September 2017 - Page 4 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

A Little Luck

September 13, 2017 by Belghast

Last night the loot gods were very good to me. Weekly reset is a time where the impossible seems possible… or at the very lease you have a new round of milestones that can reward “powerful gear” otherwise known as Luminous Engrams. For the unindoctrinated… these are a weird cross between purple and gold and contain gear that is always a significant upgrade over whatever you happen to be wearing. This always probably needs to have its own caveat given that when you hit the current hard level cap of 350… this will in theory constantly keep rewarding you maximum power items. These right now seem to be the primary method of moving the needle forward… and I guess that makes sense given that the normal mode of the raid is 260 to 280 power. This makes sense due to the general difficulty increase as you progress through raid bosses and the hope that you will be slotting in items you get on the first few bosses to keep ratcheting your power level as you traverse the content. This is the point where I am going to apologize because I will inevitably for a long time keep calling it Light instead of Power… and while I am trying my best to catch these several of them are going to slip through the cracks. Functionally now that we are all arriving at 265 we are settling in for the long game of slowly incrementing our levels each week through doing events. The folks that are pushing 300 right now did some sheer madness… namely I know it was super popular in the reddit circles to roll 3 of exactly the same class so you could swap gear and get three times the weekly engrams… greatly increasing your chances of moving things forward.

What I did not expect was for Cayde-6 to pay out this week the way that he did. For the also unindoctrinated… once you hit level 20 and complete your main story quest each of the traditional NPCs does a specific thing. Ikora Rey for example lets you replay three missions a week and then in turn rewards engrams based on the faction tokens you get from doing this. Zavala is once again all about the strikes and the nightfall, and Cayde-6 unsurprisingly is all about sending you on a quest to gather up loot he has stashed. He sells 5 maps per week for 5000 glimmer each and they are always going to be in whatever zone happens to be the Flashpoint area. This week for example it was Nessus and when you purchase them a series of Spade icons appear on your map with no real indication of how to actually get there. Other than a few rare cases these icons are “breaking the border” of the map… meaning you need to figure out if they are in a cave system or if you need to climb up somewhere and jump out in what is officially unmarked space of the map. Occasionally there are gimme chests like the one this week that is literally in the middle of a structure that is impossible to miss… but I won’t go into any spoilers about any of them. Last week I got one exotic engram, one legendary… and a bunch of random junk that Cayde-6 will buy back from you… like a Spinfoil Hat. This week was insanely good loot wise because not only did I wind up getting four legendary engrams and one exotic, I also got a 271 weapon. So that means in theory you could possible get power level increasing upgrades from him going forward.

Since I was functionally gifted almost the right number of items for a specific quest… I decided to make last night all about trying to catch up on the various exotic weapon quests. When you finish the main storyline there are a number of blue crown icon quests that start showing up on the various planets. From what I understand each of these ultimately leads to an exotic. I had already been working my way through the one that rewards first the MIDA Mini Tool submachinegun and eventually the MIDA Multi Tool scout rifle made famous in Destiny 1. The quest where I needed all of the engrams however I am still working my way through by doing silly things on Nessus. However one of the first steps in the chain involves going to Master Rahool in the tower and decrypting 5 legendary engrams and 1 exotic engram. The quest itself pays out one legendary engram, so I knew that this was one of those times where it would be easy to move forward in the quest chain since I had everything sitting there and ready to go. The only quest that I have not started is the one for the Rat King, but I will be doing this soon given that I am hearing this is a decent week to try and get through it as one of the steps requires you to make insanely good time in the Nightfall. I feel like I am still making progress, but a lot of that progress is slow and incremental. We’ve entered the cold winter phase of Destiny, when every few points of light requires a large amount of effort. I’m completely fine in this territory because I have been there before, but I am wondering if we end up losing a few people in the post 265 slog.

