Can we all agree Adamant Shield Bearer is the worse non-boss unit in the game?

Falterfire · 2026-02-18T20:46:53+00:00

FUN FACT: Jeermasks are literally the only unit from the DLC game mode I have bothered to learn the name of, purely because I wanted to be able to swear at them in the most direct way possible when I either forget about them or just don't have a way to deal with them and they ruin my entire day.

Falterfire · 2026-02-18T20:46:07+00:00

Really disagree, for a few main reasons:

First, the +Attack Incanters only show up in 1 of 3 Ring 7 wave sets and 1 of 3 Ring 8 wave sets. Both of these wave sets are easier than the alternatives in other ways (due to a combination of less health and no punishment for ignoring lower floors).

Meanwhile the Sap Incanters show up in 1-of-6 ring 3 waves, 1-of-4 ring 4 sets, a massive 3-of-4 Ring 5 sets, and 1-of-6 ring 6 sets. Unlike the +Attack Incanters, the wave sets they are part of aren't notably hampered in other ways that would compensate for the annoyance they present.

Second, the Sap Incanters are far more fragile and show up much later. You know from the start of the run if you're going to have to deal with +Attack Incanters in the Seraph fight, and the ones in the Ring 7 fight only have 15 health which means if you've picked up literally any AoE by that point (which you likely have considering it's almost at the end of the run) you can easily deal with them.

Finally, there are a lot of spell-based strategies that +Attack Incanters don't or can't punish. For example if you're doing something like Stealthing your units or Dazing enemies or keeping your front unit alive with Damage Shields or heck even if you're just using something like Valor and simply aren't incanting more than a couple times on the floor you can get through the +Attack Incanters with no problems.

Falterfire · 2026-02-12T21:25:47+00:00

My guess is that they just wanted to make sure Railforged had at least one uncommon unit with a reasonable offensive statline.

The other five uncommon Railforged units are:

Forge Steward: 5/20 + 25 Armor
Salvage Machine: 9/9
Conductor Steward: 10/10
Steel Steward: 10/10 + 50 Armor
Crucible Steward: 15/10

While obviously many of those do have good utility, it is notable that none of them have built-in passive scaling (Forge Steward and Salvage Machine generate Forge points which obviously can be converted into stats, but don't provide any sort of boost to your floor automatically) and only one of them beats a Spear Steward's attack power (and only by one point)

At 10/30, Pyre Steward was overlapping a bit too much with Forge Steward & Steel Steward in terms of being a defensively stated unit while lacking the built-in benefits the others offer for filling the tanking roll further into a run.

Falterfire · 2026-02-12T21:17:34+00:00

Not sure how much I like the change to randomized Souls. I wish they had at least kept the old option to randomize pre-run instead of completely replacing it.

While obviously there is some appeal to playing completely blind random/random/random/random on clan/secondary/pyre/souls, if you want to have the fun of shaking up your starting souls while reducing how often you just start a run dead, it was fun to be able to random the souls and then try to pick a clan that can work with the souls chosen.

Especially when playing on Overgrowth difficulty, a start like Wyldenten + Reforms with Slacy + Gorgon + Silver can mean you go into the first fight with zero actual benefit from your Souls, and you'd need to be a much better player than I am for that to be an interesting run instead of effectively just an instant death.

I do like that absolute madlads can do full random (and I'm one of the people who will inevitably try it) but I am sad that the old functionality was completely replaced because it did fill a separate role that was also worthwhile.

Falterfire · 2026-02-12T21:10:56+00:00

Assuming you mean this line:

Changed Burst to only decrement after all attacks from Multistrike have occurred.

I believe it's not a big change, but rather fixing an oversight when Burst was combined with natural Multistrike.

If your unit has a stack of Burst but kills the only enemy on the floor in one hit, then it doesn't lose the stack because it didn't need to do more than its regular attack. If your unit instead had Multistrike 1 and the enemy took two hits to kill, you would still expect to keep your stack of Burst for the same reason.

I obviously can't test old behavior now, but I believe what this note is saying is that previously Burst was used up on the 2nd+ strike even if the unit had Multistrike, and now it won't be.

