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Last Banana

August 4, 2017 by Belghast

It has been a very gaming light week for me, and I wound up heading to bed something like 8:30 or 9 ish which is very much not normal for me. Functionally I am coming off of a few really rough weeks at work where I have been in firestomper mode 24/7. As a result I get home and I am just too drained to deal with human beings… or in truth the possibility of human beings. This is where my “I” streak comes out with a vengence, and it has lead me to play a lot of games in a very low key and solo manner. Last night however I decided to go ahead and play some Destiny. Right now the very last Iron Banner before the release of Destiny 2 is going on… and with it the chance to get the sniper rifle and hand canon… neither of which I have a decent roll for. Additionally with the thought about going into Destiny 2… I am finding myself more than a little nostalgic for Destiny 1 at the moment. I’ve never been one to really work on the book achievements, but I am finding myself doing so at least in a limited fashion. September 6th begins a new adventure into the Destiny universe… and with it we are leaving behind all of the trappings of the last. As flawed at times as the original might be… it still very much feels like home.

The match type for this last Iron Banner is Control, which is also in part what is pushing me back to play some. Control is my favorite game mode because it gives me a reason beyond killing other players to be engaged. Deathmatching was something that I was a fan of when I was in High School… but once I have gotten older I find myself craving some larger objective to be working towards. While I would love to have role based gameplay along the lines of Enemy Territory… holding points on a map at least gives me some measure of that core focus. What ends up happening in truth is that players form what I call a “muderball” and then ping ping back and forth across the map capturing points. In Destiny 1 this game play is actually to some extent rewarded because the more people you have standing on a point… the faster it shifts to neutral and then to captured. In Destiny 2 however… points capture at a fixed rate so it is going to be interesting to see if players actually spend some effort focusing on defense rather than just constantly retaking points. I saved the above screenshot largely because this was as good as it got last night as far as kill to death ratio.

As far as a load out… it just feels like the special weapon slot doesn’t mean much of anything anymore. The limited amounts of ammunition you get, and the fact that it seems like Invective no longer recharges at a reasonable rate meant that for the most part I was using nothing but primary. I tried a few things as the evening went on. At first I had some early success with Oversoul Edict, but as the night went on I wound up breaking out my friend the Genesis Chain. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Suros aesthetic but I absolutely love this weapon… especially if you get head shots and trigger the firefly explosion effect. I love the way that sounds… its like a tiny “fuck yes” as you are running away to find the next engagement. What cracks me up about me and Destiny… is that I tend to bond with whatever weapon everyone else says that you should just shard. This lives in an archetype that no one seems to like and is functionally just a better version of “An Answering Chord” that is a available on the Vanguard Quartermaster. However it just feels better and seems to work better for me than that weapon ever did. I mean I also love the Fabian Strategy… which is a weapon everyone else seems to hate so my particular tastes seem to consistently go against the meta. Last night I managed to finish all of my quests from Lady Efrideet, but I have yet to get any weapon drops so I am thinking I might want to go ahead and try and make rank 5 during this final Iron Banner in the hopes of maybe seeing some decent versions of the Hand Cannon along the way.

Enjoyment and PVP

May 17, 2017 by Belghast

Last week there was a tweet that came across my feed that jarred something loose in my brain. I am wishing I had thought to save it because I honestly don’t know at this point who tweeted or at least on what specific day. It was one of those things that filtered into my subconscious and stuck there as it scrolled past. The general gist was asking what exactly a game would have to do to make PVP palatable for you personally. I was rushing between meetings when I checked Fenix on my phone, and never actually got around to replying. However it is something that I have been mulling over for days now. Why this was so sticky is the fact that I am a walking paradox it seems. I will claim not to like PVP at all, and will actively go out of my way to avoid it if it is happening in the world. If a game has one of those settings that prevents you from being accidentally flagged… I run with that on all of the time. If it is raid time… and one of our PVP centric members runs into the instance flagged and in doing so gets jumped by the Horde. I will sit there and watch them die, because in my mind they made a poor life choice for coming to a raid flagged in the first place.

