titan Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Weekend Warlock

November 6, 2017 by Belghast

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.

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.

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

October 30, 2017 by Belghast

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ready For Launch

October 23, 2017October 23, 2017 by Belghast

With the launch of Destiny 2 on PC tomorrow I mulled around at great length over this extended weekend on how to best commemorate the moment in blog form. Over the course of the last seven weeks since the launch of Destiny 2on the PS4 my blog has been filled with a bunch of information about the game in general. For the most part I have tried very hard to stay the hell away from story spoilers, but inevitably some of them will have made their way through that mental filter. As a result I thought today I would sit down and write out some general tips about the game, links to tools that I use, and the sources of information I consume.

The Classes of Destiny 2

One of the most important decisions that you are going to make from the moment you fire up the game is what class best fits your play style. Ultimately you are probably going to roll one character of each class because your vault is shared between all of your characters. However you are still going to likely end up with one you consider your main. For me I have been maining Titan since the moment I set eyes on the class and nothing so far has caused me to stray too far off the path. However I have friends who feel equally passionate about the Warlock or Hunter. Essentially each class has a core fantasy that it is based around and I am going to take a few minutes to talk about each and their specializations.

The Titan

The core class fantasy is the “Space Tank” for lack of a better term for it. This is a beefy class that benefits from increased resilience. Among the guardians these are the front line defenders and have a storied history surrounding the defence of the last city on earth and the Tower. It has specializations based on each of the three core elements in the game.

Sentinel – “Void Captain America” – this class wields void energy and can form it in a shield that they can then use to attack enemies. This can be thrown as a ranged attack, used as an enhanced melee swing or consumed to generate a protective bubble.
Sunbreaker – “Super Hammer Bros” – this class wields fire energy and uses it to hurl flaming hammers at their opponents. There are various tweaks that can be chosen like one that causes the hammers to leave flaming puddles on the ground.
Striker – “Hulk Smash” – this class wields arc energy and uses it to slam down at the ground causing a giant area of effect attack knocking enemies back and dealing damage to them. Additionally there are tweaks that let the class crash into opponents when running at high speed and general a much smaller but equally effective version of the slam.

The Warlock

The core class fantasy is the “Space Wizard” and you are going to wield magic energy and sling it at your opponents. The core stat for the Warlock is recovery causing them to bounce back from damage quicker, and they also serve an interesting role as a sort of field medic by being able to drop a shield regeneration puddle on the ground. Once again they have specializations based on each of the three elements.

Dawnblade – “Flaming Angel” – this specialization sees the Warlock equip a flaming sword and sprout wings of fire allowing them to hover in the air for short periods of time hurling down fireballs with each swing of their sword.
Voidwalker – “Void Nuke” – this specialization involves channeling the void into a giant ball of energy that they hurl at their opponents. Additionally they have the ability to devour energy with their melee hits that they can then use to regenerate their shield.
Stormcaller – “Emperor Palpatine” – this specialization channels the arc energy into bolts of lightning that fly forth from their hands as they float in the air. There are some tweaks that allow them to teleport while in this state leaving puddles of electricity on the ground.

The Hunter

The core class fantasy here is something along the lines of a “Space Ranger” they combine aspects of rogue, gunslinger and the traditional gambler archetype into one class. The core class attribute is mobility which will allow them to have a slightly higher base movement speed, and similarly they can dodge out of harm’s way. They have potentially the widest variety as far as their specializations go.

Gunslinger – “Three Shot Wonder” – This fire sub class allows them to fire “golden gun” which are three shots that effectively one shot any player and take off a sizeable amount of damage from bosses. Additionally the class gets the interesting perk of being able to use a ranged melee attack in the form of throwing knives.
Arcstrider – “Pole Dancer” – This class has the most interesting weapon in the form of a staff made of arc energy that it then uses in a combo system to cause extremely high damage melee attacks. If you can master the class you will be able to leap across the battlefield and do some really impressive things.
Nightstalker – “Void Archer” – This specialization literally allows you to materialize a bow out of void energy and fire it at your opponents. When fired at something other than a player it leaves a ball of void energy on the ground that tethers and blinds targets nearby causing them to take extra damage.

