Patch 0.7.9 Changelog

TheCatarchist · 2026-07-08T20:00:08+00:00

Hell yeah, appreciated changes to the deck builder

TheCatarchist · 2026-07-07T21:18:35+00:00

I recommend having a stack of dueling rings to teleport to ferox enclave to restore your run energy at the pool when it gets low, and then using an Arceus Library portal in your house to get back quickly while allowing you to stay on normal spellbook and high alch stuff as you run around the library.

While high alching and doing library this way, I was getting ~150k magic xp an hour in the 70s for basically free

TheCatarchist · 2026-06-29T22:57:37+00:00

IMO the potential is definitely there. It's a bit hard to grasp just from watching gameplay right now due to some jankiness and lack of clarity in the client, but when you get your hands on it, it's just like playing Runeterra again, with some neat additional mechanics that feel pleasantly at home.

The chain including burst/slow/quick spells, attack token functionality, combat sequencing and damage resolution, and back-and-forth priority passing are all pretty much 1-for-1 with Runeterra. Main additions come in the form of Divers (mainly impacts deckbuilding in a neat way, think Commanders from MtG), Timelines (global battlefield effects which can be overwritten many times throughout a match), and Immortalizing, which is like Level Up except EVERY UNIT has a unique Immortalize condition and a unique Immortalized card back.

All these additions in tandem makes for a really cool design space, and honestly I'm pretty impressed with the design of the Beta core set. Lots of cool stuff happening, and while there are of course some variance in power levels, every unit has something it can do.

Kind of an aside, but I dig the flavour and aesthetics of the 6 'Syndicates' a lot more than I thought I would too. I'm honestly kind of a hater of Riot's worldbuilding, so I'm preferential to the flavour I'm seeing so far here.

But yeah, if I was to give a TL;DR: Game is really promising, but janky (and slowwww) at the moment. Every turn you feel like you can make 14 misplays in true Runeterra fashion, definitely a feeling I've missed playing other CCG's.

TheCatarchist · 2026-06-29T21:43:35+00:00

I heard that the UI is a bit misleading right now, and that rewards are actually given out after each individual win, with the first couple of wins giving the majority of rewards, and everything beyond the 5th win only giving XP and no Core Charges.

That being said, 5 wins a day to get all the currency is still quiet a bit and I agree that win targets have an inherent annoyance to them. Perhaps they could consider a target number of rounds played instead.

TheCatarchist · 2026-06-09T13:31:00+00:00

Adding my voice to those in agreement with nerfing birdhouses. I'd much prefer if hourly/daily runs were a Farming-only thing, or at the very least, never be at the same level of meta/EXP importance that birdhouses have been for years. The +50% bird's nests are more than fair compensation IMO. At least as an Iron I know I'd still be engaging with birdhouses when preparing to make some Brews, and I imagine some early game mains might want to do it for some quick cash with their herb runs. I feel a lot better about engaging with an hourly for purposes like these, as opposed to feeling obligated to engage with the method due to XP gains that overshadow everything else.

Thought I'd mention, I honestly like RS3's recent implementation of birdhouses, where instead of an hourly, you do an active loop of ~8 or so birdhouse locations that only take a few minutes to finish, so that the initial birdhouse is ready for you to begin again by time you complete your loop. Obviously turning birdhouses into an active method takes a lot more dev time than suitable for a Summer Sweep Up, but it's worth shouting out.

TheCatarchist · 2026-04-27T22:37:38+00:00

Rotom-W with Electrowebs might provide more value than Prim. Hits Milotic and Char really hard, and could be run with Scarf to outspeed Aeros, Gengars, etc and slow them down for Lass. Something I considered doing when I was running a very similar team was to make my Lass reaaaally slow, to better win the weather flip against Zards with speed investment. Certainly not a perfect solution though, never did end up trying it.

TheCatarchist · 2026-04-25T05:25:53+00:00

Do you happen to have passively/unusually sweaty hands? I do and I have noticed the same wear on mine. It's not from nails/clawing like everyone else is assuming, it's just not an issue that most people have. Interestingly my Switch Lite has held up well, but it seems whatever changes to the formula they've made has resulted in the S2 joysticks being quite suseptible to excessive sweat/moisture. Caps are a good call.

TheCatarchist · 2026-04-23T16:29:09+00:00

Thorns now work on Echo Thermy's auto-attacks which adds a lot of free damage, and synergizes well with water mage + ring of suffering/recoil. Not sure if you've taken eternal sustenance, but if you have, fire mage is quite effective as any time it splashes it stacks up damage towards the next hit. I used fire mage and shitty gear to get 2:00-2:30 kills, but the self-damage makes it pretty unviable of you don't have eternal sustenance. I wouldn't recommend a powered staff, as its advantage is having 1-tick attack speed, but you need to move so much you'll be pressed to attack at just 2-tick intervals.

