December 2017 - Page 5 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Many Osiris Handle It

December 6, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was of course the release of the first expansion content to Destiny 2 in the form of the Curse of Osiris DLC. I was sick yesterday so completely out of it and did not realize until that evening that I could have been playing around in the expansion during the day. I did however have time to finish the main story line and am now in the after game that involves going around and doing a bunch of adventures on Mercury. I am not entirely certain what I was expecting but I enjoyed myself and found a lot of the new areas really cool to roam around. The level cap is bumping up from 20 to 25 and the light cap is bumping from 305 to 335. This means we all need to spend time pushing up that number once again, and have a whole slew of new weapons to help us with that process. Based on what I am seeing blues seem to still be bound to the 5 below your base light level as I am seeing 303 drops with a base light of 308.8. Legendary engrams which seem to be dropping like candy for me are dropping at my base light level and as a result seem to be providing a decent way of bumping up my overall power level. Unlike before I am not quite as rabidly focused on trying to squeeze the last bit of light out of each week as I have in the past. I am sure this will change but for the moment I am trying to take things easy as I may or may not have burnt myself out a bit.

In Destiny 1 we spent a good deal of time exploring the Fallen and the Hive and with Destiny 2 we have spent the bulk of our time dealing with the Cabal. This expansion sees us taking on the Vex in ways that we have not seen before. You get a decent idea over the course of the content we have seen to this point that the Vex that essentially hacks time to create the most favorable outcomes for themselves. However we have not actually really seen this in progress other than the tiny unexplained bits of the Black Garden. With Curse of Osiris we get to roam around in the massive simulation worlds that the Vex are constantly using to collect data to update their models. What is really cool about this is that we see simulated versions of all of the other races, that are very similar… but not quite exactly the same. Pay close attention to the way that the “Axis” versions of various troop types look because they appear to be almost Vex hybrid versions. As far as the length of the expansion… I would say it is probably about the same number of missions as the base game. You spend a lot of time roaming around and trying to sort out how to stop this one Vex simulated future from coming true.

As far as characters… Sagira is great and I like the fact that even after completing the main game we occasionally get to hang out with her again. Osiris was honestly not much of a character, and still remains this madman prophet that we are really no closer to fully understanding than we were going into the expansion. Brother Vance still has a fanatical devotion to Osiris even though he could not be bothered to pop out to the Lighthouse long enough to even see his acolytes. There is a nice passing of the Torch of sorts to Ikora, because really she is the Warlock we care about. Its not so much that the student has surpassed the master… its just that the student is done being a student. If nothing else this expansion brought with it one of the most badass final boss fights I have seen in awhile, and while it isn’t exactly technically complex it is fun as hell and makes the player feel awesome… even though it is really Osiris hacking reality to make it happen. It reminds me a lot of the way the Oryx fight in the Kings Fall raid felt… with this massive imposing figure that you are able to bring down by doing some stuff with some things. Unlike the main campaign I am actually looking forward to finishing it on each of my alts, as I attempt to get them ready to start pushing up power level once again.

As part of the main story we get another choice of a vanguard legendary, and I not shockingly went with the auto rifle that looks and feels a lot like the Jiangshi AR4 that I cannot seem to get the Gunsmith to give me. The bulk of the really interesting system changes go into effect next week with the December 12th patch, but we did get a fresh assortment of weapons to find and an armor ornament system. I’m looking forward to the next Iron Banner so that I can unlock the requirements to use those with my Iron Banner set. Additionally there was a refresh of the eververse store and with it a new set of fluff engrams, this time including a set of armor that I think actually looks cool. I was not a big fan of the weird formal armor set that came from the last batch, and even though I have collected a set of it on my Titan I doubt I will ever wear it. This time around however it is Vex inspired and looks pretty badass… but it has some hefty competition with both my New Monarchy and Iron Banner armor sets. All in all I think I am going to like the influx of content, but I am also not extremely focused on grinding to get everything instantly either.

