Looter Shooter

Destiny Rising: Out to Pasture

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve been a big proponent of Destiny Rising for quite a while on this blog, and I still play it pretty much every single day. At a bare minimum, I pop in and do the daily quests, send off some of the Iron Commander missions, and then do whatever I can to chip away at the Guild’s map discovery. Then, usually once per week, I run with Ace and do some more serious content as we knock out Calamity Ops and our Grandmasters. Collectively, I am still enjoying my time in the game, but it sort of feels like something is changing. This morning I am going to present the case that Destiny Rising is not long for the world, because it appears as though NetEase is throttling down on the amount of time and effort they are spending on the game.

Character banners are critical to the livelihood of a Gacha game. They are supposed to inspire us to want to pull for the character on them, and devote time and hopefully money to spending on currency in order to get more copies. I’ve happily pulled every ounce of currency that I could gather up on Gwynn, Estella, Helhest, Maru, and even Jaren, whom I initially thought I would not be that big a fan of. This pattern stopped, however, when we got Kabr the Resolute… which is effectively a rework of a free character that you unlock in the game by completing the story. It is not so much that I hate Kabr… I just find him thoroughly uninteresting as far as characters go. The rework also essentially makes him worse than the base version as far as I am concerned, and dips into an archetype that I already have a bunch of characters that can fill… namely Helhest. As a result, I have been banking “pink ships,” aka the premium currency, waiting for the next banner, and hoping it was going to be something interesting.

This was announced a few days ago, and we are getting Ikora the Hidden… aka another retread of a character that you get for free by completing the campaign. This is the point where it really set in that NetEase is not devoting any new resources to this game. Effectively, we have gotten all of the characters that were introduced during the testing phase of the game, and now, instead of introducing brand new characters, we are getting reworked versions of some of the original characters. From what I can tell, it isn’t even that the new Ikora 2.0 is getting new weapons… reportedly, it is also still going to be a Single Shot Grenade Launcher and Rocket Launcher character. Which begs the question… what is even the point? Unfortunately, I think the answer is to give the illusion that new content is being added to the game, without requiring much in the way of resources to make it happen.

There were a number of articles that came out in September pegging the initial partial month earnings for the game being around $9 million dollars in revenue. This is apparently far less than NetEase was expecting, at least compared to other games like Diablo Immortal that earned $39 million dollars during the same period. I’ve said before that Destiny Rising is exceptionally generous with its gacha mechanics, and this seems to be translating into players not feeling like they need to spend money on it. I know I generally do the cheap monthly subscription option for around $5, and that feels like it generates enough premium currency to get me all of the characters that get released. Additional articles came out in December indicating that November revenue was down 80% over the September numbers. All of this is deeply sad because the game itself is pretty freaking fun, and I will be sad when it eventually shuffles off this mortal coil.

The bigger problem, however, is that players are disappearing. I’ve pretty consistently friended folks while playing the game and doing some of the harder content, and there are a lot of names and faces that I have not seen in months. Specifically, there is a mechanic that allows you to borrow characters from other players, and it really benefits you to friend some of those whales out there that are getting maxed-out characters off every banner. The problem is, a lot of those Whales have disappeared as well. The first contacts I have in my list have been offline for 157 days… but some of the folks who were super active have been offline for over a month. It is getting noticeably harder to queue for anything because there are just not enough players actively playing the content. Generally speaking, the only time groups happen pretty easily is when both Ace and I are queueing together, which usually means we only need to pick up a third to make it happen.

In the middle of October, we got the “Threats from Beyond” teaser trailer that seemed to indicate that in 2026, we were getting some significant expansion of the game. However, as time passes, I am starting to question this. It shows our character in a ship travelling off-world, but the big tease is Crota, which we have already gotten access to through some sort of time gate, allowing us to travel to the Destiny 1/2 universe and face them. I think one of the biggest challenges to the game is that we effectively still only have three play areas… the social hub of Haven, the Jiangshi Metro, and Red Sea Rift… all of which are located on Earth. A huge part of Destiny is traveling to other planets in our solar system, and it feels weird that we are this many months past the release of the game and have gotten no new patrol areas to explore. Technically, we have visited the moon through story content, but it isn’t an area we can actually explore.

