Destiny 2

A blank screen is probably the hardest thing to confront when you are not exactly feeling up to doing a proper blog.  I am feeling a bit better than I was yesterday but still not really amazing.  In fact my fingers don’t seem to be in unison this morning and I keep having to backspace to fix issues where I hit the wrong letter in the wrong order.  As such be warned there are probably going to be a bunch of spelling errors.  For much of my day off I was dealing with email that never seems to stop even when I am out of the office, and for whatever reason yesterdays volume seemed to be more extreme than normal.  However in between the email arrival sounds I sat on the sofa playing Destiny 2 and watching a marathon of American Pickers on History Channel.  I grew up as an only child and my default mechanism for not feeling alone is to turn on the television and largely use it as background noise.  Given that for the most part I had whittled down all of the engram options for the Titan I spent my time on the Hunter working on pushing its level up enough to someday be relevant.

By the time the PC version of Destiny 2 released… I had already ground up three characters to the then level cap of 305 light and struggled to do the same on another platform.  As such my Hunter and Warlock have long been neglected with both having completely the Red War campaign but nothing past that point.  As such I worked my way through the Curse of Osiris content and a few missions into Warmind yesterday when I finally decided to start pushing the story instead of doing nothing but public events on Titan.  I still stand by that as an amazing way to level, because I have a stack of token to turn in on that destination if I ever get this character up high enough to make use of them.  There is something relaxing about playing Destiny as a whole and I can happily run loops around a planet because the moment to moment game play feels like an extension of my mind with little to know translation involved.  I can just perform the actions that I want to without thinking about doing it… the only challenge is getting used to the three vastly different jump patterns.  I still am of the firm belief that the Titan jump is the best, but pretty much every other class devotee would fight me on that.

Past that I spent a bit more time running around in Final Fantasy XIV and doing some more Palace of the Dead.  It is like I suddenly forgot that no one runs anything higher than 51-60…  because I kept trying to figure out why my 91-100 queue was so damned long.  Once I switched up my tactics and started pushing the 51 bracket over and over the progress sped up significantly.  The only negative is that I had a bunch of runs where we encountered no hidden treasures along the way.  One of my favorite things about Palace of the Dead was how often I wound up with interesting transmog bits as a result.  I am looking forward to pushing the Dark Knight high enough to be able to get into Heaven on High to see if there are also interesting transmog bits there as well.  I figure I will grind up through the brackets at least once to be able to unlock everything along the way.  I remember in Palace you needed to have beaten 100 to turn in any of the weapons, and I figure Heaven does the same shtick.

Lastly I didn’t share this in yesterdays post because I am not entirely sure what I am doing with it.  However I figure since it is a slow morning I will talk a bit about it here.  I had this weird revelation when someone jokingly referred to me as “Old Man Bel” that all three words had three characters and could be stacked in a pleasing pattern.  So while I was fiddling with making all of the sidebar images this weekend I also knocked this out.  I am not entirely sure what I am going to do with it, but I made it so I thought I would share it.  The illustration behind the lettering is of course by the amazing AmmosArt, and I talked a bit about her ESO Bel commission from awhile back.  I have more commissions that I want to get made, especially a Monster Hunter Belghast but I have to sort out exactly what weapon I want to be using and which of my armor sets to have equipped…  the truth is probably my favorite look is a weird mix of the Dober set and the original Samurai layered armor.  Like I said I have no clue what will happen with this branding, especially since I don’t actually stream on a regular basis.  That is still something I hope to do more of, but I find myself completely out of spoons most nights by the time I get home… so much so that for the better part of this year I have completely avoided voice chat in any form.  It doesn’t help that the majority of my crew are time shifted by 2 hours… and are getting online as I am going to bed.  Regardless I did a thing and I am sharing a thing.

Over the last few nights I have been super engaged with the start of the new Destiny 2 season.  One of the things I dig so much about it is how I can focus in on a different activity each night and vary up what I am doing…  but still enjoy whatever it is that I am doing.  I am not so much into the Crucible so I have not touched that this week yet, but one night I focused on the Planetary Flashpoint, another I really focused on Gambit, and last night for example I mostly focused on completing stuff in the Dreaming City including a bunch of Blind Well.  At some point I am sure I will at least do 3 strikes and 3 heroic story missions to get the powerful engrams included.  The only complaint I have to be honest is the fact that I keep getting Helmets instead of pieces of 600 gear that I actually still need for a given slot.

