Destiny Archives - Page 17 of 46 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Happy First Xursday!

September 15, 2017 by Belghast

One of the tidbits of information that we knew going into Destiny 2 was that Mister Shadow Tentacles himself… Xur the Agent of the Nine would no longer be showing up in a social space. That meant that we would need to find him somewhere on a planet. At first I thought this would be somewhat of a scavenger hunt, where we had to scour the planets to find where he was hiding. However that does not appear to be the case because they put a familiar IX logo on the director map. This week Xur is located on Nessus in the Watcher’s Grave area, and in this case he is up high in a tree next to a golden vex scannable item. The other things that we didn’t know were the level of items he would be bringing…. and the cost. We knew that legendary shards would be the universal currency for lots of different things and now replace the familiar chase item… Strange Coins. It appears that everything is 270 and I have verified with a few videos of Xur that regardless of the players power level he seems to be handing out that same static level. The basic set up is similar to Destiny 1 in that he is bringing a single weapon and a piece of armor for each class. This week we have…

Merciless – Fusion Rifle – 29 Legendary Shards
Raiden Flux – Hunter Chest – 23 Legendary Shards
Doom Fang Pauldrons – Titan Arms – 23 Legendary Shards
Wings of Sacred Dawn – Warlock Chest – 23 Legendary Shards

If you only have the Legendary Shards to pick up a single item… I would say buy this thing. I was lucky enough to get it as an Exotic Engram drop while leveling… and this thing is amazing. It has a weird perk on it that speeds up the recharge rate until you get a kill. This combined with a perk that increases your damage if you reload after getting that kill.. makes it a machine to melt mobs. Especially on bosses the fact that it keeps getting faster lets you pour some insane damage into the boss in a very short period of time. This thing completely decimates the ship that flys in on the Cabal extraction event for example. This was one of the first legendaries that I infused up, simply because I like using it that much.

I went ahead and picked these up because I didn’t already have them. Effectively when you are in your super mode… kills with the shield bash reset the cooldown of your shield throw. I could definitely see this being useful since in general you only get one throw per sentinel super. Similarly melee kills help give you super energy… and since I run around punching everything already this should be a good exotic for me. The only problem is… I am currently using another exotic just for the light levels so in theory I need to find something to replace it with before I can rock these.

For the Warlock Xur is selling the Wings of Sacred Dawn, which is one of the fanciest chest slot items I have seen in game so far. The truth is however that I largely just bought this for the item level to help give my Warlock I am currently leveling a power boost, so I can start double dipping on those sweet sweet powerful engrams. The perk is Tome of Dawn, which causes you to suspend midair while aiming while you are in your super. Precision hits extend this effects duration allowing you to stay up in the air frozen longer. Since I don’t really like Dawnblade as a subclass and went Voidwalker the moment I got it as a drop and have never looked back… this really is all about the 270 light level for me and nothing else. If you like Dawnblade your mileage may vary.

I had to swipe an image of this one online, because I have not even begun to start my Hunter leveling… since it is probably the class I like the least in Destiny 2. I went ahead and picked this up however because I had the shards… and once again it will be a power level boost when I finally get around to leveling and equipping a third class. The perk on the item is called Synapse Junctions… which causes quick successive attacks with Arc Staff to increase damage output and the duration of your super. In truth this is probably a good item for me since I mostly like the Arc Staff super ability. Again however… its really about the 270 light.

One of the slight disappointments comes not from the exotics themselves… because I really do think that he brought a decent load out of items. What I am a little disappointed in is the fact that he ONLY brought the exotics. Previously in Destiny 1 there were a ton of other items that he sold… most of which are no longer still in the game. What I would have loved to see him sell in their place however were maybe some really nice gear mods to help those players who have yet to hit that 280 plateau get there. Additionally I would have loved to see him offer Fireteam Medallions as an alternate way other than Eververse dust currency to get them, since they appear to be the replacement for three of coins. The best method of getting Exotic engrams appears to be running one of those and chaining heroic events. Speaking of which… I need to do a lot more of that. Anyways regardless of anything else… I am just happy to see the Friday tradition of finding Xur continue into this new game.