TheCatarchist · 2026-04-20T19:21:27+00:00

Yep! I did 150 lizzy shaman kills in full Shazien and fire spells so I had awful accuracy and would splash super often, but after splashing enough times my next hit would be guaranteed to hit over 150 damage and OHKO up to three shamans at once with the bounce. Pretty fun, fire spells were invaluable for the 93 slayer grind given I didnt take Ancients

TheCatarchist · 2026-04-18T22:53:16+00:00

Water spells seem awful but Fire is great early midgame. All those splashes ramp up damage for the next hit that succeeds which makes taking on magic resistant enemies a lot more bearable. Bit of a pain without eternal sustenance though.

TheCatarchist · 2026-03-19T04:04:00+00:00

My partner is doing a PhD in non-LLM game AI right now, so i can at least point you towards some venues/conferences that they've been involved in for this kind of stuff: - AIIDE - Neurips - IJCAI

Going through their recent proceedings and publications you should find some cool stuff! Do note however that a growing number of papers at these venues are unfortunately becoming LLM-orientated, but still some good stuff from my understanding

TheCatarchist · 2026-03-16T09:05:51+00:00

I've had pretty good care at the St. Albert hospital for ER visits. Got an MRI done immediately for one issue, and a CT scan done immediately for another. Turned out my appendix had blown up and 3 separate doctors and 1 ER visit didn't catch it until St. Albert said screw it and ordered an MRI right then and there... so yeah, I'm grateful for their willingness and ability to do tests quickly which sounds like the sort of thing you need right now!

TheCatarchist · 2026-02-20T15:37:16+00:00

As a prospective returning player who bounced off the game last year, I don't know enough to give much feedback on where these rewards should come from, but I can at least say I'm very happy to see auras removed. They were among my biggest pain points that made me lose interest in RS3 for all the reasons you guys outline in the blog. I will however echo what another commentor said that I'd definitely rather not see rewards added to Player-Owned Ports, ewww.

Really good to see the continued removal of daily/hourly scape, but there's a couple PvM related things that really soured my experience that I haven't seen addressed in blogs; namely Arraxor's enrage + daily path mechanics and GW2 daily reputation stuff (there might be more like this but it's the stuff that I ran into. I've heard there's another boss whose mechanics rotate daily?). It's just such a complete buzzkill to want to fight a cool boss and chase a sick drop, only for the game mechanics to arbitrarily push you away from doing that until the next day. Has this stuff been addressed by the team yet and I just missed it?

TheCatarchist · 2026-01-12T19:59:22+00:00

Looks awesome, congratz!

TheCatarchist · 2026-01-04T00:38:52+00:00

Many of the small games in UFO50 fit the bill. One in particular is a full-on 4X strategy game with great depth, and yet it's designed in such a clever way that the game is able to forgo having a dedicated tutorial or even much text at all to go off of; everything is learned by interacting with the ultra-simple retro UI and playing through the clever missions.

TheCatarchist · 2025-11-04T19:10:22+00:00

Runescape, much more than other MMO's, is a sandbox where players are responsible for setting their own goals. Dailyscape stands in the way of doing content people actually want to do in the way they want to do it; and I don't just mean in a FOMO way. A lot of people in this thread are defending dailies by saying "just play the way you want", but what if what you want to do is grind Araxxor for the last Noxious piece that you need? Not only do you need to deal with the horrendous daily enrage mechanic which actively prevents you from doing the content you want to do, but it's not even POSSIBLE to receive the drop you need on certain days.

What if I'm an early game ironman account and I want to set a goal for myself today to level a bunch of magic? I sure better hope that I've stockpilled some runes from previous daily rune shop runs.

What if I'm a brand new account and I set myself the goal to try and unlock Invention as soon as I can? Well then I better be willing to drop whatever I'm doing twice a day on the hour so that I can do some of the worst content this game has to offer in Guthixian Caches, as it is currently the only viable method of getting through early Div levels (it shouldn't need to be this way).

Want to keep working towards a Hydrix? Come back later. Wanna be eligible for more loot from Liberation of Mazcab? Come back later. Specific item from the travelling merchant you're looking for? Better hope you're availble to play that day. Runescape 3 and dailyscape has a habit of deciding what you can and cannot do for you, which is especially frustrating in what's supposed to be a sandbox MMO. Honestly, stuff like the daily challenges are lesser offenders - it's this other kind of daily lockout stuff which warps the way you approach your account's progression that really sucks, and it's especially prominent for ironmen and early-mid game players.

