I guess I am fully back in Destiny 2 at this point, because I did a thing this weekend that is slightly mind numbing but effective. In Destiny you are afforded a small number of opportunities to get improvements in your light level (yes I still call it light level). Because of this… it is beneficial for you to run three different classes through all of the various opportunities for light gain. The challenge however is for you to get the maximum benefit from doing this… you need to in theory start with your least favorite character and work your way up to your favorite.
The challenge is that prior to this weekend neither my Hunter or Warlock had really been dusted off in several seasons. So there was a significant amount of catch up to be done before I could even really begin the light grind. My Hunter was somewhere in the 800s and my Warlock was I believe around 930? If you can’t tell the pecking order of my characters goes something like this… Titan > Warlock > Hunter. I am not sure WHY the Hunter is my least favorite, but I think it has a lot to do with most of the grenades being largely PVP focused. You see almost nothing but Hunters in the crucible and in part this is because the class seems to largely be stacked towards that goal. Trip mines are not terribly useful in PVE burn encounters.
The highlight of my weekend is easily getting my ideal roll for Bad Omens that is good for the next few seasons. The Gjallarhorn was a legend because it had a very good combination of perks, namely that it had tracking and wolf pack rounds, which caused it to take out a lot of smaller targets around the main target, or at least deal a bunch of extra damage. The only rocket launcher that I have found to date that comes close is Bad Omens with Cluster Bomb and Tracking, which while not nearly as powerful does effective the same thing. Considering how useful this combination has been… I am exceptionally happy to have a copy that will stay around for awhile.
This season has largely been about finding non-expiring weapons that I enjoy, and can continue enjoying for several seasons. I’ve always liked the Night Watch Scout Rifle, but this whole expiration thing has given it a new importance in my mind. Right now of the various copies I have gotten my favorite is the one that has Rapid hit and Rampage. This seems like the ideal configuration for when I am often using a Scout Rifle, aka standing back at range and whittling down a bunch of mobs in a Nightfall or something similar. I do wish I had lucked into getting the ivory skin like I have for the other gambit themed weapons.
My workhorse of the season is the Gnawing Hunger Auto Rifle. It also seems to be what everyone is running because I have seen some statistics showing this is the most widely used crucible weapon right now. There are a lot of really good rolls on it, and right now I find myself leaning towards Subsistence and Rampage. This particular combo works nicely together as Rampage kills create a stacking buff and Subsistence makes those kills refund ammunition to the magazine to keep the chain going.
The weapon that I am the most surprised by that I am enjoying an awful lot is Lonesome, a sidearm that is also Gambit Themed. I’ve never really been a big fan of sidearms, or at least I never could seem to get the level of work out of them that some of my friends could. The specific combination that I find myself enjoying the most is High-Caliber Rounds, Full Auto and Multi-Kill Clip. I find I use this weapon in the same manner that I would a shotgun, or submachinegun when waves of things are running up on me. I am certain this is not a god roll by any means, but I like it a lot and the full auto takes away the spammy nature of the weapon.
So as I said at the start of the post, it seems like I am fully engaged in this season. What I really want however is to figure out a reoccurring time and set up some raids. I have a handful of players at the ready, but will have to work through the time commitments and find a sweet spot. Ultimately what I would like to do is work my way through all of the raids that are available between now and September. That means getting in and beating all of the following:
Leviathan
Eater of Worlds
Spire of Stars
Last Wish
Scourge of the Past
Crown of Sorrow
Garden of Salvation
Like I said I have part of a team tentatively assembled but if you want to be included in this nonsense, let me know. My fearless friend Squirrelpope has volunteered so many times in the past that I am probably going to try and figure out a way to include him, because he would serve as one hell of a tour guide.
There are times when I make significantly bad decisions. This is potentially one of them. I’ve been back and enjoying Destiny 2, and of course my brain has decided that I should totally sabotage that progress with playing the game “optimally”. There is a correct way to deal with the seasonal light grind, and that is to grind up all three characters and focus on your least favorite two first before moving on to your main character. The theory being that any light gain in your weapons along the process will help to boost your “main” character further each week. My main is of course my Titan, and probably my least favorite character is my Hunter… so I have instead been focused on grinding all of the weekly objectives on my Warlock.