Speaking of which… that “story” content is quite possibly the most laughable content I have ever experienced in a game like this. We are getting a series of quests labelled “Obsidian Secrets”, all of which are comprised of a couple of hologram conversations that we witness as the player, but have no interaction with. The first ones were extremely bad because apparently they could not get back the voice actor for Radegast, and instead of dialogue… we just got grunts each time he was saying his lines. Now it is mostly Felwinter talking to random people, and for all I know, they might be AI voices. It seems like it is teasing a bunch of elements from the existence of Rasputin, Clovis Bray, SIVA, and The Splicers, and also indicating that likely the Hive have infected our moon and not just the one from the alternate reality. However, I am not sure this is actually going anywhere.

It feels like maybe there was a plan to release some large content drop in 2026, but things are being scaled back. This is seen in the shitty quality of the quest missions we are getting, and how they are not really using any new assets and are mostly just hologram cutscenes with limited animation. This is also seen in the fact that our last two character banners have been reworks of original launch characters with limited cosmetic changes. It seems as though Destiny Rising is not the cash cow that NetEase hoped for, and as a result, they are bleeding it of the resources needed to actually make enough change to keep the players engaged. Gacha players expect something new and fresh coming around the corner every few weeks, and while we have gotten a few new game modes and a recurring sequence of the same events over and over, it might just not be enough to keep players for long. All of this is deeply sad to me, someone who really enjoys the gameplay.

Ace and I have already begun talking about what game we will be trying to play next for our “sibling time” routines. I figure by the end of this year, Destiny Rising will be sunset, because it feels like we have been herded into the pasture that is “maintenance mode” without actually ever admitting it.

Snowmageddon and Livingroom Rain

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Good Morning Folks! Hopefully yall are surviving Snowmageddon 2026. For the most part I have stayed in out of the mess. I had plenty of food, and so long as power stayed on I was going to be good. We got somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten inches. The snow was so dry that drifts were pretty rampant so it was really hard to tell an actual estimate, but I know when I was clearing my jeep yesterday and making a path so I could get out today for an appointment, it was coming up to mid calf high at times. I cleared the front porch enough that I could start putting food out for the outdoor kitties as well. I’ve not seen Tripod, but in the past when we have had cold snaps like this she has an underground borough system that she crawls down into. For years we had bunnies in our backyard prior to Tripod taking up residence there, and I think she has been using their underground warrens.

Things have mostly been okay… save for the fact that it has been raining in my livingroom. This is a problem that I had hoped we solved about three months ago when the roofers came out to work on the flashing at the top of the roof. My guess is that the snow sitting up there has basically been on top of wherever the leak starts, and then heat rising up through the roof is melting it. Essentially as far as we have been able to guess it runs down under the shingles and then finds a way into the house in the middle of the livingroom, dripping out onto this cross beam, and then down onto the ceiling fan before ultimately hitting the floor. Sadly the leak does not come down in a single spot, so essentially I just have to put towels out. It had stopped mid day yesterday, but then started up again late last night as things started to re-freeze and was still going whenever I went to bed. It stopped at some point over night because it is not going this morning. I’ve called the roofers to be on the list for after this is all over, but for now there is not a whole hell of a lot I can do. I have some IKEA bathmats and some towels down to soak up the water…. which I will run a load in the washer once things have chilled a bit.

My folks I think got it worse north of me. This is their front yard and you can barely make out the wheelchair access ramp. My dad of course had already trudged a path out to his shop, because he spends most of his time there. I think more than anything he was checking on the cats, who stay overnight in there with a heater on. I never knew my Dad was as big of a softie for strays as he is, until later in life. Maybe I get my own attachment to street cats by genes. I got out yesterday and cleared the cars and a path out, and then was wondering why the hell everything hurt today. These are all activities that I do not normally have to do, so I guess it makes sense that everything feels like it aches in my chest and arms. I don’t even have a proper snow shovel, because this happens so infrequently. My old shovel was rusted through so I tossed it, and had not gotten around to getting a new one. I guess I will make that a bigger priority. Essentially I cleared what I cleared with one of those giant plastic yard rakes and a nylon bristled broom.

