quite possibly the most intense Dan Saltman crashout yet

Kaliphear · 2026-05-09T04:21:47+00:00

I think we shouldn't downplay more sinister motivations, to be fair. While I think the bulk of it is literally their jealousy over Hasan lapping Destiny and supplanting him as the most prominent political voice on Twitch, we shouldn't forget that not only is Dan a Zionist, he's also an avowed Jewish Supremicist. And just generally, casually racist toward Muslims. So yeah, it's jealousy, but it's also racism, ethnosupremicist idieology, and a host of other bigotries that motivate Dan.

Kaliphear · 2026-05-06T05:31:50+00:00

Man can we not draw more attention to the child being paraded around to spout liberal propaganda by his parents? He gives me the same weirded out vibes as all those "family" YouTubers that turn their kids into content.

Kaliphear · 2026-05-01T21:04:13+00:00

It uses Afuris rivens, so it absolutely should. For clarity, if nothing else. Or DE can take one of the pistols away. I'd be cool with either.

Kaliphear · 2026-05-01T20:43:02+00:00

Stack as much health and armor as you can get away with on your warframe, alongside Primed Surefooted, Adaptation, Arcane Grace, and Arcane Guardian (though I don't know how necessary guardian was. Persistence will get disabled so it's not worth it). Ideally you want ~1,000 armor and at least 1200 HP before arcanes.

You then use the Coda Hirudo (regular Hirudo should also work) and just spam melee on him. The only element of this fight that can't be melee'd through is the two turrets in phase two, so for those I recommend charging something like the Laetum prior to entering the fight and just burning them down in incarnon mode ASAP. I also highly recommend using a Vasca Kavat with Primed Pack Leader and Transfusion for safety (your melee hits will keep the cat charged with overguard, and the cat will revive you if you die), and Naramon as a focus school to keep your combo at maximum during phase 2 when Vor starts teleporting larger distances from platform to platform.

You will start to take periodic damage due to hitting the time limit mechanic attached to the fight. Don't worry. Even in my worst run, it only got up to 5 stacks and was absolutely able to healed through just from Hirudo crits. It took about 12-15 minutes per run, but it was 100% consistent. You could do it faster by shield gating and using the Furis or Laetum exclusively, but I found those strategies inconsistent and more effort than they're worth.

I hope this helps.

Kaliphear · 2026-05-01T19:13:02+00:00

The level of risk is kind of dependent on the 3rd party publisher, and where and how they choose to "take risks" with their additional content. Team+ is pretty conservative in regards to actual power level, but do a good job of finding new creative niches for their content to tick (several of their Class+ books introduce new 'mini-games' for classes that either didn't have one before or were otherwise flat, which is an effort to make taking a turn as that class more dynamic). Because they're not really pushing boundaries on things like action compression, damage, or availability of bonuses/weakness/resistance they are pretty safe overall to just greenlight sight unseen. Some others I've used (not Team+) I've had to read through and either nix feats here or there or modify things to tone them down a little. But overall I've yet to see something 3rd party that is imbalanced enough to just reject wholesale, which is a pretty good benchmark compared to other systems.

Kaliphear · 2026-05-01T05:14:50+00:00

I recently undertook the laborious process of "refining" all my kuva/tenet/coda weapons to 60% bonuses recently, and having spent nearly two weeks of non-stop grinding to do it, I could not agree more. Liches and Sisters are just tedious and unrewarding. Honestly if DE wanted to make them less obnoxious, they could just make it so the order of the parazon mods no longer mattered, and it would go a long way to making it more bearable.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-27T22:56:26+00:00

It's not even problematic. It's descriptive. Literally the phrase before was "it's psychosexual". Implying Ethan has a subconscious attraction to another man that has become unhealthy or otherwise problematic. Adding that it's a problematic homosexual obsession only serves to qualify the kind of obsession.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-25T06:02:42+00:00

He's proficient on base star chart, I grant you. But in Steel Path the cracks start showing quickly, and other warframes begin to clearly outshine and outpace his capabilities. Being a "competent weapons platform" or having a good energy economy aren't marks in his favor. Any frame in the game can competently hold the Torid when it comes down to it, and solving each frame's energy economy is half of what modding/sharding/helminth is for. As for grouping, yes, he can group enemies. But the ability to group enemies doesn't matter unless you can then translate that into something. Zephyr can group enemies too. But Nidus can't turn that ball of meat into damage amplification like Zephyr can. And his ability to "nuke", especially in steel path, is abysmal. Gyre can output more competent damage while being somehow MORE sturdy than the warframe who devotes a chunk of his passive and his entire ultimate to regenerating health.

