Smoothing Down the Kuva Lich Grind

February brings with it a lot of things, like everything immediately being Valentines Day related and slathered in red. Warframe is kinda doing the same thing with a small Kuva Lich update, because those Liches sure do love being awful. Or perhaps not, as there’s a bunch of changes to Kuva Liches that make them far less awful to grind for. Yep, we got a Kuva Lich 1.5 update, and the changes are all round pretty damn good. To the point that I completely glossed over the fact that Ivara Deluxe is now available.

The first and most important change is that Kuva Liches no longer kill you if you get the sequence wrong. This is the best change ever because frankly it is so fucking annoying watching a long-ass cut scene where you watch your Warframe’s back get broken, simply because you don’t have 3 mods in the right order. And is even more annoying if you have to go through every potential sequence to get your set of mods in the right order. Now, if you get the mod order wrong, you still do your fancy stab animation but your Lich will fall down then get back up, mock you and run away. It’s still not really a “lich” thing to do, but it’s a vast improvement and makes you feel less shitty when you get your mods wrong.

Of course, this does make my recently released Lich guide a bit out of date, but still, it’s always worth stabbing your Lich whether you have the sequence correct or not, because they still drop Kuva and you still earn lots of Murmurs.

There’s also been a buff to Ephemera chances – from 5% on release to 20% with the most recent Lich update. It’s still about three hours of work to reroll a new Lich once you have one, but frankly the initial chance was ludicrous. And I’m saying that as someone who got the Vengeful Charge Ephemera on my very first Lich. Especially since it takes so long to kill a Lich.

That’s one thing that hasn’t changed. You still need to kill a fuckton of Thralls and fight your Lich a ton of times before you can successfully get rid of a Lich and go and create a new one. While not being killed by a Lich does speed up the process a lot (it’s a five-second cut scene you couldn’t avoid), you still have to farm Murmurs in a mission separate from the rest of Warframe. Which sucks even more if you are gunning for a specific weapon…

Actually, I take that former statement back. The most important change is that you can choose what weapon you want. Kinda. Now, when you down a Kuva Larvaling, the poor fellow will actually show what weapon he or she will spawn with when they get stabbed with the Parazon and become a Lich. A little icon appears above their head, showing what they have, whether it’s a brand new Kuva-only weapon like the new Kuva Grineer Bow, an old weapon like the Kuva Ogris or a new Kuva variant like the Kuva Hind and Nukor that just came out. This does mean running random Grineer missions until you get the Kuva Larvaling with the weapon you want, but a bunch of 5 minute Saturn Capture missions is far, far better than up to 3 hours PER LICH in an attempt to get new weapons.

But what if you have a Lich with an old weapon that you don’t want? Well now you can merge all your duplicate weapons together into your best Kuva weapon, in order to make one single Kuva weapon with a better status chance, while also getting a small boost to your best Kuva weapon’s stat. While I personally wouldn’t farm multiple Liches for one weapon (except maybe the Twin Stubbas?), this does mean that a perfect stat 60% Kuva weapon is 100% obtainable now.

Are Kuva Liches still worth playing though? Honestly? Not really. Sure, new weapons are cool, which are ultimately what will keep mastery-chasers like me playing. But aside from the Ephemeras and the collecting of Kuva Liches with cool names, there’s still no… longevity about these Liches. So once one has all the weapons, which is a far easier task now, there’s even less reason to do this estranged content.

Oh well, at least the ride is so much smoother now.