This weekend I spent a lot of time snuggled with cats and watching movies downstairs on the television. I will probably make a post tomorrow about some of the things that I watched. “The Librarian” reminded me that I have a Letterboxd account so if you do that thing feel free to follow and I will likely give you a follow back. I like keeping track of media consumption and previously my plex server log was the most reliable method up until this point. However that was flawed because when I was pulling together my movies of the year post… I completely somehow missed the existence of Sinners. I figure I will try and keep up with this similar to how I do Storygraph and Bookwyrm. Speaking of those two I really need to get back in the swing of reading, or at least listening to an audiobook while I do other things. I figure on the 29th with the launch of the Phrecia league it might be a good time to get back engaged.

Speaking of gaming… I played a heck of a lot of Destiny Rising this weekend. I was trying to keep all three accounts active, because we were having some bad luck finding strongholds. Yesterday morning we cleared the three that we had access to, but did not find the third until we were already logged in trying to clear the other two. Thanks to Jade Rabbit I have been playing Umeko a lot more on my alt accounts, and apparently doing well enough to regularly get MVP when I run some strikes. Essentially I am trying to get account two high enough so that I can get 3 charges of Iron Commander and can get my 60 Pinnacle done without running any strikes. Account three… at some point I just need to put my head down and push through the campaign because I have not even unlocked the second planet.

Last night I played a bit of Path of Exile II, especially since Kodra has been talking about it quite a bit. I know come the 29th I will be over in Path of Exile and playing the new Legacy of Phrecia event, but in the meantime I am hopping around and making things explode in POE2. For Phrecia I am all over the place on what to play. Right now I am looking at either doing something akin to my Ice Trap of Hollowness build, a Blind Prophet bow traps, or Poison Minions. Pohx is going for a life stacking Righteous Fire build, but it is going to require a lot of gear to make it work. I had fun with RF Scavenger last time but I also needed a mageblood to make it work, and I am not sure if I want to push that hard. It sort of annoys me that there has not been a lot of fresh theorycrafting for builds within the POE community. Everyone seems to be focused on currency strats… which will fucking sort themselves out pending you have a good build.

Anyways! I hope you have fared well during the winter onslaught. I hope my livingroom rain comes to a close finally, and I hope todays tests go well and they don’t find anything else wrong with me. I am deeply scared about everything that is going on right now with cancer diagnosis and still not having much information. I will hopefully make it through this however.

Bolstered Breachlords

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Good Morning Folks. Today we mostly return to our regularly scheduled gaming content. I’ve been playing an awful lot of Path of Exile, mostly because I feel like I am maybe done with Path of Exile II for the moment. My jumpy Fire Bear build works amazingly well, and has completed most of the content in the game except for the most tryhard hardcore content. I have no real interest in doing any of that, just like I have never had much interest in doing it in Path of Exile. So instead I have shifted gears to working specifically on trying to get 34 of 40 Challenges in the Keepers of the Flame league. Since my Righteous Fire Chieftain is pretty much as blinged out as I can get him…. I have opted to start working a bit on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, which was not a thing… prior to me doing it I think. It has been freaking potent as far as characters go and I would honestly do this over and over if I had the option. Unfortunately a lot of the power of the build is coming from Foulborn Uniques, specifically the double explode Berek’s Respite. I hope this shit goes core.

I had been trying to finish the challenge that requires you to run 50000 quant worth of maps. However on a whim I decided to see just how well my Ice Trapper could do at the Bolstered Breachlords challenge. I had knocked out one of the three conditions, and I figured since I do so well at Hive Fortresses I might as well give it a shot. The thing about the Ice Trap build is that it essentially freezes the entire damned screen. You know what is really good defensively? Freezing the entire screen when you are facing a boss. Sure enough I was able to effectively keep the “It that was” bosses locked down for the entire fight and kept them from firing off any of the specific abilities that I was not supposed to get hit by. After my second hive brain, I managed to complete Bolstered Breachlords and with it my 34th challenge of the league. I am not sure if I am going to try and knock out any more challenges at this point.

