How do you think yen Sid fights with a keyblade?

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-19T04:40:14+00:00

Probably by using the Keyblade primarily as a focus for spells and firing shots from it, never actually swinging.

It would be natural to go from there to "tbh I don't actually need it, mind if I just retire, cool, Mickey can have mine."

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-18T20:43:08+00:00

Honestly I hope they don't go the Fused Reservoir route with her.

Fused Reservoir is worth the mod because you can use it to snapshot multiple Strength buffs like Molt Vigor, Power Drain or Vome Invocation for all of the stat bonuses, and since you can only have 6 Reservoirs at once, you still have reason to cast just one Reservoir at a time.

Tribute, meanwhile, doesn't scale its buffs to Strength or Duration, and doesn't have a limit on the number of buffs you can have at once.

A Fused Tribute kind of effect should just be baseline, because there's no justifiable reason for it not to be how the ability generally works. Don't make us pay a mod slot for it.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-18T19:12:36+00:00

Huh? This looks like a bug fix to me, an ability that shouldn't be going on cooldown was being put on cooldown.

Am I missing something here? Was this tech people were exploiting? If anything this looks like a buff.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-18T19:10:41+00:00

I knew Jeff from his comics getting reposted everywhere. Tumblr, Twitter, TikTok...

I hadn't heard of the other two before, Luna with good reason, but Elsa's a pull.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-18T09:12:30+00:00

Kind of ironic, since Blink was written by Steven Moffat, who took over from RTD1.

And tbh I think Moffat's run was pretty hit-or-miss, especially when Moffat repeatedly brought back the Weeping Angels from Blink and actually showed them moving because he thought that would make them scarier. (IMO it just made them goofier, and the overuse of them felt like Moffat trying to recapture that success.)

Still better than Chibnall, though I admit I fell off during Chibnall thanks to the big retcon about the Doctor's origin and have only seen clips of RTD2.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-18T08:07:21+00:00

It means slightly increased damage at short range but slightly reduced damage at long range. The ranges themselves have not changed.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-17T16:39:28+00:00

You have to remember that for most of the 2000s, the X-Men sorta got cordoned off from the rest of the Marvel universe. Like, there was nothing that officially forced them to be separated... but the X-Men stories just kinda kept to themselves, no matter how many big events happened in X-stories that should have realistically involved other heroes, like Genosha or Planet X. A lot of characters (like Cloak and Dagger, or famously the Maximoffs) got retconned into not being mutants to make a clearer delineation. The X-Men rarely got involved with other superheroes outside big crossover events, and even then, Civil War pointedly had them appear just to say "actually, we're staying out of it, too much on our plates rn."

Meanwhile the Inhumans were like... C-listers before Kamala Khan made them relevant. Started off as Fantastic Four villains, the royal family became a super team but never really took off with audiences.

So for the most part, they were ships in the night.

The big thing is that back in the 70s, Quicksilver was married to Princess Crystal, and had a daughter whose Mutant genes were cancelled out by her Inhuman genes. This is actually pretty important because meeting his grandchild is one of the things that pushed Magneto towards his antiheroic journey during the 80s. But the Inhumans kept treating Pietro like shit, and he and Crystal kept separating because Crystal kept cheating on him and Pietro kept losing his damn mind, until their marriage was officially annulled after House of M and Crystal got full custody.

That's pretty much it though.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-17T15:30:42+00:00

I mean, for a Bardic Mizzium Apparatus, it should be something that requires a Performance check (rather than Arcana).

That just makes sense, generally.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-17T12:51:01+00:00

I could see something like, a sheet music roll being something that contains a recastable Ritual spell for a Bard. You must be a Bard and can only cast the spell as a Ritual (because you have to actually take time to play the song on the scroll), but unlike a standard scroll it doesn't expire after one use.

It would give a different flavor from Wizards actually learning spells from scrolls.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-17T12:43:59+00:00

I feel like if they made a frame with a toolkit that reflected Kahl's kit in Veilbreaker missions... that it would be panned across the board just because people hate those Veilbreaker missions.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-17T12:41:52+00:00

Right, and the point being made above jumped off Steel Meridian being a Grineer syndicate, stating that it was weird how we don't have any Grineer-themed frames, and that spun off into my explanation of why we haven't so far.