Don’t get me wrong I do enjoy the Warlock quite a bit, but Titan and Warlock jumps are polar opposites. When I switch between the two I have to do a sort of mental remap of my reactions, during which I am performing horribly. I decided to use this period of time to get the two crucible objectives knocked out. Basically whenever I am having fun, I swear my brain purposefully goes out of the way to destroy that notion. Thankfully I was hanging out with my friend Grace on voice and more or less stopped caring about performance while we chatted away. At some point during the night I noticed that both my instincts and performance suddenly improved and I once again started taking down enemies. Since they apparently disabled skill based matchmaking… apparently I improved rather than just being de-ranked enough to no longer get put up against good players.
The impending weapon sunset is having interesting effects upon me. Firstly I am being way more brutal with deciding whether or not I want to keep a weapon. I have a bad problem with digital hoarding in games that allow me to do so, and my vault is filled with artifacts from the launch of the game. The fact that most of this is going to be useless in a few months makes me realize that I need to have a massive house cleaning and shard all the things. Essentially anything with a power cap of 1060 is going to stop being relevant when the next season changes. I believe everything in this screenshot minus the exotics is going to effectively become trash as soon as the seasonal reset happens.
This means that there are a lot of weapons that I really enjoyed using… that are just going to stop being useful. Take this Hero’s Burden, I got it from Iron Banner some seasons back and have used it a ton over the seasons whenever I didn’t want Riskrunner taking up an exotic slot. It is going to be sad to see it go, but I have a vault filled with tons of these things that just no longer have the value they once did. Sure I could keep it and run around completing bounties with it, but what is the point long term because I know that there is going to constantly be a refresh of new items to chase. Essentially I am going to have to start thinking of Destiny 2 in the same way that I think of seasonal content in Diablo 3… that it is entirely disposable.
What pains me however is to lose access to what has been one of my favorite auto rifles to date… what I consider to be the perfect roll of Steelfeather Repeater. At least in the case of this weapon it looks like I probably have one more season left in it after this one is over given it has a cap of 1260 rather than 1060. This seasonal reset could be really good, if Bungie plays it correctly. When Forsaken came out all gear in our vaults was magically upgraded to 750 light, and I think Bungie needs to do this each time a season changes. So when the next season releases we should all bump up to 1060 light, which was the previous cap so that everyone starts each season on a level playing field.
I admit that a significant amount of why I have not played my Hunter is because she is currently sitting at 857. The baseline starting point for this expansions content is 1000, and Bungie would love to sell me the ability to catch up to that point quickly. It is not however worth 2000 Silver to boost up to that point, but it also represents a non-zero amount of time to sit down and grind that level up. If I am having that feeling about a third string alt, then I imagine there are a lot of players who have not participated in months or years that are feeling the same way. I know my friend Warenwolf had not played since the gear boost to 750 and as a result had a lot of catching up to do before he became “viable”.
Ultimately I would love to see them get into a cadence so that each time the game moves forward in level, your characters get mailed a set of gear that represents the minimum level required to start the next grind. Eight blues don’t really do anything to destabilize the game or the gear economy, but they go a long way to making players feel like catching up is within reach. This makes it significantly easier for those of us who are playing the game actively to successfully talk our friends into returning to give it one more try. As it stands now however… the progression of the game feels like a runaway train to anyone who has not been actively playing, which is bad for bringing folks back into the fold.
I had one of those moments this morning, where I suddenly realized that it had been a really long time since I have done one of these topics. The intent is to use this opportunity to actually lock in what I have been spending my time playing and update the sidebar of my blog. The goal has traditionally been to do one of these each month, but I regularly fall short of this. The last one of these that I did was during the beginning weeks of Blapril, and prior to that… it was August of 2019. As with many things in my life I have failed to keep track of that goal.
It has been a weird few months for the world, and I think we can all agree that maybe goals deserve a little bit of slack right now. So this morning I am going to do the thing and talk about the games I am actively playing, an the ones that are getting removed from the list. Given that several months have passed I expect a significant amount of shake up.