Destiny 2 Heroic Event Triggers

October 23, 2017September 12, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday Pete asked if I could do a post about the various heroic event triggers, and this morning I am going to attempt to do just that. Last night I was able to get a few reasonable screenshots of the objectives for several of the events. Others I have simply looked up and will attempt to explain because I don’t have good imagery for them. At this point though I now feel relatively comfortable in my knowledge of how to launch any of the events into heroic mode. I am posting a picture of my own character at the start of this post largely because I am happy that for once I have most of a matched set of gear.

Glimmer Extraction – Fallen Event

This is more than likely the very first event you ever complete in Destiny 2 because it spawns right out in front of the church. Essentially a Ketch will drop off a Glimmer Harvesting team and you have to take out the extraction teams. Each team will consist of 3 mobs followed by a mini boss type mob. Then the ketch will drop another ship in a new location. There will be three different locations that the Fallen attempt to harvest and if you take down all of them you defeat the event. In the Heroic mode however things change. In the above screenshot you can see a little engine looking thing with a stream of glimmer going into it. There will be one of these at each location the Fallen attempt to harvest, and to trigger heroic you need to destroy them before you have defeated a given waves miniboss. From there the goal changes to guarding a pile of glimmer until your folks can transmat it out. Someone has to be standing on the pile at all times to make sure the bar is progressing.

Weapons Exchange – Fallen

This event is pretty straight forward. In Destiny 1 we learned the ins and outs of fighting Fallen Walkers… hit the armor plating on their legs until one section falls of and then the carapace covering the control module slides open and you can pour damage into the unit. In this event there are 3 energy fields protecting a total of six scorch cannons. Each time you bust open the carapace on the Walker, a number of arc orbs will spawn at its feet. In order to trigger the heroic phase, you need to take those orbs and carry them to the receptacles that look like the object in the screenshot above. It will take two orbs per shield, and once you have dropped all three shields… a second walker gets dropped on your location. The goal is to have the first walker almost dead when you drop the shields so that you can grab a scorch cannon and finished both off extremely quickly.

Ether Resupply – Fallen

This event is another one that is pretty straight forward… kill the giant Servitor. During the event a number of smaller servitors will spawn in and start interacting with the bigger one. The first one has to be killed because he shields the Servitor from any damage. There is a second phase where three spawn in… and in theory you can leave these up if you are just taking down the Servitor normally. However if you kill them it starts the heroic phase… which causes the Servitor to take greatly reduced damage… talking 10-15 damage per shot in a vulnerable spot reduced damage. The goal here is to get the servitor down pretty close… then kill the three mini-servitors… then drop the big guy to close out the event.

Excavation – Cabal

This is one of the least straight forward of all of the events. The goal of the Excavation event is to stand hear the mining lander and progress the bar to 100%… all the while avoiding waves of progressively more difficult mobs and missiles that are coming in from the command ship hovering over the location. At various points in the fight a Thresher gunship will fly in and start attacking anyone defending the location. In order to trigger the heroic phase of the event you need to take down this gunship… and in my experience you have about two flyby phases to do it in before you have progressed the event to 100% and ended it naturally. Essentially everyone needs to focus fire this thing down whenever you see it. If you are successful a major cabal centurion boss will spawn in… and wreck him to earn your heroic chest.

Injection Rig – Cabal

I am not honestly sure what the non-heroic goal of this event is, because from the start it is telling you to drawn down the Infiltrator Valus… which is what happens if you trigger heroic mode. While this event is going on there will be a giant cabal shield that spawns over the drill, and every so often giant vents will open at up to four spots on the rig. If you are in the bubble you start burning, and the ultimately goal to trigger heroic mode is to destroy all four of these vents before you end up dying in the process. About the most that I have seen taken out in a single go are two vents at a time, so that means it will take a few passes to get them all down. It helps if you have a really good ranged power weapon like a fusion rifle or rocket launcher. If you are successfull Infiltrator Valus will spawn and you wreck him to get your chest of goodies.

