September 2017 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Xur Week Three: 9/29/17

September 29, 2017 by Belghast

Since this is becoming a regular thing I am doing… Happy Xursday! This time around he is located on Io given that it is the flashpoint planet this week. You can find him in the Giant’s Scar area of the planet in a cave off the lefthand side of the path coming from the fast travel location. Once again the mobs seem not to be willing to follow you into that cave so you can duck inside to relative safety. This is going to be the week where we see if Xur really does stick around until the reset, or if that was just a bug since we have had a patch since last week. There was no specific mention of Xur but as is always the case with MMOs… patches often times have a bunch of unannounced changes. Lets get into the item rundown.

Starting off we have the weapon Riskrunner, and for those who played the beta this was the exotic that Warlocks got from Lord Shaxx during the homecoming mission. It is a really unique feeling weapon given that it fires what looks like an eruption of lightning. As far as overall usefulness… it is extremely situational. The special ability Arc Conductor causes you to deal more damage and gain increased arc resistance… upon taking any arc damage. While in this overcharged state, getting kills with the weapon add additional time to the buff. Without this buff the weapon is largely just another legendary tier sub-machine gun and is quite honestly outclassed by weapons like the MIDA Mini-Tool. However if you can somehow be regularly taking arc damage… then you can churn through encounters with this gun and it becomes a formidable beast. Now if you just like the player fantasy of firing a lightning gun… then screw all of this and use it because it just looks badass.

Last weekend I leveled my hunter at least in part to be able to take proper Xursday shots rather than swiping them off the interwebs. As a result I am leading off with the Hunter item this week, the Mechaneer’s Tricksleeves. These are mobility/resistance arms that have the perk Spring-Loaded Mounting which increases the ready time and reload speed of sidearms. These are one of the choices you can make during the main story quest, and I thought they were really limited in their utility. You have to love sidearms an awful lot to spend your exotic slot on an item that improves that one weapon. That said… there are a fair number of really good sidearms in the game like Last Hope that seems to tear people up in the crucible. I personally do not like sidearms at all… but I did pick these up this week simply for the unlock. There is just not a lot more I can say about these… if you love sidearms or you also want the unlock… go for it.

The Titan armor is one that I have gotten several times from exotics… and keep infusing away to increase my power level. That is not due to the fact that it is not a good piece of armor but instead just to play the increasing your level game. For whatever reason I am just not feeling the Sunbreaker Titan as much as I was in Destiny 1, that said… if you do this is an amazing item. Functionally the perk is giving us back “Simmering Flames” from Destiny 1. Sunfire Furnace causes all of your solar abilities to recharge faster while you are sitting on a fully charged super, which in truth I seem to do more often than not because I am looking for the idea time to unleash it. That means more solar grenades and more solar melee abilities which are really the bread and butter of play for me personally. I went ahead and picked this back up because while I had this unlocked it was at 205 light… and I had shards to burn. I might play with it a bit and determine if it is useful enough to start playing more Sunbreaker.

Do you “Gotta Go Fast” and “Faster Faster Fa Fa Fa Fa Faster”? These are a weird item that I have used quite a bit largely because they were the highest light boots I had on my Warlock for a good long while. The perk Strange Protractor causes your sprint to move a heck of a lot faster… like it is noticeably faster. While sprinting it also causes your energy weapons to be automatically reloaded. This again is one of those situationally good items. I found it really useful in the crucible since I tend to mostly use Uriel’s Gift… and it also meant sprint cancelling a reload caused me to get the full reload. If you greatly favor energy weapons or just want to go really fast… then these might be the boots for you. Personally my exotic armor slot goes to Eye of Another World which highlights priority targets and increases the regeneration speed of my melee, grenades and class ability. If these sound like great boots for you however pick them up, or at least get them so you have them unlocked in your collections.

What are your thoughts? Did Xur bring something you really wanted or did I completely miss the special utility of a given item when I talk about them? I’d love to hear your feedback about this weeks offerings and in truth if anyone is actually finding this a useful thing for me to do on Friday mornings.

