This is one of those mornings when I am not even sure where to start the post. It is like I have all of these disconnected thoughts in my head and am having a very hard time wrangling them together into something that follows any manner of logical progression. Destiny 2 released on the PC last Tuesday and since then I have played a significant amount of it, only really taking a single night off to go do something else. According to WastedOnDestiny.com I’ve played 32 hours of the game since release… which is officially more than I played Destiny 1 on the Xbox One. On the PS4 I managed to make it to 267 in that very first week, and on PC I managed to break the 265 cap and push on to 271 which makes me happy. I am nowhere near as lucky as my friend Raz was… who is sitting at something crazy like 282. There are ways to do this… but they involve madness and way more grinding than I was able to get in this week or really wanted to do. Additionally I started working on secondary characters and managed to push the Hunter to 18 while recording the podcast… and finished leveling it to 20 and making it through all but the final quest last night. I also started up my Warlock and got her to level 8, which was mostly about getting my 5000 clan xp to help level Greysky Armada. We managed to hit rank 3 which is extremely awesome and is largely made possible by the fact that myself and Wolfy started leveling the clan a bit on PS4 before the release of PC.
On Friday night we decided to give the Nightfall a go, which in truth I was uncertain about given that I only actually completed the Nightfall once on the PS4 side… and even then it was a bit of a pain in the ass. I also remembered us being significantly higher than the 250ish we were when we tried it. Together Tamrielo, RustySpork and I managed to get the boss down with about 3 minutes left on the clock, which is not good enough for the rat king… but makes me happy nonetheless. Yesterday afternoon I gave it another attempt with Mor and Grace and once again finished… but just barely with me taking down the boss via a couple of pulse grenades and auto rifle fire at about the 1 second left on the clock mark. Mor was just barely at the 240ish requirement for zoning in, so I feel like in the future so long as we are bringing in 260s we should be fine for this. This week also was a bit of an aberration in that it was extremely easy to cheese the objectives because of the modifier giving us insane grenade and melee regeneration. Striker Titan with double grenades meant I could clean out a bunch of adds almost as fast as I could throw them. They still hit insanely hard though and I just don’t have the recovery yet that I really should for doing harder content. This largely comes from just wearing a bunch of scraps instead of something resembling a full set of gear. I am really hoping in a few weeks I can get the full set of Titan Iron Banner gear again because it makes for a really excellent base for shenanigans.
I would have finished the Hunter but instead I took a lengthy break Sunday afternoon and worked on doing the weekly milestones on the PS4 side of the pond. I have to say after playing so much PC… the console version just feels sluggish and odd. Everything seems to move more slowly, which makes the crucible much easier… but everything else feel really odd. Not only was the visual fidelity much lower than even my laptop running at greatly downgraded settings… but just the movement speed of my character felt slower. I noticed this when doing some of the intro missions where you are limping through the city… on the console there was a specific point I could make it to before my character was forced to pause for a moment. On the PC I could make it considerably past that point before I was forcibly halted, so my running theory is that the PC version just has faster movement speeds. Weirdness aside I did manage to get used to the controller again and finish up Clan XP, Call to Arms and Flashpoint milestones which were enough to finish pushing me to 305. I feel much better hibernating the character now that it is sitting at the level cap rather than being just slightly under it. I will probably keep logging in at least once a week to finish off these easy milestones however because I feel like I need to keep contributing some Clan XP to TQMB in addition to all the work I am doing PC side with GREY. Eventually once I have gotten my PC characters to a more manageable state I am sure I will start doing those three main milestones on six characters… 3 on PC and 3 on PS4. It takes me roughly an hour to do all of the things needed to earn those three luminous engrams, and after a point that becomes my routine of logging in a new character each night and getting their progress.
I am absolutely loving playing the game on PC because it fits my play style considerably better. With the console it forced me to be in the room I have my PS4 set up in, but with PC I can either be playing it on my gaming desktop or downstairs on my laptop. The laptop doesn’t run it perfectly and I am having to throttle it down to 720 p and a few other considerations… but it runs well enough for me to be able to do almost anything I might need to do. For something like a Nightfall where there is a timer on the line I wouldn’t want to push it… but It is more than fine for some strikes or crucible. My activity of choice however is still doing public events and random token farming through chests and patrols. My goal for tonight is to attempt to push the hunter through the various things needed to unlock her three easy luminous engrams, and then to maybe get her through the Nightfall. From there my goal by next weeks reset is to have my Warlock finished off so I can start triple dipping on the powerful rewards front. While it has been a pure joy starting over on the PC… I do still want to arrive back at where I left off… and hopefully in a much faster time frame than the seven weeks it took to get me there on console. I am booned by the fact that the game seems to have traction among the AggroChat crew and with that means that there is likely going to be raiding before too much longer. I am assuming the raid will open up tomorrow much like it did on the console side, and then I am assuming next week we will have faction rally once more. Destiny 2 on PC is pretty much everything I had hoped it would be.