Spire Integration – Vex

Much like the Fallen Walker event… this is a reboot of a classic event from Destiny 1. In the Spire Integration event your goal was to prevent wave after wave of Vex from integrating with the spire that you were guarding. One of those does in fact exist in this event, as does the objective of preventing anyone from integrating with a wiggle room counter of 10. However to progress the event to the Heroic mode you need to also help build shields around these additional spires. There will be 3 glowing rings scattered around the event… standing in one will begin to capture the point and raise a vex shield around you. Once you have captured all three of these the Heroic mode will trigger and you have to destroy progressively more nasty Vex until the timer runs out. Prepare to have Minotaurs and Cyclops to spawn in addition to all of the normal yellow bar Vex types. Stay alive and prevent 10 integrations to win your heroic loots.

Taken Blight – Taken

This one is really hard to explain visually so I am posting a picture of the objective you are trying to destroy. Essentially the goal of this event is to destroy an number of taken blights that spawn in. In Destiny 2 the blights work slightly differently in that they are protected by a bubble and in order to actually damage the blight you have to step inside of it. During this event while standing in one of these bubbles you will get a brief buff called “Blight Receding”. There is another giant blight bubble that will spawn near the other blights… and this one is protected by a shield and if you attempt to hit it you get “invulnerable”. However while you have this Blight Receding buff you can deal damage to it. Functionally you need to alternate ducking inside the bubble to get the buff and going out and damaging the big blight until it is destroyed. If you are successful this will trigger the heroic mode and summon a Taken Major for you to destroy. If you defeat it then you get shiny loots.

Witches’ Ritual – Hive

This one only spawns on Titan and I believe only in one specific location near where you spawn in at the arcology. The goal is to prevent a pair of hive wizards from opening a portal… the only problem is the wizards are shielded and invulnerable. You will notice however there are two hive sigils on the ground, and standing in one causes the corresponding wizard to lose its shield. After you take down the wizards a bigger more powerful wizard will spawn in. In order to trigger the heroic version you need to then recapture the sigils and use it to destroy two crystals that were previously invulnerable to attack. If you do this successfully another Hive Major will spawn in the Darkblade Knight. Defeat it to get your tasty loots.

Destiny 2: Thoughts after Beating Story

September 11, 2017 by Belghast

There have been many points during my leveling process where I looked pretty damned cool. However in my current state I look a bit like a rejected He-Man toy from the 80s. The important thing however is that I am sitting at 265 power… which is effectively the first soft cap you can hit… or more or less means you are “done with blues”. Now I will have to rely on a much smaller list of items that I can get potential upgrades from, but even then… it does feel like I am stalled out. The next plateau is 280, which unlocks the Nightfall and some of the advanced features of the Gunsmith, and I might have to wait until the weekly reset to be able to get there. At this point by my estimations I have spent over 30 hours in game, but the PS4 doesn’t really have a proper way of tracking this time spent. Unfortunately Destiny Tracker seems to have some issues with the API currently and is only showing the most recent information. I officially “beat” the game on Friday when I crossed two different finish lines… the first being level 20, and the second being the completion of the main story quest. Both of these are important for different reasons… level capping of course lets you start gaining power level which is the TRUE leveling system of Destiny 2. When you beat the story however the flood gates open with a ton of options that were previously locked… including one of my favorite Destiny 1 activities… Patrol Missions.

