December 2018 - Page 4 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Last Minute Shotty

December 11, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I don’t really have a lot to talk about because it seems like I do this thing where Monday I make a gigantic post… and then Tuesday I am always somewhat lacking for content. I posted about this last night on twitter, but now you can see a new screenshot with a shader applied. This is the IKELOS shotgun, which is gained by defeating the boss at the end of Escalation Protocol Wave 7. Each week you are given a different boss that drops a different weapon… with one week giving a shot at dropping all of the weapons. I have been farming this week because it was Shotgun week and I largely wanted this because of the fact that it has 8 rounds of ammo capacity… which I feel is a huge benefit to the various forge modes. Now this is not what I would call an easy farm because it requires a bunch of circumstances to fire just right.

Firstly you have to find a patrol zone on Mars where people are doing Escalation Protocol… and even more than that you need to find one willing to build up from Wave 1 all the way through Wave 7. Better yet if you can find one that is willing to farm Wave 7… because after killing the boss you have the ability to drop back down to 6 and work back to 7 again. All told I spent a significant amount of time on Mars this week and probably got in somewhere between 20 and 30 boss kills. I had largely given up on getting it and thought while waiting on my wife to get home… I would give it one more shot and helped a group work up from Wave 1. As my wife was pulling into the driveway this thing dropped and you cannot fully encapsulate how much joy I felt in seeing it drop. Now I am trying to decide if I want to try farming the other weapons for not to collect the complete set.

The Dawning event gear showed up on Tess Everett, so I am guessing today when reset happens we will begin to see those events happening in the tower. The Dawning is legitimately some of the weirdest looking gear you can get… and the Titan set looks like some sort of crazy rhino beetle? There are a few exotic ships again this time, one of which that looks really freaking cool. More than that however there is a legendary heavy machinegun that we can grind for and that is pretty much going to be my central focus. They did this for the Festival of the Lost, and I am wondering if this one will be similarly max light and equipable by all of your alts. Even if it is just 600 light it will be a good option for alting, and truth be told I need a legendary HMG since I have yet to actually get through the forge. I am so damned close but burning the wave three boss is now the problem. I may random into more of that nonsense tonight.

Lastly I have been playing a little bit of Super Smash Bros Ultimate… but the truth is I have no clue what I am doing. The jumping mechanics feel really bad so I need to sort out if there is a better way to configure the controls… because it feels like it has way more play in the jump than a traditional fighting game. All in all right now I am playing Marth, but also largely just playing World of Light. In theory I could unlock the characters faster through other modes, but I kinda like playing this as an adventure game.

Weekend Weapon Haul

December 10, 2018 by Belghast

Pretty much the highlight of the weekend for me was that I got to join in the shenanigans of the Last Wish raid in Destiny 2. This mornings post is largely going to be a rundown of the items that I got to drop this weekend. It was also the farm weekend for the IKELOS shotgun, and unfortunately as of yet I have not seen one drop. I have lost count on just how many times I have killed the level 7 escalation protocol, but it has been enough that I am starting to doubt it exists. Like the paranoia in the back of my head keeps telling me that I must not be keyed for getting loot of the boss. I do however have a huge stack of shaders that drop every single time you down it. I sincerely doubt that tonight I will get enough kills of Escalation Protocol to make a difference, and in truth it seems to be hard to find anyone actually doing it. My friend Warenwolf managed to pull me into a group, so I am guessing this is regional? I wish there was a decent matchmaking option for it.

As far as the raid itself… it was some crazy nonsense. One of the things that Bungie does almost better than anyone else is create some interesting and imaginative raid encounters. I don’t want to go into too much detail but there were of course jumping puzzles and timed burns and of course some relay race sort of encounters to unlock sections of the raid. All of which seemed doable for me who was a complete nub, but unfortunately… I am also one of those people who simply does not grok something when someone explains it. I have to do it myself to be able to understand the nuance of it, and while I feel like I still have a long ways to go before mastering the encounters… I feel like I would also do a lot better the second time in. Thankfully none of the jumping puzzles were anywhere near as stressful as the ones in the King’s Fall raid. An interesting mechanic is that first timers get an extra piece of loot at the very end, and as a result I wound up getting 4 pieces of armor and 5 weapons… one of which dropped from random trash but that still counts. Now I am going to play show and tell with each of them.

A really cool looking rocket launcher that I will never actually use because it doesn’t have cluster bombs. I could say more but really… that is the core problem and I would have used it as infusion fuel if it wasn’t a raid weapon.

This is quite possibly the weirdest feeling auto rifle I have ever used, because it is so freaking slow firing… which you would assume to be extremely stable and it is not. On PC with mouse and keyboard controls it is completely manageable, uncertain what controller would be like with this weapon. It was fun the little bit I played with it, but it also takes the same slot as my beloved Misfit so I doubt it is going to see much play.

