Destiny 2

During the Iron Banner weekend Bungie ran a Double Valor event, and I managed to get two full resets and most of the way to a third. Now things get a little fuzzy, because I swear at some point I saw a note stating that this past weekend was a Gambit Double Infamy event, which caused me to focus in on playing an obsessive amount of Gambit Prime. Now at face value, it feels like it takes way longer to get through a match of Gambit Prime than it does a Crucible match. As a result the entire process of leveling your Infamy feels sluggish at best. So I opted to try and take advantage of whatever resources I happened to have to make it a better experience.

That said… I realized at some point last night that I don’t actually think there was ever a double Infamy event and I have no clue where I saw that stated. That means I ground a completely nonsense amount of Gambit and did in fact get the reset on my own. The reason behind this was that as part of the Notorious Hustle triumph that gates the 21% Delirium Heavy Machinegun I had to get a reset at some point during a season. I find it funny that I knocked out my multikills without issue and now have the Infamy Reset, but am still needing a bunch of Envoy and Primeval kills. I think this is in part because I have gotten randomed into a lot of groups stacked against clan teams lately.

For resetting my rank I picked up a really nice curated roll of the Trust Hand Cannon, which also had a nifty shader I had not seen applied to it called Gambit Chrome. In truth… I am more excited about unlocking a new shader than I am about picking up a curated hand cannon. It is an interesting build with Genesis and Explosive rounds, and I plan on playing around with it a bit in the crucible. Too bad it is not void damage to help out with the Thorn quest. Speaking of which that is probably going to be my next big nonsense push, in order to try and knock that out. I did however get the Lumina quest to 78% buy running around with rose equipped during most of my Gambit matches. That is actually a shockingly good Hand Cannon.

All of the time spent in Gambit allowed me to finish out this seasons Gambit Pinnacle weapon the Exit Strategy. I’ve yet to spend any time playing with it, but I figure at some point I will give it a shot. I love my SMBs but I tend to prefer them in the secondary slot with an energy affix rather than kinetic ones. I may play a few matches with Trust in my energy slot and Exit Strategy in my kinetic, which is effectively a similar loadout to what I have been running of late. SMBs have more or less replaced shotguns for me because they can burn things down super fast but don’t run into the ammunition woes that Shotguns do during strikes. I have an Iron Banner SMB with High Caliber rounds which is nice for staggering out a major while I burn it down.

I think I talked about this a bit yesterday, but I hit a weird streak where Gambit was paying out like a way too loose slot machine. I managed to pick up three of this exact weapon within the span of two matches. I mean the curated roll is fine, I like that it has multi-kill clip on it… I am ambivalent to it having slideways since I am not used to sliding a ton in battle. Again it serves the problem of being a kinetic slot SMB when I am not sued to using them in that slot normally, but I could mix things up a bit. Deconstructing the spares however was a good source of materials.

Also as I said before I picked up seven different exotics dropping from random majors in Gambit. I’ve become another one of those Titans running around with the One-Eyed Mask equipped. I gotta say it is damned handy in Gambit for finding where the invaders are. There are a lot of times you get tagged by someone while running across the map and One-Eyed Mask does an excellent job of drawing a giant bullseye on them so you can go hunt them down. I still think it was just weird that I hit a spot in the randomizer where the game was paying out significantly. I wish I could somehow get banshee on the other hand to keep handing me the same three weapons.

All in all it was a fun grind, and I have reached a point where I like Gambit Prime a lot better than I realized. I have an inventory full of synths and I need to sort out what exactly to do with them. I should really play some Reckoning so I can get a full set of the Reaper armor given that apparently that is the role I play the most often in Gambit Prime. I like burning down those High Value targets. I wish I was a little better at invading and also killing invaders, but apparently I spend the least amount of time picking up large quantities of motes. This week however… is going to be all about the Festival of the Lost and getting myself a Braytech Werewolf.

