Cookies for Vance

The dawning event is live and once again we are baking cookies for the various NPCs that can be found in Destiny 2. This was a really fun event last year and was worth a mountain of experience. This time around it seems as though we can keep doing bounties indefinitely as Eva once again has the ability for us to buy more bounties. I didn’t get time to play nearly as much as I would have liked last night because we had holiday errands to run, but I did manage to knock out the first few quests and unlock both the chase weapon and the first form of the sparrow. Something of note… the game seemingly remembers all of the packaged you delivered last year and as a result I already had the “deliver packages” requirements finished.

Last year I posted a long list of all of the ingredients, and these are largely still valid. However I am going to copy and paste from that original post to keep them concise. Essentially every recipe requires three components, a green item that you get by killing specific types of mobs, a blue item that you get from specific kinds of kills, and then dawning essence which drops from pretty much everything while the event is going on. You get 5 for example from completing a Heroic Public event, a few from opening chests etc. you are going to need 15 to craft anything until you can “masterwork” the oven… which last year was unlocked by crafting one each of all of the packages if I am remembering correctly.

Green Items – Based on Mob

  • Cabal Oil – Kill any Cabal Enemies
  • Chitin Powder – Kill any Hive Enemies
  • Dark Ether Cane – Kill any Scorn Enemies
  • Ether Cane – Kill any Fallen Enemies
  • Taken Butter – Kill any Taken Enemies
  • Vex Milk – Kill any Vex Enemies

Blue Items – Based on Kill/Damage Type

  • Bullet Spray – Kills made with “Machine Gun” type weapons – Auto Rifle/SMG/HMG
  • Delicious Explosions – Explosive kills aka Class Grenades/Rocket Launcher/Grenade Launcher
  • Electric Flavor – Arc Damage based Kills
  • Flash of Inspiration – A kill that generates an Orb of Light – Supers or Masterworks
  • Impossible Heat – Solar Damage based Kills
  • Null Taste – Void Damage based Kills
  • Perfect Taste – Precision Damage Kills – aka Headshots
  • Personal Touch – Melee Based Kills or Melee Abilities like Thrown Weapons
  • Sharp Flavor – Sword Kills… not sure if Hunter Knives can proc or not
  • Finishing Touch – kills while using a Finishing move
  • Balanced Flavors – kills with marksman weapon types so Bow, Scout and Sniper
  • Pinch of Light – drops rarely while generating Orbs of Light, appears to not drop from Masterworks
  • Multifaceted Flavors – occasionally happens when registering a multi-kill on any mob type
  • Superb Flavor – drops from super kills against any mob type

The Recipe List

Each recipe requires 15 Dawning Essence for the base oven and I believe 10 once you can Masterwork it.

  • Alkane Dragee Cookies (Sloane – Titan) – Chitin Powder and Bullet Spray
  • Burnt Edge Transits (Master Rahool – Tower) – Any two ingredients other than those of the recipes below aka the failure state item
  • Candy Dead Ghosts (The Spider – Tangled Shore ) – Dark Ether Cane and Flash of Inspiration
  • Chocolate Ship Cookies (Amanda Holliday – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Null Taste
  • Dark Chocolate Motes (The Drifter – Tower Annex) – Taken Butter and Null Taste
  • Eliksni Birdseed (Hawthorne – Tower) – Ether Cane and Personal Touch
  • Gentleman’s Shortbread (Devrim Kay – EDZ) – Ether Cane and Perfect Taste
  • Gjallardoodles (Zavala – Tower) – Ether Cane and Delicious Explosion – This was a freebie though and the mats Eva gives you
  • Ill-Fortune Cookies (Petra Venj – Dreaming City) – Dark Ether Cane and Impossible Heat
  • Infinite Forest Cake (Failsafe – Nessus) – Vex Milk and Impossible Heat
  • Javelin Mooncake (Ana Bray – Mars) – Chitin Powder and Sharp Flavor
  • Radiolarian Pudding (Asher Mir – Io) – Vex Milk and Electric Flavor
  • Strange Cookies (Xur – Varies Weekly) – Taken Butter and Electric Flavor
  • Telemetry Tapioca (Banshee-44 – Tower) – Vex Milk and Bullet Spray
  • Traveler Donut Holes (Ikora Rey – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Flash of Inspiration
  • Vanilla Blades (Lord Shaxx – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Sharp Flavor
  • Fractal Rolls (Brother Vance – Mercury) – Vex Milk and Pinch of Light
  • Ascendant Oatmeal Raisin Cookie (Eris Morn – Moon) – Chitin Powder and Finishing Touch
  • Hackberry Tart (Benedict 99-40 – Tower Annex) – Cabal Oil and Multifaceted Flavors
  • Hot Crossfire Buns (Ada-1 – Tower Annex) – Ether Cane and Balanced Flavors
  • Fried Sha-dough (Visage of Calus – Triumph Hall?) – Dark Ether Cane and Superb Flavor
  • Lavender Ribbon Cookies (Saint-14 – Sundail?) – Vex Milk and Personal Touch
  • Thousand-Layer Cookie (Riven – Dreaming City?) – Taken Butter and Delicious Explosion

