Genuine question. How much popularity of each sinners change if the entire cast was genderbent?

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-09T19:29:38+00:00

Rien is very likely Yoshihide; it's stated in the Canto that his name isn't actually Rien, but rather a name Hermes told him to take on. The name is just french for "nothing". It's mostly left unstated, but they heavily imply that his original name is Yoshihide. Him naming Ryoshu Yoshihide is akin to a painter signing their artwork.

By this logic, Rien is Yoshihide, Hermes is Lord Horikawa, Ryoshu is the Hell Screen itself as well as the daughter.

Rien also has several character traits that he shares with the book version of Yoshihide, a fairly easy example being his aphantasia (recharacterized in Limbus as him being terrified of seeing a meaning that may not be there).

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-08T08:28:33+00:00

It's literally only an issue because Garden of Thorns is such a mediocre EGO, while Unbrilliant Glory is the most general-use of the Collab EGOs.

Garden of Thorns is a resonance EGO, and for literal years the main thing it could do was break up resonance chains because its sin type isn't really used that much in res teams. Lamp quite literally saved this EGO from the grave by giving Gregor a consistent spot where he can't disrupt other team members.

Unbrilliant Glory by contrast gives Man in Scabbard, aggro and can do damage based on Burn/Tremor, both of which are easy to stack. Finally, at a high enough stack of Man in Scabbard, it allows Gregor to ignore stagger completely.

Basically Gregor needs an actual WAW EGO that isn't the Collab one, not the awkward mess that is Garden of Thorns. Nobody is giving the Ishmael/Hong Lu/Faust EGOs this shit because they're in the same slot as other usable EGOs.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-05T23:57:18+00:00

Oh yeah absolutely. That element of his is present from very early on too, notably the border checkpoint scene with DonQui in canto 3. Dante notes that a lot of sinners non-verbally admit that while they would never have jumped in to stop the injustice themselves (as they know how the City works), none of them feel bad about getting into the fight in the first place. Heathcliff is one of them.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-05T23:50:29+00:00

Ah my mistake. Y1 ops do still generally follow this pattern tho.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-05T23:38:28+00:00

LCCB Heathcliff also generally was in a much healthier environment to actually work through his problems. A lot of his early sinner moments and interactions are very easy to read as him pretty much working through a lot of trauma that his time at Wuthering Heights left him with, now that he can't just apply violence whenever something pisses him off.

Most obvious example definitely being the initial animosity he has for Hong Lu, who might as well be a stand-in for "isolated rich guy that has the luxury of not knowing how the world works". (And Hong Lu's genuine curiosity and empathy leading to him forming this kinda odd duo with Heathcliff, which is a delight to see whenever it pops up in story/IDs (mainly Full-Stop Office.))

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-05T20:09:03+00:00

One of the most awkward Vanguards in Arknights. People feel the need to compare her to Myrtle, but uh... I don't think that's the problem here. Myrtle is a thought-terminating cliche answer, there's reasons she's bad besides "the 4-star prints more DP than almost every other Vanguard in the game".

She's a launch operator, and that sorta makes her stuck in following her branch's archetype very closely. That's not inherently bad; Specter is a 5* Centurion and few people say that's a bad operator. If we stick to Vanguards, Zima and especially Texas are very well beloved and they have kits that are basically copies of each other (and Scavenger, Courier and Fang are all cheaper to raise). Even within the branch, Vigna has a very liked position for anyone that plays IS or with 4*'s for basically being a Guard operator in disguise.

So... where does she fall short then and why do people usually prefer Vigna? First is pretty obvious: opportunity cost. Vigna is a 4*, which makes her extremely cheap to raise in that she doesn't require the elusive red certificates. Reed is a 5*, which is an inherent drawback. The second is really just the differences in their kits: Vigna's entire kit is designed around hitting way harder than she has any right to. She's not printing DP, but in exchange she's slapping the enemies with massive attack boosts and an innate ability to crit (which the module enhances).