Destiny 2 Heroic Event Triggers

October 23, 2017September 12, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday Pete asked if I could do a post about the various heroic event triggers, and this morning I am going to attempt to do just that. Last night I was able to get a few reasonable screenshots of the objectives for several of the events. Others I have simply looked up and will attempt to explain because I don’t have good imagery for them. At this point though I now feel relatively comfortable in my knowledge of how to launch any of the events into heroic mode. I am posting a picture of my own character at the start of this post largely because I am happy that for once I have most of a matched set of gear.

Glimmer Extraction – Fallen Event

This is more than likely the very first event you ever complete in Destiny 2 because it spawns right out in front of the church. Essentially a Ketch will drop off a Glimmer Harvesting team and you have to take out the extraction teams. Each team will consist of 3 mobs followed by a mini boss type mob. Then the ketch will drop another ship in a new location. There will be three different locations that the Fallen attempt to harvest and if you take down all of them you defeat the event. In the Heroic mode however things change. In the above screenshot you can see a little engine looking thing with a stream of glimmer going into it. There will be one of these at each location the Fallen attempt to harvest, and to trigger heroic you need to destroy them before you have defeated a given waves miniboss. From there the goal changes to guarding a pile of glimmer until your folks can transmat it out. Someone has to be standing on the pile at all times to make sure the bar is progressing.

Weapons Exchange – Fallen

This event is pretty straight forward. In Destiny 1 we learned the ins and outs of fighting Fallen Walkers… hit the armor plating on their legs until one section falls of and then the carapace covering the control module slides open and you can pour damage into the unit. In this event there are 3 energy fields protecting a total of six scorch cannons. Each time you bust open the carapace on the Walker, a number of arc orbs will spawn at its feet. In order to trigger the heroic phase, you need to take those orbs and carry them to the receptacles that look like the object in the screenshot above. It will take two orbs per shield, and once you have dropped all three shields… a second walker gets dropped on your location. The goal is to have the first walker almost dead when you drop the shields so that you can grab a scorch cannon and finished both off extremely quickly.

Ether Resupply – Fallen

This event is another one that is pretty straight forward… kill the giant Servitor. During the event a number of smaller servitors will spawn in and start interacting with the bigger one. The first one has to be killed because he shields the Servitor from any damage. There is a second phase where three spawn in… and in theory you can leave these up if you are just taking down the Servitor normally. However if you kill them it starts the heroic phase… which causes the Servitor to take greatly reduced damage… talking 10-15 damage per shot in a vulnerable spot reduced damage. The goal here is to get the servitor down pretty close… then kill the three mini-servitors… then drop the big guy to close out the event.

Excavation – Cabal

This is one of the least straight forward of all of the events. The goal of the Excavation event is to stand hear the mining lander and progress the bar to 100%… all the while avoiding waves of progressively more difficult mobs and missiles that are coming in from the command ship hovering over the location. At various points in the fight a Thresher gunship will fly in and start attacking anyone defending the location. In order to trigger the heroic phase of the event you need to take down this gunship… and in my experience you have about two flyby phases to do it in before you have progressed the event to 100% and ended it naturally. Essentially everyone needs to focus fire this thing down whenever you see it. If you are successful a major cabal centurion boss will spawn in… and wreck him to earn your heroic chest.

Injection Rig – Cabal

I am not honestly sure what the non-heroic goal of this event is, because from the start it is telling you to drawn down the Infiltrator Valus… which is what happens if you trigger heroic mode. While this event is going on there will be a giant cabal shield that spawns over the drill, and every so often giant vents will open at up to four spots on the rig. If you are in the bubble you start burning, and the ultimately goal to trigger heroic mode is to destroy all four of these vents before you end up dying in the process. About the most that I have seen taken out in a single go are two vents at a time, so that means it will take a few passes to get them all down. It helps if you have a really good ranged power weapon like a fusion rifle or rocket launcher. If you are successfull Infiltrator Valus will spawn and you wreck him to get your chest of goodies.