All of that said… I also look forward to the Iron Banner in Destiny which is a monthly PVP event, and if I am bored I often times pop into the crucible which is their version of a battleground match making system. What I have never been able to reconcile is why player versus player activity in one game feels good and in others not great at all. All I have been able to sort out in my head is that in Destiny there is no negative side effect, and the rewards for participation are balanced in a way that it feels like no matter what there is a chance that I get something really cool in the process. Now Crucible hardcores in Destiny will tell you that the things that I love about it… are the things that frustrate them. Functionally loot is not tied to performance, but instead participation. Sure if you win a match you get more faction with Lord Shax the Crucible reputation vendor… but regardless of success or failure it feels like my time spent is leading towards the goal of something interesting. I am either going to get a faction package that gives me weapons or armor… or I am going to have the chance of getting interesting gear rewarded to me at random at the end of a match.

The other thing that has stuck out in my head is that in Destiny the total time of the match is relatively short ranging from 6 to 8 minutes… to at the maximum 15 minutes. Even more than that the time to engagement is also short, with the lack of long runs back to where the objective fighting is happening. I spent some time this weekend in World of Warcraft doing battlegrounds, since that system as a whole feels like a reasonable counter point to Destiny. I knew I was in for something when about 5 minutes into an Arathi basin map… I saw a pop up through DBM timers informing me that my team would win in 21 minutes. The length of that match just felt prohibitive to my enjoyment, and the risk of that time spent… had no real payoff waiting for me at the end. Sure there is the chance of random loot, but the loot seems to be based on my current PVP rank… and not relative to my gear level which is a huge positive for the way that Destiny handles things. So since I am late to the game, that means I would have to suffer through a lot of bad experiences in order to maybe have a chance of getting something that is going to be useful to me in the long run. The risk versus reward equation is just not good enough for me to keep throwing myself at the gristmill. So instead after a handful of maps I went back to grinding World Quests because they at least felt like they had tangible rewards associated with them.

Basically my take away is that in order for me to find PVP interesting… there has to be one hell of a lot of carrot waiting on me and very little stick. The truth is that PVP in general be it Crucible or Battlegrounds is the sort of thing that I might do if I have literally nothing else to do. I participate in Iron Banner so often because it is a limited time event… and it also is a loot bonanza. While I was working my way to the current 400 light cap in Destiny, a good chunk of that progress was gained through Iron Banner drops… which tend to be one every third or fourth match. In World of Warcraft I played a half dozen battlegrounds this weekend and got a single piece of gear that was 50 item levels lower than the rest of the gear that I was wearing, so another enchanting shard just doesn’t feel that exciting. I think the shortness of the match also helps my enjoyment, because even if we are losing horribly… it is a short term predicament and one that might be remedied in the next match. Additionally battlegrounds that focus on huge scale siege objectives tend to be soul sucking for me, and each time I have to mount up and run to the opposite end of the map it just feels bad. I guess I prefer quick skirmishes rather than protracted battles, especially for randomly queuing with strangers. The other huge negative about PVP in games like World of Warcraft is the fact that I am lumped into chat with a bunch of horrible people. Simply disabling the chat and making the maps clear enough not to need communication to complete objectives would greatly improve my experience. A good chunk of my joy in Destiny is the fact that no one can spout off racist slurs in global chat.

Warlock Banana

December 13, 2016 by Belghast

Last night did not go exactly as expected, but I am pretty pleased with the results anyways. Last night was a good night, and it started from the moment I got home and got a bunch of things accomplished while waiting on the rice cooker. After a furious round of chores, my wife and I sat down to eat and then I was off to play some PS4. With my leg in its current mauled state it hurts to sit on the couch given that in order to use my laptop I need to use the recliner. This ends up putting pressure on the four wounds and while I can take it for a few minutes… it doesn’t exactly make for comfortable gaming. As a result I am largely upstairs right now, and other than being isolated from my wife it does give me access to my gaming consoles and my legit gaming desktop. The original goal for last night was going to involve running around and doing stuff with some friends in Destiny, but while waiting for that to happen I decided to start doing Iron Banner on my Warlock. I had not actually touched the Banner on either the Warlock or the Hunter during Year 3, and as a result I had the Lady Efrideet quests to complete which also reward some gear. I managed to exit the week long even with my Titan main at 393, Warlock caught up to 391 and my Hunter lagging a bit out of disuse at 389.

