titan Archives - Page 2 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Light Rising

October 19, 2016 by Belghast

I’ve been on a bit of a Destiny kick lately, and that has involved trying to do at a minimum all of the Rise of Iron bounties that Shiro hands out each week. These largely involve running around the plaguelands and doing “stuff” like specific patrols and participating in world events. I’ve also recently discovered the bounty that is the Archon’s Forge. I admit I was a little intimidated for awhile, given that when you enter the forge it essentially locks you out of leaving. My ultimate fear is that this place would murder me with great prejudice given my relatively low light levels. That fortunately was not really the case, and I was also pleased to see that the same sort of “key trading” behavior exists in the forge as it did in the Court of Oryx. I’ve been playing entirely solo so far since the launch of Rise of Iron, mostly because I am playing in short bursts rather than hanging out and making myself available to the clan for shenanigans. However pretty much any time I have rolled down to the Forge, there have been people there waiting and willing to summon stuff for us to fight. I still have trouble with the “purple” quality keys, but both green and blue ones seem largely feasible. Unfortunately it seems like you have zero control over what sort of key drops for you, and at this very moment I happen to be sitting on a purple key myself.

The forge is quite literally a modern day version of the “loot cave” because after thirty minutes or so of running keys back to back… you end up with a full mail box. This is not actually a screenshot from last night, but one I had laying around from one of my previous trips into the Forge. Last night however it became significantly more lucrative for me personally. Patch 2.4.1 did some juggling of things in preparation for the release of the Heroic Mode raid. As a result the light economy of items got bumped up a bit, allowing folks a slightly easier time catching up.

Rare Engrams will now decrypt up to 365 Light
Legendary Engrams will now decrypt up to 385 Light
Exotic Engrams will now decrypt up to 400 Light
Faction packages will now provide drops up to 390 Light

So as a result to these tweaks… I entered last nights play session at 554 and exited at 560 and on the cusp of pushing over the line with several 361 items. In the first screenshot I am decked out in Future War Cult colors… because I picked up some quest asking me to do a bunch of content both PVE and PVP repping the FWC. I have no clue what that actually will lead to but I am interested to see. The moment to moment gameplay of Destiny still feels as great as it ever did, and I am pumped that I can pop in for an hour and do a few things and feel like I moved the needle forward. I am super loot centric in my games, and so long as I am progressing my gear levels I feel like I am making meaningful progress.

The ultimate short term goal is to get to 365 so that I can join in all of the reindeer games… namely have access to the normal mode of the raid. I’ve heard amazing things about it, but I have just lacked the drive to grind things out in the strike play list. In fact I have yet to run a single strike since the implementation of Rise of Iron… which seems a little odd given how often I used to run them for nothing more than burning Three of Coins. I feel like I am torn in a bunch of different directions right now and trying to juggle actively playing four different games: Destiny, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV. As a result I am doing a somewhat shitty job of keeping up in any of them other than World of Warcraft, where I seem to be spending most of my time. That said in WoW I feel like I am bumping up against the ceiling for the gear levels I can realistically achieve other than through my Wednesday night raid… so some of my drive there is siphoning off. At the very least I am not really doing the world quests like I used to, because I know there is shit for gear out of them at my levels. This excess time seems to be getting funneled right back into Destiny, but I do need to steal a little bit of it and work on my gearing in Final Fantasy XIV as well. I am absolutely holding our group back from doing some of the new content because I am about 15 item levels short of being where I should be. If only I could clone myself… and keep those clones at home all day long playing all the things I want to be playing.

Flowers and Rank 5s

May 2, 2016 by Belghast

Backyard Whim

One of the interesting developments that has happened this summer is that we are spending a good deal more time outside than we have ever before. I mean we have lived in our house for seventeen years now… and we’ve never really taken advantage of our backyard. My wife and I tried to sort out why this was, and I think in truth it was that the back of our house looked bad. Before moving in during the inspections they found a lot of termite damage on the wooden siding, and the bulk of this was located on the back of the house. The repair job looked adequate at first, but as it aged… the back wall ended up looking like a patchwork quilt that even with a fresh coat of paint just looked “wrong”. So in many ways I think it just put us off from being outside and having to look at it. With the recent renovations and new siding, we also had a door installed off of the bedroom. Years ago we created a quick and dirty patio with pavers, and now it feels like everything has finally come together. Sunday morning for example by the time I had woken up and gotten out of bed, my wife was already on the patio off the bedroom reading. There have been many times during the weekends that we end up eating lunch on the back patio as well.