Spire Integration – Vex

Much like the Fallen Walker event… this is a reboot of a classic event from Destiny 1. In the Spire Integration event your goal was to prevent wave after wave of Vex from integrating with the spire that you were guarding. One of those does in fact exist in this event, as does the objective of preventing anyone from integrating with a wiggle room counter of 10. However to progress the event to the Heroic mode you need to also help build shields around these additional spires. There will be 3 glowing rings scattered around the event… standing in one will begin to capture the point and raise a vex shield around you. Once you have captured all three of these the Heroic mode will trigger and you have to destroy progressively more nasty Vex until the timer runs out. Prepare to have Minotaurs and Cyclops to spawn in addition to all of the normal yellow bar Vex types. Stay alive and prevent 10 integrations to win your heroic loots.

Taken Blight – Taken

This one is really hard to explain visually so I am posting a picture of the objective you are trying to destroy. Essentially the goal of this event is to destroy an number of taken blights that spawn in. In Destiny 2 the blights work slightly differently in that they are protected by a bubble and in order to actually damage the blight you have to step inside of it. During this event while standing in one of these bubbles you will get a brief buff called “Blight Receding”. There is another giant blight bubble that will spawn near the other blights… and this one is protected by a shield and if you attempt to hit it you get “invulnerable”. However while you have this Blight Receding buff you can deal damage to it. Functionally you need to alternate ducking inside the bubble to get the buff and going out and damaging the big blight until it is destroyed. If you are successful this will trigger the heroic mode and summon a Taken Major for you to destroy. If you defeat it then you get shiny loots.

Witches’ Ritual – Hive

This one only spawns on Titan and I believe only in one specific location near where you spawn in at the arcology. The goal is to prevent a pair of hive wizards from opening a portal… the only problem is the wizards are shielded and invulnerable. You will notice however there are two hive sigils on the ground, and standing in one causes the corresponding wizard to lose its shield. After you take down the wizards a bigger more powerful wizard will spawn in. In order to trigger the heroic version you need to then recapture the sigils and use it to destroy two crystals that were previously invulnerable to attack. If you do this successfully another Hive Major will spawn in the Darkblade Knight. Defeat it to get your tasty loots.

The Shader Situation

September 8, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday I briefly mentioned the issue happening right now with Shaders, but I had a few people ask me directly what exactly was going on. So I thought I would take a moment this morning to explain the issue from my perspective. In the original Destiny Shaders were an item that dropped that when applied effected the color scheme and sometimes physical properties of your armor. It was a purely cosmetic system, but one that the players latched onto with both hands. The Shaders themselves dropped from all manner of activities and occasionally were attached to achievements. This happened with enough relative rarity that when you got one… you noticed and immediately started playing with it. Each Guardian could carry a total of nine shaders with them at any given time… and I personally found myself swapping back and forth between shaders on a regular basis to fit my current mood or to coordinate which whatever weapon loadout I happened to be rocking that night. To say I was engaged in the system is probably a bit of an understatement given that I had 103 of them according to the achievement that tracks such progress. I was by no means the most prolific however because there were folks in game who had literally every single one… and you can see in the above photo… the ones that are greyed out are ones I had not found yet. The system itself was pretty limited and some shaders looked good on some armor sets… but absolutely horrible on others. However it was something that gave us some license to stand out in the tower from the other Guardians also wearing Iron Banner gear.

With the lead up to Destiny 2 there was so much talk about how improved the Shader system was going to be. It was announced that we would be able to apply shaders individually to armor pieces and even our weapons. As a long time supporter of cosmetic systems this seemed amazing, because it would finally give us some level of granular control over our appearance. In Destiny 1 it was annoying when your chest-piece looked amazing with a specific shader applied, but your boots or arms looked completely horrible. This was especially true when rocking the various combinations of black and white like I regularly did… and it would have allowed us to swap around until we found a specific shader that worked for each individual item. While playing the “Demo” I found it curiously lacking that they didn’t show off the new shader system, but given this was a build of game originally shown at E3 I thought maybe it was simply left out because the system had not been finished at that point. It was not until launch that we actually saw the system at work… and realized that shaders were not a single use consumable item. The above image is of my shader “collection” in Destiny 2, and all of these so far have come through the starter packages that you keep getting handed by the Eververse vendor at the Farm each time you reach a specific level plateau. Why the community is going to war over this minor point is the fact that Bungie took what used to be a very good but limited system… and turned it into a potential cash grab.

