Three Bananas

This weekend was an extended weekend for me, having taken two days off to match up with my wife who is on fall break. As a result I had more than my average amount of play time and the timing happened to line up perfectly with the first Iron Banner for the Season of the Undying in Destiny 2. This time around there was a quest chain that I wrote about the other day that walks the player through collecting four weapons and a full suit of the Iron Banner armor. After this however it became my first mission to make sure I had completed that on all three characters. The above collage shows them all in the gear set that I picked up with some shaders applied to make them look cooler.

The most curious part of the weekend is that I somehow capped my Valor twice and reset it… and am now grinding it up a third time presently sitting at the Brave II rank. Partially this is due to the fact that the weekend included a bonus to all valor gained, and partially due to the fact that I played an excessive amount of crucible via the Iron Banner. I am guessing that the bonus valor also somehow equated to bonus XP because I skyrocketed from around 33 at the start of Iron Banner to 60 as of last night. I also managed to hit the less permeable cap of 960… aka 950 gear and 10 bonus light coming from the artifact. From this point on I believe the gains are in single point increments.

I was completely all over the place this weekend when it came to the activities that I dipped my toes into. While podcasting I opted to grind the Menagerie a bit and attempt to get a good roll of the Austringer, something that I had apparently completely failed at doing during the Season of Opulence. I am not even sure what a God Roll looks like, but my friend Teyeger01 suggested either Rampage/Rapid Hit or Rapid Hit/Kill Clip… the later sounds most excellent. I pulled an Outlaw/Rampage which seems like a perfectly reasonable option for the time being and one well worth using. For the time being I am completely out of Desire runes and will probably wait for Thalen to unlock the chalice before grinding some out again seeing as he was not benefiting from my runefinder buff.

Speaking of which, I spent a good chunk of the weekend running around with Thalen and doing whatever he had on his list of activities. I now fully understand why Squirrel always wanted me to drive the activity we were doing, because after a point it doesn’t really matter what it is we are actually doing. It is the act of running around and getting to play big brother guardian that is really fun. I wish I could have somehow carried people to the Iron Banner armor, but the way those objectives were set up to do not exactly lend themselves to being helped out by another guardian. So many of the checkmarks are depended upon getting weapon kills of a specific type, which means you need to be the one that actually finishes the Guardian off. If they were assists… maybe just maybe I could have helped folks like Pix through the Iron Banana because apparently I am better than I realized?

Speaking of killing Guardians… I finished off my Malfeasance… which is a Hand Cannon that I am probably never going to use. Right now I am heavily favoring swapping back and forth between Austringer and Ace of Spades when I want to play with that weapon type. The problem with Malfeasance is its special perk procs an explosion after the fifth hit on a target. Very few targets can handle five hits… even Guardians tend to drop somewhere in the 3 to 4 hit range. This means the only time you are ever going to get use of the perk is on some tanky Majors and Boss type encounters… which are situations you are probably going to use a heavy or a special on. So basically this weapon feels like it needs some tweaking… if it was 3 hits and then an explosion this gun would be amazing. Regardless it is another Exotic quest checked off on my list, and another quest out of my log.

At the start of this week I would have said without a doubt that this was the best feeling Iron Banner I had experienced to date. Then things shifted… and I eventually found out that Bungie made tweaks to the way the matchmaking was working. Originally as a solo queue player I was almost always getting matched with other solo queue players, which felt amazing. The problem is the vocal minority of the “sweaty” pvpers complained that they were sitting in orbit with a full team for hours and not getting matches. Bungie made some tweaks to the system and suddenly on Saturday I started getting matched up with 4 or 5 players from the same clan against my rag tag group of solo queues. Basically I am glad that I got most of my progress towards the armor sets done before that point, because on my Hunter it took way longer than it did on any of the others.

It makes me realize how much better the Crucible would be for me personally… if there was a freelancer play list. I am almost always going to queue as a solo player, because that tend to be how I play crucible most of the time. On the first few days before they applied this tweak… Iron Banner felt amazing. On the days after the patch was applied… I got one of two games… competitive or shut outs that I got “mercied”. Even when you lose in a close game… it somehow feels better because you had a chance. The weirdest realization for me personally… is that even in the scenarios where I was getting completely tromped… I was doing reasonably well. I think of myself as a very shitty PVPer… but maybe just maybe I have improved over time. I did enjoy myself and I find doing the Crucible bounties a little less tedious than it used to be.