General Tips and Thoughts

Get Your Unlocks Out of the Way – There is going to come a point in the main story quest where a number of the NPCs start giving you side quests. Each one of these is something you are going to want to do because they will ultimately unlock the endgame activities. Especially if you are not level 20 yet these are a good boost of XP when they finally unlock.
Trash Your Early Exotics – You will get a few exotics through the main story quest but they will be locked to a specific power level and you will out level them. You could in theory infuse these up, but remember that you can always rebuy your exotics at 205 power level from the collections tab in your vault for only 10 legendary shards. I found it easier just to pick them up again once I hit level 20 than to keep infusing them.
Save 5 Blue Scout Rifles – Once you hit 20 there will be a planetary quest chain that will require you to dismantle 5 blue or better scout rifles. When you hit this point you are going to be in a mad dash to get them to drop unless you simply start banking them while you level.
Adventures Give Unlock Points – generally speaking while you are leveling the various planetary adventures give you unlock points for your subclasses just like leveling up. Make sure you check each one and I highly suggest hitting up the ones that have a skill point waiting for you.
Do Public Events and Lost Sectors – You will be handed one specialization for your class, but in order for you to get the other two you have to unlock them through drops. These come from doing stuff on planets like Lost Sectors and Public Events. If you happen upon an event I highly suggest doing them so you can finish unlocking these specializations.
Learn How To Convert Public Events to Heroic – One of the interesting things about public events in Destiny 2 is that they all have some trigger that allows you to push them into a Heroic version where the rewards are significantly greater. I highly suggest you check out the guide I wrote some time ago on how to convert each of them. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to convert an event when some player is actively working against you without likely meaning to.
Hold Off on Powerful Rewards – There will be milestones that state they reward “powerful rewards” that ultimately give you what is called a Luminous Engram. You want to hold off on using these for as long a possible because they are going to be your single best way to get power level increases once you have hit the 270 soft cap. Once you have finished a milestone you can hold onto the reward without turning it in and at the end of the week when reset happens they will be automatically mailed to you.
Multiple Classes Multiple Rewards – Ultimately if you want to maximize your luminous engrams you are going to probably end up rolling one of each class because they will all get their own set of milestones to turn in. While armor does not swap between classes, you can swap your weapons via the vault or some of the tools I will share with you below. This will allow you to keep bumping up your power level by doing multiple sets of turn ins, each time swapping your best gear onto the next character.
Keep Returning to Tess Everis – As you level your character Tess Everis the Eververse vendor will keep giving you free packages. When you reach the level cap of 20, each time you fill an experience bar you will get a “Bright Engram” aka one of the same loot boxes that are sold with the cash currency. You gain a rested buff that will allow you to get three of these easily each week by doing stuff in game. As a result the cash shop option really is not needed or that appealing.
Save Legendaries You Like – unlike the exotics mentioned above… there is no way to reclaim a lost legendary other than to hope it drops again. The infusion system allows for you to take a weapon that you loved while leveling and bump it up to current levels. More importantly start looking out for gear with legendary mods on them, because they will help you bump your power levels up more than normal gear. Ultimately gear is going to be personal preference, test everything and keep the things you love.
Join A Clan – This one I almost forgot but joining a clan is going to unlock a bunch of things eventually. However up front joining before you have leveled is going to help you in two ways. Firstly your leveling experience is going to count towards clan experience and help level the clan. Secondly you will gain more than the 5000 xp needed to unlock the first clan luminous engram, which is going to be your easiest powerful gear reward each week. Additionally once the clan has leveled it is going to unlock a bunch of perks on the clan banner item Hawthorne is going to hand you.