For several weeks this thing has been building behind Ikora Rey and I find it super interesting. I have started noticing other changes. Like at the Ramen shop there are traditionally a few people eating there, but last night they were gone. I am not sure if this is on some sort of a cycle and I just always happened to be walking by when they were sitting there or if this is something changing as a result of the building happening. I noticed some other NPCs that I swore were in one specific place moved somewhere else. It is subtle but sorta cool to see, and I am assuming that the gate we are building is somehow going to be used in conjunction with the conclusion of the Season of the Undying.

Next reset brings us back the Festival of the Lost and it seems like they are bringing back something that started with last years. There is a really cool mode called the Haunted Forest, which is essentially the infinite forest but dark… and the goal is to see how many loops you can finish in 15 minutes. Your rewards are increased by the number of loops your group can complete in that time. Last year they introduced the Horror Show auto rifle that dropped fully masterworked and at Maximum Light, and it seems like they are bringing this concept back. The Braytech Werewolf gun shown in the thumbnail seems to be a version of the Winter Wolf weapon Anna Bray rewards.

I wound up playing a good deal of Gambit Prime last night, as I am trying to get my Infamy up high enough to do a reset and knock out the machine gun pinnacle weapon that I have had in my quest log for awhile. I also find Gambit weirdly relaxing and was ultimately working on both a Werner bounty and trying to unlock the Gambit Powerful award for the week. I’m up to Heroic III which means I need to get through Fabled 1-III, Mythic 1-III and Legend in order to get that reset. Gambit takes way longer than Crucible so the grind feels so much slower than it did last week.

I am now at level 70 on the seasonal journey, and I have a feeling that I won’t have much trouble hitting 100 by the end of the season. This is the only part of this process that I really don’t like is that it feels like I need to be playing Destiny 2 as my primary game in order to get full benefit. I want the items that are available along the path and as such I am playing pretty constantly to make sure I can get them all. I will say that with all of the XP bonuses the levels come way faster as you go, but it also sorta makes you always doing something to help it out. Like if I am running around in the world and I see one of those “Kill A Bunch of Stuff” patrols, I am always going to pick it up because it is super easy to complete and worth a bunch of XP. Similarly I am always trying to make sure I have a bunch of bounties available.

I noticed that Savathun’s Song is this weeks Nightfall, so I think my next grind is going to be running the strike trying to get Duty Bound. I love the look of this weapon because it looks like quite possibly the most Warhammer 40k gun available in the game. I have no clue if it is even good but I want to own a copy, and as a result I am hoping to run the strike a bunch in the Ordeal playlist in an attempt to get it to drop. I’ve had pretty good luck so far getting the strike specific drops, but having said that I will run this thirty times with no luck. The above screenshot is just one I found online to show off the weapon and it appears that they have applied the Leviathan shader to it.

Speaking of Leviathan… I would really like to get through that place. I have access to ways of running it and just getting carried through it. However I would far rather build a super casual raid team and work our way through it. We got pretty close to callus but I think it was the dexterity check of running the orb around the ring that ultimately killed us. We have a handful of people now playing but if you are among my mutuals out there… and are interested in this nonsense hit me up. The goal would be to find a week night and run for a few hours until we down Leviathan and the six other raids and lairs that exist in the game right now. I think for me Thursday nights are probably the best option, but I am open to negotiation.

Sometimes your evening doesn’t go exactly as planned. Last night was absolutely one of those. I had every intent to hunker down and grind out Crucible until I made a significant dent in the Thorn quest line. That did not happen… in fact I didn’t even make three games before I was looking for something else to do. Ultimately I think there are a bunch of issues. Firstly I am not that great of a PVP player and it shows when I am trying to get kills that push me outside of my comfort zone. I am not normally a Hand Cannon player, and even then I am not normally one who uses the Omolon style energy hand cannons. Most of the ones that I have that are void fall into that category.

