A Little Closer

Best Laid Plans

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I had these grand plans for last night, and as is always the case when I seem to plan something… that is precisely what won’t actually happen.  The original goal was to pop into Destiny “for a bit” and get CoE finished on my Titan for the week, so that I could end up doing it later in the week on both the Warlock and Hunter.  I’ve managed to get the light levels up on both enough to be able to start getting decent loot.  The other goal was to chill out downstairs and play some more Diablo 3 since I am one piece of gear away from being able to rock the Invoker set over the Akkhan set, which I think is going to improve my quality of life greatly.  That said I am starting to maybe get the hang of playing Akkhan but still missing several items that make the build really viable.  I am however loving the flail that gives me an army of phalanxes to run around with me.  I think maybe that is ultimately going to be the best option for running with the Akkhan set since they seem to shred everything in my path.  I did get to play a little Overwatch last night however when my friend Tamrielo got home, and was pleasantly surprised that he too enjoys the game.  I am not sure if he is really a convert but it at least gets why the game feels better than Team Fortress 2, which was something I had trouble putting into words.  I managed to get in a few matches before my wife got home, and we ended up walking to go get dinner.

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When we got back I started in with the Destiny bounties, and ultimately ran a Prison of Elders to get my weekly loot box for completing that activity.  Last week I experienced a glitch, where after running a CoE I could not seem to be able to get the loot box, so I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.  From this point onwards it was me trying to get Jex and Squirrel together in the same group at the same time, which is not something that happened until about 8:30.  This weeks Challenge of Elders is a little tougher than past examples because the bonus damage and bonus scoring have no real synergy.  For example in past weeks you had bonus damage from primary weapons, and bonus scoring from headshots…  so those two worked nicely with you simply focusing on primary weapon headshots.  This time around the bonus damage was melee based, but the bonus scoring was super kills.  Meaning we spent a good deal of time wandering around waiting for our super bars to tick up so that we could get bonus scoring.  We managed to get the 30,000 score step pretty easily in our first attempt, but did not score high enough to be able to get the 90,000 within two matches.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

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It was round about this time that the monkey wrench was thrown into the works, as Squirrel had signed up for the Crota’s End retro raid.  So Jex and I ended up getting pulled along after our first Challenge of Elders match into that.  Other than simply not being what I had planned to spend my night doing, I was totally down with this because I had never seen that raid.  For the most part I think I did okay and didn’t screw anything up horribly.  One of the group was hunting for the Crux of Crota that is used in the long quest chain that ultimately winds up rewarding you the Necrochasm Auto Rifle.  As a result we saved off a number of check points, which meant jumping off the back wall into the abyss so many times.  However this also meant that instead of just doing the raid on my Titan I was able to swap to multiple characters and get lots of stuff.  The only negative here is that apparently you get rewarded the two shaders and emblem ever single time you kill Crota if they were not already in your inventory.  What I did find odd is that every single time the Word of Crota hand cannon dropped, but with slightly different perks.  The only potential gotcha here was that I had to break out a rocket launcher with tracking and/or the horseshoes and hand grenades perk.  Thankfully I had a truth, that I ultimately leveled up… even though I never actually use rocket launchers.

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In other news I am now down to the point where I need a helm, primary, class item, and artifact at 335 to max out.  So the end result allows me to sit fairly comfortably at 334, which should help quite a bit when getting drops.  As far as Challenge of Elders loot, I wound up getting arms and another copy of the Her Fury sniper rifle with crappier stats than the one I have been using.  Speaking of sniper rifles this seems to be my week to get them, because I also managed to pull a LDR 5001 from a Vanguard package.  This seems to be the sniper that a lot of the youtubers are actively hunting god rolls for, but I don’t even know for certain what a god roll would look like.  The one I got has Partial Refund, High Caliber Rounds, and Firefly which is decent… but I would have rather had triple tap somewhere in there because that comes in so damned handy for boss fights.  It is probably a great option for like heroic strikes or non-boss PVE content, but not having triple tap really places it below my existing 1000 Yard Stare or Her Fury.  The main reason why I was interested at all is just because it is really damned cool looking.  Also you can see from the above ship shot that I managed to get a ship from Variks, which for whatever reason I thought was a Trial of Osiris ship when I had seen people using it.  Was ultimately a really great night, just one that didn’t got as planned.  That however is perfectly okay because sometimes the end result is much better.

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.

 

Blog Unbroken

Technological Betrayal

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Yesterday was a really rough day.  It was the sort of day that makes you question why exactly you do anything.  It started yesterday with WordPress indicating that I should really patch my blog to the latest version.  These are the sort of warnings that I take heed, given that generally speaking the way you end up with a hacked blog is by not patching constantly.  Everything seemed completely normal, and I started soldiering on with my morning post.  About 90% of the way through the morning post I noticed that I was having some odd issues with the wysiwyg editor, so I decided to save a draft and reload.  Upon hitting that save draft button, it cleared everything I had just written giving me a painfully blank screen.  This is what ultimately lead me to post my blog broken post, because I ran out of time to write something, and I was testing to see if it was only the save draft functionality or if it was the actual publish functionality as well.  So I rattled off a post really quickly, hit publish and boom… it posted only a title with no content which told me more than I knew before.  It seemed like something that was interacting with the editor was causing problems.  This second time around I had the presence of mind to write my post in google docs, so I was able to log in through the WordPress.com interface and try making the post there, which is ultimately what added text to my post.