This is probably the favorite of the weapons that dropped because it has a decent stat package with triple tap and the ambitious assassin that all of the weapons appear to come with by default. I used this quite a bit this weekend trying to complete the crucible headshots step of the Cayde-6 quest chain, and had some luck. The problem with that step is that I am just not good at crucible anymore, but this is a perfectly reasonable weapon to be using. I also really dig the look and feel of it.

The biggest challenge this weapon has going for it is that it is a scout rifle… and all of the reasons why I would use a scout rifle are largely demolished by the inclusion of bows. This is likely never going to get play from me because even before the introduction of bows… I was not a huge scout rifle fan. That said I won’t infuse it because I tend to collect interesting weapons. It does however have rampage which is a positive that it has going for it if you can get into a situation where you can pick off adds easily.

While this technically didn’t drop from a raid encounter, I saw a shiny golden engram while we were doing the Riven fight and this was waiting in my mailbox after we left the raid. This weapon has some issues, but the majority of the problem is that this time around this is a heavy weapon. In Destiny 1 this was a secondary weapon, which would have greatly improved its utility were we able to equip this in the energy weapon slot. As it stands… it is competing with other Heavy Weapons and comes up very short against both the Thunderlord and the Sleep Simulant that are just better weapons. What made this interesting before was that it was a fusion sniper rifle… which I guess became the linear fusion category as a whole. If they ever tweak this weapon to be energy slot equipped then it will see some play, before then however… it just isn’t worth giving up that slot against arguably better weapons.

I still have not ignited the forge, but one of my attempts over the weekend got me a Two-Tailed Fox to drop, which again suffers from some of the problems that I just talked about. It is a really interesting weapon that is useful in specific niche situations… but I can’t see using this over the sleeper or the thunderlord. Still very happy to check this off the exotics bucket list.

Finally I completed the Nascent Dawn quest chain over the weekend and wrapped up the Polaris Lance. All in all I dig the feel of this weapon, but I would probably use the Legendary Masterwork version that you get in the quest chain step before the Exotic as it would free up the exotic slot for one of the two heavy weapons I keep mentioning over and over.

We also recorded a podcast this weekend as usual and some of the things we talked about are… Black Armory, Last Wish, The Game Awards, Hades by Supergiant Games, Epic Game Storefront, Super Smash Bros Ultimate. If you are someone who likes to listen to podcasts check it out… otherwise zero shame in giving it a skip. I personally find youtube the easiest way of passing along the link, but in the sidebar of the blog is an RSS feed for those who want to use a traditional podcatcher style app. Listening to me ramble on is an acquired taste so perfectly cool with folks skipping if that is not your thing.

Shotguns and Game Awards

December 7, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was a night about two things… farming Escalation Protocol in the slim hope of getting a shotgun… and watching The Game Awards. I didn’t even realize that the later was happening until Pete mentioned something about it on Twitter. I am not really a follower of awards shows in general because traditionally speaking they don’t actually reflect my interests in quite literally anything. The academy awards tend to focus on artsy films, and the grammys tend to focus on pop music… neither of which are really my jam. I still remember the Grammys where Metallica Performed and was nominated for the new “Hard Rock” category… against Jethro Tull… and Jethro Tull won. Basically I have always sorta considered the awards scene to be grossly out of touch with anything that interested me. I can’t really say that the Game Awards are all that different given that I don’t really play a lot of the games that they talked about.

It has been however super interesting to watch the show evolve over time. Each year the “realness” has escalated significantly and last night… it legitimately felt like any other big budget awards show in existence. Hell they even have a proper theme now, which was kinda cool and did a good job of showcasing the different flavors of gaming. I also enjoyed how they have this blend of reveals and awards, as well as a meaningful pre-show that instead of watching the “red carpet” used that time to give out the less glitzy stuff like lifetime achievement awards. There was also a reasonable blend of traditional celebrities, e-celebs, and legendary game devs… all treated as peers to create this weird blend of everything that makes the community interesting. For example I don’t care about Ninja necessarily, but I do know he is a big deal in the Fortnite juggernaut, and probably a significantly better ambassador to the “normies” than Pewdie Pie.

The twitch screen had up this “Worlds Will Change” logo prior to the pre-show actually starting, so when we opened the Game Awards with Shawn Layden, Phil Spencer, and Reggie Fils-aime from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo respectively all sharing the stage I momentarily got my hopes up. I wondered would they reveal that finally all games on all three platforms would be cross play by default? Sadly however it was just a gesture of togetherness rather than anything meaningful, but still very cool to see that happen as they all appear on effectively neutral ground. They still need to hammer out those details behind the scenes so that we can all play together without boundary, which is ultimately the thing I think most gamers really want. Truth be told I just want the consoles and PC versions to cross play given that I am almost always going to prefer the PC version the best.