Having not made all of these recipes yet, there are a few I am not quite certain about how to deliver them. Namely Visage of Calus, Saint-14 and Riven… and for those I have given my guess. But also indicated that it is a guess by slapping a ? at the end.

The chase weapon I got pretty quickly after doing an initial series of turn ins. It looks and feels like a slightly modified Antiope-D. The slightly faster rate of fire makes it feel a little more jumpy than the Antiope, but all it all it is a reasonable option for a primary slot submachinegun. More than likely I will keep using Exit Strategy in this slot when I have need for a Kinetic submac, but this is a reasonable option and is kinda cool looking if gold and blue is your thing. There is an ornament on the store that makes it look really nice, but has the standard 700 silver pricetag attached to it.

I am a much bigger fan of the vehicle this year. The sleigh was somewhat entertaining… but the sound effects associated with each time you boosted got on my nerves. I’ve not had a chance to actually use this one but it seems like it is more standard fare with each unlock just adding an additional perk as opposed to the gimmicks like glimmer explosions. It is more or less a snow mobile and I am fine with this.

My hope is tonight to spend more time working on both the Saint-14 quest and baking more cookies. I’ve already gotten 3 levels however since starting the event, so I feel like it is a good time to grind things up. What were your thoughts about dawning so far? I like that the event took the packages delivered last year into account for rewards. I am bummed that SRL the Sparrow Racing League did not make another appearance. That is the one event from Destiny 1 that I miss the most, and I am hoping that someday they bring it back as an actual game mode.

Martyr’s Retribution

It was a thoroughly frustrating weekend, so instead of a post in the games of the decade series, you are instead getting a general Destiny post. I took off work Friday and thought I was being awesome, running around and taking care of a bunch of things like renewing my drivers license. Then Friday night I got a text that would ultimately dominate the entire weekend. I have a warning set on my account to text me any time a transaction over $300 is placed against my bank account. At 6:13 pm I got a text saying that a “check” for $797.51 was written against my account. I knew I did not have any bills queued up for that amount, so it lead me to go sifting through my bank account where there were three other unauthorized transactions.

This lead to a back and forth with the bank call center Friday night, and by the end of the evening them realizing that it wasn’t just some sort of a printing error and that someone had faked out checks against my account under what appeared to be the actual name of the person commuting the fraud. Saturday this meant we had to go to a branch location that had lobby hours and close out our original account and open a new one… which then meant I spent the rest of the day trying to make sure everything that I had set to bank draft for utilities and such was pointed at the new account. We also had to file a police report, which I don’t actually expect to go very far… even though we were more or less able to find the guy with a series of google searches. It appears the guy used his real name, real date of birth and potentially real drivers license number when writing the checks and there is a felon that matches both name and birth date in the OKC metro where two of the checks were written.

Between flurries of dealing with the stress I played an awful lot of fairly incognito Destiny, and apparently am really bad at paying attention to messages that are coming in while I am playing. Poor Squirrel tried to reach me on practically every platform to see if I wanted to run a Nightfall. Thalen similarly tried to ping me multiple times over the weekend, and I was seemingly unaware of any of it until much later. My mind was likely going through the permutations of “which account did I forget to move over” while mindlessly grinding away in Destiny. I did however in my travels manage to pull the Exotic sparrow from the Arms Dealer nightfall which was kinda cool.

