Destiny 2 Archives - Page 28 of 45 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Nothing Much to Say

March 28, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I feel like I don’t have an awful lot to talk about, but still feel obligated to say words and things. The last few nights have mostly been what I would refer to as maintenance gaming, where I log into something… do a few repeatable activities and then log right back out. The majority of this time has been spent in World of Warcraft since I apparently have set forth a goal of unlocking the alliance races which will involve copious amounts of reputation grinding. At this moment I am about 6500 out of 21000 towards exalted or some close equivalent in both of the necessary factions. At the suggestion of my friend Grace I have started hoarding faction tokens for the Darkmoon Faire buff, which admittedly is not a thing I have really partaken of in its modern format.

I still find it super annoying that the Alliance route to new races is way harder than the Horde route. As a “Mostly Alliance” player for most of my wow career I have always felt like Blizzard favored The Horde… not in the least because of the constant insistence that we should care deeply about Green Jesus. Weirdly enough however for the last while I have been almost exclusively playing The Horde and the character I am grinding up is my Orc Warrior not my Human one. There are certain things that just work easier on that side of the pond than the other… for example jumping the wall from the flightmaster to the Horde area in Dalaran is so much faster than having to fly all the way across the map to the Alliance area. Having a reasonable foothold on both continents is another nice point… with ways to get there quickly. Sure you can still use the Theramore boat as Alliance… but it feels weird to do so.

Grace had this idea of doing a sort of “raiding light” group one night a week that worked on trying to get the Mythic+ number as high as we could. So far however that is struggling to get off the ground given in our most immediate aggrochat crew we represent the only viable folks for this mission. I am heavily favoring Horde side since my Warrior there is 927 but most of the connections I would have to pull in people for nonsense are Alliance side. Over the coming days I might start reaching out to individuals that play horde side to see if they would be interested in shenanigans but for the moment the idea has taken root but not seen much progress.

As evidenced by the screenshot I used for this post I fired up Destiny last night and played around in it for a bit. The changes have made a lot of the weapons feel odd so in theory I will need to test everything out again to see what I do and do not like now. The fast rate of fire valkydyn that I am pictured holding above no longer feels that great. The general movement speed however does and it feels like Titan Skating is back to being a fairly viable thing once more. I am not sure if this is “just me” but I swear the grenade recharge rate was lowered once again, either that or I am still struggling to adjust to how generally slow that is. Even with double charges it was rare that it would actually be up when I wanted to use it while roaming around Mercury and doing events.

I miss Destiny 2, and more importantly I miss wanting to play it. I am not sure why I bounced so hard with the release of Curse of Osiris, and why I never actually managed to get any of the other classes in my stable through the story. Ultimately I was expecting something along the scope of The Taken King, and then was disappointed that we got something the scope of Dark Below instead. Additionally there just isn’t a grind I want to be doing there, because the weapons at least prior to yesterdays patch all sorta felt the same. Maybe now with the sandbox update there will be some reason to grind content to attempt to get masterworks for the things I want to be playing with.

The other side note is that I have started attempting to play some Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate over lunch, but quickly realized that if I want to do this thing I will need to leave the floor. We have a gaming area set up for folks to mostly play the WiiU that is hooked up there, but it does offer a bunch of really comfy chairs. Over lunch yesterday I attempted to camp out in one and do a few hunts, and within minutes had someone do a drive by and start up a conversation about some project we were working on. Basically now that I am 100% in the management world I cannot bump into someone without a conversation about something we need to deal with happening. Ultimately I like the concept of playing a little 3DS or Switch over lunch, but I need to find a hidey hole to go do this thing in.

The Good Grind

February 19, 2018 by Belghast

Over the last few days I have been thinking about where Monster Hunter World has succeeded and Destiny 2 has failed. I know this is probably a strange way to start off a post, but I am playing MHW the way that I fully expected to still be playing Destiny 2. If you add up the total time I have spent with the Destiny franchise across different platforms you wind up with 741 hours. Given that sort of track record I fully expected to be playing that game currently. That said I have missed two faction rallies, two iron banners and have not really even logged in during the current crimson doubles event. Sure I could be getting all manner of cosmetic gear from them… but the weapon and gear system just feels hollow given that I have collected most everything I am interested in using.

