Destiny Archives - Page 10 of 45 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Crucible Is A Mess

November 1, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve had a series of nights that did not go exactly as plan, and last night was no difference. I had a useless and impromptu 4pm meeting which lead me to get out of work significantly later then planned, and a series of errands that needed to be tacked on before I hit the house. By the time I actually hit the computer I was already stepping into turtle mode and largely stayed there the rest of the night. This did however give me the opportunity to work on the weekly milestones for both my Titan and Hunter. As has been my plan for a bit, I chose to do them in reverse order of importance to me… starting with the Hunter and finishing with the Titan and it seems to have had the desired effect. As of yesterday I could hit 275 on the Titan and as of last nights shenanigans I managed to push the Hunter to 281 and the Titan subsequently to 283. I still have Nightfalls to do on both of them and I am hoping tonight I will feel up to group interaction and attempt to get those knocked out as well. From there it is a matter of getting the Warlock up and running and geared enough to start knocking the content out as well. The sticking point right now is the fact that I am significantly worse in the crucible than I was on the console.

Essentially whatever I had learned on the console seems to need unlearning… and instead I am having to adapt to an entirely new set of circumstances. I am improving, but every so slowly and one of the aspects that does not help is the horrific queuing mechanism present in Destiny 2. Firstly there is still the problem of 4v4 being a worse mode than 6v6 for a bunch of reasons not the least of which is… if you are not roaming with the pack you are dead. In 6v6 there were lots of sub groups that would break off from the main group and roam the map in twos and threes… but in 4v4 you tend to either encounter no one… or a murderball that is the entirety of the enemy team roaming around together. This is only made worse by the fact that you are constantly being presented with teams of four players from the same clan. In 6v6 queuing with one or two members of your clan was largely diluted by the fact that there were 3 or 4 other people on the team. Queuing as a pair… means you now represent half of the team and it greatly skews the end results. I feel like the grouping routing should in theory favor placing solo players with other solo players… and full teams against other full teams. However because of the constant complaining in Destiny 1 we have a system that favors connection speed over literally everything else and ends up throwing a monkey wrench in any semblance of proper queuing mechanics.

I realize the intent was to have Quick Play be a casual queue and Competitive be a more serious one… but that does not appear to be working. Competitive modes would be fine for full team vs full team interactions, or for e-sports tournament settings. However as a casual player they are miserable just because you are committing to an indefinite amount of time per match. I know that when I enter the quick play queue I am agreeing to something in the range of 8-10 minutes of my time. With competitive this is entirely variable based on how many matches you have to play to reach the objectives of the mode… which are not even really clear in my head. One mode seems to be that you have to win 6 out of 10 matches to move get on with your life, and the other seems to be a slightly lower number. Regardless unless you are just straight up throwing each match you are stuck there for thirty minutes. I’ve played competitive exactly 2 times per character to unlock the Call to Arms milestone and never looked back. I am hoping with the advent of season 2… we see some significant changes in the way the queue system works because right now the crucible is not fun at all and something I suffer through each week to get gear. If you removed the powerful rewards… I would probably never play crucible again other than Iron Banner… and even then it is still a gear chase and not something I actually enjoy playing. I have proven time and time again over the years that I am willing to suffer some serious bullshit for the minor prize of seeing a single number go up a few digits.

And Then There Were Two

October 31, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not quite work out entirely as intended. My hope was to get home and do a flurry of activities quickly in order to get my hunter Nightfall ready. This did not happen because I came home to a whole slew of other things that needed to be taken care of immediately. Then when my wife got home she realized that she had not stopped by the store to get Halloween candy for her classes, and I threw proper clothing back on and ventured out into the cold once more so she could get on with her lesson planning and grading. All of this mean’t that I did not even get a proper start to the evening until around 7:30 last night… which also meant there was no way there were enough hours to accomplish all of the things that I wanted to be doing. I bowed out of Nightfall shenanigans and instead focused on knocking out the milestones needed to unlock a second set of luminous engrams. The most tedious of these was the crucible, because not only did I need to do enough to get the Call of Arms… but I had yet to do the pvp required to even unlock it. Note to self… in the future do this as part of the leveling experience so you don’t have to burn through it when you finish 20 and complete the story. I cannot fully express how much I loathe “competitive mode” crucible playlist and I am continuing my track record of playing it exactly two times on each character to unlock the milestone.

From there it was grinding the Crucible and I still am not in a position where I function well in this mode on PC. The dynamics all feel vastly different and I wound up hooking up a controller to see if the aim assist would help. Turns out it did… and apparently I just cannot track erratic PVP targets with the mouse as I could with the controller. Either that or I simply need to rely on the crutch that is aim assistance. Regardless I am super happy with the way Destiny 2 PC feels with a controller and how easy it is to swap back and forth between the two modes. Effectively to start using the controller you just pick it up and hit a button on it, and then to switch back you just click a button on your mouse. So often on the PC you need to choose one or the other and it has to be toggled back and forth via some nested menu structure. Here you can so easily swap back and forth that it feels completely reasonable for me to simply choose to use controller with the crucible and mouse and keyboard for everything else. I am also assuming that most of the vehicle sequences are going to work much better with a controller, so I might simply start picking them up and doing that as well.

All of the last minute grind completely paid off because the extra set of luminous engrams allowed me to move my Titan’s power level ahead just a little bit. More importantly than that… I no longer need to grind Nessus because Hawthorne awarded me a 282 Uriel’s Gift… one of those weapons I had been desperately trying to get back. This means I once again have my crucible setup of choice in the form of Antiope-D, Uriel’s Gift and Hawthorne’s Field-Forged Shot Gun. There are still a bunch of weapons I am missing that I want to try and get, but unfortunately the two I am missing the most are both on the Crucible loot table. Here is hoping the next round of luminous engrams sees me getting a Better Devils and a Play of the Game, so that I don’t have to grind out faction tokens to get them that way. The nightfall this time is Arm’s Dealer again but with Prism… meaning that there will be a rotating buff and matching the damage type increases damage output… and not matching it lowers it. Additionally we have Killing Time as a modifier meaning every mob killed slowly adds time back to the timer. It should be interesting and way more challenging than last weeks grenade fest. In theory I will be trying to get the Nightfall on two characters from this point out, so hopefully folks really get into it. So far they seem to be enjoying it quite a bit because while I was doing my grindy bits there were Nightfall groups attempting to get it for various folks. This week also sets up a new goal… getting the Warlock leveled and through all of this content so she can start adding to the luminous bonanza as well.

First Week on PC

October 30, 2017 by Belghast

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.

Twenty Again

October 26, 2017 by Belghast

I do not have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning so the post is going to be brief. Last night I went to the simulcast of Rifftrax Live Night of the Living Dead because there was no way I was going to miss that. Predictably it was pretty great and had also been a really long time since I had seen the original black and white film. There is a group of us from work that do this was a semi regular thing and its always a lot of fun. This however meant that I was giving up play time on “night two” of the PC release to spend time doing stuff in the real world. By the time I got home I was pretty out of it, but I did manage to limp across the finish line to level 20. This morning I spent a few of the tokens I had banked up and managed to get to 211 power level. That means tonight is all about actually finishing the main story because I dropped off before the transition to the planet Io. I have a bunch of goals… not the least of which is to finish the story so I can unlock the “end game” and all of the group activities. The other goal is to gather up enough purple stuff so that I can have the legendary shards ready and waiting for Xur to arrive tomorrow. The theory is to buy the 270 weapon and armor to give myself a boost so that when I start decoding the higher tier engrams that my light level is greatly inflated. Other than that… not a whole lot to talk about this morning so going ahead and cutting this post off.