Squirrel suggested that I use the Thin Line hand cannon, but I am guessing at some point I tried it and didn’t like it because I only had one version of it sitting in my vault. Triple Tap and Outlaw is not exactly optimal for what I would be doing with it, but I gave it a shot. Overall it felt okay in actually lining up targets and dealing damage but the low stability and low handling score made the entire experience feel sluggish. I also gave a shot to the Ikelos Hand Cannon that you get through the quest line and again it was in that faster firing archetype which meant you needed to land way more hits to actually pop off a Guardian.

Ultimately I gave up on the whole void thing and just wound up using The Last Word a bunch last night which seemed to be fairly successful in finishing off Guardians. The only challenge there is that this is really a close range engagement sort of weapon and I kept getting maps with extremely long sight lines. The meta feels stacked against Hand Cannons right now but I will eventually push through it. What I think this is going to mean is that my load out is going to be Last Word in my kinetic slot and maybe the Suros Iron Banner Void SMB in my secondary or a pulse rifle depending on the map. That way I am either getting Hand Cannon kills or Void kills… because apparently getting both at the same time feels awful. Ultimately I got 10% progress for the three games I played which I guess is okayish.

What I did instead was decide to hop over and play some Gambit and take advantage of the infamy bonus. Without really meaning to however I apparently completed the Chaperone quest line and now have a shotgun that I am likely never going to use! I did not exactly love this weapon in Destiny 1 and I doubt I am going to love it in Destiny 2. I guess you could run double shotguns easily since this fits neatly in your primary slot. That seems like misery however, but I am happy to have accidentally knocked out another exotic weapon quest.

At some point along the way I picked up a sweet ornament for the weapon… but it only serves to make me miss my invective. I realize why we are never going to get the ammunition regeneration weapons… but it doesn’t mean I don’t miss them an awful lot.

Sometimes I get stuck on things and I am not entirely sure why. For example I could have done a bunch of useful things last night prior to the reset… but instead I spent my time in Iron Banner trying to get wins on the Hunter. It either was not my night, I just suck at playing the hunter, or I kept running into some premade groups… or a combination of all three. I did manage to get two more wins before finally giving up on that achievement for the evening. I am not sure WHY completing the Iron Banner page suddenly became important to me last night but it seemingly did. I did manage to get 75 packages for the entirety of the event and a lot of gear that I will mull over and decide what to keep and what to shard.

At some point I swapped back to the Titan and worked my way through the material gathering phases of the Thorn quest. I finished the first step by doing a third nightfall and a single bounty on Io. That left me with the other two steps and I opted to take the PVP route for those… the first requiring me to get kills on Titans and I managed that in a single round of Iron Banner because I happened to be on a stacked team full of Titans. The next step was to get Hunter kills and for some reason it was just Titan and Warlock night, and I kept getting teams with only a single Hunter on them. As such I think it took me a total of 4 Iron Banner matches to rack up enough kills to move things forward to the most painful step.

In this step as I understand it there is a hidden 500 point system that is instead represented as a percentage bar. You earn the absolute most points from a Void Hand Cannon streak while in either Competitive or Iron Banner. So there are sorta multiple components to the math behind this but essentially you can move the bar forward with either Void Weapon kills or Hand Cannon Kills. Ideally the weapon everyone keeps pointing towards is the Kindled Orchid… of which I don’t exactly have a stellar roll and it has been wasting away in my vault. I could in theory try and get a better roll, but they really need to rework the way the whole forge system operates. It seems way the hell too difficult to get a Ballistics Log each week.

Thankfully however the new Vex Incursion event has a fairly reasonable option as well. As it stands the best version of the Optative that I currently have is one with Accurized Rounds, Outlaw and Zen Moment. The version that I would be chasing if I so decide to do this nonsense would be one with Rapid Hit and Kill Clip since that appears to be the best combo in my eyes available on the weapon. I do have one with Rapid Hit and Mulligan that might be an option as well. Regardless of what I use… this is going to be a really long grind to go from the 12% I am sitting at as of last night to 100%. I guess I am going to be doing a lot of crucible with Last Word in my kinetic slot, Optative in my energy slot, Hammerhead in my heavy slot and while playing a Sentinel Titan in an attempt to max out the possible point gain.