Lich Endgame Suggestion: Corpus Vitae

[erikune]

Lore:

Once a Lich reaches level 30, then can get involve in a Nexus-scale project known as the Corpus Vitae: The Study and Research of Life. Those who wish to participate take the magical essense of the life they control - their pets - and pool them together into the Corpus Vitae project. The end result, they hope, will reveal new information to them about the nature of the spirits caught within the Nexus, hopefully giving them new insights or control to break free of their chains.

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Mechanics:

Liches at level 30 or higher can destroy their own pets and transfer the magic involved into the Corpus Vitae, a project that all Liches can participate in. Similar to the Lightspeaker endgame, this involves a tab at the bottom of the screen that allows the Lich to give up most of their pets and a selection of a plane: Purgatorio, Elysium, or Stygia. (Purg should be the default to avoid everybody just accidentally selecting Elysium by default.) Unlike the Lightspeaker, doing this destroys the pet and contributes the pet's summon MP towards to Corpus Vitae, with the amount as a "vote" towards the selected plane.

Pet sacrifice is based on the summoning cost, and is listed here:

• Zombies and Ghouls provide 10 MP.
• Necrophage provides 30 MP.
• Skeletons and Bone Guardians provide 10 MP.
• Fossil Monstrosity provides 30 MP.
• Will-O-Wisp provides 15 MP.
• Wight provides 20 MP.

Wraiths are not fully under control of the summoner to begin with, and so cannot be sacrificed.

This process continues until a total of 2000 MP has been sacrificed to the Corpus Vitae. Note that Liches don't get a notification how much MP has been sacrificed or how many "votes" have been cast. The transcended characters, wishing to keep options fair, hide the votes until the result becomes obvious.

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Result:

Upon completing the Corpus Vitae, it checks which plane has receive the most MP dedicated towards it. If Elysium wins, then every Lich who sacrificed any pets towards the Corpus Vitae immediately drops 10 Morality. If Stygia wins, then every Lich who sacrificed any pets immediately gains 10 Morality. If Purgatorio wins, then there is no morality shift.

On the plane in question, the Corpus Vitae is summoned. Everybody on the plane (along with all the Liches who participated) gets a notification that is has arrived. The Corpus Vitae is a monstrous Champion of the Elder Powers Wraith, having 500 HP, 1000 MP, unlimited AP, 70% to hit, 10% Defense, 10 death damage primary, and 10 arcane damage secondary. It drains half the damage dealt in MP from its target, recovering HP and MP equal to the amount of MP drained. If the target doesn't have any more MP, then nothing happens. It ignores planar pets and all pets but the Petmaster's titan pet, but attacks NPCs.

Each character it kills does not leave a body, and instead becomes a masterless Wraith with the same name as the killed character. This Wraith behaves just like any other Wraith that has broken free.

Any Lich which has contributed at least 100 MP towards the Corpus Vitae (5% of the total required) will get a notification of the kill. They receive 1 Kills stat when this happens, along with 1 Angel Killed, 1 Transcended Killed, or 1 Demon Killed if appropriate.

All Liches of level 30 will have the Corpus Vitae listed in their pet menu, along with its current HP, MP, and which plane it is on. The exact tile won't be shown to the players.

Liches cannot sacrifice pets to the Corpus Vitae project while a current Corpus Vitae is still active. They need to wait until the current Corpus is either killed or despawns before they can begin the process again.

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Notes:

A lot of these numbers are just made up and might not be the best fit. A minimum of 100 MP to get rewards and a goal of 2000 MP seems fair, since it would allow up to 20 Liches to participate and would reasonably allow 10-12 to devote pets without isolating it to a few devoted summoners. My experience with the Lightspeark endgame was limited towards the end of the breath, but I don't recall seeing even 10 names participating in that, so 20 should be fine.

If changing the numbers, keeping the "minimum" limit to 5% of the total ensures the same number of people can get involved. Lowering that allows more people to get involved, raising that means less people will get the Kills badge rewards.

If the MO change feels too harsh for players who might've just sacrificed one pet by accidnet or by curiosity, then perhaps limit the MO change to people who have sacrificed the same minimum 100 MP (5% of total) to the Corpus Vitae.

This looks similar to the Lightspeaker endgame, but with changes that I think people will find more fun and fit better with the Lich concept. Angels are about contributing for the benefit of many. Unaligned are more for individual choice and discovering the way the universe works. Hence, the voting (with the majority winning) and the theme of discovering truths about the Nexus, despite the risks.

The Corpus Vitae drains MP from its targets and heals HP/MP for itself to give it a bit more longevity, compared to other Elder Power Champions. This is in part to reward people who put days or weeks into summoning it, so that it doesn't just wander around aimlessly and despawn. My Revenant can kill these Champions in a single AP cycle, and I'm sure a Seraph/IB and probably many others could as well with some potion support, so I'm not much worried about the Corpus Vitae taking over any plane. Those extra abilities are more to just cause additional chaos while it's there and to kill off some NPCs or characters sleeping outside, thinking they are safe.