I’ve tried a whole slew of weapons and honestly nothing makes me nearly as happy as my Year 2 Iron Banner Auto Rifle… the Haakon’s Hatchet. So for the most part playing on my Warlock meant swapping this over via Destiny Item Manager. For those who are not using this I highly suggest installing the chrome plugin, because it greatly improves the utility of being able to swap gear while playing the game. Essentially I swapped my Auto Rifle and my Gjallarhorn over and was off to the races. There is a part of me that is sad that this Auto Rifle just simply doesn’t exist any more. I wish there was something you could do, like a weekly bounty for Lord Saladin that rewarded the year two weapons… just a random draw at the huge vat of available options. Range Finder is one of those perks on a weapon that I feel like gets overlooked a lot, but given the normal crap range on this weapon… with that perk it allows me to melt targets an entire map away it seems. Counter Balance and Perfect Balance on the same weapon always makes it feel great and I think a huge part of why I keep favoring this weapon… is that I have used it so much that I can predict exactly how it is going to behave in pretty much every situation.

Throughout the course of the evening I managed to go from Rank 0 to Rank 5 and complete all four of the bounties on my Warlock along with the three one time Lady Efrideet quests. That meant I saw an awful lot of gear as a result. Most of it was largely “more of the same” but I am picking out a few items to talk about. Firstly I am not a huge fan of Sidearms, but I am trying to learn how to use them. They play this interesting role of operating somewhere just outside of shotgun range but largely something you swap to when you empty your primary. Normally speaking I would just infuse this into a weapon I am more familiar with but for the moment I am holding onto it largely because I think the perk package looks interesting. With Hand Loaded and Range Finder… this means my side arm is going to have a massive operating range, and with Quickdraw I will be able to swap to it extremely quickly. Combine this with the already insane Stability and Rate of Fire on the weapon… and it might be useful if I can learn to use it well.

One of the strange things about Iron Banner is that your drops seem to be extremely character dependent. For example this time around the drops that were available were Class Items, Helms, Artifacts, Ghost Shells, Scout Rifles, and Fusion Rifles. On my Titan I got Fusion Rifles almost exclusively, save for a single Distant Star Scout Rifle drop. On my Warlock… the Scout Rifles were raining down upon me. I still think that more than likely I am going to be using the vendor roll which includes Full Auto… giving me a crazy high power auto rifle hybrid thing. However I did manage to get a few other interesting rolls, including the one above that I thought were worth talking about. Firstly to spec this out I would end up taking Braced Frame… which I really don’t like doing because it reduces the magazine size. For the second pick I would ultimately take High Caliber Rounds to give some stagger and a bit more impact, and lastly would probably go for Firefly… just because right now I don’t have a decent scout rifle with that on it. For the un-initiated Firefly makes it so that when you kill a with a headshot… it causes it to explode dealing damage to all other mobs around it. Firefly does a really great job at helping with wave clear and it is just fun to watch all of these things explode. All in all it was a pretty great week in the Banana, and I am hoping the next time it comes around I can maybe push my army of characters up to 400ish.

Literal Ankle Biter

December 12, 2016 by Belghast

This was a bit of an odd weekend. Lets get the bad out of the way. For several months we have been trying to figure out how to get Luna to a point where she does not attack the other two cats on sight. We’ve kept her sequestered in my wife’s office and each night I grab her and we hang out in my office while I play games. She almost always ends up snuggled on my desk, and in truth is just about the sweetest cat ever… when not around our other two. This is an important distinction before I tell you this next bit… because she is adorable and cuddly… when she is by herself. In my infinite lack of wisdom I decided that I wanted to make one last attempt to socialize them since she had seemingly bonded with me so tightly after our many many weeks of chilling in my office. We locked our eldest cat up in the bedroom and brought Luna out, at first carrying her and holding her on the sofa. Before long thought she wanted to explore… and for the most part our youngest and her were not interacting at all. However there came a point where we were moments away from a cat fight, and I tried to gather Luna up and carry her off to my office. She struggled to try and get away but I got her up to the office without much issue. I turned to shut the door and I felt this searing pain on my leg around my lower calf. She had bit me… and now I was left with the decision of how the hell to get out of my office without letting her out so she could go after Kenzie.