Now I am not exactly certain where it came from… but recently we have talked about trying to put flowers sprinkled around the backyard. Granted we have always had a brown thumb, but this resurgence of backyarding… has made us want to at least try it. This reached a boiling point Saturday when while running errands we found a couple of planters that we really liked at Sam’s Club, and you can see one of them in the foreground of the above image. Given that Sams always has a rotating stock we went ahead and picked them up, thinking that if we waited they probably wouldn’t have two of the color we wanted later. Now I had zero intention of doing anything with them this weekend… I mean because I had Iron Banner and Diablo Season 6 to play. However before I knew it Sunday we were making a trip to go get rock and potting soil, and plants. We are massively cheating in that the start of each of the pots is a hanging plant, but so far so good. Now we just have to make sure they keep watered, but the hope is that since we are spending so much time out in the backyard anyway… that it won’t be that big of a deal. For those that are curious I created a nifty panoramic shot of the entire back yard.

Rank 5 For All

Even though we spent a chunk of the afternoon working on flowers and such, I still managed to make it upstairs on the PS4 by around 4pm. This allowed me some dedicated time to play the Warlock, and push forward towards Iron Banner rank 5. I closed with the weekend with my Titan and 333 light, Hunter at 324 and Warlock also at 324 which is significant movement. I have a feeling that those last two points of light on the Titan are going to end up being pure hell. However on a similar photo from the 22nd… I was sitting at 324 on the Titan, and 314 and 304 on the Hunter and Warlock respectively. So I have to say… I am pretty damned pumped about the rapid progress. The Iron Banner as a whole was very good to me, especially in the equippable gear and infusion material categories. I managed to get all of the available gear for this week, minus a pair of legs for the Warlock. There are numerous copies of the Auto Rifle, Rocket Launcher, and even managed to pick up a sidearm and sniper rifle from Rank 5 packages. It has been interesting playing all three classes this weekend, and I have to say that in truth… I think maybe the Warlock and Hunter are just inherently better at crucible than my Titan. It feels like they have a lot more tricks up their sleeve, whereas the Titan is just pure brute force. Warlock Blink seems to be the best escape method for getting out of an engagement, and Hunter throwing knives seems to be the best finishing move ever.

As far as the sniper rifle goes that I managed to pick up, I am not exactly a huge fan. It has Eye of the Storm, Speed Reload and Spray and Play which in theory would make it an insanely fast sniper rifle, but given its low impact… I question how useful it really is. For crucible at least you would have to land so many shots to make the kill, and it is hard enough to nail a single shot let along multiple at range. I will probably end up holding onto it just because it looks really cool, but I have a feeling that sooner or later this will get infused into something else to bring up its light levels. As far as new snipers go, I am still a much bigger fan of the 333 Her Fury that I managed to pick up from my Challenge of Elders this week. High impact, paired with Triple Tap and Armor Piercing rounds makes it something enjoyable to use. Tonight I have plans to hang out upstairs at least for a bit and try my luck at getting more of that tasty Iron Banner loot. It would be amazing if before the end of the weekend I manage to get more of the 335 items to help push up other gear. As far as the rest of my Destiny schedule for this week it feels a little up in the air. I did not set foot into Kings Fall last week, and I would really love to remedy that this week. The thing that sucks is that I am now in a position where the only benefit I will see is from a hard mode run, given that all three of my characters are now over the 320 light level that normal drops.