Powerful Tools

Destiny Item Manager is the single most powerful tool that I use with the game because it does a few things that you just can’t do without third party intervention. Say you are going on a strike but your forgot your favorite weapon in the vault. Using the game interface this would require a trip back to a social space to retrieve it and then having to requeue for the activity. Destiny Item Manager allows you to swap gear in and out of your vault and between your characters while in game… even in the middle of an activity. Additionally it has some really interesting tools that allow you to filter and compare stats on gear as well as a really badass duplicate item finger to help clear that vault clutter. If you so choose you can create weapon loadouts and swap them in and out of your character with the click of your mouse. It is also remarkably mobile friendly so I highly suggest checking it out.

Destiny Sets is a relatively new tool that I just started using. Functionally it shows you every single piece of gear in the game and where it comes from. More than that it also keeps track of the items you have and the items you still need. When you are running three characters this becomes extremely useful especially if you get an item… and are short on inventory space and cannot remember if you needed it or not. This gives you a quick at a glance rundown allowing you to get back in the action quicker. This was super helpful during both Iron Banner and Faction rally in trying to track what I had and what I was missing on each character.

Destiny Tracker is the defacto tracking and statistics site. It harvests information from the bungie api and keeps track on all sorts of stats. This is heavily used by PVP players and even has a tool that lets you track what is going on in the current game. Until recently this was how I was sorting out how much time I had spent playing this or that activity. However a current bug is causing the API to return the incorrect amounts of time, and this has affected both this site and Wasted on Destiny.

Informational Sites

Bungie.net – the official website for Destiny and all Bungie games. This is especially useful for the This Week At Bungie column that usually appears on Thursdays.
DestinyTheGame Reddit – if you are on a low sodium diet then I would probably suggest staying away from this site or the next site. However the official/unofficial reddit is still a decent source of information.
Destiny Official Forums – this can have gems especially if you are having a very specific problem with the game. However for the most part it is a good deal of angry players lashing out at whoever they can. I highly suggest you maybe limit your time here.

One of the problems with the Destiny community is that there really isn’t much of a blog presence. I guess in truth this is only really a problem if this is your preferred method of informational intake. I am honestly likely the closest thing we have to a dedicated blog… and I am not dedicated to ONLY Destiny. Instead you find yourself venturing onto YouTube to get your drip of information and analysis. I preface this section largely because you will need to shift your thinking and effectively treat these sources as though they were blogs.

Helpful YouTube Channels

Arekkz Gaming – While he plays a significant number of other games his Destiny 2 videos are some of the best on YouTube. They are will scripted, informationally dense and are extremely timely. This is probably your best condensed source of the news without a lot of extraneous commentary.
Unknown Player – This is still an excellent source of news but since he is primarily a PVP player it is going to more of a focus on the crucible and trials meta than a lot of other sources. Still definitely someone I listen to on a reasonable rotation.
Mesa Sean – As a fellow “old man gamer” I love this guy because I relate to him on several levels. He makes an effort to be a positive voice for the community and shrugs off a lot of the salt when it is floating around.
Patrick Casey – aka Holtzman – Patrick used to do a good deal of the videos for planet destiny, namely the deep dive technical videos and when he left that channel… it was clear that he was the real force behind that information. Now his channel is packed full of the most technical and in the weeds information but sometimes you want to deep dive into the performance of a specific weapon.
My Name is Byf – While still a great source of news, the reason why I go to Byf is for the lore behind the game. Before the console launch he did this amazing two hour long video explaining the majority of the lore behind the original Destiny game and I highly suggest you check it out if you have the time.
Myelin Games – This is a very lore centric channel and does some amazing deep dives and speculative journeys that piece together what we know and theorize about what we don’t. If you get hooked on Destiny and want to know more about the universe, then by all means check this channel out.

I feel like I have just dumped a ton of information on you. It will take some time to synthesize or even decide if you want to synthesize it. The Destiny universe is a rich one with so many different rabbit trails running off in interesting directions. Similarly the Destiny community is extremely awesome in building tools or sharing information. If you find yourself having issues in your PC launch journeys feel free to drop me a line and I will try and answer whatever questions that might arise. Either that or join the Beyond the Light discord community that I have created for the PC launch. I have so much love for this game and I am ready to share it with all of the new people just getting to play it for the first time now that it is on PC. If you are curious how I actually plan on leveling myself after already experiencing the game multiple times… I also wrote up a post about that.