I snuck out and by the time I got downstairs I was bleeding pretty badly. There are five marks… so I am guessing one is maybe a claw mark or she drug off of me and raked me with her fang again. Two of them are about a half inch in length and pretty deep… and two others are deep puncture wounds where she chomped down hard on my leg. It hurts quite a bit to walk and just generally exist in the world right now, but I don’t think there is any real damage. After going through the crap with my wife when she got bitten we are being extra cautious, and using the super duper antibiotic creme that they gave us back then. Walking is not comfortable and today is going to be interesting. I had to venture out to get more extra large band-aids, because in theory you can hit all of the spots with two of the largest size. After getting bandaged up I went back upstairs where she seemed as freaked as I was by the event. She sat on the floor in the back of my office up against the accordion closet door for a long while looking freaked. Eventually I peeked down underneath the desk towards where she was at and said “it’s okay, I’m not mad” and almost instantly her demeanor changed and she bounded over and hopped up on the desk laying down beside me. The thing that is breaking my heart is that I now know that this is probably never going to get any better, and we really do need to find her a new home. Unfortunately the friend that we thought was going to take her… had her landlord say no. It was in their contract that they could have pets if landlord approved… but I am guessing the asshole is biased against cats, because he assumed they were talking a dog.

Other than the cat thing…. and hurting… I streamed a lot of Iron Banner. I think it was Friday night at some point that I managed to hit Rank 5 with the Banana, and from that point on it was just gravy as far as loot went. I guess in theory I should have been swapping to the Warlock or Hunter to get them to Rank 5 but instead I simply made a poor attempt at farming some more gear to increase my light levels. This last 10 points is going to be slow as hell, but I entered the weekend at 390 and exit at 392 which I guess is reasonable. According to beam I have now streamed seven hours of game play, which I guess isn’t a bad start for my first week. Now a good chunk of that on Sunday at least was to an empty audience, but I entertained myself and have a bunch of footage to sift through. There was one Iron Banner match where for whatever reason I started humming the Super Mario Brothers theme song inserting “Nope” instead of some of the notes. All in all I think I like Rift for an Iron Banner match type, but like I said before I struggled a bit at first because the game play feels so vastly different from anything I had been used to. The best item I got all weekend is still the above Branded Lord with Hammer Forged, Enhanced Battery and Range Finder… which I now have fully leveled and am almost using exclusively.

Lastly I played some “Let It Die” as evidenced by the first screenshot in the post today, and streamed it as well… except for whatever reason my audio was being overpowered completely by the game audio. I will have to fiddle with that and adjust it some. This game is just strange as hell, and I guess in many ways it feels a little Dark Soulsian, in that the mobs that you encounter are somewhat brutally powerful at times. There will be times that you get stunlocked to the point where you simply cannot do anything to deal with the encounters other than die. The strangest part so far is the types of weapons you encounter… hot irons, router drills, hammers… firework launchers. As you ascend the Tower of Barbs you encounter all sorts of monsters that should be in a silent hill game with bizarre implements that are trying to kill you, all the while you are using a zombie corpse thing as your avatar. You start out buck naked each time and have to scrounge up armor and weapons to be able to survive for terribly long in the tower. This is of course a “free to play” game and where the money aspect comes in is that in order to resurrect yourself using “death insurance” you need to spend a rainbow skull currency, that the game gives you a handful of to start out. However in the brief period of time I played yesterday I wound up using two of them before realizing… that in truth I had not really made any actual progress and should stop doing that. I’ve not quite figured out what the point is yet… as far as how you actually improve your character. I thought after I cleared a level I would be taken back to the lobby… but apparently I have to do that manually so I essentially lost all progress on that character and had to grab a fresh corpse to start the climb all over again. It has some deep rogue like elements, all the while mixing in bizarre Neo Tokyo and Silent Hill tropes…. with a dash of Dark Soulsian difficulty. Given that several of those checkboxes are things that Kodra likes, I think he maybe should try this game out. What I am wanting to know is if you can play it multiplayer, because this would probably be super enjoyable with friends.