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After a bunch of fiddling and turning things off I found that apparently the Twitch Embed Suite that I had used for awhile to embed my twitch stream into a page on my blog, was causing all sorts of issues.  So after disabling that I managed to make an update to the post, which is giving me hope this morning that all of this typing is not in vain.  I’ve also already saved a draft successfully so we are in a much better place than we were yesterday morning.  Unfortunately these problems didn’t stop with the blog yesterday, and my entire morning at work was spent chasing down insane issue after insane issue.  One of which had been plaguing me for a few days now and over the course of six and a half hours working on the problem and trying everything I could think of it solve it… I finally remembered that about six years ago we had something similar happen and I followed down a hunch of what had caused that issue.  The issue with problem solving is that often times I need to let a problem percolate in my brain for awhile before the answer presents itself…  which is not exactly conducive to fixing something rapidly.  So by the time I had fixed this huge issue, and a few others… it felt like I had run some sort of a mental marathon.  The day improved after that…  well that is until I found out that the daily heroic in Destiny was once again Lost to Light…  the mission that can in theory reward the Black Spindle.

Lost to Light Sucks

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Mostly I am just sick of trying for a Black Spindle.  Through the grace of my friends Squirrel and Jex, I have likely put in more than twenty attempts at this thing over the course of several different occasions with no luck in walking away with one.  On our best attempt we were one or two mobs away from completing when the timer ran out.  Last night Squirrel was available as always and willing to help, but we struggled to find a second and Jex was nowhere to be found.  So as a result I ended up trying with an old World of Warcraft friend and his co-worker.  I was feeling pretty good when I heard that the two of them duoing it somehow managed to make it to the final room with a couple of minutes to spare.  I thought surely with a third person in the mix that would make all the difference in the world.  Unfortunately we could get to the final room with about six minutes left and from there everything seemed to break down when it came to juggling clearing the adds and also working on whittling down the boss.  The closest we have ever gotten was the bubble in the middle method where we took down the boss with sword attacks and then worked on clearing the room.  This time around we largely got corralled in the center corridor “safe spot” and anytime we attempted to poke our heads out either ate a sniper shot or a taken centurion ball attack.  In any case this is another week without getting a spindle, and honestly I am not sure how much more I am even going to attempt it.  I get my hopes up and then when I fail to get it again I just end up feeling like shit.

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Now other than this little hiccup the patch has been excellent.  Yesterday I had written a huge post talking about all of the things I was enjoying in the patch, but sadly that bit of prose is lost to the sands of time… or at least wherever the internet garbage collector deposits things.  Suffice to say that I am enjoying the update and that it has lit a fire under my ass to go out and do things.  It is not entirely as magical as I would have hoped because the confusing text blurb I have talked about before from the Bungie website was exactly that…  confusing.  Originally the statement had said something to the effect that engrams would now decode to at least your current converted light level.  What that really means in practice is EXOTIC engrams will now decode to at least your current converted light level.  I am still getting a ton of trash blues and purples, but I don’t really mind them that much because I no longer have to go through a complicated process to decide if I should break it down immediately or if I should save it for infusion fodder.  The math is simply… is it higher than the light level of the gear I want to be using?  If so eat it and bump up an item… if not deconstruct and get tasty materials.  The awesome thing about this is that it is letting me dip into my bank and dust off items that I never actually used because the light was simply too low.  For example I found this amazing Byronic Hero which is an extremely high impact hand cannon with a decent magazine size.  It has triple tap, hand loaded and hidden hand giving me decent stability, better than average range… and great target acquisition with the ability to get a bonus round if I precision shot multiple times in a row.

Treasure Room Raiding

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The other thing that needs to be talked about is Prison of Elders.  When Destiny launched, I played for a few months and then got frustrated with my inability to improve my light level and moved on to something else.  I did not return until after the launch of the Taken King, which means I largely missed both House of Wolves and the Dark Below and never actually played the original Prison of Elders.  Now my friend Squirrel runs this every single week, and has for a very long time… but tends to run them on Sunday which was a lousy time for me to be doing much of anything.  So when we set foot in there a few nights ago it was completely fresh and new to me… and I loved every moment of it.  For years I have wanted an MMO to give me a dungeon that is a sequence of random encounters pulled from a larger pool of encounters… and that is pretty much precisely what Prison of Elders is.  The first four rounds of the match take place on various battlefields themed after either the Fallen, Vex, Cabal or Hive and in new incarnation apparently each one of these has the chance of spawning in as a Taken version.  The fifth round is a boss encounter and will take place on the battleground that links up to the type of mob you are facing.  In the couple of outings so far I have only seen the giant Vex Minotaur and the Cabal Primus, but I believe there a bunch of options that you can end up with, as well as some new Taken versions.  Your reward at the end is a trip down to the treasure room where you get to open three chests and each time through I have gotten at least one legendary engram for my troubles.

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The other thing of note has been the introduction of loot boxes, for purchase from the in game shop or from doing activities.  It seems like you earn a loot box for doing each type of activity per week, meaning that your first crucible match of the week, your first prison of elders/heroic of the week…  and I am guessing your first raid of the week earns you a loot box.  I also ended up opening several of the boxes with silver and managed to get a full set of the Taken themed gear as well as a full set of the Spectrum gear that allows you to change the color of its glow.  I thought I was just super lucky, until I found out that most of my friends got nothing but Titan armor regardless of who they opened them on.  There are angry threads all over the place right now talking about how crappy the randomizer is on these boxes, and folks have posted pictures of their inventory full of nine copies of exactly the same item.  I guess in the grand scheme of things I lucked out because I got all of the armor I would want, as well as a white tron themed sparrow, and a really damned cool ship.  Unfortunately it was not the taken themed ship that I really wanted…  but I am happy enough to use it for the time being and will simply hope that my future weekly boxes end up giving me the other.  In any case… I am really happy with the patch and have been slowly getting enough higher level engrams to start upgrading my gear a little at a time.  I went into the patch sitting at 309 and can now hit 312 which while not a huge difference is enough to keep me engaged.