new monarchy Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Faction Rally 1: NM Edition

October 2, 2017 by Belghast

Admittedly by the time I post this it will be of extremely limited benefit given that as far as I understand the Faction Rally should in theory reset on Tuesday. For the unindoctrinated the Faction Rally is this event happening currently in Destiny 2 that involved choosing one of the three factions from Destiny 1 and representing them. The goal of the event is to collect tokens while doing almost any activity in the game, and then turn these in 20 at a time to the faction leaders. For my Titan I decided to rep Future War Cult, and I wrote a post last Thursday about the weapons that were available. Each faction is offering four unique weapons from their packages and I thought it might be cool to attempt to get them all and do similar write-ups. Now I had done this a week ago when the faction rally went live… it might be of some significant benefit. Now however I am largely just doing for the fun of it, and it seems useful info in the long run.

We are going to start off this New Monarchy edition with what was ultimately the hardest weapon for me to actually get to drop. This weapon has gone through a name change since it first started dropping occasionally from Cayde-6 treasure caches to when the Rally proper began. The Song of Justice VI formerly the Sentencer IV is a nearly max range high impact scout rifle that trades these stats for really low stability and handling. It is also relatively slow firing in the 150 rounds per minute class until the more popular and broader 200 rounds per minute class represented most noticeably by the MIDA Multi Tool. It lives in a really weird place, but after spending some time using it while doing patrols and such I can see its charm. It will probably never take the spot of my Manannan SR4 largely because I love explosive payload more than I can rightly express with words… it does have a few of its own nice perks. Armor Piercing rounds is extremely nice for destroying mob shields, which I have not seen on that many weapons so far. Additionally it has auto loading holster which causes the weapon to reload itself while holstered, making this work extremely well in situations where you are not using this as your primary weapon. I could see it working nicely on strikes when you are using an energy auto rifle as your primary weapon, and just swapping to this any time you need to snipe something at a distance.

I am a huge proponent of the Auto Rifle and have loved them since the first moment I got one in my hands in Destiny 1. In Year Three one of my favorite weapons was the Suros made Genesis Chain, which was a slow rate of fire high impact Auto Rifle… that looked valuely like this weapon. I got my hopes up and then they were quickly dashed when I saw what archetype this weapon fit into. The 600 RPM bracket already has a few really good competitors in it and I think the problem is… this gun just isn’t nearly as good as either of them. The key problem is the lack of stability… this gun kicks weirdly and often times unpredictably making it significantly harder to control than Scathelocke or Ghost Primus that both live in this same archetype. Now if you do not have access to either of those weapons… then sure this is a good option and once you get used to its quirks you can make it perform fairly well. The biggest problem however is there just is no viable reason to use this over one of the other weapons I mentioned… other than it just looks aesthetically cool. However if that is really your thing… then grab a Martyrs Make and slap a New Monarchy Shader on it… because you are going to have a much more enjoyable experience.

Up until now New Monarchy has been the tale of weapons that are just flat out outclassed by other options. I think however we are going to finish strong starting with the Royal Dispensation II. Sub-Machineguns for me at least are the new shotgun… when you absolutely need to wreck someone up close and personal much the same way as I used to do with my beloved Invective. There are basically two competing categories the 600 rpm class and the 900 rpm class. In the grand scheme of things I tend to prefer the slightly slower rate of fire because they are much more controllable and easier to keep trained on the precision damage markers. That said this gun is shockingly stable for as fast as it is firing, and when combined with the Grave Robber perk… gives you some really up close and personal power. When I run a submac it is because I am getting up in peoples faces and the fact that if I get a melee kill it reloads part of my magazine… means I can stay there and be effective for longer. The gotcha however… is with 900 rpm and 33 shots in the magazine… this thing unloads extremely quickly. This gun is effectively the Foggy Notion with slightly better handling speed and slightly worse reload speeds… but that little tweak seems to make the gun feel so much better to use. Well worth holding onto and playing with to see if you like it, because at the end of the day that is all that really matters.

Up until this gun entered my life I carried around a pretty heavy crush on Hawthorne’s Field-Forged Shotgun… because Destiny 1 spoiled me on insisting that if I was using a shotgun that it had to have full auto. I was honestly shocked that I had not encountered anything else in game that seemed to have it… and then I saw this weapon. One of the big problems with the Hawthorne shotgun is the rate of fire… not that it is too slow but it is way the hell too fast. I cannot count the number of times I have fired shots into the void because I couldn’t pick my finger up off the trigger fast enough to stop from firing one round too many. The Unification VII fixes this with its 55 rounds per minute rate of fire as compared to the frankly too fast 90 on Hawthorne. Additionally we gain a significantly higher impact per shot and slight range increase… at the loss of some reload speed and one round in the magazine. What cannot be properly accounted for however is just how badass this weapon looks and how good it feels. The weapon has High Caliber rounds, which causes it to stagger mobs which is always going to be useful.

I am curious how you feel about the New Monarchy offering this time around? It has been leaked that each faction has a significantly deeper pool of available weapons than these four, so it is going to be interesting to see what arrives each time this event runs.

Third Week Summary

September 26, 2017September 26, 2017 by Belghast

Today is reset day in Destiny 2 and brings a close to the third week of gameplay. At this point my maximum power on the Titan is 291 and I am really hoping to get some good luck in week four with the luminous engrams. At this point that is realistically the only way I move the needle forward other than the occasional extremely lucky exotic engram or loot from nightfalls. This week in particular seems like it is going to be interesting for the Nightfall because there is no way to extend the timer. The really interesting thing happening in the tower however is the faction rally, where the three faction leaders return and ask you to pledge your loyalty. The rally itself involves collecting faction tokens for your respective faction in the hopes that at the end of the rally your side has gotten the most. Most of my clan has chosen to go Dead Orbit… and in truth I think they are likely going to win because at least in Destiny 1 you saw a lot more of those faction emblems than literally anything else. I personally have been a huge fan of the Future War Cult starting with the No Time to Explain quest line, and in Destiny 2 it is the only faction that has weapons I am extremely interested in. As a result I went FWC on my Titan main, New Monarchy on the Warlock and Dead Orbit on the Hunter. Of the weapons available however… the only one I have any interest in is the FWC Pulse Rifle with the new version of firefly.

The real important happenings of the week is that I leveled my Hunter to 20 and wrapped up the main story last night. Then after doing that I managed to unlock flashpoints and knock that out as well as the clan xp luminous engram. That means for the week as a whole I finished up a grand total of eight luminous engrams, pushing my total power up slightly across the board. I am amused at just how fast you can pull up a second or third character. Functionally what I have done is latched onto a single item from Xur and then all of my higher level weapons from my main. This has allowed me to get to the 260 or so power level point extremely quickly, and then keep pushing it up by carefully infusion gear. Similarly this time around I had legendary mods to rely on which is something I didn’t quite have when I was doing this for the warlock. Granted I don’t have them for every slot, which is why for example I still have some blue boots on the hunter above. However I feel like I am in a really good place to be going into the faction rally. Before sitting down to write this post I knocked out a single heroic event on Io and got 8 faction tokens, so I am wondering if we are just going to be flooded with new loot from the faction vendors. I am perfectly okay with this is that is the case, and I plan on doing a bunch of heroic events tonight to get some of those sweet sweet future war cult weapons. I am specifically after the omolon auto rifle, because it looks like it might be the same class as my beloved Uriel’s Gift.