Honestly the thing that has most soured me on Destiny 2… may or may not have anything to do with Destiny 2. A few weeks ago on patch day I started having issues running the game. Ultimately this thing would occur where the game would freeze for anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes in the worst cases… all the while the audio would continue playing in the background. If I happened to be watching a YouTube video on the second monitor its video would freeze as well, as would my ability to alt tab or interact with anything. Everything would recover itself and return me back to whatever I happened to be doing… and if I was in a group activity the game would rapidly catch me up to the same time frame as the other players… often resulting in my death. As a result I had been avoiding doing anything serious and anything that forced players to require on me not fucking up. I’ve searched the forums and crawled through the bowels of Reddit attempting various fixes, until this morning when I found something that is a possible culprit. Around about this same time I got forced upon me the heaping pile that is yet another windows 10 update. As a result it force reset a bunch of my settings, one of which flipped my system into power save mode for some ungodly reason. Before sitting down to write this post I played a bit of crucible because that seemed to always make it happen… and seemed to be doing just fine. I need to run around on Mercury a bit to do some further testing but I am hopeful that maybe this was the mystery sauce that was causing all of my problems. I would love to be able to return to doing group content without fearing that I would be a liability.

MMO Blogging Dead?

December 5, 2017 by Belghast

One of the things I have failed miserably at lately is keeping up with my blog feed. During the heyday of Google Reader I was a voracious consumer of gaming blogs of all stripe, and regularly read through everything in my backlog of posts. Stuff happened and my attempt to expand my horizons when I was writing a column on the blogosphere saw my feed ballooning to some 700 sites… a good number of them posting about things that never really interested me on a personal level. As a result I find myself spending less time reading blog posts and tend to catch up in a flurry of reading on the weekends. That said I did end up doing a strafing run on Feedly yesterday afternoon and stumbled across a post from Tobold posing the question of whether or not the MMO Blogosphere is still alive. The short answer is yes, the community is still very much alive. The long answer however is a lot more complicated. While there are still a ton of active people that I see when I catch up on my feed, there are also a lot of names and faces that I have not really seen much from in years. There has been a changing of the guards and I feel like maybe I have done a poor job of catching up with who is leaving the community and who is brand new. Additionally the “community” aspect is a little on the ropes. We didn’t have a Newbie Blogger Initiative this year nor did I do anything with Blaugust… two previously big events that pulled people in. We barely had a Developer Appreciate Week… and only then because Ravalation was determined to make sure it happened. I’ve personally failed miserably this year at attempting any sort of outreach into the community because 2017 has been a time when literally all I can seem to manage to do is attempt to keep one foot moving in front of the other.

The other big change I have noticed is we no longer have the big MMORPG game looming on the horizon that we are all interested in playing. The community as a whole is way more fragmented in their tastes. In the run up to World of Warcraft expansions, Star Wars the Old Republic, Guild Wars 2, Wildstar or even as far back as Warhammer Online there was a community upsurge of blog sites that sprung up as players attempted to mitigate their hype levels by pouring that excess energy into post form. That is just a thing that doesn’t really happen these days as the traditional MMORPG outside of South Korean doesn’t appear to be a viable business model that big studios are really releasing these days. Instead we have the MMO-lite games that have some online interaction capabilities like The Division or Destiny but lack some of the rich imaginative landscape that us bloggers used to feast upon. Essentially when we started playing MMORPGs it was a novel concept and gave us a sort of interaction that we could not get in any other game. Now that same concept of being online and playing with a bunch of your friends while working on some long term achievement is no longer really something special… and instead describes almost all of the games on the market right now. Almost every game has RP elements that allow you to customize or build your character, and almost every game now has an online presence often with some sort of persistent progression system. MMORPGs no longer really offer something unique that you cannot get in dozens of other places… that also don’t require the level of community to support them. The games have changed and with that the amount of effort and time they ask of us… or at the very least the sort of skills that they require. While I can wax philosophically about the differences between two guns and the way they fire in Destiny 2… that isn’t exactly something more players even care about.

