Shadowkeep Show and Tell

This morning is mostly just going to be a long string of pictures and commentary about those pictures. I spent the vast majority of the weekend playing Destiny 2 and the Shadowkeep expansion content. If you could custom build an expansion to my interests you would end up with this one, largely because it has a lot of overworld activities going on and things to grind for. We are going to start this off however by showing off my favorite ship. Weirdly I have a massive collection of Exotic ships and sparrows, but it is a Legendary ship that I have somehow latched onto called the Pitfall Souter E5D. I really like the design on this one better than the exotic version of this drop ship, and it feels very Titan-y to me.

I hit the soft cap over the weekend and have since pushed up to 905 without the artifact, or 910 with the bonus. This is setting up a situation where we have the whole Year 1 thing with legendary items giving you more light than they actually do which feels real weird. I would have greatly preferred that they just took this new adjusted light number as your actual light number. That said I am still pretty regularly getting prime engrams that are slowly pushing that number up.

As far as the seasonal track goes, I am sitting at level 17 with about halfway through 18. This has been interesting, but I wish when you got gear off the track that it counted as a powerful engram rather than just being miscellaneous debris. The whole acquiring new items through the track is a bit lackluster when it is just the same set of gear that you got at step one. As a result you see that there are a lot of steps where I have chosen not to collect the reward. Same goes for all of the glimmer as I am not having any issue getting glimmer, and there might be a point in the future where I wish I had a large stack of it.

On the Artifact itself I have mostly been unlocking Autorifle/Submachinegun and Hand Cannon perks, and trying to make sure I have a reasonable coverage of Anti-Barrier and Anti-Overload rounds available. These come into play during the Vex Invasion activity that you can queue for. Various mobs you encounter have either a Barrier or an Overload that causes them to keep from being damaged until you drop that shield, and as a result the easiest way is to hit them with a weapon that has the equivalent “anti” effect. Right now I have Anti-Barrier on my Auto-Rifle and Anti-Overload on my Submachinegun. This tends to be my favorite combo right now and has largely replaced Auto and Shotgun for me.

Lets just stop to appreciate how damned cool the Vex Invasions look when they are happening on the moon. Full on Terminator vibes going on and lots and lots of vex to violently dismantle. Generally speaking they seem to happen a few minutes after a public event finishes. As such I have had the best luck going to an area, completing the public event… and then waiting around for a few and before long the vex will start dropping in. The only negative of these events is that they are really really hard to solo and you don’t get a chest to drop until you have taken down three of these little incursions in a row. If you are too slow the boss will “escape” and you won’t make it to round three.

I was never a huge fan of the Monte Carlo in Destiny 1, in either version. However the Destiny 2 version is freaking amazing and I managed to get this in one of the first activities I participated in after hitting 900 light. So far a lot of people seem to be reporting getting it pretty early in the cycle, and the Vex Invasions are supposedly a good way of farming Exotics if you end up doing a bunch of them in a row. The queued event drops a chest after each wave of the encounter that has Vex themed goodies, and supposedly these also have a reasonable chance of dropping exotics.

There are a bunch of weapons that can drop while doing assorted activities on the moon, and when they do a quest will start allowing you to “cleanse” the item. This generally involves doing a specific thing a number of times, getting kills with that weapon type, and then finding some MacGuffin deep in the bowels of some area of the moon. You then return these to the Lecturn next to Eris Morn and you collect a weapon. You can spend some currency to get new rolls of these weapons at pretty much any time, and can skip the MacGuffin step since you have already collected it. By far my favorite of these so far is the Arc Logic Auto Rifle, which happened to roll with Rampage, Subsistence and Extended Mag making it fairly potent. This has become my Anti-Barrier weapon of choice.

Probably my favorite of the Vex themed weapons so far is the Imperative Scout Rifle that rolled with subsistence, multi-kill clip. I am sure there are better rolls of this weapon available but this one is serviceable for situations when I need to hit things at range. I hope that we are going to get some access to secondary skins for these weapons because the leaf covered thing is kinda cool for a few minutes, but eventually wears then when you realize that you can’t do much to apply shaders to them. The leaves themselves will always stay the same shade. Right now these serve the role of really easy to get weapons as they seemingly drop like candy from the queued Vex Invasion activity.

I really should spend some time tonight pushing through the storyline, as I have yet to get to the end of it. This is the problem with opening up the world and letting me do things without completing the story… I ultimately don’t put any emphasis on actually finishing. With Forsaken I was pushing ahead in the story because I wanted to unlock access to the Dreaming City. As far as I know finishing the story doesn’t really unlock anything new that I don’t already have access to. I should do this thing however just to get it done.