Lobbing SIVA Charges

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Last night did not go entirely as planned, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a pretty amazing night.  The original plan that I had in my head was an attempt at completing the Nightfall bounty on as many characters as I could for shots at the Icebreaker.  However as the day went on that plan slowly morphed into going to my very first Wrath of the Machine raid.  So around 8pm last night we managed to pull together the six players needed for the raid and I shifted into full on learner mode.  Destiny is one of those games where I am constantly amazed at the level of dedication the community has.  A raid in Destiny is this complex sequence of events that have to be completed in a specific way…  and the first time I step into one of the encounters it is full on information overload.  I find it interesting how fast the community as a whole crowd sources the solution to the fights, sharing tidbits of information and ultimately mapping strategies for how to complete them.  I say this because the fights themselves are actually messaged somewhat poorly as to what you should be doing at any given time.  Since I am very much a “learn by doing” player, it means for the first few raids I ultimately feel completely lost.

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What is extremely interesting about Wrath of the Machine versus Kings Fall is that the “roles” are not necessarily fixed.  In Kings Fall you could essentially put your most seasoned player on the job of doing whatever was the most important task on a given fight.  While there was a certain measure of randomness, like who got chosen to run the spark on the invisible platforms…  others like the person getting Golgoroth’s Gaze were very much something you had in your control.  As a result to some extent it was much easier to carry a new player through and allow them to see the fights in motion, before they were ever expected to take up a key roll in the fight.  That is very much NOT the case in Wrath of the Machine given the game shifts the roles around quickly and while you might be dpsing one moment, the next you might be needing to toss SIVA charges at fixed markers.  The hardest of these fights for me to grok was the Aksis encounter where the raid divided up into three sides, and the game randomly empowered three players at a time…  sometimes requiring you to shift around quickly to cover a side if it did not have an empowered player.  The end result is that new players ultimately have to learn quickly because you never know exactly when that key role is going to fall on your shoulders.

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There were several points during the night where I absolutely know I failed at various mechanics, but while moving through the content I started to get a feel for what I was doing wrong and how to correct it.  Now with Kings Fall, most of the encounters were fairly easy…  but it was the jumping sequences that were the bane of my existence.  With Wrath of the Machine, the encounters themselves seem to be the challenge, and while I died a few times during the much shorter jumping sequences they didn’t see anywhere near as nerve wracking as disappearing ships over of a giant open chasm.  Last night was also important because it marked the first time I had really done large group content with Tequila Mockingbird my clan.  It has been over six months since Axioma clan was dissolved in a fit, and [TQMB] was formed out of the ashes.  It definitely feels like we wound up with the absolutely best natured of folks for the reboot.  Within minutes I felt right back at home, which I guess is a strange statement considering I have been proudly sporting the clan tag since the moment the reboot happened.

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So while I had no real intent of raiding last night, I am super happy to have seen the content now and to have gotten some of the really awesome stuff that drops there.  There seems to be a massive problem with duplicates from the SIVA key caches.  On the first boss encounter I got the Ether Nova fusion rifle… and then turned around and got the same thing from the cache.  From the second encounter I managed to pick up Arms, that I am extremely happy about given that they have the crazy heavy ammo trait.  From the third encounter, I picked up an Artifact which is decent but it is really hard to get excited over an artifact when I am apparently now swimming in 400 light ones.  From the final phase of the Aksis encounter I walked away with the Genesis Chain auto rifle, and then spent a key and got an exact duplicate.  Past that I wound up with three exotics from the run:  4th Horseman, Hereafter, and Crest of Alpha Lupi.  The first two turning into shards since I don’t really like either weapon, and the last from an engram serving as infusion fodder for the Twilight Garrison I had yet to upgrade.

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I spent a bit of time after the raid running around in the Plaguelands patrol zone to play with both the Auto Rifle and the Fusion Rifle and I like both.  The Genesis Chain feels really awesome when you get headshots and cause the firefly to proc since it has a unique sound effect that goes with it.  The Fusion Rifle… largely just feels like a competent Fusion Rifle.  I sincerely doubt I will be giving up either The Branded Lord or Saladins Vigil for it, but it is nonetheless a reasonable weapon that is probably going to get ferried off to one of my alts.  I have heard it works really amazingly in Crucible, so I will have to give it a shot there.  It is bizarre how I have gone from being someone that NEVER used Fusion Rifles, to being someone who largely now favors them over Shotguns for close to medium range engagement.  The other really awesome thing that happened is that I am now flagged to do the Outbreak Prime quest, which honestly could be an entire post in itself.  It turns out that Lexy is also stalled on this quest, so that gives us Hunter and Titan… and we just need to find a Warlock to ride along with us since that quest requires you to group up all three classes to progress.  Wondering if maybe some point this weekend we can knock out the required pieces so that by the time the reset rolls around we are working on the final step which is the run the raid again.

