290 Power and More Weapons

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Last night I pushed through and hit another Milestone in Destiny 2, and that is hitting the 290 light barrier.  While our clan lead seemed to hit this practically over night… it has been a long slog for most of us.  I’ve talked about this before but the gearing process slows down greatly at 265 and then each additionally point of power seems to be a struggle to obtain.  This is going to be the phase of the game that loses most people because if you have never dealt with how rough Destiny 1 was to get light…  then this is going to seem like a chore.  For the most part I am enjoying the process because I like watching the numbers go up.  For frame of reference however…  the game was released on September 5th and sixteen days later I have logged roughly 57 hours of play according to Destiny Tracker.   Now for additional point of reference I spent just shy of 500 hours playing Destiny 1 on the PS4 and just shy of 50 hours on the Xbox One.  Basically all I am trying to say here is that 290 power level is a significant investment of time, but in theory you could probably also get there just by focusing on the few powerful gear rewarding objectives that you can do each week.  My process has involved a lot of doing random stuff hoping to get exotic engrams that then push me up every so slightly.

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As far as things to talk about this morning I don’t have much.  I thought instead I would share a few new weapon pickups that I am enjoying.  Each week I do the crucible milestone so that I can get the luminous engram associated with it.  During one of the many matches I had to play to get 100% completion to get my loot…  I managed to get this gun to drop.  As far as I know this is only available from the crucible itself or from turning in crucible tokens for faction with Lord Shaxx.  This gun is amazing in PVE and I imagine similarly amazing in PVP given its propensity for one-shot killing almost anything but yellow bars, and even then a single shot will usually strip their shield.  I was using it last night while running around on Io and straight up 2 shotting Vex Minotaurs…  one to drop the shield and one precision shot to kill them.  It did similar magic on Taken Centurions, except their shields seemed to take to shots to drop them.  If you get this gun, I highly suggest you play with it a bit before sharding it because I think you are going to like it.  I also love the name because its a play on two infamous guns from Destiny 1:  The Devil You Know and The Devil You Don’t.

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As the reward from completing the nightfall, I managed to pick up an Origin Story.  I have no clue what weapon I chose at that step in the quest chain…  but I know it was not this gun and whatever I did wound up as infusion fodder somewhere along the way.  At this point in my life I was deeply connected to Scathelocke and could see no other weapon taking that primary gun crush position for me.  However after hearing people talk about this gun, I decided to play with it a bit before using it as power level fuel.  I am certainly glad that I did because my god this gun is amazing.  It is a much slower rate of fire archetype as compared to the Scathelocke…  so if that is the Haakon’s Hatchet then this is closer to the Suros Regime or Genesis Chain.  This has quickly taken my primary slot and the only time I am not using it… is when I am rocking Better Devils.

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A weapon that I have loved for awhile but was not using a lot at the time of the last post is Uriel’s Gift.  I try really hard not to run double auto rifles because it limits the things that I can do, however there is a period of time when I did.  Now that I have started using Better Devils a lot more this is filling in as my secondary slot.  Similarly I am using this a lot in crucible because it just has an insane time to kill.  Out of the gate the gun has really good stability in spite of what looks like on paper a relatively low stat… or at least it has a very predictable recoil pattern.  This allows me to choose High Caliber Rounds to get the stagger effect against enemies.  This has been the game where I suddenly greatly favor Omolon weapons.  In Destiny 1 I always thought they looked cool, but never really liked the way they felt.  This time around I am digging both.  Functionally my two primary setups are Origin Story/Manannan or Better Devils/Uriel’s Gift and I swap back and forth between those as needed.

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This has been the version of Destiny where pulse rifles are just not that good.  I’ve tried a bunch of them and none of them really feel like they used to…  or have the ability to shred enemies like they used to either.  Of the pulses I have tried, I have largely standardized on using the Nergal because it feels the best and seems to perform the best out in the field.  I’ve actually used it a bit in crucible and it works well enough…  the problem is it is just outshined in every way by the Auto Rifle options I have now.  I have this feeling that we are going to see an Auto Rifle stability nerf which will clear the way for the pulse to shine a bit more.  Previously Pulse was the stable multi shot option… and Autorifle was all about learning how to ride a bucking bronco into battle.  If you are looking for a pulse however I highly suggest you check this one out.  I get it regularly from the gunsmith, and it seems to be on a pretty generic drop table.

 

 

9 thoughts on “290 Power and More Weapons”

  1. The only crucible milestone I have is to do 3 Competitive Matches, which I’ve avoided because I suck so badly in Crucible and I figure in the Competitive Matches I’d really piss people off. And it gives a Legendary Item. Do I have to power through that once in order to unlock the Luminous Engram Milestone?

  2. Quick question – did you use shaders on all the weapons? Same/similar color scheme on all of them except Origin Story (or was that just luck?)

    Are shaders not as much of an issue with your hours and grind put in? (I’ve only used shaders on ships so far, hording them!)

    • Yeah they all have shaders applied. I am way more likely to use a shader on a weapon, since I am going to use it for a long while. I have 4 pages worth of shaders right now or roughly 8 rows in the shader inventory. The biggest stacks I have are ones that come from some of the planets that you get in random chests and from event rewards, and I think one of those is a stack of 32. Some of them are rareish but overall if you just want to blend your armor together its relatively easy.

  3. I’ve been using OS and UG a lot. Both are favourites of mine.

    That said, I often have to use something else just to bump up my level. I’ve been stuck at 272 on my Titan now and finding it very hard to slog past that.

    I was talking with my son — he and I will be playing together on PC — and saying how I’m going to be making three Titans (likely… maybe Hunters) on PC to look exactly the same, and think of them as one character. Then I’ll just shift around the gear as needed for the weekly milestones, but it’ll always feel like I’m playing the same character. That way I can level up their light level a lot faster.

    • I am thinking about the 3 titan thing as well as a sort of means to an end. Get up to 305 ish aka the pre-heroic raid cap and then delete them and reroll a hunter and warlock. I mean with the PS4 I had my meandery journey through Destiny 2. With the PC release I want to do it quickly and efficiently 🙂

    • There’s a lot of talk on Reddit and other places that this doesn’t work. That only the first character of a given class can get Luminous Engrams from a weekly Milestone. Of course it may all be nonsense.

      • Since I have not started leveling my hunter… I might try this out before the PC launch. Delete the hunter, start a titan and try getting double luminous. FOR SCIENCE!

        • I have a 2nd Titan, I just haven’t gone back to try this yet. He’s through the campaign but I swapped everything over to Titan #1 to do this week’s Flashpoint and haven’t gotten around to swapping everything back. Hopefully Titan #2 is far enough along that he’s offered the Flashpoint (using that as an example since its so quick and easy). If I do it, I’ll report my results.

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