To Those Remaining
Destiny 2 – PC
Hello Darkness, my old friend. Destiny and I have had a long tumultuous relationship since its original launch back in 2014, but it is never very far from my list of regularly played games. I had reached a point where I was deeply disillusioned about the seasonal system, and finding it really hard to muster the drive to grind out the content each time. Then recently I have found myself back in the orbit of this game and greatly enjoying my time. What changed? Well the Darkness has finally arrived and we are seeing some significant forward momentum in the story line. Additionally we have an event going on right now that is a farming bonanza that is a mix of Gambit and a Escalation Protocol. I am active and enjoying myself but time will tell how engaging the next expansion drop in September will be.
Diablo III – PC and Switch
Diablo you are so rarely very far from this list, but admittedly right now I am playing a lot more of you on the Switch than I am on the PC. A new season will be dropping very shortly, so I am sure that will change at least for a brief burst of activity. This has replaced Dragalia Lost as the thing I often play before falling asleep, because the length of time it takes to do a round of bounties or grind a handful of rifts is about how long I have before sleep claims me. My greatest wish however is that my Switch account was actually connecting to my PC account allowing me to farm real progress from the handheld. Cross play should be the rule of the land, and I am hoping as we enter this next general that it and cross save become more of a fixture.
To the New and Returning
Guild Wars 2 – PC
So recently Tam has been on a Guild Wars 2 kick and trying to upsell folks hard on playing it. As a result I have been back poking my head into the game and I still am not super happy with it. This is a title that I have had an extremely long and sordid past with, as we never could quite see eye to eye and still cannot. I’ve said it before, this is the first and only alpha program that I felt the need to actively resign from. It is doing something, and a lot of people love it… but it is a struggle for me to play it. I did however spend some time on the Revenant last night and had a significantly more enjoyable time than I do generally on my Warrior… but that seems like a mountain of horizontal progression that separates those two characters. This might get removed from the list as quickly as it was added, but for now I am throwing it on there.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
I came back about a month or so ago and spend a significant amount of time grinding mounts and leveling the bard the rest of the way to 80. Now I find myself languishing a bit with not really being certain what I should be doing next. I leveled my three harvester classes to 70, with one of those being fishing that I leveled completely from scratch. The challenge I have with FFXIV is that I never seem to be able to find a rhythm of repeatable interactions. I show up… grind for awhile… burn out for awhile… and then return when more story drops to repeat the cycle. I wish I could find something more favorable to use as an engagement pattern, but I struggle for whatever reason to find it.
Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC
I gotta admit, this right now is the new hotness. This is the thing that I have probably poured more time in lately than anything else. I loved the original Phantasy Star Online back during the Dreamcast era, and previously went through the hell of playing on the Japanese servers. So of course when the game released to North America and on PC I would spend time playing it. As of right now my Ranger is sitting at 71 and I expect to keep grinding it up to 75. I spent a bunch of meseta to fix my previous transgressions with my mag and it is now a perfect 200 Ranged Power. Still deeply enjoying the game, but as I have said before it takes an awful lot to actually get through some of the nonsense systems. I need to sit down and push further into the story, but it is its own kind of slog. For now real happy to have Phantasy Star Online back in my life, and pretty much I am playing it and Destiny every evening at least for a bit.
Torchlight III – PC
I’ve been an alpha and beta tester of this game for quite some time, since it was originally called Torchlight Frontiers. However all of that time was covered by an NDA and as a result I have not really been able to talk about the game until recently when it shadow dropped on Steam Early Access. The game is very “early access” right now, but I am playing it intermittently while dealing the various bugs that are cropping up and the issues they seem to be having with the server infrastructure. I expect great things for this game, and expect it to be on the list for awhile as I play it every so often until it officially releases.
World of Warcraft – Retail – PC
World of Warcraft makes the list, but is kinda hanging by a thread right now. I am not actively playing it at this very moment… but I VERY actively played it since the last time I wrote about the game. WoW will always be comfort gaming, and as we adjusted to our new lives in the pandemic, I clung pretty hard to this game. It doesn’t hurt that there is a massive XP buff going on and I could abuse it as a way of catching up a bunch of characters. I started this recent run only having a Warrior and a Demon Hunter at level 120 horde side… and I closed it with having my first Alliance 120 with my Paladin, along with another Paladin, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Druid, a Death Knight, and a Mage horde side at 120. However the grinding ground to a halt and I have not been actively logging in much lately. That said I know I am never very far away from logging back in to World of Warcraft.