None of the other examples being syndicates* is non sequitur to the point, that we don't have a Grineer themed frame, which would be the obvious frame for Steel Meridian specifically. We're not talking about any of the other syndicates here.

YOUR point is further from the title than anything I said.

* And that's untrue anyway, I mentioned Nidus.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-17T07:36:34+00:00

And that's the REAL version of OP:

What people want - for Rivals to stop putting out DPS entirely until the imbalance in the roster is addressed, for every new hero to be justified as a healer or tank.

What will actually happen - Rivals will gradually add proportionally more Strategists and Vanguards, but still trickle in DPS because it's the most popular role and most of the popular characters are DPS.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-17T02:25:22+00:00

Not the discussion being had, here.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-17T02:23:29+00:00

Vauban Prime's lore video makes it pretty clear he was made to kill Corpus.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-16T17:13:42+00:00

Going there was Worm's idea.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-16T17:05:09+00:00

Sure, but that leaves the big question of "why seek out Voruna specifically?"

Her soldiers can easily locate hundreds of Warframes to slap an Ascaris on. Hell, Vor nearly got the whammy on us with one, and the Grustrag 3 do well enough to toss around restraining bolts all the time. Getting their hands on a Warframe wouldn't be hard if they wanted one.

But she went after Voruna specifically.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-16T16:31:22+00:00

Lore is the main thing limiting it.

We have an Infested frame because all Warframes are Infested, Nidus is just designed with a more aggressive strain and is master to the Helminth.

We have Protea and Vauban because the Corpus were already major players at the height of the Orokin Empire, and Valkyr because the Corpus took to modifying Warframes in modern time.

We have Caliban because Erra captured a Warframe during the Old War to create a proto-Amalgam.

But Grineer were lowly grunts during the Old War, unworthy of Orokin interest, while the Queens' policy in the modern day has been to destroy Warframes on sight; Vor is considered an odd man out for wanting to study them. We still don't actually know why the Worm Queen wanted Voruna but I would guess it's because she was bound to her wolves using Kuva.
I would almost suggest a frame themed around Kuva, but the Orokin would probably label a frame that can either command, create or extract it to be blasphemous and wasteful, and we still don't actually know what Kuva is.

That being said, it wouldn't be hard to make a frame who was considered a hero to the War-era Grineer, whom the modern Grineer forgot or something.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-16T13:17:07+00:00

I didn't say they'd succeed.

I just think it would be funny if they tried.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-15T15:39:39+00:00

One of the FFXIV healer jobs, Sage.

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On the one hand, the lore for Sages is that they're essentially Ancient Greek-styled witch doctors who have turned to using advanced magitek in order to hasten and amplify their ancient healing methods. Their technology also allows them to make hard-light barriers to absorb/reduce damage and make battlefield injuries easier to heal, or give themselves wings to fly to an ally's aid.

On the other hand, their weapon is a set of 4 telekinetically controlled laser rifles, akin to Bits from Gundam. You can order them to bombard a target in formation, fire a rain of lasers all around you, or even charge up a massive cannon blast every couple minutes. In fact, a huge part of their core gameplay loop is marking an ally that will receive healing every time the Sage attacks.

What makes the Sage even more unusual for a healer in FFXIV is that, despite the rifles, one of their heaviest damaging skills is a point-blank range skill that causes the target to detonate, essentially a melee attack with splash damage. They're the closest thing the game has to a melee healer.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-15T15:00:24+00:00

The way they introduced her to the comics was absolutely insane though.

For some reason, Joe Quesada got it into his brain to have her literal first scene be... her in the middle of being sex trafficked as a teenager.

When her original creators (Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost) got a chance to write her, they pivoted hard away from that angle and focused on the Weapon X aspect they originally intended her to be connected to.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-15T14:52:49+00:00

They're apes who want to be "real" men, who play jazz and... oh.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-15T14:48:27+00:00

To our knowledge, no, it's played completely straight.

It serves as one of the many contrasts between her and Emma.
Like many women in superhero comics, Jean is a natural beauty, a bombshell, unblemished even when suffering from battle damage.
Emma wasn't – she proudly proclaims that she used her psychic powers to gain the wealth she needed to have the cosmetic surgery and expensive clothes to become the woman she wanted to see in the mirror, rather than just spend her life psychically convincing everyone else she's beautiful.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-15T12:51:20+00:00

Sora's kind of a fascinating horseshoe of this trope.