 

Combo Breaker

Ending the Streak

The other day I talked about how the three plus year streak has been looming over my head like this impassable object.  After long thought I’ve decided that the sooner I break it the better, and as a result I will not be making posts this weekend.  I mean that is in part a lie since I will be posting over on AggroChat Sunday morning in the form of our weekly episode.  However tomorrow morning I am going to chill out, and eat my breakfast in peace with zero thought of what the hell I am going to post that morning.  That is at least the theory… I have a feeling that in practice it is going to be a lot harder to NOT post than it is to post.  The end goal is basically to reach a point where I am posting a new post every workday morning, so I can continue the routine of drink coffee and write about stuff.  That means weekends and holidays I get to myself, or more than likely it just means I start gaming a little earlier on those days.  My hope is that some time off is actually going to present topics that I want to talk about, rather than trying to wrack my brain for a new post.

I have to tell you I am a little nervous about this “new experiment” following up the previous “grand experiment”.  It makes solid sense to just post week days since those are the days that folks generally read on.  However at this point I am just used to the comfortable routine.  So in theory the next time you will hear from me is Monday morning.  As far as my weekend plans…  I think I have a pretty chill one ahead of me.  Tonight may or may not be a thoroughly awkward family dinner, largely because I have not decided if I am actually going or not.  We just had one of these a few weeks back, but there is a family member in town that folks have not seen in some cases years…  so folks are pulling together an impromptu dinner.  Past that I am hoping the report of non-stop rain is exaggerated and I get to spend a little time out on the back porch.  I have bubbles that need blowing.  Last weekend I went to a birthday/adoption party and they had bubbles for the kids…  and it made me remember just how damned much I love blowing bubbles.  So I bought myself a small bottle of the soapy mess for hanging out on the back porch.  Viva adulthood and the ability to buy your own damned toys!

Light Level Cap

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It has been a little over a month since I last set foot in the Kings Fall raid, or at least it seems like it.  There was a bit of a change around that ended up with Squirrel trying to start an earlier raid team beginning at 8 pm which is more sane and rational for those of us who get up at 5 in the morning for work.  However that never really took off in the fashion that we had hoped, and it also lead for the official “rookie” raid night to get moved to Wednesdays.  As a result of this switcheroo I simply didn’t raid for several weeks, and this week was my first time signing up again largely on the promise of a “guaranteed” 335 artifact from the War Priest Challenge Mode.  Unfortunately that Guarantee like oh so many things in Destiny, was not really set in stone and I wound up getting yet another damned 334 item.  I did however have a lot of fun running the raid, and after some time away from it all of the jumping puzzles that stress me out so much didn’t seem quite so bad.  I even managed to run the orb on sisters without screwing up too badly.

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Last night Squirrel, Jex and I had what has become somewhat of a tradition… a night of Challenge of Elders and whatever the hell else any of us happened to need.  So on paper this should have been one of the easiest weeks, with precision shot bonus experience.  However in many cases we struggled to survive and I think it was largely the inclusion of “fresh troops” into the mix.  I died so damned many times last night, and we were just shy of being able to get to the 90,000 bonus in two rounds.  I would have felt bad about my performance were it not for the fact that both Jex and Squirrel died quite a bit as well.  The frustrating thing about CoE is it has become one of those “unskippable” activities each week because it is one of the few reliable means of getting 335 loot.  I say that… however almost every single item I got this week was a damned 334, which is completely maddening.  There seems to be some bug that hits where instead of giving you upgrades it starts giving you side grades.  That said I did manage to get a Titan Mark as end of match loot, and then after CoE we went to the Dreadnaught for some Court of Oryx.  After summing three Tier 3 events… the final one dropped my 335 Artifact taking me to the current light level cap.  This is extremely exciting for me, because this represents the first time in my history playing this game that I have EVER been capped on light.  Special thanks to Squirrel, Jex, Wet and the entire Axioma Clan for helping me get here.