While I love the token loot system, Destiny 2 has a problem with not giving us a meaningful grind to be focused on. Doing event after event hoping to get a Masterwork Weapon or Piece of armor doesn’t really count. When I say meaningful grind I mean something that I can do on a nightly basis that is fun, but also feels like I am making progress towards some larger objective. In many ways the fickle nature of loot in Destiny 1 and the existence of things like the Court of Oryx and Archon’s Forge gave me something I could do… that felt like I was potentially moving in the direction of something that I wanted from the game. As it stands there are too few interesting weapon options and the watered down version of exotics no longer really make them worth chasing in the way we used to before.

It may simply be because I am playing on the PS4 with friends that I am drawing the conclusion… but as I play Monster Hunter World I think about the ways that it has given me this path to madness paved with little incremental rewards. When you kill or trap a Monster you are hunting you are showered with a bunch of monster parts… some of which are useful and some of which are not as useful. The thing is, regardless if I have 50 of an item… I am still sorta excited to see them because I know that eventually I might need to use them to craft some new weapon that I then have to upgrade up to the final version. I might suddenly decide that Hammer is awesome and then have to start building up my collection of weapons much the same as I do for my beloved Longsword.

I know that every thing I kill, and every object in the world that I loot is taking me towards some bigger goal. The number of times that I have had to go out lately and farm herbs… one of literally the first items you encounter in the game… is shocking given that I am dealing with a completely different set of monsters than I did back then. However it doesn’t seem like tedium because they have placed value on almost everything you can encounter out in the wilds and while you may not need it today… there is likely going to be a time at some point in the future where you will be wishing you had more of it. While literally every moment I am not hunting a big epic monster is busywork… none of it feels like it because it feels valuable to the larger mission of the game.

While Destiny has never really had something close to this grind, I am thinking maybe it should. The central focus of all of this for me personally is the Smithy, which is a menu driven crafting system that allows me to turn all of these bits and pieces of critters I have taken down… and meld them into usable gear with interesting stat combinations. I’ve spent a good deal of time farming up Odogoron, which is a giant hairless blind hell hound looking thing. I personally really like its armor set and I want to be able to wield the full thing a a potential replacement for my mishmash of gear I am currently wearing. This gives me a goal, and the grind itself is slow enough that each kill feels like meaningful progress without ever giving me that landfall moment of getting everything I possibly need in a single round.

Imagine for a second if you had gear and weapons in Destiny based on a similar concept. Each time you took down the Fallen example, there was a chance of getting an item that could be used in the crafting of Fallen themed weapons or armor. The common items would drop from Dregs, medium rarity items from Vandals and the rare bits from Servitors and Walkers. Then say you wanted to craft the Vex Mythoclast you would need to maybe take down a Gate Lord to get the focusing lens, and a bunch of Minotaurs to get the armored housing. All of this is more meaningful than collect 40 of token Z and hope the RNG gods smile upon your en devour as you may or may not get the item you want from a relatively deep loot table. It also turns Banshee-44 into more than the Gachapon machine that he currently is, by giving him the actual ability to craft specific items for you.

What Monster Hunter World does better than almost anything is that it gives me a target for my nightly nonsense. Granted right now I cannot craft the Chrome Slicer I because I lack the zenny to do so…. but I know where every single piece that it requires drops from. I know that I can run loops around High Rank Wildspire Wastes for most if it, but to get the Fucium Ore I am going to have to make my way down into the Elder’s Recess. If I notice a weapon requires parts off of a specific monster I am given a bunch of different ways to target that one specific encounter and run it over and over if I so choose. In my case what I personally tend to do is answer SOS beacons for that specific encounter, feeling like I am actually helping out someone else in the community take down that critter for fun and profit as well.

More than anything what I think Monster Hunter World does so well is that it eases you into all of this. You quickly learn the value of the items you can grab out in the world as new patterns start showing up that you can craft. You notice that items have ??? beside some of the materials and it drives you to go out and explore until you find them. All of this creates a feedback loop of take down epic feeling monsters, get items, craft interesting gear… so you can take down even bigger monsters. Sure a lot of the gear is not strictly required… but for someone who is very gear focused it certainly makes the journey feel a lot more meaningful. The monster battle portion being fun enough that while I am actively engaged in fighting… I am not even thinking about what might drop which is not the case in most MMORPGs.