Crusaders and Guardians

May 1, 2016 by Belghast

Season Six

While I greatly enjoy the concept of the Developer Appreciation Week… I am always somewhat happen when it is over. During the week I feel like I have to be making posts along that them, so when things happen that I want to talk about… I end up pushing them down until the week is ultimately over. Now as I sit here for the first unfettered post in awhile… I am finding it super hard getting started. The biggest happening of this weekend is that Friday evening at 7pm my time the newest Diablo 3 season began. For season six I opted to roll a Female Crusader, because I had so much fun playing as one last season. I have this general goal of getting a male and female of each class eventually, but that also means that someday I will have to finish playing that mage and attempt to play a witch doctor. The only problem I am running into is that it feels like what made the crusader so amazing last go round… was the fact that the Invoker set was just phenomenal. Now that I have my six piece Akkhan set, it doesn’t feel anywhere near as powerful as I did last season. In fact while the set dungeon was a breeze for me last go around, this one is only causing chain wipes. Granted I am not nearly as geared as I was at this point last year, in part because I am not getting drug by Carthuun.

When the season started we ended up with six people on the guild discord, and as a result we split into two three player teams. Ultimately ending up with me and Grace playing together, with Solaria and Kodra joining up for short periods of time. Towards the end of the evening Kylana was with us as well as the other three player team ultimately disolved with Ashgar got pulled away for work, and Callalil went to bed. I myself only lasted through level 60, because that was ultimately the point at which I was starting to fall asleep at the keyboard. So I went to bed around 11pm and the rest of the group pushed onward. Yesterday morning Grace and I ended up playing together, and she helped me get the rest of the way to 70, and unlock my gear set. She was sitting over 100 paragon levels, which means that more than likely Carth is sitting around 300ish. At some point I will join in his Torment X shenanigans because I really need some gear. All in all it was a great start of the new season, and at some point I will sort out my spec and with gear should be able to solo more stuff. Right now the challenge is finding thorns on gear, and I have ended up burning through all of my materials trying to enchant away useless stats and turn them into thorns.

Banana Split

Another awesome happening this weekend is that yesterday while waiting on folks to show up for the AggroChat game of the month show, I managed to push my Hunter to rank 5. This is the first month that I managed to get to characters to rank 5, and I’ve since started working on getting the warlock there as well. My hope is that after I finish knocking out this blog post I will head upstairs and work on that. Iron Banner has been really damned good to me, letting me amass a lot of gear and weapons that will ultimately either get used as is or serve as infusion fodder. In theory I should probably be doing matches on my Titan with the hopes of getting more 335 items, but it feels good actually working on my other characters. After playing the hunter I can absolutely see why they do so damned well in the crucible. Throwing knives are amazing, and I had so much fun yesterday finishing off people with them. I still feel like golden gun however is the least exciting of the supers, but I am getting used to using it to optimal efficiency. There was one point where I managed to get three kills in a row with it and earned the way of the gun trophy.

Over the course of the week I have picked up so much gear, with the latest acquisition being a 335 Tormod’s Bellows. The only challenge here is that I am not sure if I will keep it or infuse it into one of my heavy weapons. I could really use a 335 sword… just saying. The funny thing is… I got the 335 drop on my absolute lowest level character while working on the Warlock yesterday. So I am wondering if maybe the buff in faction that you get for pushing up additional characters does something as well to the chances of getting max light drops as well? In any case another Iron Banner has come and almost gone, and I have loved every minute of it. I finally sorted out why I like PVP in Destiny and never have in other games. There is something about getting real loot at the end of matches, as opposed to a currency in lieu of loot that can maybe someday add up to be enough to get something interesting. I love random chance, and I love being rewarded with interesting stuff. More so than that… I love getting not quite perfect items… and then trying to figure out how to use them to my advantage.