To Those Departing
Animal Crossing: New Horizon – Switch
Animal Crossing New Horizons was effectively my first Animal Crossing game, having only ever played the mobile title before. It was an interesting ride, and one that helped me to get through those first few covid tinged days. However the grind reached a point where I decided I just didn’t want to keep up with it anymore. Were I to play this again I would absolutely join team cheater and start time travelling, because the engagement pattern of ACNH is such that after awhile I felt chained to it. I felt like I had to log in every day because I was wasting potential progress time. Were it the sort of thing that I could play hard for a weekend and then walk away for another couple of weeks, it would probably still be in the rotation. I realize this is exactly how you can play if you time jump, so I might dust this off and figure out how exactly that works at some point soon. For now however I am going to be honest and remove it from the list.
Atom RPG – PC
You were a really cool game Atom but I never quite got around to finishing you off, and I am not exactly sure why I added you to the list of games I was actively playing and not just the “ships passing in the night” thing that I tend to do for more single player experiences. In the time since adding it to the list, they have released a sequel so I figure at some point I will return and finish this off. For now however it is getting bumped from the list.
Wolcen – PC
I can’t honestly tell you why I stopped playing, but it happened. I’ve heard there are a lot of issues going on with the game, and that in itself has kept me from returning. I had a lot of fun, but there were some issues that I had, namely that group play felt less valuable than single player play. The few times that Grace and I attempted to group up, it felt miserable. I hope they sort some of this out, and I am absolutely down with returning at some point in the future. However for now, it gets removed from the list.
Summary
During the time since the last post I have shifted further back into my MMORPG roots and away from the Single Player game sequence that I was on over the holidays. Destiny 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2 have more or less become my primary games, with occasional jaunts off into other titles. I will be curious to see if I find my roots again in Guild Wars 2 or not, but the external pressure isn’t exactly helping that desire. I have a few side projects that I am working on, and I hope to get to the stage of being able to unveil them soon… which might completely change the mix of titles. For now however we are back up to date, and hopefully I can get back in the habit of doing these as a monthly thing.
With the AFK Forge Farm broken, the planetary activities appear to be back on the menu. I spent a good amount of time last night on Io rolling from one event to another with no fear of having enough folks to actually be able to defeat the heroic boss at the end. This is what Destiny feels like when it is good, an effortless series of events that ignite off the conclusion of the last. The unfortunate thing however is that it never quite stays this way. For now everyone has renewed vigor for something other than AFKing for hours and getting free engrams, and as a result I am riding it for all that it is worth.
One of the things that is making everything feel so damned good is a new auto rifle that appears to be in the rotation. I have no clue where it originally came from, but I played an excessive amount of gambit and never seemed to find one. I love this thing so much and for the first time in years that I have had anything that felt close to my beloved Haakon’s Hatchet from Destiny 1. I am very happy that I will in theory be able to carry this weapon forward for a few seasons. You can tell this fact by the little yellow number that shows 1360 power, meaning that this thing can be capped for a few more seasons before it becomes defunct.
What does not bring me joy is the stark realization that so many of my favorite weapons are going to be gone after this current season. Notice on my perfect roll of Bad Omens that it shows 1060 power, which is the current seasonal cap meaning that after this go round this weapon will no longer be able to grow. Bad Omens however is currently dropping from Umbral Engrams, so I am hoping that through all of this I can maybe get another one of these to drop that extends the life for a few more seasons. With cluster bombs and tracking this is pretty much as close to feeling like the Gjallarhorn as has ever exited in Destiny 2.
Nothing will ever likely replace the easymode farming that was the AFK Forge, but simply going out and playing the game seems to yield a fair number of engrams on its own. I played for a few hours last night and managed to walk away with six umbral engrams, a powerful engram, several random legendary drops and an exotic drop which seems like a pretty reasonable haul for playing some Crucible and Gambit. Right now I am mostly focusing down the various things that can reward powerful or pinnacle gear, as well as working on the various bounties associated with the season to stockpile on currency. I am not sure why I am back playing, but I am… and I think it is at least in part a desire for one last ride with my favorite gear before it starts to go away.