Pets are just assigned a cost towards the Corpus Vitae based off their summon/rejuvenate cost. The exceptions are the Necrophage and Fossil Monstrosity, which give MP equal to the zombies or skeletons sacrificed to create them. These could be adjusted to balance out the summon trees better.

Lich players seem to have fun with setting Wraiths free to terrorize local people, so I figure this should be something fun for them to do as well.

Depending on how the timing of things works best, the Corpus Vitae could be summoned immediately once its MP total has been reached, or it could be summoned at the end of a 24 hour period which will check if the total has been reached. Similarly, Liches could get the kills badge bonuses at the end of the same 24 hour period (similar to how Lightspeaker endgame works) and the ability to sacrifice new pets to the Corpus Vitae could be reset to become available at the same 24 hour period, rather than making it immediately available once the old Corpus has died.

[Stretch]

What if each lich would contribute towards its own corpus, each lich having only one at a time, to unleash upon the plane of its choosing? and what if the corpus had HP and attack characteristics consistent with the type of creature most sacrificed to summon it? To add more interactivity, perhaps make the creature a bit stronger (to not be instantly soloed) and require less “MP” to summon, but the lich had to stay on that plane and that corpus would die if someone found and slew the lich.

Skeletons would give slashing, wisps would let it see invis, fossil monstrosities would be larger and hit harder to compensate for requiring so much effort to summon, wights would regen more hp on damage and do magic damage

[Stretch]

Additionally: Wraiths should report kills to the formerly-controlling lich, and each time a lich has released 65 wraiths, it should unleash a super wraith.

[erikune]

Additionally: Wraiths should report kills to the formerly-controlling lich, and each time a lich has released 65 wraiths, it should unleash a super wraith.

I think that normal Wraiths already report kills when they set themselves free?

The reason that the Wraiths generated by the Corpus Vitae don't report kills is to avoid combat spam, and because it would likely be more difficult to code that sort of thing. If a Lich releases a single Wraith, then reporting its kills just means reporting back to a single master. With dozens of people contributing to the Corpus Vitae, it just seems easier to generate the character-killed-Wraiths under the general "no master" ID than attempting to assign them to all the Liches that had contributed to the Corpus.

What if each lich would contribute towards its own corpus, each lich having only one at a time, to unleash upon the plane of its choosing? and what if the corpus had HP and attack characteristics consistent with the type of creature most sacrificed to summon it? To add more interactivity, perhaps make the creature a bit stronger (to not be instantly soloed) and require less “MP” to summon, but the lich had to stay on that plane and that corpus would die if someone found and slew the lich.

The idea was to make the creation a bit cooperative (multiple characters contribute to make it happen) and also a bit competitive ("voting" on which plane gets the Corpus Vitae) so the idea of it just being a personal T4 superpet doesn't really fit with the idea. Also, I think it acting like a Wraith - a creature that already rebels against Lich control and already has the "MP drain for MP restore" ability - seems to fit best.

[Atrele]

I like this, but I think I would set it so Liches could still donate pets while a Corpus Vitae is active, but limit Corpus Vitae summoning to 12 hours per Corpus Vitae per plane or if there are no Corpus Vitae on that plane. If the liches really get together with the project, they can set up a marauding independent pet horde, but they can't just overwhelm a plane without taking a little time.

I would also allow MP to be spent on voting on particular aspects of a Corpus Vitae, to give each Corpus Vitae more variance. A lot of MP spent voting on a Skeleton aspect instead of a Zombie aspect may make it more damaging at the cost of accuracy, while a Wisp aspect might gain damage/defense at the cost of taking bonus damage from attacks. Lich skills could provide possible voting options for the construction of a Corpus Vitae. I would also separate the Corpus Vitae into separate projects based on plane so that skill aspects would determine the power of each Corpus.

[Klapaucius]

Ok. But what if instead of one necro-kaiju, there were lots, and they battled to the redeath in a no holds barred winner takes all showdown.

[erikune]

I like this, but I think I would set it so Liches could still donate pets while a Corpus Vitae is active, but limit Corpus Vitae summoning to 12 hours per Corpus Vitae per plane or if there are no Corpus Vitae on that plane. If the liches really get together with the project, they can set up a marauding independent pet horde, but they can't just overwhelm a plane without taking a little time.

The main point for this is to give people a break from Corpus visits, and to specifically have a downtime where the Liches are working on building up for the next one. It also gives Liches some time to do other things, as opposed to focusing all their MP and AP towards just summoning more pets.

If you could just build up a second Corpus Vitae while the first one was active, then the next would could just pop out as soon as the first was dead, effectively spamming a plane with a fairly annoying miniboss. It would also mean that a few dedicated Liches could simply "pack the ballot box", so to speak, by pumping so much MP into one vote that it guarantees where the Corpus would show up. At least with the current idea, they'd be forced to wait until the first one dies before shoving a bunch of pets into it to start the voting again.

And yes, they could just summon a bunch of skeletons/zombies/etc. and keep them around until the voting starts, but that's fairly MP-expensive and could backfire if the current Corpus Vitae doesn't die off when expected. It evens the playing field a bit, allowing Liches not devoted to this to be on somewhat more even footing with ones who want to overly prep for the next Corpus.

[SkullFace]

Take my upvote for Wraithzilla!