The real thing that I am chasing is getting the same sized totem pole for my hideout. I have been collecting totem poles since the Sanctum league, and when Necropolis league happened I was able to get 34 of 40 challenges. After that it has sort of set a benchmark for me in my league journey, and now that is my ultimate goal is to be able to get the same size as I have previously gotten. I doubt I will ever be a 40 of 40 andy, at least not without paying for some of the ubers… which is not a thing that I want to do. Please note when I talk about paying for carries in Path of Exile, we are not talking about real world money. There is a thriving business of people who make bossing specific characters and then spend the entire league doing nothing but carries for Chaos or Divine Orbs. There are a lot of places where you can get access to this but the most common is The Forbiddden Trove discord. I specifically hate doing The Maven fight. I CAN do it… have done it more than once… but I hate the fucking “simon says” round and as a result I almost always pay for that carry to get my last voidstone.

In my travels of completing my last challenge of the league I happened to get a Hinekora’s Lock to drop, and these were at that time going for 147 Divine Orbs. I don’t really NEED the Divines right now since I am winding down the league, but I figured I would rather than the Divines in standard than the Lock. For reference at this point in the league a Lock effectively sells for Mageblood money. It is not like I need a Mageblood for anything however, because I do not want to shuffle the gear on either of my characters to try and make room for it. I still stand by my statement that a Mageblood is the least interest of the high priced items, because it mostly just allows you to cheat things on your build, and doesn’t really add anything interesting to the mix. Given the choice I will always build around a Headhunter instead, because it actually does something interesting mechanically. Though in truth I rarely play the type of builds that can benefit from either of those.

In other Path of News… we are getting a redo of The Legacy of Phrecia event and I am pretty pumped about it. Instead of using Standard as the baseline we are getting all of the bells and whistles that come with the 3.27 Keepers of the Flame league. Phrecia was one of my favorite events last year, and honestly it was hype enough that I put it on my games of the year list. Essentially every normal ascendancy is replaced by 19 new alternative ascendancies, and what is wild about this version is that we will also have the new bloodline ascendancies… which will create some truly wild combinations. I have no clue what I am going to be playing, because I am waiting on the patch notes to drop that explain some of the updates that rebalance the state of things in the last running of this event. Everyone is assuming this will mean some nerfs for Scavenger and Ancestral Commander because they dominated the last round. Scavenger for example made it trivial to get 90% of physical damage converted to elemental damage, because you could stack that cloak of flame node with an actual cloak of flame. Anyways this one starts on the 29th and I am fully expecting to be mainlining this event for awhile.

Last night I spent a bit of time in Destiny Rising, because due to all of the shit going on in my life we did not get to do our normal “Sibling Time” night on Tuesday. We knocked out a couple of rounds of Grandmasters, and unfortunately learned the lesson that you can in fact run with characters that have run out of stamina… but you do not get the Grandmaster rewards. We got enough to Calamity Ops to not be relegated, which we are calling good and then finished up with some Morgran’s Hunt. I will still need to do another 5 key run, but that should be easy enough before the reset. We have found two Strongholds for the week, but I know I have expended resources on three accounts… so that is probably all we are going to find. I know I need to spend some time running The Expanse this weekend so I can get some fruit and progress for the upcoming reset next week.

As far as the other news in my life… I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support that I have received. It is honestly overwhelming. I had a bit of a nervous breakdown yesterday at one point when out of the blue and without warning I was scheduled for two diagnostic tests that I do not remember the doctor mentioning. I of course immediately expected the worst… but then later called their office only to find out that no they did not have the biopsy results back and that these were just part of the standard procedures to look for anything else that might be going on. I still know next to nothing other than I have cancer, and at some point it has to be removed. I am just hoping that the snowmageddon we have barrelling down on us, is such that I can get out Monday for those diagnostic tests. I am trying desperately to hold my shit together in the meantime while my nerves eat away at me. I go between being largely fine and resigned to whatever is going to happen, to being a basket case.

Death Portal

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Good Morning Folks! For those of you who are off for it or celebrate it, Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I’m choosing to celebrate it… by stacking up a bunch of appointments and then trying to speed run my way through them. So essentially I will be out and about this morning but I wanted to sit down and do my normal Monday morning summary blog post of the shenanigans that I got up to this weekend. It has become a bit of a tradition for myself, Ace, and Ammo to get together Sunday mornings and run whatever strongholds we have unlocked for the week in Destiny Rising. Sometimes if there is time we run whatever event happens to be going on. For example we knocked out a 5 key run of Morgran’s Hunt which is active currently. I enjoy these little group interludes greatly, and any time I can group with Ace and Ammo it is a joy.