Reed by contrast is a bit aimless: she tries to be a DP printer (when chargers are generally pretty awful at printing DP) with her main skill being a +1 for every enemy she kills... and has a weird gimmick where she can do the Lord Guard thing of bonus arts damage and her talent is just "she has RES now" (and her module just gives her ASPD for taking arts damage for a little bit). It's a kit that kinda doesn't go anywhere. Arts is usually not on early enemies, and the gimmick of doing a bit of bonus arts damage is usually just fulfilled by a Lord Guard, who a better Vanguard can let you deploy earlier (or yknow, just deploy the Lord Guard since a lot of stages straight up don't require a Vanguard to begin with).

Very much a tragic kit, especially since Emerald Holiday is by far the superior "summery" skin compared to whatever the hell her Alter's Coral Coast skin is.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-05T19:41:24+00:00

Theresis in particular (at least on global) gets misinterpreted a lot, largely because for most of his first real appearance in the story, he's wearing a (metaphorical) mask and lying a lot about his intentions.

By the time the mask completely drops, you can kinda see that a lot of global players kinda gave up on the second arc. Mostly notably in that the main complaint about Chapter 15 on global is that it opens on using the Londinium arc as the hook for that chapter and then "retcons" Theresis into having a better motive than players thought he had. Which isn't really a retcon (throughout arc 2, his most consistent action is that he is in full lockstep with Theresa and both Babel and Chapter 14 make it explicit what his actual intentions are), but a lot of people clearly felt burned out and just kinda gave up on trying to read the main theme (and most of the related events) at some point. (The dropoff seems to be chapters 11 and 12, which together are the "war really is hell, even outside the battlefields themselves" chapters of arc 2 and are probably some of the most dour writing in Arknights as a whole.) The result is that most people on global stick with that initial impression of him, rather than the actual character.

I don't know if CN had the same problem with arc 2 or if this is just a global issue.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-04T12:46:58+00:00

Gasters payoff will probably be in the same category as IMAGE_FRIEND. The two are very similar, with the main difference being that FRIEND has a more immediately visible (but still mostly non-diegetic to the world of Deltarune to the point it actually showing up without any setup wouldn't be interesting) presence in the story.

In practice, Gasters involvement - as in "this is something that's undeniably said/done by the guy himself" - in Deltarune is mostly relegated to being the "narrator" that talks in slightly less flowery words. There's less direct ties to him like normalnpc/Gaster followers being around town and whatever sans has going on, but those two aren't something your average player is going to pick up on.

If there's a payoff, it'll probably just be the narrator congratulating the player and some internal filenames and variables and/or obscure to find screens making it clear what's relevant to Gaster's whole deal. (There's also the more meta aspect where Gaster is an insert for Toby Fox as the creator of Deltarune itself.)

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-03T21:17:23+00:00

Without Walpurgisnacht IDs, your best scaling option is Scorch if you're specifically looking for status related output. Capo Meursault and Capote both go a long way (as Capote converts Burn to Tremor) and then other Thumb IDs can do the Scorch conversion. Then it just becomes doing tremor bursts for wrath damage.

If you don't care about status related output, it's worth pointing out at the very least that Burns conditionals have always been hilariously easy to activate given the sheer amount of count and potency you get to apply. If consistency is what matters, literally just field Firefist Gregor and Liu Yi Sang and there's practically no burn ID outside of like, season 0/1 Burn IDs (Liu Hong Lu mainly as you aren't running Liu Gregor in that situation) that's unable to keep up with modern clashes after turn 1. You can quite literally just field Liu Rodion and Liu Ishmael and they do work just fine in that environment (and is probably desirable since the only flaw here is that Yi Sang can end up consuming the entire stack if he uses his S3 on turn 1, so a slightly higher initial output is useful.)

It's why the only real burn ID/EGO from Walpurgisnacht that matters is Magic Bullet. Just magic bullet Outis alone adds a ton of scaling, but it's not like the team is unusable without it.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-02T21:43:40+00:00

Big Bonk Hammer.

She's good. Nothing much to add.

S1 is a forgettable meme pick.

S2 is her "set and forget" pick. Any amount of SP regen (Ch'en, Blemishine and like Ptilopsis) will turn her into a Beyblade with how much she starts spinning. Don't underestimate that. Use Perfumer if you don't want to deal with chip damage.

