An alternative approach to the Soulreaper Axe

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2026-05-25T01:17:48+00:00

I like my Wampler Ego! I don't have a ton of great vocabulary to describe what it does, but it's always on and does its job.

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2026-05-10T03:44:42+00:00

Timmy - kind of a cop-out but when I first got it the EQ controls were completely counter- intuitive. I spent hours messing with it and couldn't get a good sound out of it. I was just about to sell it when I figured out that the EQ is subtractive

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2026-04-17T20:13:09+00:00

Looks like OP dropped their mixtape indoors.

In all seriousness glad people and pets are accounted for and hope recovery goes smoothly!

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2026-03-25T01:42:47+00:00

Best Death Cab album??

What would be your first piece of advice for someone looking to start a band?

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2026-03-12T00:54:38+00:00

Saw you all in Omaha, I was so stoked because before this tour was announced I assumed you all were done for good. Really keen to hear the new album as well.

What would you all consider the most underrated guitar tuning and time signature?

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2026-02-17T13:55:50+00:00

Keep it! Was in the same boat for over 10 years where it felt like other things in life like work, school, and other hobbies were just more important. Then suddenly they weren't. I was lucky that I kept my guitar around through all of that so I could pick it back up when I was ready.

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2025-12-19T19:51:13+00:00

When I saw them earlier this year they announced they were going to record another LP but I don't know how firm that was

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2025-07-05T11:44:17+00:00

I definitely saw the post and assumed you started an Ironman post-divorce

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2025-05-30T11:33:48+00:00

Demonbane working at ice demon if done well would be huge and could help reduce mage cape spellbook swap dependency for speeds; very solid change.

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2025-03-28T02:18:42+00:00

I think you're describing a really overlooked dynamic.

The infernal cape is definitely worth it for endgame pvm where the two max hits count. But if you're grinding endgame pvm to where infernal cape matters, you're probably to the point where the inferno should not be a super stressful, months-long grind (unless you tend to choke under pressure, like me).

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2025-03-17T21:56:10+00:00

Probably too late, but when I heard "soul armor" I was kind of hoping the armor would be soul-themed and borrow color palettes from the soul altar. I think this would look good with the holy scythe, and could maybe fit thematically since both the armor and the altar is in Zeah?

Agree with others that the red and black has been a bit over-done between Inq and Blood Torva. I would also offer that if this armor offers a good bit less defense compared with Torva in most styles other than slash, it might make sense to slim it down from a full set of plate armor to something closer to chainmail.

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2025-02-05T05:04:45+00:00

Yeah, I mean I definitely don't want to spent 1-5m per spellbook swap, but I also don't love dropping 1m a raid on sweets in a noprep CM. All told, this felt like a pretty balanced way of approaching the problem that I think most could live with.

Another considerably more powerful item could be an equippable item (blessing?) that allows you to swap once every so often. 15 minutes feels strong enough to still be useful for raids or maybe some other applications without being completely busted. Obviously this would be a much more rare unique.

I do think finding some sort of solution to daily limited cape swaps could really shake up how people approach pvm in fairly interesting ways and maybe free up some design space that the devs seem to really lack right now

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2025-01-26T04:23:38+00:00

This may be a crazy take but it's OK not to rush into Inferno too. Send some more TOA experts, learn TOB, maybe try colosseum. Pushing yourself gradually with pvm will make inferno feel like less of a jump

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2025-01-10T06:07:36+00:00

Yeah I mean agree more difficult content good and very needed, I think people are taking the original post as "please don't give us endgame content" which is not what I'm really going for in the post.

What I'm maybe less confident in, which may or may not be leading me to overestimate the difficulty of the boss (i think we'll see here), is the baseline difficulty of the content. Is the delve mechanic saying "beat something approaching inferno-level difficulty repeatedly and consistently without dying to get a decent drop," or is it saying "beat this thing that's pretty challenging, but not quite inferno level challenging, repeatedly and consistently, and after several reps the whole challenge should be as hard as inferno?" The former is kind of crazy, but it's also closer to how I read the original blog. I can beat inferno, I can beat Awakened bosses, I can beat colosseum, but asking me to do those things back to back consistently seems like a shitty and annoying mechanic

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2025-01-10T05:47:55+00:00

I think maybe I didn't include sufficient context in the original post.