Yesterday Luke Smith released a sequence of statements on his Twitter account talking about the issue… and the answer feels less than satisfactory. Luke is literally the only person who thinks that doing “shader farming” is a good idea. That sounds miserable especially when it means that you now somehow need to rope five of your friends to follow you down a rabbit hole just so you can have pretty armor for the week. It is hard enough to convince people to run old school World of Warcraft raids when only transmog items are on the line… let alone run a 2-3 hour long Destiny raid that never really trivializes… for armor paint. Now up until this statement I was taking a wait and see approach and in part I still am. I noticed that all of the planet faction NPCs had shaders on their loot table that you can get from engrams. Maybe as he says as we start to grind faction we will be swimming in armor spray paint, but more than likely there is still going to be a sizable number of shaders that are only available through bright engrams. Bright engrams for reference are the new RNG loot box that the Eververse sells for Silver. Right now the equivalent conversion rate is $5 to 3 Bright Engrams… and while these drop organically each time you fill up your xp bar again post level 20… that is going to be a less than enjoyable grind to get them. While I have not actually opened an actual Bright Engram, I have been opening the assorted packages that Eververse gives you in the farm and through those I have received a bunch of shaders enough to make me think that this is going to be the easier way to get them.

As of last night I hit 15 and probably will push through to 20 tonight, so I should start to see this supposed increased shader drop rate shortly. What is frustrating to me is that everything else about the game is really amazing. However that amazing is slightly tarnished by the fact that I know one of my favorite systems has turned into something I looked forward to using… to something I will probably hoard and never actually use. You change out gear in Destiny constantly… and even on my maximum light cap 400 characters in the original game… I was regularly tweaking and fiddling with my build out each time I got some new interesting piece of loot. There is never going to be a point where you can set your armor selection in stone, knowing that you will likely never get something that works better for you. Each patch Bungie tweaks this or that making it likely that you are going to be swapping gear our to optimize whatever you happen to be going for this week. There is never going to be a point where you have enough of your favorite shaders… nor will you have the freedom to swap them around at will just to do silly things like have everyone raiding in Glowhoo or that hideous McDonald’s looking shader. Shaders were fun and one of those few non-gear rewards that you loved seeing at the end of a Crucible match or after a strike. Gone are the days when you cannot wait to try on the new shader you just got to see what it looks like. Now instead it is going to be a stack in your inventory that keeps going up in number… but you still feel like you maybe shouldn’t use yet because there is a really awesome item waiting around the corner that you might want it for. So that in a nutshell is the situation with shaders and why the Destiny 1 player base is frustrated by it.

For the Puppies

September 1, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve rattled on over the last few days at some of the things I have been disappointed thus far in the Destiny Demo experience, or at least airing some of my concerns and misgivings. I thought I should probably spend some time this morning talking about one of the things that they are doing amazingly well with the launch of Destiny 2. One of the core reasons that most of my friends bounced off of this game… was the lack of story. Don’t get me wrong… there is plenty of story to be had… they just lay it out in a way that is largely nonsensical. Only by hoarding weapon and armor descriptions… hundreds of grimoire cards… and then cross referencing those against missions in the game and random nonsense that is in the background of the level design… do you actually get the true picture of what is going on. Please note… that I didn’t actually do this on my own but at some point I stumbled across the Myelin games channel and drank deeply of the font of lore theory. If you want the story in a much more digestible form then I refer you again to the amazing Lore Primer video that MyNameIsByf created where he attempts to lay everything that we know for certain out in a linear timeline… that happens to be an hour and a half in run time. Prior to launch they claimed the game would have a story line rivaling that of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars… and we all balked. In truth however it does in fact have this story woven through the fabric of the game… but makes every possible attempt to disguise it from us and make it harder to figure out than is humanly reasonable.