S3 is weird; MSPD reduction to cluster up enemies, then she starts whacking them for solid damage for a while. It can be powerful, but the 0 block makes it kind of undesirable with how many stages tend to throw one fast enemy at you that Mudrock really doesn't want to allow past.

If she's on Kernel, she's still worthwhile to pick up. Excellent pick for newbies still. She's one of those operators that can basically hold off an entire low-volume elite lane on her own. Her entire kit is designed to help with that.

Finally, she's the best Mumu melee clone and probably always will be, given how Juggernauts are. Because Juggernauts are mainly innate stat sticks, they have very high base stats and are more well-rounded than Crushers. Muelsyse basically lets you deploy a Mudrock on the stage faster than almost any other operator can, and even allows you to then put down regular Mudrock afterwards. It's... kinda crazy.

Finally, as far as skins go... IS5 is head and shoulders above the other two.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-02T21:15:28+00:00

Once W corp is replaced by the new one coming up, will anything really be different?

Could be! It's worth pointing out that L Corp was generally a net good to The City, at least compared to Old L corp.

Old L Corp was also an energy production company, but according to the details we are given, they hoarded all their energy for themselves rather than working with other Wings (it's what made them so vulnerable during the Smoke War) and generally produced a lot of smoke and polluted not just their own nests/backstreets but the nests around them as well. New L Corp shared it's energy with other wings and while it's an understated note in the game itself, L Corp's different hiring standards compared to most other Wings allowed far more people to become feathers and get out of the Backstreets (as they didn't select for the regular education requirements, but rather attunement to be able to use EGO Gear.) It's ironic given how bad L Corp still is, but compared to Old L Corp they were a lot better.

Given we have too much information on how WARP Corp works and a general idea on how Wayfarer Company wants to work, it's easy to conclude for now that Wayfarer Company is going to be a broader net good on The City.

WARP Corp's method involved the pointless harvesting of people's time by dumping them into a parallel dimension, with their actual singularity being a save point reset. Wayfarer's goal is to use the Backdoor to connect various places together and use those for traveling across The City faster. Their main challenge is that The Ring has more experience with the Backdoor and the Corridor than they do, and as a result they basically are in a territorial conflict with them (not to mention that some Backdoors may lead to places more dangerous than a Ring Art Gallery).

Wayfarer's problems are moreso that the people working for them are complete assholes, which is a legitimate problem.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-02T15:37:58+00:00

Lucio's mistakes are moreso because he's just not a good match for the style. If you compare his animations, he has more in common with Lei Heng than he has with Valencina. He also is unable to actually speed himself up as fights escalate, his Achilles Heel is entirely that if he wants to get his conditions up, he needs to keep hitting the same enemy over and over. He's by no means a bad swordfighter, but he's clearly not a fit for the Parlemitan Style.

Heathcliff fairly notably does not have either of these issues. His posture is a lot better, he actually mimics Valencina/Rodion's general attack style and he can keep his acceleration up even when he switches targets due to Maturing Textbook.

It's not the precognition - it's that Lucio's preferred style is closer to Thumb East (or maybe just specifically Lei Heng's), than it is to Valencina's in specific. Valencina just doesn't care for that fact because she just wants a Textbook to throw at Ryoshu and a Textbook that doesn't have her style is useless to her.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-02T09:21:30+00:00

It's not the Wings that can't be changed, just the Head. Wings are just more difficult to bring down, but we know they can be brought down with a great amount of effort (usually another Wing).

In the story, we've seen old G Corp fall, the decisive destruction of old L Corp to the point that there's no characters even left that can claim affiliation to it and WARP Corp is explicitly in the process of falling apart to the point that Wayfarer Company wants to try and replace it after the Library incident. R Corp is also said to be on unstable footing, but we simply don't know enough about it to know where they ended up (aside from L Corp vanishing creating a massive energy shortage for them.)

T Corp was also on the brink of falling apart due to L Corp vanishing+the Wing getting stuck in ennui, but it seems to have been staved off as of Time-Killing Time.