Treadblades and Grenades

May 22, 2017 by Belghast

A good chunk of this weekend was about me riding the high that was the Destiny 2 gameplay reveal panel. I wrote about my feelings Friday, but I am still extremely hyped. What I find interesting is that there are some hardcore Destiny players that walked away disillusioned by the announcement. For me I largely wanted them to take the same Destiny mechanics that I love and apply them to a much more open world. From the sounds of it that is precisely what we are getting. However it seems like the competitive PVP scene walked away frustrated, because they were expecting ladder brackets and things like that to support their specific play style. While I love the Crucible, I am anything but serious when I play it… and as a result I largely am okay with a more casual PVP focus. What is funny about this is that it is the same community that got super frustrated when they were only being matched against similarly skilled players, and have been the biggest proponents of moving away from skill based matchmaking. I can at least see one of their complaints, which is largely that they were expecting the game to move to a server/client structure rather than the peer to peer setup that we have today. I feel like the currently crucible matchmaking algorithm does a decent job of weeding out the “redbars”, and it has been a really long time since I have been in a match with more than one of them. That could however be based on the fact that I am living in the center of the United States and have solid pings to either coast though.

What all the Destiny love created however is a strong desire to play the game I currently have my hands on. Over the weekend I spent a good deal of time upstairs playing around, and picked back up my Xbox One character since it allowed me to experience the full circuit of Destiny emotions. All of my PSN characters are comfortably at 400 light, and all I am really doing there is upgrading additional gear to that level. So there is a missing chunk of the experience… the brief joy of seeing a higher light level item that you can then use to infuse into your gear. So as a result I opted to spend most of the weekend playing my now 378 Titan. On PSN however I did spend a bit of time working on achievements, and that meant a lot of chain running of SIVA Crisis Strikes for the purpose of trying to get super kills. This also meant rocking my Bad Juju, because for me at least it seems to be a much better super energy magnet than the Zhalo Supercell. I think right now I am 5 super streaks away from finishing up one book, and then I can start in earnest on the modern Age of Triumph book. I am still a little bummed that they came out and dashed my hopes of “cross save” functionality between the various client versions. I would have happily purchased Destiny 2 for all available platforms if this actually happened.

On the World of Warcraft front, I indulged in something I had been wanting to for awhile. With the recent spike in token prices I opted to purchase one and it sold for roughly 130,000 gold. I then took that gold and purchased the Champion’s Treadblade… which I always thought was a way cooler design than the Warlord’s Deathwheel. This also jarred me off center in being less of a lazy engineer. I never actually got around to crafting the original Mekgineer’s Chopper. It was one of those things I always intended to do… but never wanted to spend the money on. functionally no matter how much faction discount you have the end result is always going to be 12,000 gold worth of parts. I used this influx of cash from the token however to serve as a reason to go ahead and finish this off. I happened to have pretty much everything else needed to craft it laying around on various alts, so it was simply a matter of flying out to Storm Peaks and buying the few vendor items.

The last major event of the weekend is that I finally decided what to use my character boost on. I have not really touched much of anything this expansion on the Horde side. My friend Grace has reverted back to her Horde ways, and as a result I figured I should probably have at least one character that I like to be able to play with her. As a result I took the Deathknight that I rolled on her server and boosted it to 100, and started leveling it last night. The thing that I didn’t realize about the 100 boost… is just how lousy the gear is that they give you. I remember I started Legion sitting in mostly 710 gear on my characters from the pre-launch invasion events. My newly boosted Unholy Deathknight was equipped in a full set of 640 gear… which if I remember correctly was the required level to queue for heroics in Warlords of Draenor. As a result this is the first character I have taken to the Broken Shores invasion scenario that I actually had trouble surviving. I died about four times during this invasion… but that also could simply be because this late in the expansion there was only one other player actually doing it. Whatever the case I clawed my way up from the frustrating gear level and am making progress in Azsuna.