This time around however they swore they had changed, and when we got our hands on the PS4 demo… as I have said before there is literally more story in the Homecoming mission than there was in the original game sequence leading up to the Black Garden. I am not trying to be hyperbolic here… but in truth there is way more character exposition than exists in any form in Vanilla Destiny. We were introduced to a cast of characters… like The Traveler, The Speaker, The Stranger… and a handful of characters that I could tell we were supposed to care about that served as our class leads…. but never actually did much in the way of leading. We also had a nonsensical enemy in the form of “The Darkness” which sorta felt as stupid as attempting to go to war against “Terrorism”. We lacked anything resembling a big bad Villain that we the players were focused on… and when we did get raids… we had no emotional payoff in taking down Aetheon or Crota… because they were just another name in a long line of names that meant nothing to us. One of the best experiences I have ever had was when I finally took down Arthas… the Lich King for the first time… because I had an entire expansion focused on combating the forces of the scourge and playing cat and mouse with him across a continent. When it finally resolved and we got to see that cut scene for the very first time… there were literal tears of joy in my eyes. With the Taken King we got a better shot at a big baddie… but even then we didn’t really have enough time to learn to hate him the way we should have. The emotional payback element was largely missing because he zoned into our solar system… blew up a bunch of Awoken… and then wrecked a ship that wasn’t even ours. We had a dozen or so missions to get into her head, and by the time we took out Oryx… it was cool and definitely felt epic but was still lacking any resounding payback theme.

The core problem there… is the Taken King content and our supposed “war” with Oryx happened disconnected from anything that we actually cared about as players. The Tower… our home for the last three years remained largely unscathed… as did the Reef other than a few NPCs swapping places. There was no sense of loss to fuel our desire for revenge, and while it is a freaking amazing expansion and a leap forward in storytelling… but still not quite there. With Destiny 2 there are so many things changing… and in truth they needed to. There will be players that lament the loss of their shiny vault full of weapons… and I won’t like there are a lot of things I will be sad to say goodbye to. However what we are getting is a tangible reason for fighting and that means so much more than any given piece of loot could… and the folks that know me really well will be shocked to hear me say that. The history of the city is built on the backs of major flash points that we can only really find out about in legend… or in the name of locations. Growing up I heard about all of the things that my Grandfathers went through with World War II… how one Grandfather stormed the beach at Normandy… got shot up by a gunner and just happened to fall into a trench with a medic that could patch his punctured lung. That was his story though… and not mine… much in the same way that the tales about the fabled Guardians of the past are just legends and didn’t really factor much into my day to day game play. In Destiny 2 we start the game by living through the fall of the Tower and the loss of our Light as a source of power… as well as the potential loss of our constant companion the Ghost. We have reason and motive to want to take back what was ours from this Chubby Darth Malgus. I am so ready to hit the ground and start taking down Cabal as I at the same time attempt to fortify and rebuild our new home… the Farm.

Another thing that the Taken King did better was start to give our class leads a personality. Cayde-6 went from being a random Exo Hunter in the tower… to Robotic Mal from Firefly. Zavala went from being that dude that sold me crappy Titan gear… to being the Stalwart defender of the tower and the “worrier in chief” about everything. Ikora Rey went from being someone I never actually talked to… because the Warlock jump is horrible… to being this sassy arcane dynamo. The Homecoming mission took all of these elements and built on it, and they have been carrying this mission forward in the form of a flood of videos about Destiny 2. I’ve been linking them in and out of the paragraphs of text, and they do this amazing job of packaging up the elements of the world that you might want to care about and delivering them to you on a silver platter. Yesterday the live action video shipped and it is truly amazing… and I said this before but there is no song better for a “getting shit done” montage than Sabotage by the Beastie Boys. Leading up to this however there have been five character vignettes… one for each of the class leads: Cayde-6, Zavala, and Ikora Rey… as well as one for Hawthorne the person who is going to be helping us a lot at our new home on The Farm… as well as one for Ghaul our new bad guy focus. They’ve done more in the months leading up to the release of this sequel to set the stage and give us a reason to care about it… than they did in the entirety of three years of the original. For me… its like getting to share this gift with all of my friends because I was the only one mental enough to actually go digging into the lore. For the last few years my friends have had to listen to me rattle on about this or that from Destiny without actually knowing any of the context. Here is a giant fucking context sandwich… and it gives me a lot of hope for the future. I think Bungie gets it… and they understand that you cannot just throw a train of breadcrumbs in your game and call it good. They started in the middle of an established story… but never gave us enough bearings to be able to really find our way clear of caring about what was going on. I’ve said before that the central focus of Destiny is shooting space monsters with space guns… and I still stand by that. If you are really not into that premise then no amount of story is really going to make you want to stay. However… it does give you some reasons for why you might want to shoot those space monsters… and understand where exactly your space guns game from.