Destiny Archives - Page 15 of 45 - Tales of the Aggronaut

How I Should Have Done It

September 27, 2017 by Belghast

This is a post I had planned on making for awhile, and now that we are a little less than a month away from the PC launch… I figure the timing works fairly well. At this point I have leveled and geared three characters through Destiny 2 on the PS4 and during that time I have sorted out some of the things that work and some of the things that don’t. My first trip through any game is a meandery mess as I let myself get distracted by every little bauble that comes across my path. Quite honestly… this is fine because I enjoy the hell out of that first trip. If you also like to sometimes revel in being inefficient… then by all means please ignore anything I am about to write. However more than anything this is my game plan for how I intend on leveling during the PC release and how I intend to claw my way back to the relative positive I currently am on the PS4. This is going to be a much different experience for me than someone starting out in Destiny 2 for the first time. Not only did I have the experience of playing over 500 hours of the first game… I also now have this bundle of experience playing on the PS4 which I have sorta used like a beta test environment. When I pulled up my Warlock and Hunter I tested out some of these methods, and have reached a point where I think I am good with a clear path going forward.

The natural path through the game is to follow the main story quest and then add in as much side content as you can along the way. My first trip through the game I did all of this and dinged 20 well before finishing the main story arc. My friends however focused on only the main story and wound up beating the game around level 15 leading them to do a bunch of grinding to open up the end game. Firstly you have to understand that grinds are more or less fun for me… and Destiny 2 has a grind that is better than any I have seen in a long time in the form of the Heroic Public Events. Public Events spawn at regular intervals and as you open a planet up you are going to notice that at least one is up at pretty much all times. Titan the second planet you reach seems to have the best public event grind available, largely because Titan as a whole is very small surface area wise… but has a bunch of added complexity in the form of overlapping Z axis areas. There are three public event areas that spawn in the planet… One in Sirens Watch and two in the sections known as The Rig. These are either going to be Fallen Weapons Exchange… aka Fallen Walkers or Witches’ Ritual. Both of these are extremely easy to convert from a normal Public Event to a Heroic, and I highly suggest you check out the guide I posted some days back on how to convert each event. In addition to public events there are five or six high value target spawns that appear in this relatively small area as well as countless chests and harvestables making Titan an amazingly compact farming destination.

So my goal come Destiny 2 PC release is to push my way through the European Dead Zone as fast as I can, and then get to Titan. After a mission or two the planet opens up completely and instead of following the main story… I am going to farm my little heart out on Titan until I hit level 20. Now I just did this method on my Hunter that I leveled on Saturday, and through level 10 I was managing to get a full level off of each Heroic Public Event. From 10 to 20 it took roughly two events per level, but considering you are able to hop back and forth between the events easily this went fast as well. During the bits of downtime I hunted chests and high value targets… basically anything that I thought might give me some blue gear drops, glimmer or experience. Now the reason why I grind to 20 on Titan is that it is extremely fast, but also pushes me into endgame power levels as quick as possible. I noticed while playing the main story content, that these missions seem to drop a significant number of pieces of gear… considerably more than just wandering around the open world. Ultimately the name of the game is trying to get to 260 power as soon as humanly possible from blue drops. Putting my leveling in on Titan lets me start doing this as I work my way through the rest of the story quest. The other benefit of this process is that it gives you a nice stack of faction tokens that you can cash in once you actually hit 260… in order to boost you to 265.

From there we start to enter the dark territory of the slow endgame grind. The primary means of jumping over this is going to be utilizing the “powerful gear” quests that are available once a week and give you luminous engrams. The other primary means of defeating this curve are to find pieces of gear that have legendary mods installed in them. Hoard these like they are the most precious thing in the universe, because until you get to 280 power your only means of getting them is going to be pure dumb luck from either a random legendary gear drop… or from turning in weapon parts to get packages from Banshee. Once you have a full set of items with legendary mods… you can begin to start infusing your way to the next goal which is 270. It is my intent not to turn in any luminous engrams until I have reached 270 on my first character. This is likely going to mean a bunch of grinding to get items with legendary mods in them, but ultimately I am trying to get as high of power as I can in that first week… and there are limited number of luminous engrams that I can get per character. You can get one for each of the following activities…

Crucible Call to Arms – This has taken between 8 and 10 Crucible matches on average for me.
Clan XP – Get 5000 xp… if you follow this method the first one will be a gimme since all of the story missions will count towards this.
Flashpoint – Do 3 Heroic Events on the weekly planet… or 6 regular events or a combination of them.
Nightfall – This is not always the easiest of engrams but if you have a group capable worth doing.
Raid – This again requires a full team of six players, and is just a bonus to the actual reward which is raid loot.