Lastly I think the players and their habits have changed. When I started playing Destiny at launch back in 2014, one of my big frustrations was how there were no blogs really dedicated to the game. Instead that community exists as a combination of Reddit posts and YouTube videos that you then need to somehow knit together to get an overarching picture of what is actually happening. I wish I could say that this phenomena is unique to Destiny, but it seems more often than not the newer games don’t really have much in the way of a blogosphere presence. In some ways I think we are aging out of blogs being a relevant experience. While I have never actually had the “thousands of vistors per day” that Tobold talks about in his post unless some major news site picks up one of my posts… I’ve had a steady trickle that has stayed pretty stable through the almost nine years I have been blogging. In honesty my daily readership comes and goes based on what I happen to be posting about. Each time on get on a Destiny bender, the folks who just do not care about that tend to disappear. When I pick back up a game they are interested in… they tend to come back. Most of our blogs were started during the most fertile period of MMORPG releases to exist… and with that ground turning fallow we are left to turn to other interests. My blog started as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog… with a super narrow focus and over the years has shifted over and over again until finally I don’t really have a “format”. This blog is me and my ramblings and if you aren’t interested in that you aren’t likely going to be here very long. I’ve seen many other bloggers shifting to the same sort of thing, and while I personally care about their lives and their opinions… it makes our blogs harder to digest for those who have not been along for the full journey.

Grind to a Halt

December 4, 2017 by Belghast

When we last visited my Orc Warrior on this blog I was just about to start the Warlords content, and this week when I have not been poking my head into Destiny I have spent it pushing forward in World of Warcraft. It’s honestly been a shock just how fast leveling went until I hit Legion content. The old world was a confusion slog where I jumped zones each time I saw an exclamation point show up on the adventure guide. This meant I was constantly jumping zones every few levels and most of that journey was a complete blur. When I started Outland I did the majority of Hellfire Plateau then jumped over to Terrokar Forest for a little bit before finishing up the grind in Nagrand. From there I jumped to Northrend and did a good chunk of Borean Tundra before jumping to Grizzly Hills and doing most of it and finally leaping over to Scholazar Basin to finish the run out. From there we entered the Cataclysm zones and did all of the 80-85 grind in Vashj’ir without actually completely finishing that zone. Then came Pandaria and I managed to do the entirety of the 85-90 grind without leaving Jade Forest. From there I went to Draenor where I managed to hit 98 by doing the entirety of Frostfire Ridge and finishing up with just a tiny tiny bit in Spires of Arak.

This is the point where the express elevator has come to a grinding halt and I’ve been confronted with normal speed leveling because all of my heirlooms petered out at 100. I chose to do Stormheim first largely because it is both my favorite and least favorite zone at the same time. All of the Norse themed Vrykul bits are awesome, but all of that faction nonsense is not. It did give me access to another Order Hall champion quickly however so I am down with that. At this point I have finished both the main story arc of the zone and the faction bullshit arc and am likely to move on to the next area. There are a lot of things I have noticed… not the least of which is how ridiculously huge this shield is on my female orc warrior. It is as thought they scaled the shield for the insanely bulky male models and then just called it good enough for the female ones. The second of which is how much more intricate and slower paced the Legion content is compared to Pandaria or Warlords. When I leveled through the content it seemed really quick, but what makes things slog a bit in comparison to what came before is how fragmented the quest hubs quickly become. This might also be an aspect of the map itself feeling so busy with so many world bosses and objectives hidden out there to slow your journey down. I cannot resist wasting a few minutes to find a chest that is nearby or going after a mini boss, and as a result my leveling pace has gone to hell.

At this point I am contemplating investing in a set of Heirlooms which will set me back quite a bit of gold. It isn’t as much about leveling quickly, it is more about not outpacing the gear I am wearing…. and also not looking like I am picking up scraps from the battlefield while I level. I’ve liked making outfits for my character up until this point and then progressing my way through the content without having to care too much about swapping out items. In a perfect world Warcraft would have heirlooms for every slot and I could simply level my alts without ever having to worry about swapping gear out. With the new races coming in I fully expect to be leveling a lot more alts, and in truth investing in plate 110 heirlooms now will probably helm in the long run given that I tend to play plate wearing classes more than any others. I am still really bummed about the direction they are taking with artifact weapons. I would have loved to see them turn them into leveling heirlooms much the way that the items that dropped off Garrosh in Pandaria served this purpose. It would have been a fitting end to a really awesome chapter of the game to be able to then use those weapons to level your alts. Still having a lot of fun but I am also ready for the ride to be over and for my character to get geared up.