Faction Rally 1: FWC Edition

October 1, 2017September 28, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I went to bed at 7:30 pm… and wound up sleeping the entire night other than a brief bit of time at 3 am when I had to struggle a bit to get back to sleep. This is almost supernatural for me because traditionally I struggle to get six hours of contiguous sleep… let alone ten hours. The difference here is that myself and my wife have apparently been coming down with something. I’ve felt like crap for a few days now, and last night I found out that my wife has all of the same symptoms. In theory we have some sort of a bug that has been floating around, but regardless when she said that she could go to bed at 7:30… I put away my Destiny 2 and decided to join her. It was probably a good call since sleep tends to heal, or at least makes it seem like your body is sorting out the defense properly while you aren’t diverting system resources to other activities. Right now in Destiny 2 an event called the Faction Rally is taking place where you can earn favor with the classic factions from the first game… Dead Orbit, Future War Cult and New Monarchy. My allegiance went to the house that had more weapons that I wanted from the loot packages… and quite frankly Future War Cult has the best weapons. This morning I thought I would have a little show and tell… since I have collected all four weapons available.

I won’t lie.. this is the primary reason why I chose Future War Cult. I absolutely love the Uriel’s Gift energy auto rifle, and this is effectively its higher stability cousin. You gain that additional stability at the cost of the having high-caliber rounds all of the time. For PVP purposes this is probably not a great tradeoff, but you do at least have high-impact reserves which is the d2 equivalent of glass half full. I do however love the fact that this gun has ricochet rounds, which makes fire fights in closed spaces a little more deadly. I will likely stick with Uriel, but I do still love this gun and will be breaking it out every now and then.

Another gun I was super pumped about was this scout rifle, which is a cousin to my favorite scout in the game… Manannan SR4. Once again it is a situational choice because you are giving up explosive rounds which are insanely good for fights with lightweight swarms of mobs like thralls. What you are gaining in its place however is Rampage which gives you a stacking damage boost for each kill that you make with the gun and stacks to three. If you are in a situation where there are phases where several minion type mobs come out at once… you can easily oneshot them with precision shots with this weapon and then use your rampage stacks on the boss. I’ve been playing with this on the captain packs on the rig, and taking down several dregs before just shredding the captain and it works nicely. Again however this is all situational… the two guns are very similar and you might need to carry around both depending on which you actually need.

This is effectively a high damage lower stability version of the Better Devils hand cannon that I already loved. What makes this gun special however is the Timed Payload perk, that causes an explosion a second after hitting the target that knocks it back or at least flinches it and does additional damage. You will find yourself doing silly things like hitting dregs in the body just to watch the following explosion kill them as their corpse gets thrown a bit. While the gun is lower stability than Better Devils… I really didn’t find much difference between the two and keeping them on target while pouring a lot of precision rounds into a boss. In truth there is rarely an occasion where I would not choose this over Better Devils… largely because if someone is hiding behind a corner these rounds will end up causing at least a little splash damage on the target if you shoot the wall. The only real weak point is the 11 shot magazine, as opposed to the 13 of Better Devils.

This one I have not really used because I never liked Sniper Rifles much in Destiny 1… and I like them even less when it means I have to give up using a weapon I do like in Destiny 2. Overall the gun is a little low impact for my tastes, but I remember Omolon snipers being really stable and fun to use in Destiny 1 so I imagine this will also be the same. This is essentially a version of The Mornin’ Comes but you are sacrificing Outlaw and Ricochet Rounds for Field Prep and Steady Rounds. In truth its a toss up… because if you are in a situation where you can crouch while firing this weapon you are going to have significantly faster reload time and deeper ammo reserves. Steady rounds is just going to tamp down the recoil a bit and make it easier to hold on target… so for a camper this is going to be the better weapon. I am not one of those people so it is likely going to collect dust in my vault.

Lastly I wanted to show this off. The raid apparently had a repeat performance and cleared the Leviathan in one night this time, so huge gratz to the TQMB raid team! As a result I had an engram waiting for me this morning on Hawthorne and wound up getting the weapon I really wanted to play with. I have heard great things about the raid auto rifle, now I just need to find something to infuse into it. Essentially the Raid and Trials engrams provide a weapon that is either 10 power or 15 power… and in this case I lucked out and got one with a legendary mod already slotted into it making life easier when it comes to infusing. I am sure at some point in the near future I will talk about my results with this weapon, but just taking a look at it initially it reminds me a bit of the overall stats of my Year 2 Haakon’s Hatchet.

How I Should Have Done It

September 27, 2017 by Belghast

This is a post I had planned on making for awhile, and now that we are a little less than a month away from the PC launch… I figure the timing works fairly well. At this point I have leveled and geared three characters through Destiny 2 on the PS4 and during that time I have sorted out some of the things that work and some of the things that don’t. My first trip through any game is a meandery mess as I let myself get distracted by every little bauble that comes across my path. Quite honestly… this is fine because I enjoy the hell out of that first trip. If you also like to sometimes revel in being inefficient… then by all means please ignore anything I am about to write. However more than anything this is my game plan for how I intend on leveling during the PC release and how I intend to claw my way back to the relative positive I currently am on the PS4. This is going to be a much different experience for me than someone starting out in Destiny 2 for the first time. Not only did I have the experience of playing over 500 hours of the first game… I also now have this bundle of experience playing on the PS4 which I have sorta used like a beta test environment. When I pulled up my Warlock and Hunter I tested out some of these methods, and have reached a point where I think I am good with a clear path going forward.