When they first started talking about Destiny 2 being a much more open world and quest driven game… this is honestly the sort of experience I had been envisioning. What if you could fight a Destiny boss the same way you do a Monster in Monster Hunter World? What if getting every player to focus on taking out a Gatelord’s weapon arm caused it to no longer be able to fire that weapon… and instead forced it to change up tactics and start engaging in melee attacks. What if the way you fought a boss mattered just as much as the weapons you took into the fight? When we got Destiny 2 and it was a stripped down version of what we had in Destiny 1… I was disappointed, but the mechanical loop of the game kept me engaged for way longer than the game itself probably deserved. I had enough hype built up to carry me through the console launch and restarting with the PC launch… but now I just don’t ever feel like even logging in.

What I want is a good grind. That doesn’t necessarily mean running Omnigul hundreds of times hoping that maybe just maybe you will get that one in a million perfectly stated Grasp of Malok. What that means for me personally is something that I can do on a nightly basis that feels like I am eventually heading towards some goal down the road. Maybe at some point in the near future I will feel like I am out of grinds in Monster Hunter World, but I can at least see a road map in front of me that seems like it is going to be an interesting ride. Right now I am almost overwhelmed by the sheer number of objectives that I could be chasing, and as I move up… it feels like the world keeps expanding out rather than narrowing down to a pin point like the raid cycle does in an MMORPG. Monster Hunter World is a really great grind, that is attached to a really fun experience of taking down giant monsters that fight in a fluid and believably organic manner. Maybe Bungie will find its footing at some point, but for the moment I am enjoying discovering the Monster Hunter franchise.

Radiolarian Paradox

December 28, 2017 by Belghast

The world is a really weird place and I sometimes have trouble reconciling just how random it is. Yesterday after legitimate decades of not being in contact… I had a friend I grew up with reach out via the email address on this blog. As the day went on we chatted and for the most part found out that we are still drift compatible. We fell out of contact for reasons that quite honestly I have probably talked about on this blog at some point without assigning names or faces to the situation. However I always sorta hoped at some point he would find his way back into my monkeysphere and that seems to have actually occurred. It is super weird to get back in touch with someone who hasn’t been around for the last two decades. Like for example he knows my wife, but at the time we were last in regular contact we were dating and not married. In that time I have shifted through many jobs and titles and positions… and had the birth of the blog and podcast and my attempts at writing for a gaming site and then determining that wasn’t really for me. So much life has happened for both of us and it is weird trying to slip back into a friendship from so many years ago. Regardless it was a really cool happening to close out 2017, a year that has been generally crummy in so many other ways.

Lately I have fallen into a pattern with my evenings where I spend a little time in World of Warcraft knocking out the daily emissary chest and doing any world quests that have interesting rewards. Then I usually end up swapping over to Destiny 2 and doing whatever package schematic is available that day to get more Dawning rewards for free. I’ve talked about it at length in another post, but the Dawning being a largely cash shop holiday has been immensely frustrating for me. This was an event that I was so into when it happened in Destiny 1 in part because it brought back the sparrow racing league and ushered in the beginning of strike scoring. As it stands now I cannot seem to bring myself to run strikes of any form because they largely feel pointless. The bane of my existence at the moment is the Advanced Paradox Amplifier needed to get several of the prophecy weapon unlocks. These come from Strikes, Heroic Adventures and Crucible matches… and come extremely sparingly at that. I have been mostly grinding them out by chaining the new mayhem mode crucible matches and unfortunately most of the time you wind up with a single Paradox Amplifier per match… that you then need to turn in ten of to get the advanced variety. Unfortunately both the Strikes and Heroic Adventures award with the same frequency meaning that you can either do two things that take a significant amount of time… or grind your face off in PVP. I feel like part of me is completely dead inside from all of the crucible I have done lately, because I really don’t enjoy it… but I want the items that I can potentially get from doing it.

