate strategy.