d1 Archives - Page 3 of 9 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Snipers and Hellboars

November 16, 2017 by Belghast

One of the core problems with Destiny 2 is that progression is all about luck. What I mean by that is especially as you wind down towards the end of the power curve, everything lives or dies upon what you happen to pull from your powerful engrams each week. Once upon a time SquirrelPope told me that he started getting random world 300 blues when he hit 299.5 on his base light level. I’m at 299.8 at this point and have yet to see one and nor have I actually seen any of the supposed vendor engrams that go as high as 300. At this point on my Titan I need a chest and a class item to hit 305, which admittedly is way sooner than it happened during the console release. That said everything is luck of the draw for me and this week my luck was just about as bad as I could possibly get. In total I got six sniper rifles among the nine powerful gear packages that I have opened on my characters. Sniper rifle being the only weapon that I consider utterly useless because I have yet to find one that is even close to being worthy of that power slot. Grenade Launcher is traditionally a stinker as far as slots go, but even there I have Berenger’s Memory and Play of the Game that I like using. If I absolutely had to use a sniper… so far the only one that seems even viable is Gentleman Vagabond from crucible packages but even then… there are so many other good weapons that I could be using in that slot.

#Destiny2 PSA: You are likely using Scorch Canons wrong. After firing hold trigger down. After 4 seconds scorch round will double in size. Release for massive explosion. Conserves ammo, does more damage than spamming.

— Bel 🆚 Slug Emperor (@belghast) November 15, 2017

I tweeted this comment out last night and I thought I would post it on my blog as well this morning. I promise I meant this to be helpful and not ragey, but it does frustrate me when I see players effectively wasting the scorch cannon rounds spamming the crap out of them. I admit that I did not know this was even possible until I got to run the Wrath of the Machine raid in Destiny year three, so I went that long effectively using them wrong myself. The scorch cannon at face value looks like a rocket launcher with a lot of ammo, but it is way more than that even though the bosses that use it never actually use them to their full power either. With Titan being the weekly flashpoint planet, you are going to encounter a lot of scorch cannons considering 2 of the 3 available events on that planet involve Fallen Walkers. The weapon has a somewhat hidden alternate fire that involves holding down the trigger after you have fired the round and letting the munition grow in size before releasing and letting it explode. You are going to have an auditory and visual queue to this and while you can continue to let this go and keep gaining strength as Squirrel pointed out last night, my personal experience is that the 4 second rule seems to be the most efficient for killing those walker tanks. What I do is fire a round and then duck behind cover while holding the trigger allowing the munition to grow in size and about 4 seconds into holding it visually doubles in size. At this point I let it go and let the damage get dealt while lining up a shot for another round. Basically doing this will burn your target faster and easier I might add than spamming rounds and also give you more than enough ammo to take out both tanks with a single Scorch Cannon. The AOE explosion is also fun for dealing with waves of yellow bar captains and such, but unfortunately this is a tidbit of ancestral knowledge that has not yet circulated through most of the population given that I see most players wasting these weapons. As a result I just wanted to toss this thought out there and hopefully it sticks.

As far as last night goes however… after my crushing disappointment of being in sniper rifle hell… I decided to chill out on the sofa with my new favorite orc. At this point I am just shy of level 64 and am still in the Hellfire area cleaning up the quests. In theory I should be able to completely skip Zangarmarsh and go to Terrokar, doing the every other zone leapfrog across Outland much like I have done with Legion content. There is something extremely relaxing about Warrioring it up and all the while chatting occasionally with the Facepull crew horde side. Mostly World of Warcraft is serving as this super relaxing comfort gaming time for me, and with work being as stressful as it has been lately I guess I am finding I need it. Right now it is looking like I won’t really get to take much time off for the holidays other than the default days they give us off. I have too many deadlines crashing in together at the same time, and this is also throwing a massive monkey wrench in my traditional Pax South plans. Right now unless something massively changes I will not be attending this year which is a bit of a bummer considering I’ve gone every year since its inception so far. It also means I will miss out on meeting up with friends and hanging out… and the biggest bummer of all is that I just found out my friend Cuppy is on a panel this year. I would have loved to have seen that, but then again I am absolutely horrible at actually attending panels at Pax. I tend to miss them while wandering around doing other things. Even if not for Pax I am hoping to make it back to Austin as some point in the future.

Week Three Thoughts

November 15, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was if I am counting correctly the third reset we have experienced on the PC version of Destiny 2, and as a result that seems like an interesting time to take a sort of postmortem of my experiences so far. In fact I apparently also made a similar post three weeks after the PS4 launch, that could serve as an interesting comparison. At that point I was sitting at 291 light with the rest of my characters sitting in the 285ish range, and now I am knocking on the door of 305 with my Titan sitting at 304 without completing any of his weekly milestones, and the rest of my characters in the 300-302 range. In fact it was not until October 18th if I am looking at my posts correctly that I could hit 304 which I believe was somewhere in week six after release. There are a bunch of variables at work here, namely that I am trying to get a Nightfall every week and I did not do that before. Similarly I am dabbling in the raid and did not do that before… however the raid itself is not providing much in the way of gear yet other than a higher than normal level engram every week. What I am missing however is that after the second or third week I had access to a raid engram every week on the console side and we have yet to finish the raid on PC side but are getting close. I think when you balance everything out I have had access to roughly the same amount of gear so it isn’t simply that I am getting more of it more frequently. According to WastedOnDestiny.com I’ve spent 126 hours playing the PS4 version and 84 hours so far playing PC… so all things considered I have maybe been playing a little bit more on the PC than I was on the PS4 at this point.