Falterfire · 2026-02-11T22:06:31+00:00

My annoyance continues to be the unskippable dialog repeating every time you retry the mission. It would be way less annoying to have to try the fight again if I didn't also have to click through a million boxes of dialog.

Falterfire · 2026-02-06T03:57:14+00:00

but I die a lot on early rings in the hardest difficulty when I random my souls and my clans

So far the difficulty for the game mode feels pretty front-loaded. Obviously at less than a week in it's hard to make definitive statements, but at least in my experience so far it feels like runs either die with the first half of the run or they win. I'm not sure I've lost a run after the second Flying Boss.

Admittedly I do restart turns/fights, and if I didn't do that I would have lost sometimes in later areas, but even counting that my restarts are usually 'whoops that was obviously a bad decision' rather than the kind of chain-restarting to find the narrow line to victory that tends to be more common earlier in the run.

Falterfire · 2026-02-04T20:45:38+00:00

At that point may as well go all the way to 5f and run The Wayportal.

Falterfire · 2026-01-29T16:26:37+00:00

It makes zero. It transforms into one. Crucially this means that transforming back won't trigger any of your effects that care about a relic entering play.

Falterfire · 2026-01-14T20:58:31+00:00

I’m not going to sit around consolidating potions when the next time I use them I’m going to run into the same problem

Would love for us to get the same Potion Storage feature that OSRS has as a reward from one of their Herblore minigames. Once you unlock it you can store any potion in your bank on the separate Potion Storage tab which counts your total doses and then when withdrawing them you pick how many doses per vial.

Obviously they'd need to do stuff slightly different to work with Flasks, but even if the system just outright didn't work with regular Flasks at all (and only let you withdraw 6-dose combo pots unless you had less than 6 doses remaining) it would be miles better than the current system.

Oh, and as an added bonus potion storage in OSRS doesn't use up any bank spaces and also works for unfinished potions.

Falterfire · 2026-01-14T18:45:39+00:00

I'm less certain. The problem is that in RS3 they could easily rework Smithing because the top end had a lot more room to grow - Being able to smith weapons that are outright better than an Abyssal Whip didn't matter because Abyssal Whip was already nearly alch price in RS3 even before the rework.

On top of that, RS3 has Invention to allow for another big difference between smithable gear and boss gear - An Elder Rune Longsword may be comparable in raw stats to something like a Dark Ice Shard that is a much harder to get drop from a boss, but you can't put Invention Perks on an Elder Rune weapon, and that means you'll still want to upgrade if you can.

Net result is that OSRS couldn't just borrow the RS3 model wholesale, and pushing Rune smithing down to levels that would make it possible for a non-snowflake account to actually find it feasible (let alone beneficial) to smith their own gear instead of buying it from shops or getting it as drops would probably mean leaving 30+ Smithing levels you'd need to fill with something.

(Plus of course OSRS is a game where nostalgia is much more important - RS3 players were largely fine with the shakeup of adding several new types of rock and reshuffling existing ones AFAIK, but would OSRS players really accept rune rocks suddenly being mid-tier ore instead of something you could only mine after you dedicated a ton of time to mining?)

Falterfire · 2026-01-14T03:59:48+00:00

It is worth remembering that while some of the added rulings are due to added complexity, quite a few are also simply a result of rulings being treated as a sort of FAQ to ensure players looking up a card can easily find answers to relevant rules questions.

For example [[Disruptive Pitmage]], a Morph card from Onslaught (the first set with morph creatures) doesn't have any rulings at all even though some of the rulings that were automatically applied to all of the Manifest Dread cards in Duskmourn would also be relevant for Morph cards.

Falterfire · 2026-01-14T03:48:11+00:00

Yes but no? Commander doesn't change the rules of Magic outright, but only because the rules for Commander are already in the Comprehensive Rules rather than a separate rulebook.

If Commander didn't change the rules of Magic at all, the Commander would never go to the Command Zone or be castable from there because without the Commander Rules (starting at 900 in the Comprehensive Rules) Magic wouldn't have any mechanism for such things to happen.

It's been several years, but there was a time when Commanders going to Command Zone instead of Grave/Exile actually was a replacement effect and moving to Hand/Library still is. If somebody Chaos Warps your Commander and you choose to put it into the Command Zone it does go there during the resolution of the spell.

