Iron Banner

Modem Death Cry

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Better than Xur

Last night was a bit of a strange night in that I once again flipped between games like mad.  I started off in doing my daily love rocket frustration grind… and once again I have nothing to show for it.  Then I popped into Dragon Age Inquisition for a bit, but I am having a hard time remembering just what the hell I was doing when I last played.  So I wandered around a bit aimlessly and almost accidentally completed a quest.  Finally at the end of the session I realized that I apparently have one of those major quests waiting in the queue where I go off to seal some breach somewhere… and have apparently been just avoiding completing it each time I have played lately.  Once again I logged out sufficiently avoiding it, but at some point over the weekend I really need to finish it so that hopefully I can get back on stable ground once more with this game.  Throughout all of this my wife and I were trying to catch up on iZombie because at this point we are about five episodes behind.  It was around this point when the hulu stream stopped and I started having some issues staying connected to the network.  I get upstairs and once again my modem is insanely hot, and my internet connection that normally tests out around 200 Mbps is testing 5 Mbps.  I unplugged everything and did the “throw it in the fridge for a few minutes to cool it down” trick once more.

When I finally got everything back up and running… I decided to just hang out upstairs and play some Destiny.  So I set forth on a sequence of events that wound up keeping me awake until midnight.  Destiny is still that game that I can just play happily without much forethought.  Since I had not done so in awhile I opted to do a heroic, and I have to say… it was pretty miserable.  For whatever reason I almost always get the restorative mind when it comes to heroics….  which is essentially the destiny equivalent of the Oculus.  No one that I know of likes it…  because for starters it is a huge mission and involves the damned “move the orb” mechanic to keep pushing forward.  Additionally there is a segment with a bunch of Vex Cyclops that are just annoying to deal with.  Finally you have this horrible segment at the end, where you have to keep running the ball while trying to avoid the beam of death from the restorative mind… and at the same time avoiding waves of goblins and hobgoblins that spawn in.  This is pretty easy to deal with in normal, but in heroic the stupid beam of death is quite literally that.  I made it though and ended up with a few purples…. that wound up being disenchant fodder.  I continued running 36 strikes from that point on until I finally got an Exotic to drop…  which is ironically Truth, the weapon Xur is selling this week… but in a much better 290 version.

Player Versus

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I Want a Strike on This Map

It is round about here that my night starts to get a little strange.  I don’t hate the crucible but it is one of those activities that I never actually participate in.  Similarly I have never done Iron Banner or Trials of Osiris…  and I completely missed doing any of the Crimson Doubles.  Essentially I am a no show for the player versus player activities, and I have no clue why… but on a whim last night I decided to start doing Iron Banner.  Firstly I absolutely expected to be horrible, since Iron Banner is in theory worse for new players than Crucible.  In the Crucible all players are scaled down gear wise to a happy medium allowing all players of all levels and gearings to be viable and on somewhat even ground.  Iron Banner on the other hand does not scale the players down…  and my lackluster 298 ass is nothing compared to the 330 folks that are running around in the zone.  The funny thing is however that I seemed to do mostly okay.  Sure there were occasions where I just got wrecked from out of nowhere, but there were lots of other occasions where I gunned down my target and even so much managed to get a three streak of kills before finally getting wrecked in return.

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Actually Won Some Matches

I think what makes this feel more enjoyable than a lot of the player versus player combat I have experiences is that it quite literally feels like there is no negative.  You play a match, you shoot some people, and at the end of it there is a chance of loot.  There are no repair bills, there are no lasting consequences… and even when you die you pretty much instantly respawn.  This feels more like the old school Doom deathmatch gameplay that I originally cut my teeth on.  Maybe I have shunned PVP all of this time without good reason.  Sure I rarely broke 1.0 KDR but as the night went on I got significantly better.  I even managed to pull a legendary from the place, and am pretty close to ranking up with the Iron Banner.  I have to say I am shocked at just how much I enjoyed myself, and in truth I really need to do more crucible as a result.  All of this kinda makes me look forward to the Dark Zone in The Division, because hopefully I can get a team together and we can roll around as a group exploring.  Maybe I am not as carebear as I always thought I was.