The thing you probably want to hear about however is the story, since that was the chief complaint about the original game… or at least the lack thereof. I personally enjoyed it greatly but your mileage may vary. It is hard to separate the part of me that is a lore junkie from the original game and poured over countless YouTube videos, grimoire cards and is even in a discord group specifically for… pieces together the story. Objectively the story works significantly better than that of the original game, because you are given a more traditional plot structure. Going into the game you have an event that has thrown your world into turmoil, and you are presented a very clear nemesis that is responsible for those events. From there it sets a path in motion, first of survival and then of figuring out a way to fight back. All of this works pretty well, and the game crescendos during the last four or five missions until you reach what feels like a pretty damned epic climax. More importantly than all of this… you are invested in the people you meet along the way. In the first game… especially in the year one content… everyone was just a name without any attributes really associated with them that would make you start to care. Now you get introduced to a bunch of new characters along with the characters you already knew… and at each step of the way you are given little bits of story about them that make you start to care about their situation… not just how they might benefit you. There are several NPCs in Destiny 2 that I genuinely like and enjoy doing further content with and for… because I get to hang out with them again. Functionally this is a world I start out much more invested in, and it isn’t up to me to go digging through the debris to find meaning… the game keeps delivering that on a silver platter.

As far as “end game” content goes there seems to be plenty of that as well. The above screenshot is of part of the director map for European Dead Zone, the little blue diamond represent events… and in truth all of these have yet to actually start. You can over your cursor over a given event and it will tell you what the rewards are and how long until it starts… or in this case you can look at the orange ring around the outside of the diamond because that also serves as a visual timer. You tend to get about five minutes notice before an event starts and the white circle symbol with the big triangle and small triangle represent transmat warp points, allowing you to quickly jump around a map without the need to traverse the whole thing like in Destiny 1. Additionally the orange icons on the map represent the adventures that I have talked about in other posts… which are functionally story missions that occur “in world” where one of the NPCs will direct you through a sequence of objectives and then gives you some rewards at the end. I need to spend some time doing these because several of them reward upgrade points… which are ultimately the way you unlock “powers” on your sub classes. Additionally each of the original vanguard members gives you some sort of end game activity that happens on a weekly timer. Ikora Rey for example has you replay missions from the main story, each time gaining a little faction and in my experience doing an entire batch of three gives you enough currency to get one of her faction packages. Cayde-6 lets you purchase treasure maps… which unlock a series of chests… that can reward you everything from an Exotic engram… to a spinfoil hat with varying degrees of “worth it”. Additionally there are other quests that start to open up that lead to good old fashioned Exotic weapon quests… like one to regain the MIDA Multi Tool for example.

The Crucible is still very much a thing, but seems to have way fewer options than before. Right now you functionally choose between two different lists… Quick Play or Competitive… the difference being that the first is supposed to be for casual play and the second is supposed to feed into their ultimately ranking system. The only part that is jarring about this is that in Quick Play you alternate between game types… so you might do a Supremacy and then the next match might be Control or Clash. There are times I feel like I am getting the hang of the four player crucible experience… and then there are times when I feel like I know nothing. The positive or negative of this experience is that the game is getting me to play Crucible by danging rewards in front of my face. There is an item called a Luminous Engram, that can be achieved by completing a handful of weekly milestones… one of which being to play a number of crucible matches… which seemed to be something in the range of 10 of them. This is also potentially gated on your performance because I never seemed to get the same amount of percentage advancement in the milestone each match. Regardless the reward was enough for me to spend my afternoon yesterday doing matches until I got my shiny reward at the end… which is effectively a really powerful faction package that is a marked jump in your overall power level… generally up to 10 power levels over your current rating. The Crucible is just one of many of these that effective have you out doing different kinds of content chasing these big rewards. Effectively I like that the game is going to dangle big enough carrots in front of my face to make me want to do things… that normally I would not.