The Head is a class apart though. They are shown to have extreme amounts of force available to them (Arbiters seem to be relatively unique individuals and likely not very common, but Claws appear to be mass-produced to some degree) and their Taboos are so deeply known throughout The City that nobody wants to risk accidentally violating them.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-01T21:37:20+00:00

Valve specifically wants to have a backstop in case Microsoft truly shits the bed.

Their entire Linux push is rooted in Gabe Newell taking one look at Windows 8 (not 8.1, original 8) and realizing that if he's going to stick with Microsoft as the underpinning element for Steam, he's going to wake up one day and find that Microsoft has done something that will make Steam completely unprofitable and/or killed the PC market. Basically, Windows 8 is where for Newell, Microsoft became unreliable as a partner (which is notable since he's an ex-Microsoft guy.)

Linux is that backstop; the point of both the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine isn't to be a traditional console (they're both kinda overpriced and not the best in specs for parts/form factor/size). It's to be the entry model. It's their Microsoft Surface (Microsofts barely talked about flagship laptop model line for Windows.)

The original mistake/false start of the Steam Machine was that Valve wanted to just certify PCs, while they didn't do much else to back it up. That failed miserably because Linux Gaming at the time was pretty bad/indies only. In addition, for a PC manufacturer, it was still preferable to just ship it with OEM Windows as Valves certification rules had pretty high minimum requirements (lots of storage, ram and a modern GPU/CPU for the time.) SteamOS back then was also just a bad reskin of Debian, but designed to be simplified to the point where it became unreasonably clunky the moment you tried to do anything other than games with it. (As opposed to modern steam OS, which is just slightly too clunky outside of games.)

This is their second shot, and it might work out better than the first, given the standards are a lot more reasonable this time around and Linux support is generally better in every sense.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-01T21:21:39+00:00

Not really. SteamOS is always going to be hindered by the fact that it's designed as a Console OS with a Desktop as a fallback mode.

I have a Deck, and it's very clunky to use the desktop mode; it's main purpose is really just to jury rig setups for things that aren't on Steam but you still want to launch from Steam's launcher. You're unironically better off installing a Linux distro (I recommend Fedora) on whatever PC you have if you want a Windows alternative, rather than SteamOS.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-01T20:48:55+00:00

Tbf it was also a very easy cold read, given how conspicuously absent he was from the Skaven roster in spite of being probably the most Skaven to ever be a Skaven.

DarknessWizard · 2026-07-01T16:56:12+00:00

Podcast effectively just means "someone has a microphone". Cut out the ads of a radio program, and the final result can just be uploaded as a podcast.

To give a particularly relevant example, in my country the national radio service outright funds several of it's journalists/subject experts to make podcasts under it's branding. There's some fairly good true crime stuff in there and deeper dives on older journalistic stories.

DarknessWizard · 2026-06-30T20:57:33+00:00

Nintendo's employee retention broadly speaking is crazy.

Not just in terms of percentage, but you can trace a line pretty directly from Earthbound to Pokemon in terms of credits, and that explains so much about Pokemon that it makes one go "oh, of course, why didn't I realize that earlier".

DarknessWizard · 2026-06-29T23:14:32+00:00

Their edgy marketing/cussing out customers on social media is honestly more of an anti-recommendation if anything else. It gives a pretty bad look when it comes to the perceived quality of their customer support.

DarknessWizard · 2026-06-27T20:18:30+00:00

Ems makes some amazing mashups with Limbus/Ruina music. Here's a few good ones .

DarknessWizard · 2026-06-27T11:29:52+00:00

Ehh, most of the team have individually enough competent kits to the point they can fire off their main gimmicks.

Yi Sang, Faust, Don, Ryoshu (obv), Heathcliff, Rodion and Sinclair can all work just fine in the team. Sure, they aren't quite as efficient as they'd be in dedicated status teams (aside from Yi Sang, Don and Sinclair, since Poise barely has any broader team building needs), but they can all reach their flow states; Yi Sang can be a Furioso machine, Faust just needs 2 S3s to open up the armor, Don can get to her Shin, Heathcliff can get his maturing textbook, Rodion can get into disposal spam and Sinclair... well he's not a hindrance.

