Open World Dungeons

Throwback Zones

One of my favorite aspects of Destiny is the patrol zones.  I can quite literally spend multiple hours in a given night roaming around on one of the planets or the dreadnought just doing “stuff”.  I guess in some way they remind me of the way that dungeons used to be designed during the early days of MMOs.  Back in Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot all of the dungeons you encountered were these wide open places that had no predetermined path through them.  Players tended to carve them up into smaller sub dungeons, that were focused around getting to a specific spawn… and I remember spending many an hour with a group of friends essentially leveling our characters by hanging out in these dungeons.  This is precisely what the patrol zones feel like…  an almost dungeon experience with so many little offshoots and places you can disappear into if you know where you are going.  I realize that essentially all of the Patrol zones are big loops, but there are several places where you can get off the beaten path, and honestly end up with relatively pristine hunting grounds if you just know where to look for them.

One of my favorite examples is on Venus, there is this place with a fairly rapid spawn Vex major Minotaur.  On the days when you have the Vex Major/Ultra duty this area becomes heavily camped with players fighting over the ability to kill all of the yellow health Vex that spawn there.  However if you just got a bit farther and get off the beaten path there is an area that is completely ignored that happens to have three praetorian spawns… aka major Minotaurs.  I feel like the game rewards exploration and willingness to muck through dungeon like areas to see what is at the end of the path.  What makes patrol so interesting to me is that you can visit most of the areas you can find in the strikes and missions that happen on that same planet, just if you make the effort to go there.  I also love that Patrol mode tends to reward you richly with engram drops for your diligence and time spent wandering around looking for interesting bits.  The dreadnought is this concept on overdrive, because there are so many hidden nooks and crannies filled with chests for you to find.  At some point I am going to write up a blog post that explains all of the hidden goodies that I know of on the Dreadnought.

Halloween Is Everywhere

As strange as it might sound… there is in fact a Halloween event happening in Destiny.  Doing actions while wearing a paper mache mask gives you candy… and when you fill up a candy bag you can turn it in for a loot box that will drop masks and candy… which acts as a short term buff.  The only problem is… that this shit takes up inventory space.. and last night I actually ended up having an exotic shard mailed to me because apparently I had filled up the very spartan 20 slots of material space.  If you manage to get a legendary mask, those can be kept past the event.  However if you find a blue mask that you really like there is a way to save those as well upgrading them to legendary by using materials gained through disassembling other masks.  On my first bag opened I got a legendary Speaker mask, which honestly is good enough for me.  The masks are equippable head slot items… but have no stats so essentially by wearing one you are losing stats.  There are a series of quests you can complete by wearing masks while doing activities out in the world.  I am doubtful if I will actually complete any of them.

Other than that I had a night full of farming Vanguard Strikes, and managed to pull six exotics throughout the night.  They broke out like this… 2 Helms, 2 Arms, 1 Chestpiece and 1 Primary weapon.  Sadly the primary weapon was Last Word that I already had…  and honestly is no longer that good of a hand cannon any longer.  At the very least there is never a reason why I would use it over Hawkmoon.  Engrams are so amazing when they drop… but so disappointing when they turn into something that you have no interest in.  There are so many primaries that I really really want… like the Zhalo Supercell for example but the likelihood that I will actually pull one of them is pretty slim.  I pulled a ton of engrams… so many that I had fifteen items waiting for me in my mailbox at the end of the night and that was after disassembling dozens of items that dropped while running the strikes.  I did manage to raise my light level by one as well as picked up a few things that I thought were interesting like the unique legendary arms from the bond brothers.  I also managed to level my defender a bit…  which I am still finding relatively miserable to play as.  Pretty much anything that is not “Super Hammer Bros” is going to be a let down at this point.