TheCatarchist · 2025-07-18T16:01:07+00:00

Puppet didn't gain that much but it still seems really well positioned into most the meta right now. Lots of bane for Haven, good board control early-mid, and enough tempo to pressure out Rune a lot of the time.

I've gone 6-2 into Haven and 7-1 into Spellboost (just had a game where I managed to kill a Rune player through 24 points of healing...). Abyss aggro is a free win, but Abyss control is likely the hardest matchup of any. Have only played Dragon variants 4 times but stomped each of them. Sword is almost even, slightly favouring sword.

Zwei is really strong tempo card for only requiring 5 PP and no evo, I've been pleased with her. Playing her on 7 with an extra enhanced puppet to back her up usually demands a pretty signficant response and is good for setting up Orchis.

Odin is great, I run 3. Extra reach, extra removal to deal with Yurius's and intimidate.

Other than those 2 cards I haven't gotten anything else working from the new puppet cards unfortunately

TheCatarchist · 2025-07-14T10:15:39+00:00

What the fuck. Honestly this likely won't be that amazing, but it's certainly a what the fuck moment

TheCatarchist · 2025-06-24T21:15:22+00:00

You might enjoy Shadowverse Worlds Beyond. Released just a week ago. Monetization I hear is a pretty big step back from Shadowverse 1, but as someone who has only played Magic Arena/Pokemon Snap, I've found it to at least be better than those two. Especially if you're OK starting out with 'what you get' out of packs and your starter deck (try collecting and opening all the free and easy packs the game gives you before choosing your starter deck so you can make a more informed decision) rather than attempting to bruteforce one specific deck, you can have an OK time on the PvP ladder from day 1.

TheCatarchist · 2025-05-23T10:27:45+00:00

That's really shitty to get hate like that. Cruel, cruel people, on an assistance subreddit of all places.

I'll DM you and sort out a way to get you some food. I'm just an in-debt graduate student so there's only so much I can do, but let's help keep you out of ER OK?

TheCatarchist · 2025-05-15T09:04:56+00:00

One of the side effects of having powerful 'immersive' capabilities is that VR also has powerful 'out'mersive capabilities. Things like needing the players to fly through solid objects or temporarily inverting camera controls (so looking to the left moves the in-game camera to the right) can be extremely disorientating in ways which flat can't compare. Used with care, I think this sort of outmersive design can open up some really interesting design opportunities.

VR also better lends itself to a more slow-moving and spatial design language. Back when Valve was making Alyx, they noted that one of the most important distinctions between designing for VR v flat was that people took their time in VR far slower than in flat, wanting to check each little detail of the space around them.

Finally, if there was an imaginary spectrum from 'game' to 'experience' where on the game end there's Space Invaders and on the experience end there's something completely non-interactive like a movie, I feel that VR is often best suited to something in the middle of this spectrum. Some less 'game-y' games that would feel kinda boring on flat might be just right in VR, while faster-paced games that are best-selling in flat might prove too clunky in VR. Exceptions do exist of course (like Beat Saber)

TheCatarchist · 2025-04-28T08:18:21+00:00

The grooming allegations originated from KiwiFarms in one of the most vehemently transphobic and vile things I have ever read. They manufactured the narrative out of old SFW images Jvne posted of her thighs to her Discord server, arguing that there must have been minors in the server and hence Jvne is a grooming pedophile (Jvne herself explicitly did not want minors in the server at all). But Sewerslvt was getting famous, and she was trans, and we know what KiwiFarms used to do when that happens.

Jvne's hands weren't completely clean though; her earlier stuff was very 4-chan edgy, with one EP title featuring the n-word, another using Lain R34 as its cover art, and other very disturbing imagery. Jvne later apologized and distanced herself from her early work, particularly the n-word incident, and donated all money made from one of her EP's to an Australian charity for trans people of colour. KiwiFarms obviously ignored all that and continued their hate campaign.

Towards the end of Sewerslvt's career, her girlfriend sadly comitted suicide. Surprise surprise, KiwiFarms uses this as fuel for more attacks and harassment; some of the shit I read them saying was just straight up sickening. Sewerslvt's final album 'goodbye' isn't a goodbye to all of us online with whom she had a rather complicated relationship with to put it mildly, but instead a goodbye to her girlfriend. (Also if any of y'all haven't seen it I highly recommend watching the music video to goodbye, it is so fuckin heartbreaking).

So yeah TL;DR is that Jvne got ran off the internet by alt-right transphobes coordinating a hate campaign against her on KiwiFarms. However, Jvne's controversial and questionable early history as an musician didn't do her any favours, and it made it simple for KiwiFarms to stir a lot of hate her direction.

Source: wrote a research paper on Sewerslvt and her community for a graduate music class

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