The other part of my plan… is to push up my Hunter and Warlock as quickly as possible… potentially before I even start decoding Luminous Engrams on the Titan. I would love to be able to keep all three classes at roughly the same gear level so that I functionally get three times the engrams each week. With the PS4/Xbox One launch there were a bunch of players doing a thing where they created three of exactly the same class so that every piece of gear could transfer to the new character and keep pushing the total power levels higher. That trick has been officially broken by Bungie because their intent is for us to play individual classes instead of duplicates. However in my experience after running Titan, Warlock and Hunter together is that the luminous engrams seem to benefit all three. Sure the armor pieces won’t transfer over, but the weapons absolutely will… which will allow you to start getting higher gear to drop… which will allow you to start slowly infusing up the gear you already had on that character. In truth, once I hit 265ish on the Titan I plan on starting the Warlock and pushing it to 20 as soon as possible then handing over the weapons I have been using on the Titan to help push up the new characters power level faster. Once again when I get the Warlock to 265… I plan on doing the same to the Hunter and then and only then once I have a trio of characters… do I intend to start decoding those luminous engrams. The piece of knowledge that we have learned since the launch of the PS4 is that you can let those engrams sit on the vendors up to the point of the reset…. and then instead of losing them the game just automatically decodes them for you. Basically you are at no risk of running into issues by letting them sit there, and waste potential power levels if you decode them too early.

Ultimately my goal is to exit that first week of Destiny 2 on the PC with a Titan, Warlock and Hunter completely leveled and farm up three sets of luminous engrams. This might be insane and it might be a hell of a lot of work… but considering how fast the Warlock and Hunter went… that initial character seems to be the challenge. The other benefit I have going into the PC release is that I already know which weapons I like and need to hold onto… and which ones I can shard because I just don’t enjoy whatever it is that weapon is doing. Similarly I know which pieces of gear I should probably go after on each class, and what talent trees I favor to unlock first. I carry into this new release a bunch of ancestral knowledge that is going to hopefully make the transition path smoother. Now everything I said today… I ultimately suggest you ignore on your first time through the game. I had this amazing voyage of discovery when I first set forth into the new areas of Destiny 2, and I don’t want to rob anyone else of that experience. That said… I have had that moment and I just want to push up characters so I can be ready for everything that the PC release is going to offer. I’ve had my moment of wandering around in awe of everything… and am ready to buckle down and push like mad to get where I want to be. My goal is to break the 280 light barrier in that first week, which is going to depend on a lot of luck. Considering four weeks into the game I am just in the mid 290s… it is probably going to be a challenge to get there again but one I am ready for.

Third Week Summary

September 26, 2017September 26, 2017 by Belghast

Today is reset day in Destiny 2 and brings a close to the third week of gameplay. At this point my maximum power on the Titan is 291 and I am really hoping to get some good luck in week four with the luminous engrams. At this point that is realistically the only way I move the needle forward other than the occasional extremely lucky exotic engram or loot from nightfalls. This week in particular seems like it is going to be interesting for the Nightfall because there is no way to extend the timer. The really interesting thing happening in the tower however is the faction rally, where the three faction leaders return and ask you to pledge your loyalty. The rally itself involves collecting faction tokens for your respective faction in the hopes that at the end of the rally your side has gotten the most. Most of my clan has chosen to go Dead Orbit… and in truth I think they are likely going to win because at least in Destiny 1 you saw a lot more of those faction emblems than literally anything else. I personally have been a huge fan of the Future War Cult starting with the No Time to Explain quest line, and in Destiny 2 it is the only faction that has weapons I am extremely interested in. As a result I went FWC on my Titan main, New Monarchy on the Warlock and Dead Orbit on the Hunter. Of the weapons available however… the only one I have any interest in is the FWC Pulse Rifle with the new version of firefly.