Rising Light

Unintended Kings Fall

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The original plan for last night was to chill on the sofa and play some Ratchet and Clank over the PC Remote Play application.  However as the day went on yesterday I noticed that there was a new raid scheduled for last night that my good friend Sagacyte would be attending.  Since the Tuesday night Rookie Raid… now called the Squirrel Squad didn’t make due to the patch and too much newness for folks to be exploring, I thought it might be a good idea to pop in and at least get some boss kills for the week so I had a shot at loot.  Things went pretty well overall, but I think I blew all of my jumping skill early on.  I managed to make it through the ship puzzle without falling and even make it over onto the ledge that leads up to the chest.  However by the time I got to the wall puzzle, I was apparently out of juice because I fell so many times trying to get over to the exotic chest.  There was one jump where I kept bouncing off the damned wall.  The jumping is the only thing that I dread each week when I run Kings Fall, and while I seem to be improving… there are times where it feels like I can simply do no right and either land too hard, or can’t quite get over the gap.  In any case I eventually gave up and headed to the end of the puzzle and managed to do that without much issue.  It was just the ledges leading up to that chest that I seemed to be having problems with.

As far as the raid itself things went really smoothly other than that time that I got torn during sisters… and had no clue what platform I was supposed to start from.  Now I know however that you apparently look up and find the orb and then start counterclockwise to it.  While we wiped on that round we managed to pick it up and wreck them on the next.  Probably the best moment however was one-shotting Oryx doing it the challenge mode, especially considering how much issue we had with him in the previous few weeks.  I failed to get back from the exploding balls in time, but we still managed to get the kill.  The best best part however was getting a bunch of loot that were upgrades, and finally getting a Red Death.  Smite of Merain has been my go to weapon for awhile now, and I ended up picking up a 318 version of exactly the same roll.  Getting Red Death however was the icing on the cake since that was one of those exotics that I had been hoping to see.  All in all the run went really well, and while Squirrel keeps trying to tell me that I am no longer a Rookie, I still very much feel like one.  I know the fights, but I still feel like there is a certain amount of skill that I am lacking.  The fight I feel the most comfortable on is Oryx oddly enough, because I really like the bubble titan duty there.  Above is a gallery of all of the nifty things I picked up throughout the evening of playing.

Rapid Increases

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The thing that has felt insane for me is how I floundered at sub 300 light level for the better part of a year, and over the last two months I have shot up to as of last night 318.  I guess it is like any game, that if you have access to raiding your gear levels increase rapidly.  Early in the evening I spent some time with Broken and Squirrel running the Challenge of Elders, which was one of the new pieces that went in with the patch.  The idea is that once a week you grab a scorecard from Variks, and then there are two challenges that need to be completed.  The first is to finish the three round Challenge of Elders while earning at least 30,000 total team score.  We failed barely to get this on our first go, but on the second and third attempts we blew the score completely out of the water.  The second challenge is to get a weekly total accumulated score of 90,000 which we easily hit within three outings in the area.  Each match rewarded some decent infusion fodder, and at the end we managed to score a guaranteed weapon for the single match objective, and a guaranteed armor piece for the cumulative challenge.  Unfortunately the roll on the helm and machine gun that I got were kinda crap, but they did serve nicely as infusion fodder taking my Iron Companion helm and my Bretomart’s Stand to 318.  I have to say the Challenge of Elders was really damned fun, and I look forward to doing this one at least once a week.

Quite honestly all of the Prison of Elders content has been great, and it is the sort of thing that I am not really going to turn down if anyone is looking to run it.  Squirrel mentioned that he plans on running Prison of Elders quite literally all day Sunday and that doesn’t seem like a horrible idea.  I am wanting to see how doable the level 41 version of the event is to complete with total strangers.  I am assuming that you can queue for a group like you can for a strike, and after experiencing it… it seems like it would be doable with strangers.  As far as for farming gear this seems like a decent way to go since every match I ended up walking away with at least one if not two legendary engrams with a chance of one of the special legendaries to drop.  Honestly the thing I am enjoying the most about this patch is it feels like I have lots of different ways that I can be increasing my light level.  I’ve run a handful of crucible matches and each time I managed to get something at the end.  The getting nothing problem seems to have either been fixed or greatly reduced, because now the consolation prize seems to be coins or a few motes… and the best option is some infusion fodder.  Either way I am down with it, and will probably try and use crucible to farm a few more motes before Xur disappears this week.  I need to replenish my stock of three of coins.

