Destiny 2 Archives - Page 24 of 44 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Packed Weekend

November 5, 2018 by Belghast

I was off Friday and as a result did something that I had been putting off for far too long. For quite some time now I have had a new case that I needed to shift my main gaming machine into… so that I had enough room to slot the 1080 ti graphics card I picked up for cheap. The problem is it has been a sequence of two things… firstly not wanting to have my machine down on the weekends when I spent most of my time using it and doing things like recording AggroChat. Secondly I have been dealing with some nasty bouts of anxiety and the little voice in my head kept telling me that I would screw something up and be without a gaming machine while I tried to fix it. As a result I have used the powers of avoidance to keep kicking that can down the road until finally last Friday I took care of it. It took me about three hours to gut everything from my previous case and install everything fresh in the new case… with time in between to clean the components before seating them again.

Admittedly I was watching Netflix so was probably greatly slowed down by that as well, but regardless by noon-ish I was up and running and wondering why the hell I waited so long. As is tradition when I get new hardware… I launch what feels like every game I have just to see what it looks like on the highest resolutions. I now have officially entered the realm of 4k gaming… and it is glorious. Sadly these scaled screenshots won’t really do it any justice… but seeing it in motion is gorgeous. The other interesting thing I found out this weekend is that my beloved Parsec client, takes a 4K signal from my machine upstairs… scales it dynamically down to 1080p and delivers it to the laptop without losing a lot of the fine detail. The end result looks like I am running 1080p super sampled to 4k and still providing a much nicer experience than just playing the games at 1080p all without noticeable issues.

Another thing that happened this weekend is that I managed to get together with Tam and Kodra and play the Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. aka… stress test. At some point they sent all of us a few friend codes, and I shared one with a good friend and former coworker that was considering getting into the game. That left me with two codes t hat I offered up to the AggroChat members. Luckily the test times on Saturday happened at a time we could all be online and… while I was enjoying the game solo, it really shines with friends. Just the interaction between three vastly different play styles made it so we were constantly finding different interesting things to get engaged with. I would find a chest and the other two would come over to see what was in it, or Kodra found a base that we could claim… that then lead to an event where we had to build up the defenses and fight off a wave of scorched trying to take it from us. The moment to moment gameplay and little doses of exploration was a glorious thing… and also it ran great at 4k without issues. I am really looking forward to being able to set up a private server for the AggroChat crew to roam around on.

I also spent a decent amount of my time in Destiny 2, and managed to get my light level up to 575 which seems reasonable. I’ve started getting 580 drops from Powerful/Prime Engrams, and I feel like soon the elevator to 600 will start to slow down a bit as has always been the case in Destiny. I am mostly logging in and piddling around and trying to accomplish something that will net me an engram or two but have not really been playing very seriously this week. It feels like there are just too many different things going on for me to really devote all of my resources towards any one of them. I have the desire to play… but the lack of focus to really push harder than I already am.

I still say failure shots in Monster Hunter World are among the most interesting. Right now the Kulve Taroth event is going on and I am trying to make sure I get in a few attempts each day so I can stock pile weapons. So far I have gotten a few really interesting things, but I am less shocked each time I get something cool than I was during the running over on PS4. At this point I have a few useful weapons for pretty much every slot, with the possible exception of Bow. For whatever reason Bows are extremely scarce, and I remember that being the case on Playstation 4 as well… similarly I always seem to get Heavy Bowguns instead of Light Bowguns. I do however have plenty of options to play around with, and I believe all of the items needed to make a full set of Kulve gear… minus the various Elder Dragon gems which I will have to farm later. My primary focus however is collecting the two sets of layered armor, which simply take repetition since the most tickets I have seen in a single run is 4.

Another thing I messed about with this weekend was the demo of World of Warcraft Classic. I started off playing a Tauren Warrior, which is legitimately the first character I ever created during the first stress test I got in back in 2004. However… Warriors about level 15 are miserable… and so is the Barrens… which were sort of this poorly thought out dumping ground of content. Instead I opted to also recreate Lodin my Dwarf hunter and spend time roaming around Westfall. I talk more at length about this on the podcast, but there are so many things that I remember… but only after seeing them in person. Like for example… I did not remember quest text scrolling as slow as it does. That said I now remember seeing out an addon to speed up quest text scrolling, and that was legitimately the first addon I ever installed. There are supposedly some tweaks you can make, but I am proud of blizzard in creating a way to legitimately play on a pseudo classic server with something resembling patch 1.12 on the client. I also applaud them for giving it to the players as part of their normal World of Warcraft subscription. I am likely going to play something up on a classic server, and I think it would be kinda cool to try some of the older content like Molten Core again.

Diablo was effectively the game of the weekend… for reasons other than what I am about to talk about. However I have been enjoying the hell out of playing Diablo 3 on the Switch, and wound up playing for quite a bit last night from bed. I’ve not spent a lot of time with a console version of Diablo in spite of having Reaper of Souls on the PS4, in part because if I have access to a console… I can just play the PC version of the game I have devoted so many hours to. However the switch is an interesting case because in theory I could drag it to work and play it over lunch, getting in some demon slaying on the go. All in all I have enjoying the experience of playing it with the switch, and while blizzon was going on I was largely playing this in docked mode while watching the streams.