The real important happenings of the week is that I leveled my Hunter to 20 and wrapped up the main story last night. Then after doing that I managed to unlock flashpoints and knock that out as well as the clan xp luminous engram. That means for the week as a whole I finished up a grand total of eight luminous engrams, pushing my total power up slightly across the board. I am amused at just how fast you can pull up a second or third character. Functionally what I have done is latched onto a single item from Xur and then all of my higher level weapons from my main. This has allowed me to get to the 260 or so power level point extremely quickly, and then keep pushing it up by carefully infusion gear. Similarly this time around I had legendary mods to rely on which is something I didn’t quite have when I was doing this for the warlock. Granted I don’t have them for every slot, which is why for example I still have some blue boots on the hunter above. However I feel like I am in a really good place to be going into the faction rally. Before sitting down to write this post I knocked out a single heroic event on Io and got 8 faction tokens, so I am wondering if we are just going to be flooded with new loot from the faction vendors. I am perfectly okay with this is that is the case, and I plan on doing a bunch of heroic events tonight to get some of those sweet sweet future war cult weapons. I am specifically after the omolon auto rifle, because it looks like it might be the same class as my beloved Uriel’s Gift.

Destiny Roegadame

September 25, 2017 by Belghast

I had this post that I was contemplating making this morning, but I’ve decided that maybe today is not the right day. I woke up with a headache that sort of feels like my brain case is trying to split in two… so it maybe isn’t the best time to be getting into subjects that require a delicate touch. So instead this morning you are going to get to see some of what I did this weekend over in Destiny 2. Firstly you get a shot of my current Warlock outfit… I am in the one in gold and black with the crazy horns. Now it was announced last week that they nerfed the luminous engrams for multiple characters of the same class. I am beginning to think that maybe they also nerfed said rewards for ANY characters. I spent a good deal of time on the Warlock completing the few “easy” engrams… namely the Weekly Flashpoint (Titan), Clan Experience Reward and Call to Arms Milestone. The last two line up neatly because you get a predictable 500 xp per crucible match, which helps to chew away at that 5000 xp needed to get the Clan reward. I held all of the engrams until I had completed all three and then equipped my strongest power gear and turned them in one at a time so I could in theory adjust as needed. Now when I do this on my Titan I usually see a significant jump in power… and when I turned in on the Warlock they all for the most part dropped at the same light level as me or maybe one higher. Ultimately I am not sure if doing multiple luminous engrams per week is really worth it… but if I can get my Hunter through the main story in time I might try at least one of hers to see if I get the same results.

That brings me to the fact that I started my hunter this weekend, and wound up deleting my Destiny 1 character and re-rolling as a Female Awoken. Some interesting things to note… that even though I deleted my character I got specific story hits as though I was a legacy character. I am guessing those flags are set at an account level and not a character by character level, so I still got referenced based on my past deeds even though I ultimately deleted my previous hunter. My Titan being Exo is really the important part of the equation, and the fact that my other two characters were Exos… was largely due to the fact that there are no beards in Destiny. Since Hunter is such a nimble and graceful class, I always thought in the back of my head that I probably should have rolled a female character… and in part I am just correcting that original error. As far as rolling Awoken… this is the closest I can get in Destiny to having a Roegadame… which is always the correct choice if you have it.

This is ultimately a test run for how I am likely going to level when the PC release happens. I quested my way through the European Dead Zone to unlock Titan, and did the first quest there which unlocks the planet as a whole. From there I ran public events until I reached 20, which for the first 10 levels took a single event per ding… and afterwards took roughly 2 per. So if I functionally get to titan around level 5 that means within 25 public events I should be sitting at the level cap. The reasoning behind this is that you get an awful lot of random gear drops while doing the story content. Now the specific rewards like Exotics have power limits and will not float up as your level increases… but all of these random drops absolutely will. There is a significant part of the leveling process that is going to involve grinding something until you hit 260 light… the cap that you can get to with blue items. From there you will need a stockpile of faction rewards to get to 265… and in this case I had a fat stack of Titan tokens to turn in when I got there artificially by equipping the chest I had purchase from Xur and all of my Titan’s weapons. I started the Hunter around 11 am yesterday afternoon and wound up dinging 20 around 5 pm… with time between to do laundry and cook and random tasks like that. Now I just need to finish out the main story, which in theory I should be able to do tonight.