The natural path through the game is to follow the main story quest and then add in as much side content as you can along the way. My first trip through the game I did all of this and dinged 20 well before finishing the main story arc. My friends however focused on only the main story and wound up beating the game around level 15 leading them to do a bunch of grinding to open up the end game. Firstly you have to understand that grinds are more or less fun for me… and Destiny 2 has a grind that is better than any I have seen in a long time in the form of the Heroic Public Events. Public Events spawn at regular intervals and as you open a planet up you are going to notice that at least one is up at pretty much all times. Titan the second planet you reach seems to have the best public event grind available, largely because Titan as a whole is very small surface area wise… but has a bunch of added complexity in the form of overlapping Z axis areas. There are three public event areas that spawn in the planet… One in Sirens Watch and two in the sections known as The Rig. These are either going to be Fallen Weapons Exchange… aka Fallen Walkers or Witches’ Ritual. Both of these are extremely easy to convert from a normal Public Event to a Heroic, and I highly suggest you check out the guide I posted some days back on how to convert each event. In addition to public events there are five or six high value target spawns that appear in this relatively small area as well as countless chests and harvestables making Titan an amazingly compact farming destination.

So my goal come Destiny 2 PC release is to push my way through the European Dead Zone as fast as I can, and then get to Titan. After a mission or two the planet opens up completely and instead of following the main story… I am going to farm my little heart out on Titan until I hit level 20. Now I just did this method on my Hunter that I leveled on Saturday, and through level 10 I was managing to get a full level off of each Heroic Public Event. From 10 to 20 it took roughly two events per level, but considering you are able to hop back and forth between the events easily this went fast as well. During the bits of downtime I hunted chests and high value targets… basically anything that I thought might give me some blue gear drops, glimmer or experience. Now the reason why I grind to 20 on Titan is that it is extremely fast, but also pushes me into endgame power levels as quick as possible. I noticed while playing the main story content, that these missions seem to drop a significant number of pieces of gear… considerably more than just wandering around the open world. Ultimately the name of the game is trying to get to 260 power as soon as humanly possible from blue drops. Putting my leveling in on Titan lets me start doing this as I work my way through the rest of the story quest. The other benefit of this process is that it gives you a nice stack of faction tokens that you can cash in once you actually hit 260… in order to boost you to 265.

From there we start to enter the dark territory of the slow endgame grind. The primary means of jumping over this is going to be utilizing the “powerful gear” quests that are available once a week and give you luminous engrams. The other primary means of defeating this curve are to find pieces of gear that have legendary mods installed in them. Hoard these like they are the most precious thing in the universe, because until you get to 280 power your only means of getting them is going to be pure dumb luck from either a random legendary gear drop… or from turning in weapon parts to get packages from Banshee. Once you have a full set of items with legendary mods… you can begin to start infusing your way to the next goal which is 270. It is my intent not to turn in any luminous engrams until I have reached 270 on my first character. This is likely going to mean a bunch of grinding to get items with legendary mods in them, but ultimately I am trying to get as high of power as I can in that first week… and there are limited number of luminous engrams that I can get per character. You can get one for each of the following activities…

Crucible Call to Arms – This has taken between 8 and 10 Crucible matches on average for me.
Clan XP – Get 5000 xp… if you follow this method the first one will be a gimme since all of the story missions will count towards this.
Flashpoint – Do 3 Heroic Events on the weekly planet… or 6 regular events or a combination of them.
Nightfall – This is not always the easiest of engrams but if you have a group capable worth doing.
Raid – This again requires a full team of six players, and is just a bonus to the actual reward which is raid loot.

