Destiny Archives - Page 18 of 45 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Assorted Turtling

July 27, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was an exceedingly stressful day, and that combined with the fact that my wife is out of town… lead to a sudden bout of turtling. For those unfamiliar with the nomenclature… I go through these periods where I feel like I need to pull my head into my shell to attempt to remain sane. I’m thankful that I have a few friends that get it, and don’t give me too much hassle about it, but every so often I just reach this point where I need to disconnect from humanity. Last night was one of those nights and I cycled restlessly through a whole bunch of games to see if I could find something that would fit well enough to pass the evening in. The negative is that in theory this should have been a night I was tanking in Final Fantasy XIV, but I just could not handle communicating with others… or having anyone I cared about relying on me. The irony is that I wound up for a bit early in the evening in Destiny… and absolutely wound up carrying two other players hard through a random strike. I took a screenshot not because it is impressive… but because it shows the massive difference between my participation and that of the other two. This was on the Wretched Eye strike… and I wound up kiting the Ogre… and DPSing most things down… and resurrecting the other two people constantly. Now I know what Squirrel and Jex feel like when I run with them.

From there I wound up back downstairs and watched the last episode of Handmaid’s Tale… which is maybe not the best idea to watch when you are already feeling depressed. While doing so I ended booting up Rift and playing around some there. I am still level 67 and working on the Gedlo Badlands, which is not exactly my favorite zone so far. Moonshade Highlands is my jam, and I have never been that big of a fan of desolate desert landscapes… especially not ones where everything is on fire. That said I did make a lot of progress knocking out various quests and while it still feels like my experience bar isn’t really moving… the constant ding of planar levels seems to help the feeling of being mired. I have been running around with a heavy Warlord hybrid build, and while I have been absent it seems to have been buffed significantly. Previously I had a lot of problems with struggling to kill a given mob in time before it killed me. Now I seem to be able to run around and wreck things pretty safely. My biggest complaint with Starfall Prophecy now Prophecy of Ahnket… are the legendary morphs of abilities. Each of them seems to read like it is going to be universally better than the original… but after taking a few of them they seem to FEEL worse. The biggest problem here is that you cannot undo them without paying for a respec…and then you have to remember what the hell you chose as a spec down to the point where you screwed up and chose the wrong legendary morph. Personally I think the system should just be a toggle, and that you can have X number of legendaries toggled on equal to the number you have earned.

I also played a little Secret World Legends, which is something I seem to do just about every day… or at the very least I am logging in to get the rewards. I am not completely sold on the game but I am enjoying it enough to keep showing up and experiencing it. The combat feels fresh enough to make going through a bunch of quests I did long long ago feel worth it. My key complaint however is the game still does a piss poor job of clearly identifying which quests you have completed and which ones you have not. That was one of my biggest problems with the game is to log in and roam around through a sea of cutely named quests… that all sort of blend together in my head making it impossible to sort out if I have or have not completed them. This was even worse when it came to expansion content going into the game, and blending in among all of those other quests that I did a year ago. So far blade and elemental is fun enough, but I find myself really missing the shotgun… and with the way gear levels up in this game I feel like I am really not in a great place to switch gears at any point soon. I do have an extremely low level shotgun sitting in my inventory and I might try swapping it out at some point soon just to see if it is viable. I’ve moved on to the Savage Coast but there is honestly still a lot in Kingsmouth that I have never really gotten around to completing. My biggest complaint overall is as compared to the original… the drop rates of anything meaningful in the world is nonexistent. All of your gear seems to come from lootbags gained through doing quests… so I have a feeling that a big part of the “endgame” is going to be repeating quests on the daily reset to get more stuff to fuse into your gear. That doesn’t really bode well for those players that are not a big fan of grindy mechanics.

No Time To Explain

May 25, 2017 by Belghast

Once upon a time in Destiny year one, there was a weapon called The Strangers Rifle. It was funky looking, had a unique feel and sound to it… and you got it whenever you finished the primary storyline of Destiny… then spent forever collecting stuff to level it up completely. It was also gained from someone that we really know little to nothing about… other than the fact that she doesn’t have time to explain why she doesn’t have time to explain. However this weapon got left behind in the past largely because The Taken King introduced the ability to upgrade weapons through infusion. However they did introduce a hidden quest that involved a bunch of madness that I mentioned at least briefly back in April of 2016 in a post. Apparently they have changed it up a little bit… but once upon a time you had to wait for the Paradox mission to appear as the daily heroic. Then during the course of the mission you had to collect three ghost fragments and return the Future War Cult Ghost to Lakshmi-2 in the tower. From there you had to pledge the Future War Cult and gain 1000 reputation to unlock the next part, which involved killing Taken Minotaur until a Simulation Core dropped. Then we reach the part I was stalled on for over a year for various reasons… killing Atheon in the Vault of Glass on any difficulty.