Purple Hand Cannon

April 22, 2016 by Belghast

Challenge of Connection

There are some nights where things don’t go quite as planned but ultimately work out okay in the end. Last night was one of those nights. The original plan was to do some Challenge of Elders with Squirrel and Sagacyte. I got home at my normal time, but I couldn’t really commit to doing much of anything until after we ran some errands. So the plan was once my wife got home, we would go run errands, and then grab dinner on the way home. After munching some food it would be challenge time. Unfortunately my wife got home significantly later than I had expected, and then our errands themselves took significantly longer than expected… and when we went to grab food there was a longer line than expected. The end result meant I didn’t actually get upstairs on the PS4 until a little after 8 pm. By that time Squirrel was having all manner of connection problems. While sitting in voice chat together we were getting only every third word he was saying, making it damned near impossible to understand what he was trying to say. We gave it the good college try and made an attempt at doing the Challenge of Elders without him on voice chat.

However a few minutes into the match he disconnected which lead Saga and I to end up having to try and solo Sylok the first boss. We attempted to duo the Cabal boss but had absolutely zero luck there, and ultimately went to orbit. It was around this time that in the clan channel that Broken and Havel were asking for a third for their own CoE shenanigans. I felt like a dick leaving Saga, but he assured me that I should grab the open spot. Last week the bonus was primary ammo headshots, which was super easy and lead to allowing folks well below the suggested 320 light to be able to complete it without much issue. This week however the bonus was grenade kills, making it significantly harder. I went in as Sunbreaker because the Simmering Flames perk meant that so long as I had a super ready my grenade recharge was greatly increased. To that I ended up swapping all of my gear so that I was sitting around 360 discipline. On top of that I wound up getting a 324 Armamentarium moments before the first attempt at the Challenge, meaning that I also had double grenade charges going in. Both Broken and Havel did similar steps to allow them to get super grenade action, and as a result we managed to get 108k score over the course of two matches. So while it sucked that I didn’t get to run with Squirrel and Saga… it is pretty awesome that I managed to finish on my titan regardless. During the course of the weekend my new goal is to make sure that both Squirrel and Saga get through as well.

Spoils of War

The result for me is that I walked away with an interesting Hand Cannon that I am not quite sure if I will actually use. I spent the rest of the night doing bounties with it to see if it was something I actually enjoyed using. For ages I swore by the Hand Cannon, but then I got used to Auto and Pulse Rifles… and quite simply never use them. The state they were in after the serious round of nerfs held me back from really enjoying the experience. During year one I used the hell out of the Last Word, and then for the first part of year two I largely rocked the Hawkmoon… enjoying both weapons greatly. As far as Her Revenge goes… I like how it feels and it has an interesting sequence of perks so for now I plan on leveling it up and seeing how I enjoy it in its final form. As for my armor piece, I ended up getting a 328 chest piece… which was below my current 329 so instead of keeping it I wound up shipping it off to my hunter. As I talked about yesterday, there has always been a pecking order when it comes to gear… which generally falls in line with Titan > Hunter > Warlock. My hunter is closer to being viable for things like Challenge of Elders so my goal is to buff him up enough to be useful when it comes to the current “end game” content.

That said I did also manage to throw a few handmedowns onto the Warlock, bringing the light level up by a few points. If I can keep stair stepping them up with no more than a 10 light level difference between them I think life will be pretty grand. I think the mission for tonight is to try and run some content on either the warlock or hunter with the hopes of bringing their light level up a bit. The biggest thing I need right now are legendary artifacts for both. The best route to that is of course the Court of Oryx, but neither of them has an antiquated rune to make that possible. I do have a few skyburner keys and wormsinger runes… so in theory I could burn through those hoping for some drops. The other awesome thing from last night is that I managed to get another Sublime Engram which takes my set piece count up to three… with 2 chests, 1 helm, and now 1 Titan Mark of the new Jovian Guard set. I really love the look of that thing, and while I am not sure it would win out over my Iron Banner set… it is still something that I would proudly rock. Speaking of Iron Banner, Bungie has apparently announced the next bits of gear that will be available and I am super pumped. I should finally be able to get legs to complete the Iron Banner look, and it also seems like I will be able to get a Titan Mark in the process. Other than that this round is offering the Auto Rifle and Rocket Launcher, both things that I am super interested in. Right now the goal is to push both the Titan and Hunter through, so I will be trying to do daily bounties on both of them.