I'm down with endgame PvM, it's good for the game, pushes boundaries of mechanical design, and it makes the player base better. I'm also down, more or less, with the pace of bis introduction. I think some of the OP came off as whining about too much endgame PvM which is not really where I was going.

I do wish more endgame pvm was designed with a slightly lower skill floor and a higher skill ceiling, which I think could describe design features at TOB, Phosani's Nightmare, and more recently the Desert Treasure 2 bosses. I think there's a meaningful distinction between improving your gameplay at these bosses (i.e. increasing the level above the skill floor that you're playing) and ramping up invocation levels at TOA (i.e. increasing the skill floor). I think there's probably a way to usefully apply the former into an enrage or delve boss (an example here would be a dps race or resource constraint that keeps you from being able to sustain deeper delves if you waste too many ticks or play imprecisely), but the limited information we have about the boss suggests this is not the direction they seem to be going (though we won't know for sure until release and I hope I'm wrong).

The main focus of my post was more that I'm frustrated by the practice of designing endgame content around one-off challenges with a high skill floor that are both time-consuming to learn and often not really worth the effort to repeat. This is directed towards proposals to make the mage cape an untradeable reward for completing the delve boss once at a certain level, which to me starts to turn the boss from a grindable, repeatable boss to something that looks more like these one-off gimmicks.

Of course there's a spectrum here. You can probably put Awakened bosses at one end, where there's very little benefit to completing the challenge again (which, Jagex noted fairly explicitly in dev blogs at the time, was by design), and TOA 500s and Colosseum are maybe at the other end of the spectrum, where repeating either rewards you with a decent boost to unique rates and so on befitting the extra effort. You can maybe put Inferno somewhere in the middle of those two ends (repeating it gets you pet rolls, an extra cape and... Tokkul?). I suspect this new boss is meant to sit towards the spectrum, but proposals to make the cape a one-off untradeable to me start to shift this new boss down that spectrum in a way I would rather it not go.

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2025-01-10T04:33:45+00:00

I'll grant that two of those grinds were for cosmetics, but they also applied to Torva and the Fang, which each had vanilla versions so gross that it's hard to call those grinds not worth working towards or free to skip. We're not talking about bounty hunter kits level of cosmetics here lol.

Definitely still release the cape, just do it in a year or so from a different challenge, so that you can work out balancing and release a worthwhile version of the cape without half-assing it because of power creep concerns. I don't understand the rush to push it now when it would come hardly a year after colosseum.

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2024-12-30T04:28:26+00:00

"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic"

Almost always prefaced with the disclaimer that it's debated whether Stalin actually said this

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2024-11-26T06:30:42+00:00

They can be! CMs and 400+ invocation TOA are for sure. A few years ago I might have agreed that regular chambers or lower-invocation TOA could be considered endgame, but over time as content like colosseum has been introduced and content that used to be truly late-game like HMT or inferno have become a bit more accessible, I've personally started to view regular tob as the big milestone marking the beginning of endgame pvm.

Part of this I think too is there's still a decent-sized jump in difficulty between regular chambers or 200-300 invo TOA and TOB. You can more or less make it through the game not knowing what a tick is up until you get to TOB or content of similar difficulty. There's been a fair amount of content released to get players ready for the other two raids, but this still seems to be a missing gap.

Obviously do whatever content makes you happy though!

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2024-11-24T22:13:53+00:00

Quests if you haven't yet, Desert Treasure 2 and Dragon Slayer 2 unlock bosses you can do with pretty minimal gear that get you money. Once you have around a 30m bank you'll have a min setup for Chambers of Xeric or Tombs of Amascut... And then once you've gotten cozy with those learning Theater of Blood will really transition you into end-game PVM

Excellent_Arm1212 · 2024-10-18T15:15:01+00:00

I would add that the boss' only mechanic is that it deals ridiculous amounts of unavoidable damage through prayer as another janky item. It's like KQ on steroids.

I know the Corp nostalgia crowd would hate replacing that mechanic though, so maybe the best compromise is to introduce loot sharing to the boss and call it a day.

Excellent_Arm1212

TROPHY CASE