The hero of the weekend is Martyr’s Retribution… or Marty as I have heard the community referring to it. This is a brand new type of grenade launcher that fires a Titan thermite grenade out along the ground that follows the grenade being ejected. As a result of this behavior you use this basically like you are throwing an extra grenade to help soften up any enemies in front of you. This can be used to devastating effect in the crucible where I racked up several medals in the very short time I spent doing that this weekend. The most important trait for me personally is Auto Loading Holster, which allows me to play in a way where I fire this off, then immediately swap to my primary and then after getting some kills swap back to fire off another round that has been reloaded for me.

Another good get for the weekend is a significantly better roll of the Breachlight sidearm… which coincidentally pairs very nicely with Marty. I love this sidearm and having one with outlaw and multi-kill clip works well. I did really like Vorpal blade as far as new weapon perks go, but this one is overall better suited for my play style. I would have rather had something else in the second column than Drop Mag, but I guess this is the way of Destiny. There is always a more perfect roll out there somewhere waiting to be found.

The other take away I have from the weekend, is that I have started to see a bunch of weapons that I have not seen at all since Year 1. The Old Fashioned for example is one of those, and while this is not an amazing roll with hip fire and pulse monitor… it was interesting to see it show up regardless. This maybe means that we finally have the full compliment of weapons available from banshee again, as for some time it seems like I kept getting the same ones over and over. I am hoping to see a weapon that has eluded me completely on the PC… the Jiangshi AR4 Omolon Auto Rifle. It seems as though according to the Wiki you may be able to get Uriel’s Gift in random roll variant which would be similarly awesome.

I hope the new week brings me some stress relief… but I know it probably won’t considering I have to do a ton of stuff to close out the year since as of next Monday I will be off for two weeks.

Steelfeather God Roll

Last night was my second night of playing through the new seasonal content in Destiny 2, and immediately it feels like there are a lot of comparisons between this and the Season of Opulence. In that season it introduced the concept of the Chalice, which is a quest item that you effectively unlock various functions of over the course of the season. Additionally there is a runes mini-game that allows you to forge specific weapons in a new game mode called The Menagerie. This mode sent you into the Leviathan where you participated in a randomized sequence of encounters, the number of which you have to do depends on just how successful you are at each of them. The runes slotted into the Chalice dictated what sort of rewards you were able to get in this game mode.

For those who are playing this season, that is going to seem really familiar because the Obelisks that we unlock around the locations are more or less serving the same role as the Chalice, giving us something to keep unlocking as the season goes forward. The improvement this time around is that they jettisoned the runes mini-game and instead simply allow us to choose a specific weapon upon each completion of the Sundial event. Which weapons you get to choose from are determined by which Obelisk you have linked the Sundial event to. I’ve been running with the Tangled Shore event linked in an attempt to get really good Auto Rifle rolls. In theory at some point I will swap over to Mars where I can get a Grenade Launcher or a Linear Fusion Rifle. Next week we apparently get a new set of destinations and with it brand new weapons to try for.

In my journey to get a god roll on the Steelfeather Repeater, I think I may have just gotten one. This weapon is amazing, and is rapidly becoming my favorite Auto Rifle. The roll that I managed to pull is Multi-Kill Clip, Feeding Frenzy, Ricochet Rounds and Hammer-Forged Rifling. Feeding Frenzy and Multi-Kill Clip work so well together on this weapon with Multi-Kill Clip giving you a buff for killing multiple targets with this weapon before reloading and Feeding Frenzy making that reload after a kill way faster. The cadence that you can fall into this weapon feels so good and the sound and speed… just makes you feel like you are wrecking everything in sight.

Another interesting weapon that I picked up last night is this curated masterwork roll of Last Man Standing. I took down an invading Guardian in Gambit Prime and saw this drop into my inventory. I like the gun an awful lot, but the biggest problem that I have with it… is the magazine size. I still use my Ikelos shotgun almost entirely because of the fact that it has 8 rounds in the magazine. Were this a different element… then it might have gotten some play. The biggest thing this weapon has going for it is auto loading holster, allowing me to swap over to a primary and have this reloaded when I need it again.