Xur Week Twelve: 12/1/17

December 1, 2017 by Belghast

Destiny 2

This is potentially the last of these Xur reviews that I will be doing on this blog. It is not out of a lack of interest, but more than next week with the Curse of Osiris the reset time is changing and with it when Xur arrives. Right now Xur shows up in the middle of the night and as a result by the time I shower, get ready and sit down to blog is available for me to talk some shit about what he just brought. Starting next Tuesday however that reset time will shift from 5 am my time to 11 am … long after I have already been at work for a significant amount of time. This is a boon for the career YouTube types so they don’t have to wake up quite so early, but not really for me so alas this is probably the end of my recent Friday feature. The flash point zone this week is the EDZ which means Xur is hanging out near the Winding Cove drop zone. There is technically a cave that allows you access to the ledge he is on… but I never can remember where the entrance is and just end up jumping up the rocks to the right of where he is at.

Sweet Business is a really cool sounding weapon that winds up being a horrible idea. Maybe I am being a bit unfair but in truth I have never been able to get much out of this gun. Firstly it requires some wind up time while firing before it arrives at its final rate of fire and as such true damage potential. The perk payday in theory helps with the wind up because you can fire it from the hip relatively well and as such start firing ahead of when you are actually needing to deal damage to a target especially in the crucible. The magazine size of 99 seems really awesome… but given how fast this fires you will be empty and suffering the pretty horrible reload speed before long. Where the gun really lacks however is in the total ammunition you can carry. Payload might help your magazine but it doesn’t actually seem to help your pool of ammo and when I attempt to run something using this weapon I find myself always starved for kinetic ammo. Definitely pick it up if you do not already have the weapon, but I am not a huge fan of it.

Do you want to punch things? Do you want to punch all the things? Then these might be the gauntlets for you. In the grand scheme of things they probably are not that good, but are pretty fun to at least play with while running around doing planetary content. The biotic enhancements per does two things really, firstly it greatly increases the range of your punch allowing you to hit targets at roughly the distance warlocks can. On top of that it gives you a version of surrounded where the damage your punches deal increases based on the number of targets around you. This is insanely fun against boss type encounters with a lot of minions and would potentially pair nicely with either the Sentinel or Striker trees that allow you to gain health regen on kills. Definitely a pick up if you do not already have it… and in truth I am even going to log into the PS4 and buy this since it is the only Titan exotic I am lacking there.

Arc Bolt is one of those grenades that only seems to work in really ideal conditions. This chest is all about making that grenade be able to chain a little further, giving you some wiggle room on what those ideal conditions actually are. The problem is… there are WAY better hunter exotics than this one and in truth until Arc Bolt gets some sort of a rework it isn’t exactly worth building an item loadout around. The positive however is this version does come pre-slotted with an arc grenade recharge mod so at least they realized the only edge case anyone would ever want to use this item. It’s worth picking up for unlocking but not really much more than that.

Do you like Nova Bombs? Do you want to always be Nova Bombing? Me too… sadly this helmet won’t actually let you do that thing. The perk Actual Grandeur in theory grants you super energy on Nova Bomb kills. The rate that I have seen is that if you are able to Nova Bomb and kill five targets, it will take your super bar roughly to the halfway point. So sure this does a decent job of regeneration but it also falls drastically short of the dream of being some sort of Evil Ryu throwing void fireballs. In my experience if you are dedicated to Voidwalker you are far better off with Nezerac’s Sin or even the Eye of Another World. Once again, pick it up for the unlock because Bungie occasionally balances exotics to make them better and you might as well have it in your collection.