Last night the awesome folks in Tequila Mockingbird… but more importantly Squirrel and Jex helped pull together a raid for the purpose of getting me my Atheon kill. We did it on old school difficulty, largely for the purpose of trying to steamroll through it and then move on to getting in a Crota kill. After the raiding I lucked out during the next part, which is to find a chest that spawns in a weird version of the Twilight Gap crucible map. Thankfully I knew my way around the map and I decided to head over to B first… and sure enough sitting right beside what would normally be the capture point was a chest containing the piece I needed. From there I went on to do the Blood of the Garden quest, which did not exactly work how I was expecting it. Firstly I did not realize I was not in the final area of the map… and I knew there was an anger mechanic that was supposed to spawn the Taken Ultra that I needed to kill to get the final component. However I didn’t remember how high I needed to get my anger and I wound up slaughtering wave after wave of Minotaur until I somehow managed to get the anger to over 200%… and when nothing still spawned I noticed the arrow on my mini map pointing to the next area. Sure enough the big Minotaur was up and way easier to take down than attempting to survive that constant deluge of a dozen regular Minotaur at a time. Finally I went back to the tower and claimed my No Time to Explain exotic pulse rifle… to which I had to sacrifice both an exotic that I was no longer using… and a 400 primary to bring it up to modern standards.

That was the part of the evening that went amazingly well… the other part of the evening was struggling to do Crota. First off I had only actually been into the raid once before… and back during the “we overpower this so much, what are mechanics even” phase. As a result we struggled more than a bit, because we were doing it on heroic where resurrections are not a thing that happens. Additionally we lost a member of our fire team a little bit into the raid, and wound up replacing him with an unknown quantity. Said new person was moody as hell while we were actually failing to mechanic, and then when we called it a night made sure we knew how mad he was. Before he left chat he said something along the lines of that he bailed on his normal raid to come get an easy Crota kill, and now he screwed up and missed the raid invite. No one promised him an easy kill, and even though we were failing a lot… we were laughing and having fun while doing it. That is ultimately the important part, and sure I didn’t manage to finish my Necrochasm quest… but I had a lot of fun learning bits and pieces of the modern version of the Crota raid. In truth I think if I went back in again I be more prepared for what I needed to get through on the other side. All told however I managed to pick up a couple of cool weapons in the process including a spiffy new Oversoul Edict… so I think in the grand scheme of things the night was a complete win far as I am concerned. Once again huge thanks to Tequila Mockingbird for hanging out and making stuff happen, and Squirrel for prodding them into doing so.

Treadblades and Grenades

May 22, 2017 by Belghast

A good chunk of this weekend was about me riding the high that was the Destiny 2 gameplay reveal panel. I wrote about my feelings Friday, but I am still extremely hyped. What I find interesting is that there are some hardcore Destiny players that walked away disillusioned by the announcement. For me I largely wanted them to take the same Destiny mechanics that I love and apply them to a much more open world. From the sounds of it that is precisely what we are getting. However it seems like the competitive PVP scene walked away frustrated, because they were expecting ladder brackets and things like that to support their specific play style. While I love the Crucible, I am anything but serious when I play it… and as a result I largely am okay with a more casual PVP focus. What is funny about this is that it is the same community that got super frustrated when they were only being matched against similarly skilled players, and have been the biggest proponents of moving away from skill based matchmaking. I can at least see one of their complaints, which is largely that they were expecting the game to move to a server/client structure rather than the peer to peer setup that we have today. I feel like the currently crucible matchmaking algorithm does a decent job of weeding out the “redbars”, and it has been a really long time since I have been in a match with more than one of them. That could however be based on the fact that I am living in the center of the United States and have solid pings to either coast though.

What all the Destiny love created however is a strong desire to play the game I currently have my hands on. Over the weekend I spent a good deal of time upstairs playing around, and picked back up my Xbox One character since it allowed me to experience the full circuit of Destiny emotions. All of my PSN characters are comfortably at 400 light, and all I am really doing there is upgrading additional gear to that level. So there is a missing chunk of the experience… the brief joy of seeing a higher light level item that you can then use to infuse into your gear. So as a result I opted to spend most of the weekend playing my now 378 Titan. On PSN however I did spend a bit of time working on achievements, and that meant a lot of chain running of SIVA Crisis Strikes for the purpose of trying to get super kills. This also meant rocking my Bad Juju, because for me at least it seems to be a much better super energy magnet than the Zhalo Supercell. I think right now I am 5 super streaks away from finishing up one book, and then I can start in earnest on the modern Age of Triumph book. I am still a little bummed that they came out and dashed my hopes of “cross save” functionality between the various client versions. I would have happily purchased Destiny 2 for all available platforms if this actually happened.

On the World of Warcraft front, I indulged in something I had been wanting to for awhile. With the recent spike in token prices I opted to purchase one and it sold for roughly 130,000 gold. I then took that gold and purchased the Champion’s Treadblade… which I always thought was a way cooler design than the Warlord’s Deathwheel. This also jarred me off center in being less of a lazy engineer. I never actually got around to crafting the original Mekgineer’s Chopper. It was one of those things I always intended to do… but never wanted to spend the money on. functionally no matter how much faction discount you have the end result is always going to be 12,000 gold worth of parts. I used this influx of cash from the token however to serve as a reason to go ahead and finish this off. I happened to have pretty much everything else needed to craft it laying around on various alts, so it was simply a matter of flying out to Storm Peaks and buying the few vendor items.