Now the piece that is much harder to account for is ancestral knowledge. By playing Destiny 2 on the PS4 I essentially gave myself an extended beta test period with the game and by playing it as hard as I did I gleaned a bunch of knowledge that I then attempted to share on my blog. I know how things work and more than that I know how to best spend my time at least in the early game when I probably wasted some potential power gains on doing certain things too soon. In the console I was in a rush to see and do everything and now I more or less know what I like playing with and what it takes to get those things again. As a result I am now sitting on stockpiles of tokens that I can then use later as leverage when playing the 300 engram game trying for max level loot. I for example am sitting on 131 EDZ tokens largely because I know there isn’t much on that loot table that I don’t already have. On the converse I burn down my stock of Crucible and Vanguard tokens as soon as I get them because I am still looking for weapon drops from those activities. I could also be doing a lot more, like for example I don’t think I have touched Ikora’s memories at all during the PC launch and they are an additional draw at Vanguard loot that I should potentially be tapping. Essentially I progressed so much faster than I was expecting to… and I would chock that up to experience were it not for the fact that a lot of the Aggrochat crew are also progressing at similar levels. Are they simply getting the benefit of my experience as well, or did the PC game loosen the throttle a bit and let everyone’s item levels drift a little higher than was the case on the console?

The Achilles heel of the PC launch seems to be something that was almost completely overlooked. Destiny 2 added this fairly detailed clan system that allows players to benefit from the actions of other clan members… but does absolutely nothing for helping them communicate. What I mean by that is that while we have a weird text chat system on the Bungie website… that does not exist anywhere in game. The only options for chat in game are /fireteam, /team, and /whisper leaving out the very critical /clan. I mean I realize Bungie is still in denial that they made an MMO but this is the most basic functionality that PC MMO gamers expect from a game. Blizzard introduced this whole “social” section of the battle.net client… but that doesn’t work in game either leaving this huge gap for now to glue people together. Prior to launch I shared out the Beyond the Light Discord as a sort of multi-clan hangout and several weeks in I am still thinking that is going to be the best option to help people connect up for groups. I feel like they largely did not consider how vastly different the PC community would be and what sort of cultural norms we would expect going into the game. The end result however seems to be “use voicechat” as the way to connect up with folks… and there are just times where I don’t want to be talking on voice chat. My dream for Blizzard games is to have some sort of guild chat that spans across all of their games and allows me to talk to people playing Diablo 3 or World of Warcraft while I am playing Destiny 2. However that dream is seemingly still a long time coming, but in the mean time… Bungie please put in /clan.

Holy Crap A Sword

November 14, 2017 by Belghast

This wee the Faction Rally event has been going on in Destiny 2 and as I stated earlier in the week I was absolutely expecting Dead Orbit to win. They had the worst weapon during the first Faction Rally and won regardless, and I just assumed that was going to be our fate in life from this point out. However it feels like Bungie attempted really hard to stack the deck in favor of New Monarchy by offering up the only faction based sword weapon as the prize for repping the faction. Basically in my opinion Future War Cult has the best weapons on average and New Monarchy has the coolest looking gear and shaders… then Dead Orbit is the also ran faction of having both gear and weapons that look scavenged. However Dead Orbit has black/grey/white shaders which at least in Destiny 1 tended to make everyone want to faction with them. Hell I did it for awhile until I started on this whole Future War Cult kick. Basically I had resigned myself that I would log into the game this morning and we would have a crappy grenade launcher waiting for us to purchase for far too much glimmer. Instead I have a sword slung across my back and some pep in my step as a result.

Last night we ventured forth into the Leviathan again, and as a bit of a favor to myself and Grace we used a brand new raid seed so that we could get in and at least get some tokens for the week. Sunday night while I was downstairs playing WoW and watching Walking Dead a crew made their way into the Leviathan and made a repeat performance at dogs, and then put in some work on figuring out the Gauntlet event. Last night we once again downed dogs, this time on our second attempt and were able to move on to work on the Gauntlet as well. I like that all of the fights so far feel extremely repeatable, as in once we get the dance down we seem to be able to do it without much effort. The most challenging part seems to be that the dogs themselves are erratic as hell and seem to behave oddly at times making it a little slow. I fully expect that once we have the fights down solid we will be able to clear all of the Leviathan in an hour, which means we can do multiple trips in each week to get folks through it without a lot of effort. I realize we are months behind in doing so… but I am looking forward to being able to beat Calus on our own terms and unlocking raid engrams for the rest of the clan.