As far as the other Diablo news… for the moment I am just going to link to our podcast from this weekend… because we spent the majority of the show talking about it. I have thoughts still that I will ultimately put into blog post form… in fact there were a few points during the weekend when I started drafting something in Google Docs, only to delete it all shortly after. For the moment I am disappointed in both Blizzard and the Diablo Community, but am generally okay with a Mobile Diablo existing because Dragalia Lost has proved to me that it might be something I would be interested in. It is going to take me a bit to work through my thoughts fully however because they are somewhat nuanced. For now however… this is already a massive post so closing things out.

Five Sixty

October 30, 2018 by Belghast

I had a really great night, largely because over the last few days I have allowed myself to break free of the turtle a bit and communicate with other people. Sunday this was me hanging out with Warenwolf doing some stuff in the Dreaming City. During the first part of last night it was me hanging out on Discord with my good friend Grace while we were doing completely different things. I am not exactly sure what she was up to but I spent my time running strikes and heroic story missions in Destiny 2 to knock out two more powerful engrams for the week. I’ve talked briefly about this but it really is so much easier to get geared now than it was before. There seem to be an endless supply of opportunities for Powerful/Prime engrams to drop. I am not sure what the mechanics are behind it, but I have a buff that says it allows for the dropping of Prime Engrams, and to the best of my knowledge in spite of getting several of them… I have never seen it disappear. Apparently there was something I did called “Prime Attunement” that gave me the buff but for me… it largely just showed up without me realizing it.

Later in the evening I got together with SquirrelPope who assisted with one of the quests that I had outstanding and taught me the ropes of the Ascendant Challenge much like Waren had with the Blind Well the night before. Apparently the game took my desire to get a Tigerspite to heart because I now have three of them… none of them sadly with the god roll. I’ve managed to get my light level up to 560 which is still a good ways off from the cap of 600… but nonetheless a lot of progress. I am still very much in the phase of using whatever gear happens to be the highest light level, and that is probably going to be the case for awhile since I figure the grind will slow down significantly at this point. I am not exactly sure when Prime and Powerful engrams stop giving the huge boost that they do now. I will admit a lot of my slingshotting level was was the fact that I picked up Horror Story at 600 light. At some point I will probably start working on my other classes and that slingshot will be similarly handy for them as well.

One of the things that I have to talk about briefly is how great the collections tab is. As you run through the world and get items to drop they flag as being collected. If said item is a static roll, aka a pre-forsaken item you can always reacquire it from the collections tab at a reasonable light level. Right now I am 560 light and everything in the collections tab is showing as 540 light for reference. There are tabs like this for armor, exotics, ghost shells, sparrows, ships… basically anything that takes up vault space that you may or may not need to keep forever. At some point I need to have a great cleaning of the vault as I shard tons of items that I can get back from the collections tab. Similarly I need to start trying to finish the sets, seeing as you can still get most of it from planetary vendors. There are a few items that I got on the console that I never managed to get on PC, that I would really like to add to my collection.

The Blind Well

October 29, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was largely about catching up on the Destiny 2 storyline and progressing to the official end game stuff… even though I had been at the level cap and slowly gaining gear for a bit. As I mentioned before, I somehow completely lost the main story quest thread, and did not realize that the quests themselves were being presented as adventures in the Forsaken Shore area. I have to confess that I largely ignore adventures… which is a thing I am ultimately going to have to stop doing given that they seem to be a way of unlocking upgrades for the new sub classes. So if I want to be the superest hammer bro with the superest hammer… I need to start doing them more often. Once I got the hang of it I enjoyed the whole choose your own adventure aspect of hunting down the six barons that are in no particular order. Each of the fights was fun, and a lot of them I failed miserably the first time… that is until I managed to catch on to whatever the gimmick of the fight happened to be.

Upon defeating the final boss of the expansion, you are sent on a sequence of events that ultimately reward you in unlocking a brand new patrol zone called the Dreaming City. The first two screenshots are from areas within this zone and while it is gorgeous… functionally it reminds me a lot more of the dreadnaught since there a bunch of little activities interwoven within the zones. I started working on bounties for Petra Venj which lead me to encounter an event called the Blind Well… which is finally that Court of Oryx/Archon’s Forge style event that I had been asking for. It however feels a lot more like the opening event of the Leviathan raid than either of those. It does however seemingly has the chance of dropping Last Wish raid weapons, because on one of the times through it I managed to get one to drop that I will talk about in a bit. Huge thanks to my friend Waren for helping me get through this, but it also seems like the sort of thing like Court of Oryx that once you coax people into summoning that you end up doing a bunch in a row. We did several Rank 2 and a couple of Rank 3 Wells before I needed to wander off and do other things.