In other Destiny Rising news, I have fully unlocked the Jade Rabbit exotic Scout Rifle on all three accounts. Since there are now several Scout Rifle specific characters in the game, this really goes a long way into making them feel more beneficial. Slapping this puppy on Umeko or Kabr 2.0 immediately makes them feel much more solid for group content. I do wish there was a way to change the element of these weapons, but alas that is not really a thing. Basically there is an event running currently that through doing daily content you can unlock this exotic and a skin for it, and if you have not played Destiny Rising in awhile you probably should pop in to get this while it is available. I am not sure if this is going to end up on the exotic shop or not, but at least on my free to play characters it is a massive pain in the ass to gain enough currency through the black market to buy any of these weapons.

I also spent quite a bit of time this weekend in Path of Exile 1. Essentially I am trying to grind out two more of the league challenges so that I can get the same 34 point totem pole that I have for the last several leagues. Essentially I set the focus on grinding out as many Originator influenced maps as I could because you need to run essentially 200 affixes worth of content divided up in as many different ways as possible. If I were doing this with maximum efficiency, I would have made sure I was running only eight mod maps… but I did not do this thing. So a lot of the maps I ran were somewhere in the five or six mod territory making it take significantly more maps in total to grind this out. Essentially I just put my head down and ground until I came out the other end. I did have to snap up some maps off the market and it seems like the going rate for originator influenced anything is around 5-10 chaos each.

Now that I have completed that difficult grind, I am back to just running maps as fast as I can and have chosen to do so on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, The character is a heck of a lot of fun, and does a much better job at dealing with the Breach Fortress maps than Righteous Fire did, because I am blowing up most of the screen at all times and also freezing it. Essentially the grind I am working towards is Quality Quandry and I am sitting at 39886 or 50000. Basically going forward I need to run max quality on my maps, which then combines with 15% from the tree, and 20% from running four sacrifice fragments. Regardless…. it is going to just require grinding out a bunch of maps and is honestly the perfect idle activity while listening to an audiobook, podcast, or youtube video. There is the additional side benefit of throwing levels on my elementalist while doing it.

One of the things that I learned this weekend is that you can right click your world and edit it after having created it. This grants access to a few things, for example you can slow down or speed up the day/night cycle. More importantly you can completely disable falling damage and completely disable the death penalty that causes you to lose items on death. I absolutely did these things because I was dying an awful lot and it was annoying me to lose so much stuff in the process. There is one thing that is extremely overpowered in this game, and that is any kind of monster that can poison you. Your health just plummets almost instantly from the damage over time effect. So I figured by disabling the item penalties I am way more free to roam around and run amok. I don’t play games for the challenge of them, I play games for the fun… and not losing shit on death makes things more enjoyable to me personally.

I’ve started on some semblance of a permanent base. There is a floating rock not too far from my original spawn point and I built a staircase up the side of it and then began flattening the top so that I could build a platform. This is essentially going to be my resource sink for awhile as I keep dragging rock of various sorts up here to start building away at a final creation. Probably the most important aspect is creating an optimized crafting area so that I have a bunch of storage chests that are all accessible by each of the machines. I wish the game had some sort of automated filtering system when it comes to chests, or at least some way of labeling each chest for a specific purpose. There might be mods that do this thing, as there are a staggering number of mods already available. For example I installed one that gives you the name of any item your cursor is pointed at, and another one that creates lucky mining streaks for ore so that it will produce additional ore nodes near the one you are mining when it procs.

Not having to worry about losing everything on death, has made the entire process of exploring the world so much more enjoyable. Firstly I want to now hop down every hole that I see because I can’t take falling damage, and the worst thing that can happen to me is that I get ported back to my spawn point. Secondly the entire process of pushing myself deeper under the earth in search of resources is just a way more fun way to play the game than trying to be careful all the time. Combat is always a bit of a battle of attrition and in spite of using your abilities to the fullest, you are always going to take some damage which compounds the longer you are exploring. I think for me this is the ideal way to play, but your mileage may vary if you care about challenge. I also really like the fact that I can just kill myself anytime I get bored of exploring an area and go back to base… rather than having to painstakingly make my way back to the surface.

I hope you had a most excellent weekend. What did you get it up? Have you been playing Hytale as well? Drop me a line below.