Radiolarian Paradox

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The world is a really weird place and I sometimes have trouble reconciling just how random it is.  Yesterday after legitimate decades of not being in contact… I had a friend I grew up with reach out via the email address on this blog.  As the day went on we chatted and for the most part found out that we are still drift compatible.  We fell out of contact for reasons that quite honestly I have probably talked about on this blog at some point without assigning names or faces to the situation.  However I always sorta hoped at some point he would find his way back into my monkeysphere and that seems to have actually occurred.  It is super weird to get back in touch with someone who hasn’t been around for the last two decades.  Like for example he knows my wife, but at the time we were last in regular contact we were dating and not married.  In that time I have shifted through many jobs and titles and positions…  and had the birth of the blog and podcast and my attempts at writing for a gaming site and then determining that wasn’t really for me.  So much life has happened for both of us and it is weird trying to slip back into a friendship from so many years ago.  Regardless it was a really cool happening to close out 2017, a year that has been generally crummy in so many other ways.

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Lately I have fallen into a pattern with my evenings where I spend a little time in World of Warcraft knocking out the daily emissary chest and doing any world quests that have interesting rewards.  Then I usually end up swapping over to Destiny 2 and doing whatever package schematic is available that day to get more Dawning rewards for free.  I’ve talked about it at length in another post, but the Dawning being a largely cash shop holiday has been immensely frustrating for me.  This was an event that I was so into when it happened in Destiny 1 in part because it brought back the sparrow racing league and ushered in the beginning of strike scoring.  As it stands now I cannot seem to bring myself to run strikes of any form because they largely feel pointless.  The bane of my existence at the moment is the Advanced Paradox Amplifier needed to get several of the prophecy weapon unlocks.  These come from Strikes, Heroic Adventures and Crucible matches…  and come extremely sparingly at that.  I have been mostly grinding them out by chaining the new mayhem mode crucible matches and unfortunately most of the time you wind up with a single Paradox Amplifier per match…  that you then need to turn in ten of to get the advanced variety.  Unfortunately both the Strikes and Heroic Adventures award with the same frequency meaning that you can either do two things that take a significant amount of time…  or grind your face off in PVP.  I feel like part of me is completely dead inside from all of the crucible I have done lately, because I really don’t enjoy it…  but I want the items that I can potentially get from doing it.

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What makes this so painful is that Radiolarian Cultures seem to drop like candy from every public event or chest you open.  I can spend 30 minutes and roam around opening chests on a planet and get more than enough to do several weapons, and then I am stuck grinding for legitimately hours to get a single blue quality advanced Paradox Amplifier.  Throwing another thing into the mix I apparently need Fossilized Hermaion Blossoms which drop in Nightfalls.  I need two of these so does this mean I will have to complete two Nightfalls in order to get this step done, or does this simply mean that they drop two at a time?  The prophecy weapon grinds are largely frustrating because there is no real casual activity on the Paradox side of the equation.  Had they said…  you could do strikes, crucible matches or lost sectors…  that would have been something that I could piddle around on my own happily doing for hours.  Instead strikes feel too long and unrewarding, crucible matches are mind numbing, and the heroic adventure mechanism is just generally unfun especially since they included another god forsaken timer.  At this point I have completed Hand Cannon, Pulse Rifle, SMG, and Sword…  and now seemingly am working on the Saint-14 shotgun.  I need to chain run a bunch of strikes over the next few days so I can get the currency to purchase Curtain Call from Zavala before the weapons swap again next Wednesday.  I am in this weird place with Destiny 2, where I keep playing because I love the moment to moment gunplay…  but keep getting frustrated by the myopic design.

2 thoughts on “Radiolarian Paradox”

  1. I completely agree with you here.

    I’ve been grinding Heroic Strikes to get Paradox Amplifiers, and it’s an absolute chore. The verse I’m trying to do now requires 2 Advanced amplifiers, which means 20 of the green ones. At an average drop rate of 1 per run, that’s 20 heroics just to get a single weapon.

    Talk about tedious…

  2. I hear ya! Last night it took me 3 hours of doing strikes to get 8 paradox which I needed for getting the advanced one.

    And now, after completing prophecy 6, Vance is not giving me any more…. 😣

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