Another system that is shaping up to be extremely important is that of Clans. Right now the roster is screwed up as is the clan membership count, but what is working is Clan Experience. Effectively doing anything out in the world grants you a certain amount of Clan Experience, and in the second screenshot in this post you can see a little blip on the right hand side of the screen denoting that I earned some. There is a cap that you can reach each week for the total contribution towards your guilds leveling process, and if you do so… there is another one of those Luminous Engrams waiting for you. Where the Clan system really gets cool is that it functionally rewards every member of the Clan for the activities of its members. They turned on the Clan system Friday and by that evening we had maxed our our total experience for the week and pushed the Clan to level 2, and additionally when one of our members completed a Nightfall it unlocked a Legendary Engram for everyone in the clan. Similarly when someone finished the Crucible Luminous Engram… everyone got a Legendary Engram… and in theory the same will be true for the Raid and the Trials of the Nine which are not open yet. Its really rather cool that there is this sort of “share the wealth” type system that lets players who are maybe not as progressed as their clanmates have a nice hand up in that department. The Experience cap for the week was low enough that functionally it took three players capping their weekly contribution to get there… so in theory this is not going to be one of those systems that greatly favors massive Clans and screws the little ones with a handful of members.

Lastly I wanted to close out with the Shader issue again. I still am not super happy with the changes to this system, and I am hoping they come to their senses and tweak how it works. I would be fine with something along the lines of once you discover a shader, you can then purchase them from the various faction NPCs for glimmer. Once I dinged 20 the drop rate of these did in fact increase, and after 20 your experience bar effectively rewards you a Bright Engram each time you “level up”. This happens often enough that I’ve gotten somewhere around 10-12 of these just by going out into the world and playing through content. Additionally the NPC Faction packages and the random spawn chests throughout the world seem to reward a lot of them specific to a given planet. Prior to dinging 20… I had two different colors… and at the time I took this screenshot I had 27 and a good number of them with enough to actually dye a full set of armor. Basically it doesn’t seem like it is going to be long before I am absolutely swimming in shaders, like I seem to currently be with mods. Please note… I still don’t like this system change, but it also doesn’t seem to be the end of the world I originally thought it was going to be. Especially given how damned often I seem to be getting “free” bright engrams that are the same thing as you purchase with the in game currency. I’ve even managed to pull one of the exotic sparrows… of which a screenshot will be inserted below.

In the grand scheme of things… I could not be much more happy with my Destiny 2 experience. In the podcast I called it “The Destiniest Destiny” and this still holds true. If you didn’t like the original game… I am still not entirely certain you will like Destiny 2. Everything about this game is an iterative approach to the original… which things being so much more fleshed out and wildly more “stuff” to do… but it is still very much the same overall game play experience. If you were one of those players that sat back and thought “I like Destiny, but in order for it to be playable it would have to change drastically”… then this game is very much not for you. Calling the game Destiny 1.5 or 2.0… really is appropriate than really thinking of this as a sequel. I am completely fine with this notion and at this point I am absolutely chomping at the bits to start over from scratch on the PC. Very shortly I will begin working on the Warlock and Hunter on PS4 so I have the ability to get multiple characters worth of luminous engrams per week. There are some players that are even creating three of the same class to maximize this further… but I think I will stick to having three classes. All in all the game is still grindy but I find that specific brand of grind extremely fun. I am hoping that at 265 I can actually see the raid… but I am thinking that the more likely power level will be 280 which means I am going to need to do a bit more leap frogging in power level in order to get there.

The Shader Situation

September 8, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday I briefly mentioned the issue happening right now with Shaders, but I had a few people ask me directly what exactly was going on. So I thought I would take a moment this morning to explain the issue from my perspective. In the original Destiny Shaders were an item that dropped that when applied effected the color scheme and sometimes physical properties of your armor. It was a purely cosmetic system, but one that the players latched onto with both hands. The Shaders themselves dropped from all manner of activities and occasionally were attached to achievements. This happened with enough relative rarity that when you got one… you noticed and immediately started playing with it. Each Guardian could carry a total of nine shaders with them at any given time… and I personally found myself swapping back and forth between shaders on a regular basis to fit my current mood or to coordinate which whatever weapon loadout I happened to be rocking that night. To say I was engaged in the system is probably a bit of an understatement given that I had 103 of them according to the achievement that tracks such progress. I was by no means the most prolific however because there were folks in game who had literally every single one… and you can see in the above photo… the ones that are greyed out are ones I had not found yet. The system itself was pretty limited and some shaders looked good on some armor sets… but absolutely horrible on others. However it was something that gave us some license to stand out in the tower from the other Guardians also wearing Iron Banner gear.