The other part of my plan… is to push up my Hunter and Warlock as quickly as possible… potentially before I even start decoding Luminous Engrams on the Titan. I would love to be able to keep all three classes at roughly the same gear level so that I functionally get three times the engrams each week. With the PS4/Xbox One launch there were a bunch of players doing a thing where they created three of exactly the same class so that every piece of gear could transfer to the new character and keep pushing the total power levels higher. That trick has been officially broken by Bungie because their intent is for us to play individual classes instead of duplicates. However in my experience after running Titan, Warlock and Hunter together is that the luminous engrams seem to benefit all three. Sure the armor pieces won’t transfer over, but the weapons absolutely will… which will allow you to start getting higher gear to drop… which will allow you to start slowly infusing up the gear you already had on that character. In truth, once I hit 265ish on the Titan I plan on starting the Warlock and pushing it to 20 as soon as possible then handing over the weapons I have been using on the Titan to help push up the new characters power level faster. Once again when I get the Warlock to 265… I plan on doing the same to the Hunter and then and only then once I have a trio of characters… do I intend to start decoding those luminous engrams. The piece of knowledge that we have learned since the launch of the PS4 is that you can let those engrams sit on the vendors up to the point of the reset…. and then instead of losing them the game just automatically decodes them for you. Basically you are at no risk of running into issues by letting them sit there, and waste potential power levels if you decode them too early.

Ultimately my goal is to exit that first week of Destiny 2 on the PC with a Titan, Warlock and Hunter completely leveled and farm up three sets of luminous engrams. This might be insane and it might be a hell of a lot of work… but considering how fast the Warlock and Hunter went… that initial character seems to be the challenge. The other benefit I have going into the PC release is that I already know which weapons I like and need to hold onto… and which ones I can shard because I just don’t enjoy whatever it is that weapon is doing. Similarly I know which pieces of gear I should probably go after on each class, and what talent trees I favor to unlock first. I carry into this new release a bunch of ancestral knowledge that is going to hopefully make the transition path smoother. Now everything I said today… I ultimately suggest you ignore on your first time through the game. I had this amazing voyage of discovery when I first set forth into the new areas of Destiny 2, and I don’t want to rob anyone else of that experience. That said… I have had that moment and I just want to push up characters so I can be ready for everything that the PC release is going to offer. I’ve had my moment of wandering around in awe of everything… and am ready to buckle down and push like mad to get where I want to be. My goal is to break the 280 light barrier in that first week, which is going to depend on a lot of luck. Considering four weeks into the game I am just in the mid 290s… it is probably going to be a challenge to get there again but one I am ready for.

Third Week Summary

September 26, 2017September 26, 2017 by Belghast

Today is reset day in Destiny 2 and brings a close to the third week of gameplay. At this point my maximum power on the Titan is 291 and I am really hoping to get some good luck in week four with the luminous engrams. At this point that is realistically the only way I move the needle forward other than the occasional extremely lucky exotic engram or loot from nightfalls. This week in particular seems like it is going to be interesting for the Nightfall because there is no way to extend the timer. The really interesting thing happening in the tower however is the faction rally, where the three faction leaders return and ask you to pledge your loyalty. The rally itself involves collecting faction tokens for your respective faction in the hopes that at the end of the rally your side has gotten the most. Most of my clan has chosen to go Dead Orbit… and in truth I think they are likely going to win because at least in Destiny 1 you saw a lot more of those faction emblems than literally anything else. I personally have been a huge fan of the Future War Cult starting with the No Time to Explain quest line, and in Destiny 2 it is the only faction that has weapons I am extremely interested in. As a result I went FWC on my Titan main, New Monarchy on the Warlock and Dead Orbit on the Hunter. Of the weapons available however… the only one I have any interest in is the FWC Pulse Rifle with the new version of firefly.

The real important happenings of the week is that I leveled my Hunter to 20 and wrapped up the main story last night. Then after doing that I managed to unlock flashpoints and knock that out as well as the clan xp luminous engram. That means for the week as a whole I finished up a grand total of eight luminous engrams, pushing my total power up slightly across the board. I am amused at just how fast you can pull up a second or third character. Functionally what I have done is latched onto a single item from Xur and then all of my higher level weapons from my main. This has allowed me to get to the 260 or so power level point extremely quickly, and then keep pushing it up by carefully infusion gear. Similarly this time around I had legendary mods to rely on which is something I didn’t quite have when I was doing this for the warlock. Granted I don’t have them for every slot, which is why for example I still have some blue boots on the hunter above. However I feel like I am in a really good place to be going into the faction rally. Before sitting down to write this post I knocked out a single heroic event on Io and got 8 faction tokens, so I am wondering if we are just going to be flooded with new loot from the faction vendors. I am perfectly okay with this is that is the case, and I plan on doing a bunch of heroic events tonight to get some of those sweet sweet future war cult weapons. I am specifically after the omolon auto rifle, because it looks like it might be the same class as my beloved Uriel’s Gift.