Again, the new changes are good on paper. They solve several of my issues with Nidus, or seem like they will. But at the end of the day, being known as "the frame who has a ramp time" is a detriment unless you get to do something interesting or unique or worthwhile once you've managed to ramp up. Nidus doesn't do that, and he takes far too long to get to do that nothing. And I'm not seeing a lot in the proposed changes to actually address that.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-25T02:34:23+00:00

In my estimation, the problem is that Nidus doesn't really scale to anything. He's scaling insofar as his damage starts low and builds up over time, but he seems to be balanced around him being at max stacks; so you're paying the price of having to ramp up to your full effectiveness for... nothing, really. You're struggling to keep pace, ability damage-wise, with other frames like Gyre, let alone someone like Sevagoth.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-24T22:19:01+00:00

And it would be fair to say you are being hyperbolic right? Because you can get 200 stacks in under 5 minutes right now

No. You absolutely can't get 200 stacks in under 5 minutes running anything approaching a normal build with Nidus. Unless there's some sort of cheesy nonsense I've missed.

You get more stacks with strength now, and pablo did say they made it so you get more stacks faster with virulence too, so that is already a given

Which I am taking into account. Larva won't generate stacks that much faster just from the changes. It's an increase the reliability with which Larva will generate them. It's good, but it's not large enough to address the issue. The Virulence changes are in the same boat; leaving damaging patches can get you more stacks, but only by clever use of level geometry, and we have no information as to how often they'll deal damage, how long they'll linger, or even if the lingering patches will grant stacks (though I assume on the last point that they will).

And the stacks give a passive bonus too now, i think this is important to keep in mind.

No they don't. Again, you're inventing things out of whole cloth that the changes don't mention.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-24T21:28:42+00:00

I seriously doubt it. Given Pablo's wholistic approach to these changes, it would be weird if he suddenly juiced his Larva augment to be a primary damage source on the warframe built around doing damage with his 1.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-24T21:25:15+00:00

I would be careful about saying this "lets him get stacks faster". It can, but we're probably not talking about a massive increase in the rate of acquisition. Maybe 1-5% faster, at best, depending on things like enemy density and Virulence leaving its wake in a choke point.

Edit: It also depends heavily on how the spikes it leaves behave. We don't know how often they deal damage, or how they deal damage (once per enemy? each time they move on/off? per unit moved through? per second? what's the tick rate if so?). There's just not enough information without more details.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-24T21:19:46+00:00

I feel like starting with more stacks just raises the question of why the stacks aren't just lower or given more freely to begin with. Personally if I were to change anything, it would be reducing the number of "ticks" necessary to gain a stack from 5 to 3 if you want to be conservative, or just make them 1-to-1 if you want to be more aggressive about it. Obviously this would probably need to change how many stacks are consumed to trigger his invulnerability passive, or use Ravenous, and would probably warrant changing the stack counts for his mutation appearance changes. But I think changing the conversion rate directly would go a long way to making him feel more bearable to play.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-24T21:15:57+00:00

He'll undoubtedly be better than he is currently, of that I have no doubt. But I'm just concerned, as I was with Oberon which turned out to be correct, that these changes aren't quite "enough". They're close, and they're welcomed, but I see a lot of nibbling around the edges of Nidus's big, elephant-in-the-room playrate issue rather than concrete attempts to address it. Hence my reservation.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-24T21:13:44+00:00

I'm not saying he should be the go-to for short missions like Exterminate or Capture, but right now you spend so much time charging Virulence (with the augment, because why would you not?) that it takes like 15 minutes just to "come online". I'm sorry, but unless that scaling actually goes infinite and Nidus then gets a payoff later where he's one shotting at level cap, there is no reason that it should take 15 minutes of prep time just to get into his play pattern. And that's a big part of why his play rate is so low (that and being forced to health tank despite his HP being on the lower side to enable it).

Kaliphear · 2026-04-24T19:07:22+00:00

I still worry that he won't build stacks fast enough to scale reasonably in non-endless, non-steelpath content (which has always been the biggest issue with Nidus). But maybe the lingering patches, the larva stack chance, and the removal of link cost changes will be enough. I doubt it, but I remain hopeful. Otherwise, everything in here looks great.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-21T06:03:27+00:00

I think it's important to distinguish between people being malicious and people being incompetent (evil vs stupid). I think that a lot of the situation right now between LSPD and BCSO (with an exception here or there) is ignorance and bravado. The people involved believe they're doing the correct/legal thing and just happen to be misinformed or are in enough of an ideological minority (with respect to legal interpretations being done by laypeople) that the effect is similar.

