A Personalized Grineer Enemy, Just For You

The Old Blood, Warframe’s newest update, came out with only an hour to go before October ended for me, so I wasted sleeping time waiting for the game to update and load, so I could jump straight into the flesh of the new update: the Kuva Lich.

Kuva Liches are enemies created solely to hunt you down. They start as frankly rather out of place Grineer workers that wander around level 20+ Grineer missions, picked out by Kuva Guardians to be blessed. When a little Kuvaling spawns, you’ll see a flash and a Kuva Guardian will mention that a Grineer has been chosen. You kill them, they scream and get teleported away in a flash of red light and you… are kinda none the wiser until you get back to your ship.

Once you finish the mission, you’ll get a little message from a freshly born Kuva Lich, essentially mocking you and saying that they will come back, stronger than ever. You can get more information on your Kuva Lich by going to your pause menu and hitting the Kuva Lich button next to the big Nightwave button.

From here, you don’t really have that many options. The Kuva Lich, with a random name, weapon and appearance, will suddenly take control of a planet in the solar system and if you do missions there, the Kuva Lich will steal loot from you. Normally this is just a handful of items, but it can steal relic rewards and mods as well. This only really affects one planet, so how much this bothers you depends on what planet the Lich is roaming around on. Ladd Impa is currently on Venus and he can’t control the four nodes (Fortuna, Orb Vallis, Romula and Fossa) I care about anyway.

So how do I kill this Kuva Lich? It’s all a TON of luck.

Firstly I need to do Kuva Floods (100% chance for a relic but only doable once an hour) and Kuva Siphons (30% chance but more missions available) in order to get Kuva Relics. I then need to open all these Kuva Relics so I can get the special Kuva-based Requiem Mods, by opening them in fissures on the Kuva Fortress. There’s 8 Requiem Mods in total scattered across 4 Kuva Relics and I need at least 3 to be able to defeat the Kuva Lich. Oh, by the way, the Kuva Lich can steal the Kuva Relic if the Kuva Siphon is in the Kuva Lich’s territory.

I then need to kill the Kuva Lich’s Kuva Thralls, in the territories that my Kuva Lich controls, so I can get some Requiem Murmurs, which will tell me precisely which three Requiem Mods I’ll need. I need to put the Requiem Mods in the new, spangly Parazon, a special blade that replaces Warframes hacking and can be used to perform finishers on enemies. I need to take this blade and go and face my Kuva Lich.

All the while the Kuva Lich will taunt me and continue to steal stuff from missions done in their territory.

But nooo there’s more, because I don’t know the ORDER I need to put the mods in. I literally have to guess, I have to go and fight the Kuva Lich multiple times and hope I got the mods in the right order. If I’m wrong, then the Kuva Lich just some how defeats me anyway and I have to try again.

Once I HAVE got the mods in the right order, I can either murder the Kuva Lich and get all my stolen loot back, as well as its weapon, or I can spare him and make him a friend, to be used later on in the whole Rail Jack Empyrean thing.

After that, I’m free to create a new Kuva Lich and complete the cycle all over, mainly in the hopes of creating a Kuva Lich with one of the three new weapons, or any weapon aside from the Kuva Seer or Kraken. Because typically my first Kuva Lich has one of the most mediocre weapons around.

Alternatively, you can just ignore them, like I’m doing. I don’t care much about Venus or Ladd Impa or his dumb Kuva Seer. He can loot Venus for all I care. Sure, Ladd Impa will get pissed that I’m ignoring him, but it’s not like he can really hurt me…