The absolute BEST part of this season however are the changes made to Escalation Protocol. You can now get relevant armor each time you take down the wave 7 boss without having to go through the key upgrade minigame. As a result folks are playing this game mode again and this morning when I dropped onto Mars to check that Obelisk I happened to random into a successful Wave 7 kill. That is something that used to happen back when Escalation Protocol was active content, but has not happened for a very long time. Now however… I am super pumped to have this back in the rotation of things that I can do. I hope to finally get the weapons I am missing as a result.

All in all I am pretty excited for this season and the way they are tweaking things to revitalize older content. Destiny really is in and excellent state, and I think Bungie as a whole has a pretty firm grasp on how to make this game successful.

We Broke Time

Yesterday was the opening of a brand new season in Destiny 2 and with it comes a new batch of events to participate in and quests to complete. Thankfully it seems that if you failed to complete any of the “Ritual” weapons from last season they are still in your quest log and seemingly something you can continue to chew on. I am SUPER thankful about this because I have done a relatively poor job at keeping up with these, and as a result I have a massive backlog of things to work on over time. Gone is the Vex Incursion and here to replace it is the Sundial, which involves us attempting to fight back waves of Cabal culminating in a battle with a super powered Psion.

Similar to last season, if you have the seasons pass you get a full set of the armor and an exotic scout rifle called the Symmetry. Taking this to Banshee unlocks the catalyst quest, and for someone who generally does not like scout rifles at all this is a pretty solid weapon. It is fairly fast firing for a Scout Rifle and packs a surprising punch, but I have not really spent much time doing content with it. I have to admit I was a little uncertain of what this season would feel like since the last season dropped at the same time as a whole bunch of expansion content. However as a result it feels like Bungie made this event way more intricate to make up for the fact that we are not also spending a lot of time doing Shadowkeep content at the same time.

Attached to the Sundial is powering up pylons that appear on different destinations. The first of these is on the Tangled Shore and involves doing content there to gain energy, when you then bank into the pylon. Once the pylon has been unlocked you can spend a currency called Fractaline that you get from doing bounties and completing main quest steps in order to further power up the pylon. Each rank seems to unlock new weapons that you can attempt to “forge” of sorts by completing a bounty effectively phasing them into reality. I completed several of these last night trying to get better rolls of the new Auto Rifle called Steelfeather Repeater which is a fast rate of fire weapon that just sounds and feels awesome to use.

Another weapon that I got from the first pylon was Breachlight, which is a truly badass looking sidearm. Normally speaking I don’t really like sidearms, but this is of the pulse variety firing I believe 3 rounds per burst. I can’t say that my particular roll was amazing, but it is not horrible. The main reason why I am getting used to this is that one of the new ritual weapons this season is also a sidearm and requires you to get a bunch of kills in strikes using that weapon class. I like that they are mixing things up each season and trying to get us playing with different weapon types.

Once again there are two weapons unlocked by leveling your way through the seasons journey. For Undying it was an Auto Rifle and a Heavy Machinegun… both weapons that are thoroughly in my wheelhouse. This time around the first one unlocked is a thoroughly mediocre rocket launcher. Ultimately for me there are three perks I care about on Rocket Launchers… Tracking, Cluster Bombs and Proximity Detonation. This has none of those and as a result is not likely ever going to replace my baby Gjallarhorn which has Tracking and Clusterbombs on it.

Another weapon that is absolutely not generally in my wheelhouse is the sniper rifle. I never use them. Like in Destiny 1 I used to use them during burn phases, but it always feels like there is never enough ammunition available to make them worthwhile. The Trophy Hunter unlocks later in the seasons journey and is extremely high impact and long range… which could be useful for using it to break void shields thanks to the Genesis perk giving you back ammunition. It also has Dragonfly which might be useful if you slot in a Dragonfly mod… which reminds me that I really need to spend more time forging weapons so that I can buy more Black Armory mods. I am not exactly excited to have this weapon but that is only because I am not a sniper person.

The weapon I am the most excited about… I think is going to be tied to the Recovering the Past quest line. I loved Saint-14s shotgun from the Curse of Osiris expansion, and I am hoping that we get an exotic version of this through the questline, or at least a better modern legendary version. I feel like I barely had time to scratch the surface of the new content and there are already enough switches to flip to keep me happy for a bit. I am only rank 2 for the season, so over the next few weeks I will be working on grinding out Rank 100 again to unlock everything. I really like the direction they are going with this game and since I am effectively done with Season 19 in Diablo 3, I am ready to go here again.