As far as reveals go the one that was the most interesting to me personally was The Outer Worlds by Obsidian, which appeared to be a Fallout style game set in a Wild West Space Opera sort of world on the outskirts of the universe. I am always down with scifi blended with westerns blended with what appeared to be bioshock style advertising branding. It is Obsidian, so we know the story is going to be good… that is the thing they do really really well. It will also probably be very buggy, because that is another thing they do really really well is generate bugs. Regardless I am now really looking forward to this game after only having seen a little bit of trailer.

We got a much longer trailer for Psychonauts 2, which is something we already knew was coming but also something that is going to be excellent. I fully expect to be replaying the previous one prior to this game coming out so I can sorta blend my way into the new story. It has been a really really long time since I last played Psychonauts.

I am also really interested in Far Cry New Dawn which to the best of my knowledge is the first game in the Far Cry series that is a direct sequel to the previous one? It also makes me want to play Far Cry 5 if this is where we are going to end up. There were lots of other reveals and they have posted most of them on the official The Game Awards Youtube, which is super handy.

What games were revealed that you are looking forward to? Drop me a comment and let me know. I will be spending the weekend on a mix of still farming for the shotgun in Destiny 2 and splitting time between two big alphas that are also happening.

Destiny Nostalgia

December 6, 2018 by Belghast

With my general disappointment I have over Black Armory and the direction the game seems to be going now… with focusing only on the end game and not actually giving us anything new that we can do the moment a content update drops. It got me feeling notalgic about Destiny 1 and some of the things I miss that have never quite made it over to Destiny 2. So I am going to take this morning as an opportunity to rifle through my vault and pull out the things I would love to see over here. This is mostly just me posting a bunch of pictures of weapons and talking about them, so if that is not your thing then today’s post is likely highly skippable.

Legendary Weapons

Destiny was largely a game about collecting the exotics, but there were a handful of legendary weapons that stood out and that I coveted. I figured a handful of these definitely needed to be talked about. There were a lot of them that I liked, but these were the weapons that I absolutely loved.

We are going to start things off with the weapon that I bring up so many times… my perfect roll Haakon’s Hatchet, or at least what I considered to be a perfect roll. It came from Year 2 Iron Banner and still has one of the overall best looking Iron Banner weapon visual aesthetics. It had Range Finder, Perfect Balance and Counterbalance so was insanely stable and while relatively short range… it could melt targets especially in the Crucible or Iron Banner. This also doubled as probably one of my favorite PVE weapons for just dealing a bunch of reliable damage to targets.

The Haakon’s Hatchet was eventually replaced with the Genesis Chain which dropped on my first time through Wrath of the Machine when I was super carried hard by my friends in Tequila Mockingbird. I admit a lot of why I used this weapon was because it looked cool and it had an interesting perk called Focused Firefly… which was essentially a much bigger version of the normal firefly that caused targets to explode when you to a precision kill. It also had this super satisfying noise that it made when you triggered one of these explosions… which I think is the real reason why I kept using it. It sounded sorta like the ping of kicking brass out of a Mosin Nagant in all of the WW2 era FPS titles with a bunch of reverb at the end.

I generally hated the look of all of the Year 3 Iron Banner weapons… there is just something about having a bunch of bits crudely cobbled together that didn’t do it for me. This is weird because in general the Fallen weapon aesthetic is very similar… but somehow works with all of its spiky nonsense. The main reason why I loved this weapon was its absolutely crazy high impact, and the fact that enhanced battery took the available shots up to 6… and with performance bonus it had a chance of refunding some ammo. This could just straight up melt any target in front of you, and was a pretty good option to help burn elites.

My heavy weapon of choice has usually always been a machine gun because it always feels like you have a lot more versatility due to the larger magazine size… or in the case of most of them drum size. Once again this gets a strike against it for the horrible asethestic of year 3 Iron Banner weapons, but it has a lot going for it when it comes to stats with Extended Mag, Hand-Laid Stock and Counterblance giving me a fairly high impact and very stable machine gun. Not much else to say about it… it was very much a utilitarian burn option that wasn’t flashy but got the job done.

Exotic Weapons

While we have ended up with a large number of carry over from Destiny 1 in the Exotics department, there are still a handful that I really enjoyed using that it would be nice to see reborn in one form or another.