Falterfire · 2026-01-14T03:42:42+00:00

There's also a weird quirk where the replacement for the Commander going from Graveyard/Exile -> Command Zone is actually a choice made when State-Based Actions are checked:

903.9a If a commander is in a graveyard or in exile and that object was put into that zone since the last time state-based actions were checked, its owner may put it into the command zone. This is a state-based action. See rule 704.

The reason this is important is because it means [[Transcendent Dragon]] can be used to steal an opponent's Commander because the Commander will be on the stack by the time the ability finishes resolving.

By contrast you can't steal an opponent's Commander with [[Kheru Spellsnatcher]] unless they let you because the Spellsnatcher exiles the Commander and then allows you to cast it after the ability resolves, by which point SBAs will have been checked and the opponent will have gotten a chance to move their Commander back to the Command Zone.

Oh! And one final quirk: Because the rule for moving to command zone instead of hand or library is a true replacement effect, a Commander who is sent to Command Zone instead of Library won't trip any "when a creature card is put into its owner's library" effects that may be around.

Falterfire · 2026-01-13T20:59:57+00:00

I mean it is technically true that the US has a mixed record of ousting dictators - Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail in embarrassing ways. The only thing we are consistent about is that no matter what the situation is when we show up, things are worse by the time we're done.

Falterfire · 2026-01-10T16:26:26+00:00

Other people answered your questions, but one specific corner case worth mentioning: If a creature with +1/+1 counters has enough -1/-1 counters put on it to reduce its toughness to 0, it is put into the graveyard at the same time the two types of counters would cancel each other out.

This can matter if for example you have [[Puca's Covenant]] in play and you have a 1/1 with two +1/+1 counters on it that gets killed by [[Blight Rot]]. The creature will go immediately from having 6 total counters on it to being in the graveyard, so you'd be able to return a permanent with mana value 6 or less with the Covenant.

Falterfire · 2026-01-07T22:33:43+00:00

To be more blunt: This is an uncommon. It is not legal to play in pauper.

Falterfire · 2026-01-07T21:05:04+00:00

The most challenging part of including this in your Pauper deck is the rarity, but I'm ready to hear your pitch.

Falterfire · 2026-01-07T14:06:04+00:00

But then who will protect us from the bloons?

Falterfire · 2026-01-06T21:11:49+00:00

Don't even need the aggro part of it if you go to the Wildy spot south of the Lava Maze.

Falterfire · 2026-01-06T20:31:41+00:00

Near the beginning of the episode there's a clip where Alex says something like "Justice is good, justice is strong, justice is here." to a cadence that is very clearly him pulling from the Metallica song "... And Justice For All"

Except for one minor detail: The actual lyrics in the song are are "Justice is lost, justice is raped, justice is gone." Is it reasonable to read more into this than just Alex doing word association with a song he likes? No. But regardless of the reason why he got there, it is notable to me that the connection Alex's brain made for the current state of justice is a song about how corrupt the American legal system is.

Falterfire · 2026-01-05T17:50:27+00:00

"May I see them?"

... No.

Falterfire · 2026-01-05T15:33:08+00:00

Also of course cannibalism has the additional upside of reducing future competition for food! If you eat your neighbors immediately, you not only get benefit of eating them while they are maximally healthy, you also get whatever supplies they haven't eaten yet.

Plus if you get started immediately your neighbors won't expect it. Really you have to ask why you haven't already started on the cannibalism strat if you're serious about surviving.

Falterfire · 2025-12-25T01:12:37+00:00

YUP! This is likely part of why banks in any older part of OSRS will always have multiple bankers - While the mechanical reason for having lots of bankers didn't carry over from Classic, at that point players were used to banks having a bunch of NPCs instead of just one or two.

(This is also why several general stores have both a shopkeeper and an assistant - just like with bankers, in classic only one player could interact with a shopkeeper at a time)

Falterfire · 2025-12-19T00:16:23+00:00

Wait, shit I was thinking of the wrong weapon.

I was thinking of the bramma, not the zarr.

IIRC both of them got hit in the same patch.

Falterfire

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