With the lead up to Destiny 2 there was so much talk about how improved the Shader system was going to be. It was announced that we would be able to apply shaders individually to armor pieces and even our weapons. As a long time supporter of cosmetic systems this seemed amazing, because it would finally give us some level of granular control over our appearance. In Destiny 1 it was annoying when your chest-piece looked amazing with a specific shader applied, but your boots or arms looked completely horrible. This was especially true when rocking the various combinations of black and white like I regularly did… and it would have allowed us to swap around until we found a specific shader that worked for each individual item. While playing the “Demo” I found it curiously lacking that they didn’t show off the new shader system, but given this was a build of game originally shown at E3 I thought maybe it was simply left out because the system had not been finished at that point. It was not until launch that we actually saw the system at work… and realized that shaders were not a single use consumable item. The above image is of my shader “collection” in Destiny 2, and all of these so far have come through the starter packages that you keep getting handed by the Eververse vendor at the Farm each time you reach a specific level plateau. Why the community is going to war over this minor point is the fact that Bungie took what used to be a very good but limited system… and turned it into a potential cash grab.

Yesterday Luke Smith released a sequence of statements on his Twitter account talking about the issue… and the answer feels less than satisfactory. Luke is literally the only person who thinks that doing “shader farming” is a good idea. That sounds miserable especially when it means that you now somehow need to rope five of your friends to follow you down a rabbit hole just so you can have pretty armor for the week. It is hard enough to convince people to run old school World of Warcraft raids when only transmog items are on the line… let alone run a 2-3 hour long Destiny raid that never really trivializes… for armor paint. Now up until this statement I was taking a wait and see approach and in part I still am. I noticed that all of the planet faction NPCs had shaders on their loot table that you can get from engrams. Maybe as he says as we start to grind faction we will be swimming in armor spray paint, but more than likely there is still going to be a sizable number of shaders that are only available through bright engrams. Bright engrams for reference are the new RNG loot box that the Eververse sells for Silver. Right now the equivalent conversion rate is $5 to 3 Bright Engrams… and while these drop organically each time you fill up your xp bar again post level 20… that is going to be a less than enjoyable grind to get them. While I have not actually opened an actual Bright Engram, I have been opening the assorted packages that Eververse gives you in the farm and through those I have received a bunch of shaders enough to make me think that this is going to be the easier way to get them.

As of last night I hit 15 and probably will push through to 20 tonight, so I should start to see this supposed increased shader drop rate shortly. What is frustrating to me is that everything else about the game is really amazing. However that amazing is slightly tarnished by the fact that I know one of my favorite systems has turned into something I looked forward to using… to something I will probably hoard and never actually use. You change out gear in Destiny constantly… and even on my maximum light cap 400 characters in the original game… I was regularly tweaking and fiddling with my build out each time I got some new interesting piece of loot. There is never going to be a point where you can set your armor selection in stone, knowing that you will likely never get something that works better for you. Each patch Bungie tweaks this or that making it likely that you are going to be swapping gear our to optimize whatever you happen to be going for this week. There is never going to be a point where you have enough of your favorite shaders… nor will you have the freedom to swap them around at will just to do silly things like have everyone raiding in Glowhoo or that hideous McDonald’s looking shader. Shaders were fun and one of those few non-gear rewards that you loved seeing at the end of a Crucible match or after a strike. Gone are the days when you cannot wait to try on the new shader you just got to see what it looks like. Now instead it is going to be a stack in your inventory that keeps going up in number… but you still feel like you maybe shouldn’t use yet because there is a really awesome item waiting around the corner that you might want it for. So that in a nutshell is the situation with shaders and why the Destiny 1 player base is frustrated by it.