I have to give an initial shout out to Hawkmoon, which was the very first Exotic that I ever got to drop. Now rumor has it that we are getting this back at some point in the upcoming seasons… but for the time being an equivalent does not exist in game. It was a high damage high capacity hand canon made interesting by the fact that two of the bullets would deal extra damage. Ultimately I replaced this in my line up with the Eyasluna which was essentially the legendary version of Hawkmoon allowing me more leverage in where I chose to use my exotic slot. It still bears mentioning however for introducing me to how cool exotics could be.

Another weapon that was also near and dear to my heart that absolutely no one else liked playing with… was the Fabian Strategy or the Titan exclusive exotic. I have always been a very run and gun player and as such was regularly closing the gap on a pack of mobs, which triggered crowd control and the front lines perk that increased weapon stability and rate of fire. The fact that a portion of the ammo was reloaded into the magazine on kills meant I could storm the castle and maintain a killing screen while taking out minions. This all fits my general play style and made me love this weapon far more than I should have given how many other people kept telling me it was garbage. Proof again that weapon choice is absolutely a personal preference thing.

Red Death was my go to for whenever I needed to sustain my life in a situation where I knew I would be taking a significant amount of damage. This made it the ideal weapon for those affixes that would cause your shields not to regenerate normally, or anything where there was a aura effect that would be slowly damaging you over time. Sure we got Crimson which is effectively a Hand Canon version of this weapon, but it feels lousy to play with in my opinion and as such doesn’t really count for me. I would love to see the original Red Death back. Given the storied past of this weapon it feels like the perfect option for a lengthy chain to unlock it.

Now for the weapon that inspired this post… Thunderlord is awesome and does a great job of melting a bunch of minions because of its arc damage proc… but the best version of that was on the Zhalo Supercell. Not only was it a really stable auto rifle, but the chain lightning proc made it perfect for clearing waves of mobs. It also held a special place as one of the few elemental primaries that survived the year one cull, which made it amazing for arc burn weeks. I would love to see a version of this gun back with a similar proc, especially given how many horde mode encounters we are getting in the game now.

While I never got to experience the grandeur of year one Gjallarhorn because I stopped playing shortly after launch… I fell in love with this weapon during Year 3 and it is impossible to make a nostalgic post without mentioning it. There was just nothing cooler than watching an entire pack of mobs melt to wolfpack rounds. During much of Year 3 this was pretty much the dedicated exotic that I used for everything because even if it was not solar burn week… it still was the best option for killing all of the things at once. Sure one might say that made it too powerful, but it was insanely fun to play with so it deserves on this list.

Another weapon that I would love to have back that we will probably never get back… is Invective or the shotgun that regenerates ammunition over time. Sure this and the Icebreaker the sniper equivalent were a little broken… but I loved this weapon so much in The Crucible because I didn’t have to care about the meta of trying to camp the special ammo. It looks amazing as well which as we all know goes a lot way to making a weapon feel good to use. Party Crasher+1 was the only shotgun I used regularly other than this one, but for most of my iron banner nonsense it was this in the special, Haakon’s in the primary and some machine gun in the heavy slot.

Sure we got a version of this with the Curse of Osiris DLC called Machina Dei 4 but it is nowhere near as good as this classic exotic version. It also looks nowhere near as cool. I would love to see a version of the original return, because again… this was an epic quest in the original Destiny and would give ample opportunity to make it a seasonal quest to recover the weapon. Everyone loved the Stranger’s Rifle and this was just an updated version of that, so would love to see it back.

These next two are largely situational, but I felt like they were unique enough that I wanted to include them as well. Touch of Malice was a must have raid weapon for the Taken King expansion, given that there were many burn phases where you were given an invulnerability effect allowing you to effectively pour rounds into the target without reloading with this weapon. It’s special effect allowed you to drain your own life and convert it into a bullet to keep firing after you have essentially emptied your magazine. This mean’t that it was super useful in a few clutch situations, but also was a great way to kill yourself if you were not paying much attention. In either case it was fun for the entire family.

Lastly we have Bad Juju that had two situations where it worked amazingly well. String of Curses did two things… firstly kills caused your ammo to reload and give you a damage buff. Secondly this effect when procced caused you to gain additional super energy, allowing you to charge your super significantly faster if you could be put in a situation where you had to kill waves of mobs. This made this the go to weapon in situations where you needed to have your super up regularly, which came in super handy in Prison of Elders and similar activities where you were both fighting a bunch of stuff and also getting additional credit for using your super. Other than that I was not a huge fan of the weapon, but I liked it because it filled a specific niche in my armory.

What were some of the weapons that you miss from Destiny 1? I largely excluded the elemental swords because I would have had to have included all three of them… because they were all great in their own way. Drop me a line in the comments below about your favorite Destiny 1 weapon that we have not seen yet in Destiny 2.