When I logged my character in earlier to take a few screenshots I noticed that my Clan has defeated the Raid. When this happens everyone in the clan gets a specific engram that is a level 10-15 version of one of the raid weapons. I just so happened to have a base 290 pulse rifle sitting in my bank that I sacrificed for science… and infused to bring the weapon up to usable levels. All in all I like this pulse rifle quite a bit, and while it is going to take some getting used to the action and the sounds it seems to be really solid. The important thing however is that I am super proud of my clan for defeating the angry penis head… which if you have seen Emperor Calus… it is a fairly apt description that I sadly cannot claim as my own. I am not sure which team specifically got the kill, but awesome work because I know it took a lot of people over the course of two weeks to really nail this all down and get the fight across the finish line. Now the rest of us casuals have some shiny baubles as a result. I think tonight I will be working on the Hunter main story so that I can at least test the flashpoint engram to see what sort of levels I get it to decode at.

Xur Week Two: 9/22/17

September 22, 2017 by Belghast

Since I did this last week I thought I would continue with it for at least another week because Xur brought something I had been wanting. This time around since the weekly flashpoint is Titan, Xur is located on the section of the planet called “The Rig”. To get here you will have to cross some areas of the map that have lots of mobs on them, but thankfully none of them seem to be willing to follow you into the actual room he is located in. Previously in Destiny 1 Xur arrived Friday morning and left Saturday at Midnight PST. This time around that does not seem to be the case because he was up on Nessus until the reset happened Tuesday morning. I am not sure if this was intentional or some sort of a bug, but regardless I would suggest checking him out today or tomorrow just to make sure.

This time around he has brought the Wardcliff Coil or for those of us that played Destiny 1 and followed the dataminers… the Dubious Volley. Honestly I think Dubious Volley is a much better name for what the weapon does, because it is essentially an anime missile launcher. What I mean by this is if you have ever seen something along the lines of Robotech where a bay of missiles opens up and then they sorta fire in a bunch of different directions… that is what this weapon does. In use from what I understand it feels a lot like a Gjallarhorn that ONLY fires Wolfpack rounds… but way more of them. One of the problems I have heard is that as the mini missiles are tracking in… if a mob moves close to you… it will in fact blow you up too. This is one of those fabled weapons that we never got in the first game… so I am absolutely picking this up so I can play with it now.

The Feedback Fence is an item from the first game… that in truth no one actually used. There were a few super edge case builds that you needed to run if you were going to optimize this… which is a bit sad given that they look amazing. Functionally to make it work you need to run around punching things… and then letting something else punch you to explode it. This makes it extremely unpredictable, and not that useful given that the cases you really want to unleash damage on a target… are most likely cases where they don’t actually melee you. The number of bosses that reliably melee you is pretty limited. I would suggest only picking these up if you simply need the light level and using them as infusion fuel.

Do you like Solar Grenades? If so then these are probably the gloves for you. I like grenades quite a bit but in general I am not a fan of the changes to the fire subclass for Warlocks, so as a result I am probably going to give these a pass. This is the second week in a row that we have had a solar specific item on Xur for Warlocks which is a little disappointing. I used last weeks chest piece only until I got a legendary chest that I could it into. All of that said, this does not take away from the fact that this really is a good item. It increases the duration of your solar grenades and causes solar melee hits to increase grenade energy regeneration. If you want to be a mad bomber this is probably going to be down your alley.

Once again I have not even started my Hunter yet so this is an image that I borrowed from the internet, and then overlayed the stat block. When zooming in on a target this helmet will place a little red X over it. When that target gets low health you begin dealing significantly more damage to the marked target. The drawback here is that if you focus on any other targets for any length of time it will shift the X and that may or may not be what you want to have happen. Another edge case that is super useful is in the tracking of a mob that might be running from you… like how some high value targets do these days. I am personally not that interested in this helm, and plan on just sticking with the chest piece from last week that increases my Arc Strider stuff. Folks are saying however that this is a really powerful pickup and I can see why because in theory it just gives you bonus damage on a target, which would be nice for boss burn phases once the boss gets within “execute range”.