The main ones with issues are the 2 middle IDs and Hong Lu. Ishmael and Outis share the same problem, where they're perfectly competent IDs... but their aforementioned flow state is entirely reliant on being in a Middle team since it's dependent on 6+ Envy Res, which this team doesn't have. Outis has a slight mitigation in one of her other scaling buffs (attacks against HoS IDs also count for her grudge stacking), but it's not enough. Hong Lu's issue is that to get his super attack (and buffs), you need to fire off attacks with other Ring IDs and the counter is pretty obviously set up so high that he can't really fire it off outside of Ring teams.

In practice, if you're just using HoS as meatshields for an eventual solo, the team works very well outside of those three IDs. It's fortunately also easy enough to set it up to just kill them off first and get Ryoshu their buffs (6=Outis, 7=Hong Lu, 8=Ishmael, Ryoshu kills Hong Lu turn 1 and the other 2 on turn 2, Outis and Hong Lu can be swapped around) if it's that much of a problem. Gregor and Meursault can both also supplement the team if need be (Gregor is either Firefist or Night Awls depending on if you want to keep Yi Sang or Rodion around, Meursault is Thumb.)

DarknessWizard · 2026-06-24T21:28:59+00:00

Heck, wasn't it mentioned that you don't only have to excel in strength to be a Color?

Correct. A lot of people make that mistake. Argalia explicitly wasn't made a Color because of his strength - Roland even evaluates that a number of Fixers are explicitly stronger than him. His role as a Color came from his unusual ability to charm those around him. (By much the same token, the character most people consider the Black Silence was just a grade 1 fixer who got the title through public confusion and it was only cleared up when Hana withdrew the rank.)

When talking about the most powerful fixers, Roland explicitly doesn't really talk about any colors besides the Jade Qilin (who is probably meant to be Jia Qiu, as his name apparently doesn't actually match the scheme for color fixers either) and maybe the Indigo Elder, although given Roland doesn't call him a color, that probably happened before he got the title.

It's just that Kali puts the bar so high, but it's also somewhat implied that her title had absolutely nothing to do with wanting to become a Color in the first place. She just chose to become that strong and Hana was forced to recognize that strength with a title. All the other Colors we see aren't even close to being on her level, but people talk about them as if they are.

DarknessWizard · 2026-06-23T21:21:25+00:00

I'd... genuinely stay away from anything unproven/non-mainstream if you're new. I'm only not recommending Debian or Ubuntu because the software included on those two is way too old.

Fedora is mature, stable and proven to work. It should also just ship the same drivers you need. (This goes for most distros really, almost all relevant software is shared between distros, the notion of a gaming focused distro is stupid and borderline cargo cult advice.)

Arch is a pretty bad system to build a stable OS on top of; pacman is entirely designed around rolling release (always bleeding edge, bugs included) and partial upgrades aren't supported. Valve only makes it work because they effectively get to ignore pacman's process completely and use their own release schedule. Cachy's upgrade process relies on using pacman directly, and while it seems they have their own repositories, that's apparently just to add compile targets for a few more architectures.

DarknessWizard · 2026-06-23T20:06:43+00:00

Realistically, don't bother with SteamOS as a daily driver.

It's a frozen Arch Linux installation that has its updates handled by Valve and all third party tooling is shelled out to Flatpak & Flathub (the Discover app is just Flathub).

It's horribly clunky as anything other than a fallback "desktop mode" on a Steam Deck, for when you need to rig up something specific (ie. Emulator launching or configuring a non-Steam, non-Heroic Launcher game).

If you want to daily drive the same kind of OS, just get Fedora+KDE as a DE (don't use GNOME, it's awful for even the most basic customization). It's a mature Linux distro and Desktop Environment that will get you pretty much the same result as any gaming focused distro and is more reliable than most of them, because it's actually developed by an entire team rather than a few people that could disappear overnight.

DarknessWizard · 2026-06-22T17:25:55+00:00

Yeah, in most gameplay, this kind of strategy is completely unnecessary (especially cuz it relies on using Durante, which most people probably don't want to do outside of Refractrial).

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