Kuva Lich Overhaul Concept: Tenno Created By Enemy Factions

[Brinstar7777]

This is a repost and refinement of an earlier idea I had, that replaces the current Kuva Liches/Sisters of Parvos with enemy-aligned tenno. After all, Tenno are pretty lichlike in that they cheat death and have a Phylactery in the form of their operators. And what's to say that some tenno decided that the Grineer or Corpus are actually the good guys and sided with them. The only thing stopping enemy-aligned tenno from developing is that the means to create them has been lost to the ages, or maybe was exclusive to the Zariman to begin with. 

Enter Alad V and his newest breakthrough.

Tenno.

Alad V has discovered the means to create new Tenno, and he's sold the secret of their creation off to EVERY major faction in the origin system. The Grineer, The Corpus, Narmer and his disciphles... they all have the means to produce Tenno of their own now, and it's only a matter of time before we must face these newly created Tenno in battle.

- The Lotus

Reworked Lich System Overview:

Spoiler

AN IMMORTAL FOE 

This warframe that menaces you cannot be killed permanently; the adversary who controls it will always use the power of the Void to revive it in the aftermath of every defeat. To slay it permanently, you must ascertain the location of the adversary's command ship and take them down. 

TAXES

In regions controlled by the adversary and their minions, mission rewards may sometimes be lost to them. Defeating the adversary once and for all is the only way to recover your losses. 

DRAW THEM OUT

To locate the adversary's flagship, you must acquire Void Signatures by besting the adversary's warframe in battle. Defeat their servants and disrupt their operations to lure them out of hiding, and then execute them with your Parazon to collect a Void Signature. Be wary, though; each time you do this, the adversary becomes more powerful.

DISCOVER THEIR WEAKNESS

Use the signatures to assemble the Nav Coordinates to the adversary's flagship, and then take to the Proxima Regions to take the fight to them.

TAKE THEM DOWN

Fight your way through the adversary's flagship to the throne room and best them in battle. From there, you have two choices.

MAKE YOUR CHOICE

Vanquish your adversary to lay claim to their weapons and their faction-themed warframe for your own use. 

Convert your adversary to free them from service to the faction and gain an on-call ally.

System In Detail:

Spoiler

Candidates:

During normal gameplay or through specific triggers, players may encounter a special enemy called a 'candidate' that can be mercy-killed with the Parazon to create their adversary. A Grineer Candidate will evolve into a Child of the Worm Queen and a Corpus Candidate will evolve into a Child of Parvos. Unlike the previous system, the warframe that killed it won't determine its skillset and the Elemental damage bonus of its weapons. However, its stats are determined by the relative 'level' player that killed it, and thus it scales with the player's power level. 

Minions:

A Child is accompanied by a legion of thralls that take control of the System under their name. These minions have abilities unique from other enemies in the same faction and have additional Damage Reduction over their normal/equivalent counterparts. Killing them agitates the Child significantly more than it does for killing normal enemies in the node. 

Tax System: 

Upon creation, a Child establishes influence on a planet. This influence is felt in the form of its minions, which will appear during missions on the controlled planet, the level of the local enemies being raised/lowered to match the level of the lich, the nodes on the mission changing hands from the original controller to the faction the Child is aligned with if they weren't controlled by that faction already (with the obvious exception of open world nodes such as the Plains of Eidolon and the Orb Vallis), and the claiming of mission rewards by the Child through a Reward Tax. Everything the player loses through Reward Tax will only be reclaimed after they have defeated the Child once and for all. 

Each time the Lich ranks up, it relocates to a new planet and establishes influence there, losing its influence on the old planet and returning all conquered nodes to their original owners in the process.

Rage Meter:

A rage meter can be seen on the Child's Profile page, representing the likelihood that the Child will appear in the player's missions. The 'angrier' the Child, the more likely the player will encounter them. This Rage Meter can be increased by many means; killing enemies within the Child's area of influence, completing missions on nodes controlled by the Child, and killing their minions. 

There are five levels of anger: Indifferent → Annoyed → Fuming → Furious → Enraged. The meter will reset every time the Child ranks up. If a Child is sufficiently enraged, there is a chance their warframe will appear in the mission to hunt you down. Killing or even fighting the Child's warframe is not required for mission success (for example, waves in Defense missions will end even if the Child's warframe is still active).

The warframe has a shield and a health bar, and a hidden energy bar that is invisible to the player. Its AI is a lot more complex than the AI of specters and uses the player's Energy system to keep track of ability usage rather than the cooldown system the Specters use, and it's a far more unpredictable and deadly combatant as a result, easily able to hold it's own against the player. 