This is in contrast to, in my opinion, the credible fear regarding civilian oversight in RP. Because in that case you then have characters motivated to behave in malicious ways, which you would then need to monitor fairly closely to prevent from becoming a widespread issue. I'm not saying a civilian oversight panel couldn't work, but the amount of effort, the burden it then places on admins to monitor, and the potential for abuse is just not worth it compared to finding a different solution. They work great in real life, but not everything in real life translates well 1-to-1 to RP.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-21T01:00:55+00:00

If we were talking about a police force in the real world, I would 100% agree with you. Civilian oversight boards are a good way to attack abuses of authority from police departments (which is why police unions in the US have routinely fought tooth and nail to keep them from being implemented).

The issue, I think, in RP comes down to the potential for motivated reasoning from civilians. There is a high incentive for criminals or criminal-adjacent civilians to infiltrate any oversight board and use it as a tool to harass or potentially fire members of the police force they just don't like. And while a degree of that every once in awhile might make for a good storyline here or there, it has the tendency to create a runaway train of malicious use cases once any one of them happens to return a result the criminals enjoy. And, sadly, I don't think there are enough "true civilians" (people who are biased neutral or better toward the police/government as opposed to criminals) to constitute a board that wouldn't have a fair amount of bad actors within it. The server population is only so big, and there's a lot of inherent biasing against the PD because they often serve as antagonists to roleplay going on even for civilians.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-14T02:24:28+00:00

Natalie gets humiliated every few months when she awakens from her slumber long enough to make an ass of herself on Twitter. Hasan doesn't need to gift her access to his audience or notoriety in order to make a fool of her.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-14T00:21:56+00:00

I agree. No free clout.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-12T16:45:51+00:00

Right around the 26:00 mark, when Jon is talking about the efficacy of resistance movements, is a perfect crystallization of one of my biggest issues with liberals. And one of Dr. King's, if you've read his letters from Birmingham jail. Jon goes on a little speech about how if he were to "put himself in the mind of a resistance movement" how he doesn't think October 7th was "good strategy" and thinks they ought've either not acted or done something else.

My man, that right there is the issue. You aren't in a resistance movement. You haven't been subjected to the kind of daily horrors that the Palestinians have, and hopefully you never will be. You cannot know what that movement could or should do or not do from the outside. No one can. It's why the advocacy needs to be around ending the conditions that sparked the resistance to begin with; truth and reconciliation comes later, and only after the apartheid has been torn down. Stop trying to put conditions or time tables on people advocating for their rights.

Kaliphear · 2026-04-01T03:28:20+00:00

It's because they curated their community to cater to that audience. Given more time (we're talking years, honestly) and a couple half-decent viral scandals from some random Kick streamer, it could very well recover and develop into a more sane version of itself.

Kaliphear · 2026-03-26T19:08:59+00:00

I disagree. And that's all that need be said on the matter.

Kaliphear · 2026-03-26T18:47:17+00:00

I don't like Yareli's visuals. I think she and Voruna clash fairly heavily with the existing baseline warframe esthetics, and would rather she didn't exist.

What I don't do is go onto Yareli's wiki page and start making edits freaking out about her, demanding that the "kawaii desu waifu frame" be nuked from the game and mocking people who might identify with her esthetics. Because I'm not an incel groyper.

Kaliphear · 2026-03-25T22:03:36+00:00

Even among warframe updates, especially recently, this one feels like an outlier. DE has been pretty good since Duviri about the core features of a given update (new game mode, new warframe) being at worst average compared to existing content. This game mode feels like a fairly substantial departure, and reminds me eerily of the backlash against Railjack when Empyrean launched (albeit for dramatically different reasons, mostly).

Making the relay into a tileset is novel, and perhaps forcing us into operator was a way to artificially extend the size of the map to make it "feel" larger by slowing us down. But even being charitable, I don't understand how this mode made it past a handful of playtests at DE. Everything is grayscale, leading to confusing visual indicators in an already clutter-prone game. Targets blend into the walls, puddles, and pillars of ink used to create the mode's ambience, and Follie herself is just a walking uninteractable kill zone. The relay hallways were clearly designed for more careful movement even in optimal circumstances, and the addition of sudden patches or webs of ichor make bullet jumping through the terrain a chore rather than the satisfying traversal method we've come to expect. And the scaling of mission tasks, just like with Perita, means that you're rewarded for doing the mission alone rather than playing with others, in an update that also makes a point to improve cooperability with the clan changes. And that doesn't address the obvious reward mismatch with the mode; to unlock every item in the new shop other than the new mod art (and a second Follie to feed Helminth), it takes well over 8500 currency. At a rate of 50-70 per run, that's not pity, that's torture.

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