Bad Concierge

Yesterday I failed miserably at making any sort of a post.  In truth by the time I had realized I had not logged in and created a blog post it was mid afternoon…  and figured I might as well just call it a day off.  First off this morning I feel like I probably need to update considering my Monday post.  I saw a Doctor Monday afternoon but good or bad the pain had subsided by that point.  The pain in whole lasted roughly 3 1/2 to 4 hours and without it being “acute” the only way they really had to diagnose things was some scans.  Their advice to me is that if the pain comes back at all…  go to the Emergency Room immediately.  Based on my description they thought it might have been either a kidney stone or my appendix…  since I still have one of those so in both cases something dangerous if I allow it to go unchecked.  While I was there however they also told me I had a pretty significant sinus infection and prescribed a round of antibiotics to help clear that up.  I had been coughing up a storm the last few weeks and apparently I actually had an infection to back that up.  The doctor suggested that I not return to work until Wednesday, to keep down the odds of me infecting someone else…  which I guess makes sense given this is a sort of work based free clinic thing that I went to.  So for the bulk of yesterday I chilled out while something cooked in the crockpot and piddled around in World of Warcraft while consuming Netflix/Amazon shows.

wowscrnshot_010818_184347

One of my favorite things about ElvUi is the AFK screen thing.  Not sure why it makes me happy to see it pop up and I have a directory littered with screenshots of my character sitting down while dancing on the side.  At this point I am level 52 on my newish Tauren Hunter and spending time in the greater Gadgetzan area.  In truth last night before logging for the evening I got the precursor quest to take me to Ungoro crater, so I will likely be heading there shortly.  Being fully decked out in Heirlooms makes the leveling experience really odd given that things rarely last long enough for my pet to even reach the target, let alone need any form of “tanking”.  This means that I am largely running a pet for the flavor of it rather than for the functionality.  Traditionally when I need a pet to be a barrier between me and the target I tend to favor bears…  however for the moment I am running around with a golden brown Owl I picked up somewhere in Feralas that I named Bubo.  The hunter is ridiculously relaxing which has been exactly the sort of thing I have been looking for lately.  One of the things I enjoy about hanging out in Facepull on the Horde side is that I can be a fly on the wall mostly, that interacts every so often but also has the room to simply not interact at all if the spirit doesn’t move me to communication.

wowscrnshot_010918_235341

I ended up going off on a twitter tear yesterday talking about guild leadership and being the person in the background that makes sure things are happening.  When I first started leading guilds…  I was very young and lacked any sort of responsibility apart from just showing up at work and making sure I was getting my tasks accomplished.  In fact when House Stalwart hit its stride about a year into the release of the game…  I was in quite possibly the worst job I have ever been in.  I had a horrible boss and felt like I had no control over my work environment, and as a result having a smooth running community to come home to and spend my evenings with was almost refreshing.  During this time my home life was in a bit of a disarray due to the large number of deaths that were occurring in the family, and Stalwart wound up being my stability that I so desperately needed.  As we entered Wrath of the Lich King I changed jobs and wound up in a much better place where I had a support structure and actually started taking on more responsibilities.  As such I found myself starting to back away from the same sort of things that I did during Vanilla and Burning Crusade and begin placing myself in more of a distant advisory role.  By the time Cataclysm launched I had moved up to being a Team Lead, and was responsible with juggling planning and task assignment, and similarly I found myself completely checking out of the guild leadership role and even going so far as to quit World of Warcraft when Rift released.  During that time I have shifted from Team Lead, to assumed supervisor, to actual supervisor… to now interim manager of three groups.  While I have kept trying to be the social glue for guilds…  by the time I get home I just have no social capital left to make things happen.