What makes this so painful is that Radiolarian Cultures seem to drop like candy from every public event or chest you open. I can spend 30 minutes and roam around opening chests on a planet and get more than enough to do several weapons, and then I am stuck grinding for legitimately hours to get a single blue quality advanced Paradox Amplifier. Throwing another thing into the mix I apparently need Fossilized Hermaion Blossoms which drop in Nightfalls. I need two of these so does this mean I will have to complete two Nightfalls in order to get this step done, or does this simply mean that they drop two at a time? The prophecy weapon grinds are largely frustrating because there is no real casual activity on the Paradox side of the equation. Had they said… you could do strikes, crucible matches or lost sectors… that would have been something that I could piddle around on my own happily doing for hours. Instead strikes feel too long and unrewarding, crucible matches are mind numbing, and the heroic adventure mechanism is just generally unfun especially since they included another god forsaken timer. At this point I have completed Hand Cannon, Pulse Rifle, SMG, and Sword… and now seemingly am working on the Saint-14 shotgun. I need to chain run a bunch of strikes over the next few days so I can get the currency to purchase Curtain Call from Zavala before the weapons swap again next Wednesday. I am in this weird place with Destiny 2, where I keep playing because I love the moment to moment gunplay… but keep getting frustrated by the myopic design.

Dawning Sorta

December 20, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday the new and revised Dawning Holiday started in Destiny 2, but I feel like in order to understand the rest of this post we need to talk a bit about what Dawning was in Destiny 1. This holiday originally ran from December 13th 2016 to January 3rd 2017 and was lumped in with a major update to the game. As a result it is a little hard to separate what is the Dawning and what is the content, but I am going to talk about it anyways. In Destiny 1 we had these things called record books that included a bunch of achievements and completing them unlocked loot. There was one of these specific to the dawning event and featured achievements that involved either the brand new strike scoring system also included with the patch or the triumphant return of the Sparrow Racing League (SRL). SRL is legitimately my favorite part of Destiny 1 and when it came back over the holidays last year… I ground my little face off running endless Sparrow Racing League matches. With this it also introduced a ton of new SRL themed gear and sparrows including these really awesome class items that left a neon streak behind you as you raced on your sparrow. In addition to that three exotics were introduced into the game, as well as a series of presents that were in the tower allowing you to open one each day and get a mixture of good items and complete junk. Needless to say there was a lot of stuff included in the holiday and a good deal of it like Strike Scoring became a permanent part of the game after that.

This year around The Dawning is running from December 19th through January 9th and as much as I hate to be one of those folks… seems to be largely a bunch of new Eververse Trading Company items. You are given one Dawning Engram by logging in and then there are milestones that allow you to earn one each week. When you XP up it appears that you still get a Season Two Engram rather than one of the special event ones, so your ability to actually get items from this event without spending some money seems to be at least somewhat limited. Instead of presents that give you stuff for free… you get to loot a quest item each day that requires you to do some stuff and then turns in at one of the tower NPCs for some dawning loot. The first one is a pattern that goes in your ghost shell slot and requires you to collect 10 phase glass on Io and kill 15 servitors… which largely meant hanging out and farming the Servitor events as they spawned in the EDZ. I turned in and got an exotic ship and a shader, but based on what I am seeing this appears to be essentially the equivalent of opening one of those Dawning Engrams… so wide loot table including full sets of class armor, 4 unique emotes, 10 unique ghost shells including 1 exotic, 10 unique ships including 2 exotics, 11 unique sparrows including 2 exotic, 4 unique shaders, and 6 unique transmat effects. At any given time there are seven of that assortment of forty five items available for purchase with bright dust on the Eververse vendor… pending my math is correct. Essentially this is an Eververse holiday with Eververse rewards… and a minimal method of earning them through normal game play rather than swiping your card.

The biggest problem I have with the event is the complete and total lack of the Sparrow Racing League. Instead we get Mayhem Crucible modes… which admittedly are amazingly fun, but no crazy swoop bike racing action. For the uninitiated Mayhem is a mode of the Crucible where your super regenerates at an insane rate… and grenade and melee are slightly increased as well. It means that it takes what feels like a minute to get your full super bar, and as a result you are running around doing really silly things the entire match. I played quite a bit of it last night and it was enjoyable to run around the map trying to out super all of the other supers. Oddly enough I got plenty of normal weapon kills also as I sat back and picked off weakened targets when two different super saiyans clashed in battle. As fun as Mayhem mode is… unless it sticks around as a new permanent fixture it is going to feel super hollow. The original Dawning added so much new permanent content to the game, that this version feels extremely lacking. Strike scoring is one of those systems that is desperately needed in Destiny 2 and with the bulk of the dawning items coming from cash shop purchases rather than a book of achievements… it just feels cheap. I am as big a backer of Destiny 2 as they come, but even I have to stop and think that this seems more cash grab than content.