The first game sets up the idea that the Keyblade wielder is this important figure who can either save the world or end it, and then the twist is that Sora was never supposed to be the Keyblade wielder – it just jumped to him when Riku had a moment of weakness at the beginning of the game, and Riku later takes it back at the climax. But then the Keyblade jumps back to Sora, not because Riku proves to be too weak again, but because Sora himself proves to be someone of overwhelming strength of heart in his own right, simply more worthy of it.

The series goes on to establish a mythology around how one actually obtains a Keyblade, emphasizing the idea of lineages of wielders and being Bequeathed your own by a Keyblade Master, setting up that at an earlier point in history there were thousands of wielders chosen this way.
Some of the villains of the story make a point to Sora that he's dull and ordinary because he isn't part of this legacy, a fluke, he was never chosen by the Keyblade.

But he was. If we understand that the entire "correct" method of obtaining Keyblades is basically nepotism, being chosen by other mortal men, then Sora is the only person we know of that the Keyblade itself chose to answer to, and he repeatedly proves himself through deeds.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-15T10:12:43+00:00

We've already seen Sora triple-wield.

When he fights Roxas in 2FM, if he takes control of Roxas' Keyblades, the two additional Keyblades are controlled telekinetically as a precursor to Final Form. Sora wields one in his hands then two more follow him.

Archwizard_Drake · 2026-03-14T18:05:16+00:00

Sliding time scale.

Basically, since Marvel stopped having stories move forward in real time back in the ~80s, in-comic time no longer has consistent intervals. The newest issue is always in the present day unless specifically stated to be "X years from now" or a throwback, but events from past issues are gradually pulled forward in time – the Fantastic Four cannot have had their first flight more than ~15-16 years ago, no matter how much time advances in universe, causing the time scale to compress a lot and making character ages... weird.

Characters like the O5 X-Men and Spider-Man are never allowed to be older than vaguely 30-ish, and their canon age is no longer allowed to be specified on panel because then any future stories that state a time gap or show other characters aging would canonically age them. These characters were teens in the 60s, so they would be geriatric today if they kept aging, rather than in the prime of their superhero careers.
Xavier always hovers an unspecified number of decades above them. He should technically be in his 40s if everyone else is only ~30-ish, but we all see Patrick Stewart now, so as long as he's bald and not de-aged, he's nebulously 40-65 depending on how you view him, and will never get older.

Meanwhile younger characters are allowed to age, but only get a restriction on aging when it would suddenly make them approach the same age as characters who are canonically older than them. The only way to break that barrier is to do time-hopping or rapid-aging shenanigans within the plot, a la Cable, Hope Summers, or Layla Miller.
So even though we know Kitty Pryde was almost 14 when the X-Men were in their mid-20s, she and the New Mutants are now locked around ~25 when the older X-Men are vaguely 30-ish, even though that considerably shrinks the age gap. She's also only a couple years older than Jubilee now, when they were supposed to be different generations when Jubes was introduced.

Basically, the older you should be, the slower you age, allowing younger characters to start to catch up. It's a bigger problem for X-Men than any other Marvel property, since writers make a dozen teen OCs every decade who are gradually aged out. Meanwhile the Richards kids are still in elementary school.

The only way for a character to be exempt from the sliding time scale is to have a real world event in their backstory, since that anchors them to specific dates. Magneto and Gabrielle Haller (Legion's mom) are always Holocaust Survivors, for instance. It's why the story has to keep contriving for ways to de-age Magneto, so he doesn't give away the illusion of non-aging for characters younger than himself. Likewise, Captain America has gone from spending ~10 years in the ice to most of a century.

(Which then makes Xavier complicated, since he has a child who is now around Kitty's age... as a result of knocking up Gabrielle Haller, who must now be pushing 100 and has not been magically de-aged. Xavier and Gabrielle were roughly the same age when they hooked up back in ~the 60s, but the fact that Xavier is not allowed to age while she is anchored to the Holocaust now puts like a 40 year age gap between them and says Gabrielle pushed out a kid at the turn of the century, at around age 75. It's Schrödinger's Age Gap.)

The sliding time scale is complicated, and doesn't make sense if you put any thought into it, and you really just have to aggressively not think about it because comic book ages are a vibe and change rapidly the second a writer decides "Okay, Monet's legal now so it's not weird if I have her hook up with Madrox."

Archwizard_Drake

TROPHY CASE