The truth is that every guild you have ever been in that felt active…  had one or more people behind the scenes making sure that things were going smoothly.  I used to have a motto among our officers that I wanted our actions felt but not necessarily seen, and so long as I had the focus it worked smoothly.  From Cataclysm on Stalwart has changed hands numerous times and as a result has kept going forward without me.  While now it takes a more raiding focus, it is still functional and still doing things.  However if you take away the people who are actively moving the ball forward… you end up with 30 people sitting in guild chat and nothing happening.  That has been the problem with so many of these guilds that I have formed as new games come out..  I don’t have the drive to be the cruise director anymore…  and while I gather up the people I don’t have the strength to actually do things with other people.  This was extremely noticed in the recent foray into Destiny 2 where I spent 99.9% of my time soloing, all the while people around me were trying to make things happen.  Guilds work when they have a concierge making sure needs are being met and I just cannot fill that position anymore.  I have transitioned to being one of the players that just wants to log in and have a good evening escaping whatever stresses piled up during the day.  The key difference for me at least is that I do most of this through solo play and am completely happy to piddle along with alts.  There are times that I miss big group activities…  like I wish we had beat Calus in Destiny 2, or I wish we had made a bigger push into Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood.  Then I sit back and think about the frustrations of having to remember to log in on time with all of the materials needed for raiding on a specific night of the week… and I question if I could ever go back to that.  So yes…  I play tons of MMOs as single player games and am mostly okay with that, and yes I realize I am doing it wrong.  I do like knowing people are out there in spite of me not being capable of actually interacting some evenings, so I will always seek out potential communities because someday…  maybe…  I might shift back out of whatever turtle mode I have been in for the last year.

Weekend Warlock

desktop-screenshot-2017-11-06-06-08-53-69

I had every intent of writing a post on the Battle for Azeroth announcement from Blizzcon but I still feel like I am percolating my heads into something that is more intelligible than a rant.  Instead I am going to focus on my weekend spent in Destiny, which saw me finishing off leveling my Warlock and getting it properly geared.  I am half convinced that there is some sort of shared internal item level spread across all of your characters, because every time I have managed to push up my third character…  its initial reward cycle has been insane causing it to leap ahead of the others.  This was definitely the case with the Warlock who is now sitting at 294 as compared to 291 that I can manage to hit on either my Titan or Hunter.  At this point I am fairly happy with the cobbled together gear that I have on the warlock because it gives me a stat spread that I like…  3 mobility, 5 resilience, and 7 recovery.  I managed to get the Nightfall done so far on both the Titan and the Warlock and am hoping that maybe I can find some folks to do it with on the Hunter this evening.  There is also talk about stepping foot into the raid again as well, which I am hoping we can pull off without going too late into the night.  Having half of our normal crew on Pacific time and the other half on Eastern/Central time is a pain in the ass for timing any sort of activities.

desktop-screenshot-2017-11-03-20-05-59-96

As far as the raid goes we managed to get through the bathers event and made some pretty decent progress on the doggos.  Functionally I think that encounter is going to come down to simply executing everything we have done over the course of a few attempts…  in a single go.  I like the raid so far because it feels very much like Final Fantasy XIV… in that it is a dance and once learned you can execute it pretty rapidly.  I have a feeling that at some point we will be bringing four seasoned players and two learners and getting more people in the clan some experience.  Fore the moment however we are shifting bits and pieces of the same handful of people trying to push through and learn it all.  I mean there are raid guides out there that we could be following, but it feels more significant when we sort out things on our own.  If we do make it back tonight I feel like we are probably going to make it through the pleasure gardens… which if my math is right means we have one more encounter before we actually face Calus.  In theory if things go well we might be able to actually clear the raid next week.  Its funny how much of a driving force it is for me to unlock the engram for the rest of the clan.

desktop-screenshot-2017-11-06-06-08-08-45

Next week is the start of the faction rally, and I am assuming that I will do what I did last go round and support a single faction on each character.  That also means I am likely going to match up the factions with the gear that I would like to see them wearing.  The only bad thing about that is the fact that New Monarchy has the coolest looking gear for multiple classes.  I feel like probably the Hunter set is the best looking so I will be repping them on that character.  Which means I am probably going to go Dead Orbit with the Titan and Future War Cult with the Warlock because I am most likely to wear the respective armor sets.  The real goal for me however is to play just as much as it takes to unlock all 12 dropped weapons and a full set of gear for the Hunter.  Past that anything else is gravy, and I am pretty happy with the gear I currently have assembled on the titan and warlock.  The hunter is going to get a lot of play time if for no reason other than the fact that the New Monarchy shaders are the ones I am most likely to use for weapons.  Basically we have yet another extremely busy week ahead of us in Destiny 2.  The icing on the top is the fact that Greysky Armada should easily hit rank 6 next week.

First Week on PC

desktop-screenshot-2017-10-30-06-13-37-73

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.

desktop-screenshot-2017-10-30-06-13-22-09

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.

Destiny 2_20171029180634

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.

desktop-screenshot-2017-10-30-06-13-30-83

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.