Destiny 2

Last night I did not join in FFXIV Eureka shenanigans, largely because I was not feeling terribly sociable.  This is was and will probably continue to be a trying week, as is often the case when we come back from a significant break.  In my case I was out five days, and while I spent a good chunk of the first day at the hospital…  it was still enough time to get thoroughly out of the habit of going to work on a regular basis.  Instead I spent my night roaming around in Destiny 2 and doing puttering sort of activities, in part because I had knocked down the vast majority of the major stuff over the weekend.  The thing I did not realize however is that yesterday was also the final day of the season, and I am a little bummed out that this was apparently the first season that Greysky Armada will not have maxed out guild rank… and will not be earning the banner pole.  I myself have done next to nothing to contribute to this, so in the grand scheme of things I am okay with this… just a little sad.

Instead of doing things on my Titan main, I opted to instead piddle around on my Hunter who has not really been dusted off since the launch of Curse of Osiris.  It is really weird to have the start of three different content blocks…  Curse of Osiris, Warmind, and Forsaken all on the director map.  I play this game incorrectly… and what I mean by that is my preference is to level to the new numerical cap before starting any of the story driven content.  My thought process is something like this…  if I grind the levels on something like strikes or heroic public events… I can use the story as a light leveling experience, meaning anything I happen to get along the way is actually useful gear instead of something that I immediately relegate to the shard bin.  This may or may not be worthwhile but it is the pattern that I find myself falling into over and over again.

Traditionally I have focused on doing nothing but Titan public events, since by the time you down one of them there is often times another one just about to spawn on the other half of that relatively small map.  With the advent of planetary bounties, I have started focusing on those instead and knocking out a full round of the planets that I have access to.  Each time you turn in one of the bounties it appears to be a significant jump in experience and as a result I am sitting at level 37 out of 50…  and wondering if the Black Armory is going to bump up both Light Level cap and Level Cap.  Grinding in Destiny is my jam, and I find it extremely peaceful to roam around and knock out patrols and public events.

This process has been bolstered by the fact that apparently the gun I ground for during the Halloween event, may not have a minimum level cap to equip or at least it is equipable at my lowest level which is 30.  I was swapping gear around through DIM…  and if you don’t know about Destiny Item Manager you should totally stop what you are doing and check it out.  Without really realizing what I was doing I swapped my 600 item level Horror Story over to my Hunter…  and it equipped without issue.  This means that immediately I started getting gear that is way higher than I probably should at the equivalent level.  Sure some of it isn’t necessarily usable due to level restrictions… but some of it is and as such this weapon that is an arguably worse version of the Origin Story…  serves as a light level booster.  Similarly I tried it out on my 289 Light Level Warlock… and once again I could equip it just fine.

With the opening of a brand new season….  I will likely be putting the Huntress to bed once again, however the sheer fact that I am interested in playing my alts tells you a lot about the improvement to the current state of Destiny 2.  When the PS4 version released I ground up all three of my classes to 305 light, and used them as a sort of spring board each week to help me level up my weapons…  which in turn then drug up the level of my armor.  With the PC release… I only had the oomph to get the three characters leveled… but never spent time gearing them other than the Titan.  I lost steam… and Curse of Osiris did not really help that, and at which point I seemingly became a player that only really played my main.  Now I am back in the mood to fiddle with the other classes and see what sorts of trouble I can get up to with them as well.  Essentially the desire to play is greater once more than the total package of content available to me on any one character…  which is saying an awful lot given that there are so many opportunities for Powerful/Prime engrams.

Like I have said before…  Destiny 2 is in its best state ever, and one that I feel probably rivals the state of Destiny 1 during Year 3 (and honestly the current state since it has largely been frozen in time).  If you have access to the game I highly suggest checking it out again.  If you have any questions or need help, feel free to holler at me through one of the many channels folks have to holler at me through.

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.

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.