One of the things that came up in my little social community was some comments about loot boxes and how a friend of mine did not like the Destiny 2 implementation.  On one level yeah… it is less than optimal, but after living with it for awhile and having them tweak the formula… I no longer feel it is anywhere near as heinous as some of the loot box schemes I have seen.  What changed is there are a bunch of tweaks that were made, not the least of which is the fact that once you have earned an item you can always go into your collections tab.  This is any weapons that are static rolls, so basically anything pre-forsaken…  any ghosts, sparrows, ships, shaders, etc so essentially anything has less need for permanence which is making me way more liberal at scrapping things.  As a result I almost always have a decent balance of Dust… which you can see in the above picture is like 6044.  This morning I opened one of the Bright Engrams and got a skin for one of the Titan exotics, 3 shaders, and a bounty note.  The skin could be scrapped but I have not collected it yet so that was not going to happen, the shaders scrap at around 10 dust per… and the bounty note is turned in for Tess Everis specific bounties that reward glimmer and dust.

Essentially I feel like the game is giving us a bunch of options to get cash shop goods without spending any real world money.  There is always the problem that everything coming from a Bright Engram is super random…  but that is mitigated by the fact that each week during a given season Tess is offering a bunch of items for direct purchase.  Last week they had a ton of the exotic items but this week it looks like they are mostly selling legendary stuff…  2 emotes, 2 sparrows, 2 ships, 1 ghost shell, one armor piece and a couple of the exotic weapon skins.  Basically this helps to mitigate the randomness of the engrams and allows you to just straight out buy the item you were wanting.  Unfortunately this also means you need to be logging in each week to check out and see if Tess is selling that one thing you really wanted.

In a night of casual play I tend to get one or two engrams as the bar feels like it fills way faster than it used to.  You can see in the above shot that I am pretty damned close to getting one, and that happened to be the one I opened this morning and screenshot its contents.  One night this week I got 3, and last weekend there was a really heavy play day that I got four of them in a single day.  Essentially I am saying that they are way more generous with said loot baubles, at least compared to how it felt when the game initially launched.  This isn’t a “Belghast Luck” thing because experience game is experience gain for everyone, and sure maybe the fact that the first engram I opened this season gave me the sweet ghost rider sparrow…  is luck.  Anyways I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the cash shop in Destiny 2 and how it has gone from really horrible… to completely manageable.  Having a cash shop in a game is always going to incur some problems, but the tweaks they have made since launch have turned this one into a completely manageable situation.  The biggest change for me personally was when I realized I could re-buy shaders… which has made me way more cool with scrapping them knowing that if I really want a specific color I can buy it again.

For the last few days I have been on the cusp of coming down with something I think, but the problem is my schedule does not really allow me to take a day off right now to recuperate.  If I were to take off right now, deadlines would suffer… so as a result I have been taking some over the counter stuff to try and limp along until I can collapse.  Last night however I probably should not have taken that NyQuil, because this morning…  I am groggy as hell.  Last night however was the beginning of the 5th season of Destiny 2 and it seems like they are mixing things up a bit.  For the last few seasons in Diablo 3 there has been an overarching theme to a new season… and it seems like maybe Bungie is borrowing this concept.  The latest “This Week At Bungie” blog post goes into more detail about this, but there is a fairly packed roadmap content wise that we can look forward to.

As far as last night…  I focused on starting the Pinnacle Weapon quests that I actually feel like I have a shot at getting before the end of the season.

Pinnacle Weapons are more or less a unique weapon that you can grind for during the season.  There is one tied to Vanguard Strikes, another tied to the Gambit event, and another tied to how far progressed you make it rank wise in the Crucible.  Given that I love Autorifles because I am a noob…  I decided to spend a good deal of last night working on trying to get the Gambit based weapon called Breakneck.  I think in part I just like the old world feel of the weapons that The Drifter offers.  As you can see you need to play a minimum of 40 matches of Gambit, and also do a bunch of other things in the process.  Now my hope is that by the time I have played my 40… I will have long since completed the other objectives.  My goal is to play a handful of rounds of Gambit and run a few Strikes every night to begin whittling away at this objective over time.  The truth is that will probably hold for a bit and then I will spend a weekend grinding nothing but that activity so I can get the weapon.

With a new season, comes a new set of cash shop engrams… and throughout the night last night I unlocked four of these…  one of which happening to give me this sweet Ghostrider themed sparrow.  I also pulled an exotic ship that is themed after Warmind/SIVA but it isn’t anywhere near as cool looking.  This however immediately became my new main sparrow as I ride around on flaming nonsense.  All it is missing is a bunch of skulls.  I really like the Scorn as a faction, and I love how all of their tech seems even more improvised than even that of the Fallen.  All in all it was a good night and a largely quiet one as I slowly whittled away at collecting powerful and prime engrams.  I have finally reached the point where I am pretty regularly getting 600 light items…  so my hope is in the next few days to be able to hit that item cap before Black Armory bumps it up by 50 again.  It really is a great time to be playing Destiny 2.

If you prefer to consume this information from a Bungie Vidoc… they also have you taken care of as a nice one released yesterday attempting to differentiate between the content players will be getting for free and the content locked behind the Annual Pass.