 

Iron Banana

Iron Banner

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The strange thing about this week is that we just finished one Kings Fall raid on Monday night, only to start a brand new one fresh last night.  It gave a certain Deja Vu feeling to the whole doing Oryx fight, especially given that it was so damned hard fought on Monday night.  However I will talk about that a little later.  First I want to talk about what seems to be me going completely off my rocker.  If we had talked months ago I would have told you I was a Diehard Carebear, and that if pressed I could probably shoot rainbows out of my belly in a pretty mean Carebear Stare.  Over the last few months however something has happened and I have come to realize that I actually do enjoy doing PVP in limited situations.  Those limited situations appear to largely be “Destiny” and “The Crucible”.  I am not exactly sure what makes this game different… it could be that there are relevant items that I can be earning that help me in PVE content, or it could be that it simply feels like there is no negative to doing it.  Whatever the case doing the Crucible is one of those activities that I mix in when I want to do something… but don’t want to do bounties or be bothered with grouping up for a strike.  The other interesting thing is… that I don’t really mind that I am ultimately bad at the content.

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Now I have heard stories of much toxicity from the Xbox Live community, and folks leaving crucible matches only to have nastygrams waiting for them from other players complaining about their performance and questioning their parentage.  So far the PSN community has been pretty chill about such things, and nobody actually uses the voice chat for public groups either.  The end result is that I can just zone out and play some Crucible without fear of retribution, and this zero pressure setting has made me actually enjoy it quite a bit.  So much so that while I know this is far from the first Iron Banner… it is the first one that I actually care about and will be trying to rank up to level five during.  Largely I am looking at it as a way of maybe getting some infusion fodder, and maybe just maybe a decent legendary hand cannon or machine gun out of the process.  As of last night I am closing in on Rank 2, and have managed to complete several of the pieces of the bounties that I never expected to….  like getting highest score among all the players in a match.  I’ve been warned that I should hold onto my brown weekly bounties until later in the week to turn in, because I guess they become worth more points as the weekend goes on.  I am however trying to complete the three dailies each night, and in theory when I get home from work tonight I should be able to knock those out and put in a bit more work towards the weeklies.

Melting Ogres

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Like I mentioned at the top of the post, it was a little strange stepping back foot inside Kings Fall given that we just finished Oryx the previous night.  Before the start of a new raid I end up with quite a bit of anxiety that is not fully alleviated until we get past both the ships and the piston wall jumping puzzles.  I am just bad at both of them, and end up falling so damned often that I feel like a moron.  I had a significant better run last Tuesday, and was back to my fumbling prime last night.  That said in both cases I was not the last person through either puzzle, so I guess I don’t feel too awfully bad about my performance.  For months I have listened to folks in the Destiny community complain about the RNG in the Kings Fall raid and how it never seems to actually give them any upgrades.  I feel like I have crested the new and shiny portion of the raid and am entering the valley of slow and prodding forward movement.  Which is to be expected given that at least armor wise I have every available drop… but still have a bunch of weapons I have yet to see.  The odd thing there is that I have gotten two of the pulse rifles, and two of the auto rifles…  but the rest of the primary weapon types I have not seen yet.  Given that last night was only my fourth trip to the raid… I feel like I have plenty of time.

Of the drops that I did manage to get… the only piece of armor that I might use is the chest piece and even then only because it has intellect on it.  The fist and auto rifle will absolutely be used as infusion fodder to push something else up.  The Suros Regime will replace the 280 one that I picked up off Xur some time ago, and the 310 Thunderlord will replace my previous 290 dropped version.  One of the things that I am coming to realize quickly is that apparently my first two times into the raid were flukes.  Granted all of the encounters still for the most part melt before us… but those first two Oryx kills seemed effortless.  They just worked flawlessly without much issue and while they still took a couple of attempts…  they only took a couple of attempts.  Monday and last night both seemed like a battle of wills as we kept plugging away at the fight, only to be waylay’d by this quirky bit or that.  I am not sure if I would truly elevate the problems we were having to the glitch tier, but definitely things felt like a battle and not like a loot pinata.  We managed to get Oryx on what we had deemed was the “last try” because several of us needed to go to bed, and even then we failed at doing the challenge mode variant…  finally deciding to go ahead and finish up “as is” just to get the kill in.  Supposedly I can walk in and do challenge mode at some point during the week and still get the bonus chest.  In any case… content lag or not… I am loving this game more than pretty much anything else right now and looking forward to the big April patch.