The bulk of last night was spent sorting out the mechanics to the Gauntlet and then attempting to refine what we had learned and turn it into something that was effectively repeatable. The last few attempts were really close to winning and the ultimately challenge seems to be during the “everyone runs” phase of the fight, keeping those of us who have not been running the orbs up to that point alive long enough to get enough orbs through the gauntlet to actually win. The last several rounds we were getting both runners through the tunnel each time, meaning in theory we needed fewer people to actually make it to the end of the fight successfully. However the death timer is ultimately what got it as myself or someone else failed to make one of the jumps. Functionally in my case this is going to be one of those “practice makes perfect” situations because I learn largely through doing. The other thing that I need to do a little research on is how best to handle the waves of adds because I was doing the Axe platform and it felt like I was just straight up getting shredded by grenades all the time. I did notice that my adds seems to stop coming out sooner than the other platforms so I am wondering if there is something to that. The last few attempts Tam and Shiana that were doing the runs were floating to help out the other platforms clear adds and it went so much more smoothly. I look forward to finishing this fight so we can get started on the Slug Emperor himself.

Lastly I thought I would share this over on my main blog. For those who are unaware we have another site tied to our AggroChat podcast that effectively rolls up and syndicates all of the content from all of the hosts. What this means in practice is it is generally my daily posts, perforated by the occasional post by Grace and then our Sunday podcast releases. For the past two years our banner has not at all represented the cast of the show and there has been a project to fix this getting the always amazing @Ammosart to do individual character shots. Firstly we have Ashgar as a high tech bear, then myself as a Destiny Year 3 Iron Banner guardian, Grace as the octopus pirate queen, Kodra as Commander Keen, Tamrielo as a Red Mage, and finally Thalen as a sort of futuristic marksman. Basically I had each member work with Ammo directly to do whatever representation they wanted to use going forward, and I think the set turned out great. I finally got off my ass and pulled it together in a new site banner and will start using them on the title cards that I create each week for the podcast.

Accidental Orc

November 13, 2017 by Belghast

Firstly I feel like I need to lead this post with a tweet from one of my friends that I received last night.

Didn't you just tweet about cancelling your WoW sub? Or are you just playing until it runs out?

— Jeff Rimer (@Jeff_Rimer) November 13, 2017

I did in fact do this thing. To be more specific I went on a spree of mass cancelling my MMO accounts in early October. I went so far as to actually uninstall many of the games, which is apparently the surest sign that you are just about to decide that you are going to want to play again. Thankfully I have super fast internet and downloading World of Warcraft really is not that big of a deal anymore. I am not exactly sure how to explain this one other than the fact that I have been playing on and off with a friend in Destiny 2… that I first knew through my horde guild in World of Warcraft. I guess in theory this made me nostalgic about that guild and planted the idea in my head that I really should level my warrior over there. When you combine that with the weekend we had which was dreary and overcast… and my desire to just hang out on the couch in a blanket cocoon and do some comfort gaming and apparently all of that translates into playing World of Warcraft.

The biggest challenge however is the fact that in the process of uninstalling everything I also nuked my addons. Playing WoW with the stock interface is just not a tenable solution. My previous UI was cobbled together out of several dozen separate addon packs that I had to use the Curse Client now re-branded as Twitch to maintain. I did not want to go through that again so I took this as the perfect opportunity to try ElvUi that everyone has been raving about for years. It took some getting used to because the set up process was nothing like I was used to. However I decided to embrace the difference and by the end of the weekend I had gotten used to it mostly. The thing that likely won me over however was the AFK screen where the camera spins around you and your character dances in the corner. They didn’t need to do this thing… but the world is better for them doing it. Essentially over the last few days I have chilled on the couch and leveled from 30ish to 61 as of this morning. I am now knee deep in the Burning Crusade expansion content and having a weird nostalgic trip down memory lane. I have zero clue how long I will be playing or even how often but for the moment I am enjoying myself.

In Destiny 2 news I can now hit 302 on my Titan and in theory would love to either get in a raid tonight or at least the Nightfall on my Hunter and Warlock to potentially get some additional item level movement. The biggest problem that is effecting me in Destiny is the fact that I just am not a night owl right now… and that a good chunk of our clan are now on the west coast meaning they are two hours behind me. One of two things is going to have to happen, either we break into a early evening and late night raid, or we start actually declaring some night of the week to be raid night. Thus far everything has sorta been on the spur of the moment with whoever happens to be around, and sure that is fun… but also impossible to plan around. Last night for example they were wanting to pull together the raid while I was watching Walking Dead, which is literally the only television show I watch all week long. Other nights the potential start time would mean I would be up until midnight which is just not viable during the work week anymore. Had I planned for this and maybe taken a cat nap when I got home then it might be doable, but impromptu raiding just isn’t working for me right now. I want to raid and I want to get through the content but I just need some structure to it. Hopefully with the reset we can do a better job of planning raid nights. In theory I am going to try and get one going earlier in the evening tonight so I can at least get some tokens this week.