Now I had heard a ton about the Tigerspite, and it was on the short list of weapons I wanted to get for certain. The highlight of the evening however was getting one to drop at 555 from Blind Well. Unfortunately this is way lower light than my Horror Story but I already love this weapon… so it is probably going to see a lot of play. I wish I had enough time to grind out another 600 Horror Story so I could use it as infusion fuel on this thing. Granted it is far from the best set of stat perks as mine rolled with Dynamic Sway Reduction and Under Pressure which takes an already accurate weapon and makes it feel like a laser beam. The “God Roll” seems to be Kill Clip and Outlaw, but the thing I have noticed in Year 2 Destiny 2 is that these randomized rolls… still feel good when you don’t get an ideal combination. I’ve encountered very few that were just complete garbage… and honestly its more than specific perks are just not that good… like Field Prep on anything but a sniper rifle or maybe a scout for example. While not necessarily hive themed… this design reminds me a bit of touch of malice.

Currently the highest I can manage to hit light level is 549.3 according to DIM. As it stands I think I have two more activities that reward powerful engrams… doing 2 more strikes and doing the Ascendant Challenge in the Dreaming City. I read up on that last night, but given it was Walking Dead night I didn’t make any attempts. Supposedly it is soloable… but I might try and coax someone into helping me through it this week. The strikes however should be easy enough to grind out whenever I get home tonight. Pending I get lucky, my hope is it pushes me to a solid 550 which is not bad for my first real week of paying attention to Forsaken content. I have no clue what level I need to be viable to raid based shenannigans and such. The Rank 3 Blind Well was a little on the tough side for example, but I sorta equated it to a Rank 3 Court of Oryx… which if you are not geared enough is doable but not easy either. I’ve been focusing heavily on getting acclimatized to Dreaming City, but I also feel like this is a bunch of stuff in Forsaken Shore that I have not seen either.

Horror Story

October 26, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I finished up the fragmented souls grind and picked up Horror Story, which is in fact as Squirrelpope suggested just a rebranding of The Origin Story. However that is perfectly fine with me considering that I really loved that weapon in Year 1. The biggest benefit of this weapon however is that it comes with baked in 600 light level… which had a significant boost in my gearing process. That is something I want to talk about briefly… gearing feels much better. Sure blues and purples by default drop at relatively low light levels like they did before. However there are so many more opportunities to get poweful engrams, in fact it seems like there is the daily ability to get something called a prime engram to drop out in the world while doing other activities or in the crucible. This also drops at a decent boost to your light levels allowing you to slowly ratchet that up in so many more ways than you were able to before.

In my travels last night I also managed to pick up a new copy of Go Figure, this time with Outlaw in stead of Zen Moment… which for a Pulse Rifle immediately makes it much better given that Zen Moment really doesn’t work that well for burst fired weapons. It still has High Caliber rounds and High Impact reserves so for all intents and purposes it is the same weapon with a single perk line swapped out. Unfortunately this dropped from a regular legendary engram and not one of the powerful/prime versions so it dropped at my then adjusted light level of 506.

The best light level that I can currently high is 527 since I am literally just getting started on the Forsaken grind. I’ve technically not even finished the storyline, largely because I am not entirely certain where I need to go with that. This is one of the problems with Forsaken is that you don’t have quite the clear story path as you did with previous content. Right now I have a milestone that says “hunt barons” but nothing really outlined on how I should go about doing that. This probably makes the content feel more organic for your average player, but for me… I tend to avoid doing quests like the plague so when I finally buckle down and start doing them… I want a big freaking blinking arrow pointing me in the right direction so I can get them over with and go back to nonsense free play.

Another thing that I messed around with was Dragon Quest XI last night, and I have a lot of issues with this game on the PC. The control scheme is not great… and what I mean by that is that while sure you can navigate mostly with WASD and Left Mouse click to attack… there are a bunch of other menus that drive on some other combination of keypresses. The problem with that is that the game has baked in reminders to tell you to press an Xbox controller button to do this or that, but it doesn’t actually update to tell you the equivalent keyboard command. Basically it is a poor console port, that while functionally struggles at actually doing things in a manner that PC gamers are used to.

Basically I have two options… grab a controller which isn’t super interesting to me… or spend a bunch of time remapping buttons. The other big issue that I have with the game is that it has a god awfully long intro sequence that is unskippable… and the first two times I attempted to get through it something happened which caused the game to crash out meaning that I had to set through the whole mess each time I tried to get into the game proper. The other big problem is that saving the game is super obtuse and apart from auto saves… requires you to pray at shrines to manually save. PC players traditionally expect that you can hit Esc to bring up some sort of a menu system… however in this game it brings up a prompt telling you that you are about to exit the game and lose all of your progress.

Ultimately… my suggestion if you are interested at all in Dragon Quest XI is just to get a console version. This is available on pretty much all of the consoles at this point, so save yourself the frustration of dealing with the poorly thought out PC port and play it on a platform it was actually intended for.