Depleting the health bar of the Child's warframe causes it to be 'downed', making it fall to the floor for about 10 seconds, giving the player a chance to use their Parazon for a Mercy attack. If the player does so within the time limit, the Warframe is slain, and the player acquires a Void Signature, which consists of 2 symbols paired together. Otherwise, it leaps up and unleashes an energy blast that deals Impact, Slash, and Puncture damage and knocks over nearby players and allies, much as if it were a player that had revived itself. Unlike most bosses, Kuva Liches are vulnerable to status effects, but experience them as if they were a player. 

If a Child's warframe is downed five times without the player attempting to use the Parazon on the warframe, or all Tenno are in bleedout or are dead, it will automatically flee and leave the mission. This prevents it from ranking up, but it won't drop a Void Signature.

Note that once the Child reaches rank 5, it won't rank up anymore and won't drop more Void Signatures, effectively capping the number of Void Signatures a player can acquire from a Child to 4.

Void Signature System:

On the orbiter, in the corner opposite the one where the Void Relics are kept, the player can find a Void Decrypter which is used to turn the 4 Void Signatures acquired from the Child into a Transference Origin Point. This takes the form of a string of 5 symbols that are determined by matching Void Signature symbol pairs to the symbols on the Void Decrypter, much like the Orokin Consoles in The Sacrifice quest. When the right combination of symbols is found using the Void Signatures, a new node appears in a Proxima region corresponding to the Child's faction, such as Earth or Saturn Proxima for Children of the Worm and Venus or Neptune Proxima for Children of Parvos. 

Both missions are Empyrean missions that follow a similar flow as regular Empyrean missions for the first half, featuring a ship for which secondary objectives must be completed in order to allow for boarding. Once the secondary objectives are complete (such as destroying Crewships or Security Nodes) and the vessel is boarded, the player must fight their way through the ship to the 'throne room', which houses the Child's transference system. Once there, the player must defeat the Child's warframe and then defeat the Child itself. Once the Child is downed, they will be defeated and may be interacted with via the Parazon, prompting a final choice to Vanquish or Convert them.

• Whichever choice is made, all "stolen" drops that they were responsible for will be returned to the player. 
• Vanquishing the Child will permanently kill them and award the player their weaponry and Warframe. These will be "Ready to Claim" in the Foundry and bypasses their Mastery Rank requirements. 
• Converting the Child will free them from service to their respective faction and make them the player's ally, allowing them to join a mission at the player's request. Only one such allied Child can join a player at a time, but they retain their complex AI and are thus far more flexible and effective than specters. Moreover, they can be brought aboard Railjacks as crewmembers. 

[Helstiir]

Alright, the concept is interesting

But I have a number of questions, such as what would happen to the requiem mods and the liches that people already have? And these children, are they supposed to be grineer and corpus children or humans? How would these children look? Finally, what is special about the weapons and warframes?

[Brinstar7777]

On 2022-09-12 at 1:25 AM, Helstiir said:

Alright, the concept is interesting

But I have a number of questions, such as what would happen to the requiem mods and the liches that people already have? And these children, are they supposed to be grineer and corpus children or humans? How would these children look? Finally, what is special about the weapons and warframes?

Existing liches would change into Children of the Worm for Kuva Liches, and Children of Parvos for existing factions, and the player would gain Void Signatures based on their rank. Not sure about existing requiem mods, though they could turn into a lot of Endo or Kuva.

The Children are supposed to be grineer and corpus children, and thus they resemble normal operators that bear the genetic degredation scars (grineer)/face paint(corpus) associated with their faction. They wear transference suits, but these suits bear the obvious hallmark of their respective faction's craftmanship. For example a Children of the Worm will be outfitted with a Transference Suit that has a curved, rounded, and heavily plated spot-weld look, where Children of Parvos will be outfitted with a Transference Suit that has geometric block-like shapes, right angles, and small components.

What's special about the warframes is that they are unique faction-built Warframes that can only be acquired through acquiring and besting a Child. Here's an example. It's technically supposed to be a independent warframe not associated with any particular faction, but it could easily be repurposed as a Warframe used by a Child of Parvos. I'll be adding a few examples later.

[(PSN)Vexx757]

To add to this, I have come up with an idea of how infested liches should work.

 

[(PSN)BKZ04-]

While I think this is very interesting and it does give a good take, I feel as this would be pushed off due to the fact that it's a lot more resources and can end up being a bugged mess at the end of the day.
Think of this in the dev's perspective. The Warframes would take many more resources than Liches and Sisters do in general, and changing an entire system rather than adding to it is going to put the game in a, well, bad state.
I do think it's a fine idea, but it'd need some fine-tuning, and if the current system didn't already exist, I would think people would be more, you know, excited about it.
It also stands to reason that the previous Liches and Sisters would not have data for their Child forms and Warframe, same with any existing Liches and Sisters. They lack the data.
Hate to be a letdown but there are many flaws about this given the current state of the game.