The last major event of the weekend is that I finally decided what to use my character boost on. I have not really touched much of anything this expansion on the Horde side. My friend Grace has reverted back to her Horde ways, and as a result I figured I should probably have at least one character that I like to be able to play with her. As a result I took the Deathknight that I rolled on her server and boosted it to 100, and started leveling it last night. The thing that I didn’t realize about the 100 boost… is just how lousy the gear is that they give you. I remember I started Legion sitting in mostly 710 gear on my characters from the pre-launch invasion events. My newly boosted Unholy Deathknight was equipped in a full set of 640 gear… which if I remember correctly was the required level to queue for heroics in Warlords of Draenor. As a result this is the first character I have taken to the Broken Shores invasion scenario that I actually had trouble surviving. I died about four times during this invasion… but that also could simply be because this late in the expansion there was only one other player actually doing it. Whatever the case I clawed my way up from the frustrating gear level and am making progress in Azsuna.

Destiny 2 Feels

May 19, 2017 by Belghast

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So yesterday was the big reveal of Destiny 2 gameplay and I have to say I am not disappointed in the least. In fact at this very moment I am feeling inordinate amounts of Destiny love. There were a few things that were released that gave me all the feels. The first is the “Story of Zavala” trailer of sorts that tells the tale of how he came from being a corpse somewhere in the cosmodrome to being the leader of the Vanguard. Unfortunately I have not seen this trailer released separately so you have to catch it about 14 mins into the video that I linked… which is the entire Destiny 2 reveal stream dumped to YouTube. In that trailer you see a young Amanda Holliday getting her first look at a starship, so that in itself was completely priceless. The second cavalcade of feels comes from the gameplay reveal trailer… which appears to be cut from what is going to be one of the intro cinematics showing how the tower falls. There is a moment in the trailer for each class where they get to shine… and I absolutely got all the feels when I saw Zavala call everyone to him and raise a Titan bubble. There are similar badass moments where Ikora Rey Nova Bombs a Cabal transport, and Cayde-6 Golden Gun’s three Cabal troopers.

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Destiny 2 is a tale of starting over after a monumental fall from grace, which in itself is probably the best way of dealing with a power reset scenario. Having spent the last week playing through the Fallen Empire storyline in Star Wars the Old Republic… I absolute approve of the notion that sometimes you need to shuffle the deck to freshen up the game. What I like the most about what I saw though is that everything looked and felt like it was still Destiny… just with the Destiny-ness sliders moved all the way to eleven. They reveal that we are going to four new places… but in part I am hoping that given time we will also revisit areas that we have been to before. The maps themselves are supposedly more open world style, or at least the one that was showed reminded me of something on the scale of the Hinterlands from Dragon Age: Inquisition with lots of active hotspots to go explore and find adventures. This is definitely playing to my core desires as a player, but I am also hoping that it still has directed story missions for the folks like Tamrielo who tend to bounce super hard from “now go explore” setups in games.

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It sounds like all of the things that made Destiny awesome are coming back, but that they are adding a whole layer of new stuff on top. To be truthful if you look at my characters stats… I have spent a significant number more hours doing patrol missions than literally anything else in the game. Just as a reference according to my Profile on Bungie.net… on my Titan I have played a grand total of 14 days 15 hours… and of that time 7 days 4 hours was in Patrol mode. So giving me a big open world to roam in is absolutely going to serve my interests. However it sounds like the strikes and raids and crucible modes are all coming back with a vengeance with brand new concepts being introduced. It also seems like some of the specs are being tweaked… and I am not sure if each class is getting a wholly new sub class or if we are just losing one and gaining one. Titans for example I know have a Void class that revolves around wielding a shield like Captain America. Warlocks have a new sub class that gives them flaming angel wings and lets them wield a giant flaming sword. So I am not sure if those are in additional to the subs we already have… or if those are now replacing the Defender Titan and Sunsinger Warlock. I mean I am hoping we get something new… but Defender was absolutely one of those sub classes that was super niche and extremely hard to complete “kill with elemental abilities” sort of bounties.

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The biggest news from yesterday is that the PC client would be going through Battle.net… which is curiously being referred to as Battle.net and not the Blizzard Launcher. I said before that I would likely never stop calling it Battle.net, and I am guessing maybe they have rethought that branding decision… now that a non-Blizzard game is going to be using that infrastructure. This decision has a lot of positives and as far as I am concerned fairly few negatives. I’ve spent over a decade now cultivating a community inside of the Blizzard franchise games, and knowing that I can carry that ready made community into Destiny is going to be a huge bonus for me. What Bungie is getting from PSN and XBL is an account system that takes care of all of the day to day friend maintenance and messaging functionality and lets them just connect up a game to it. I mean the option that we all probably through they would be taking was to integrate this game with Steam completely, and rely on steam users for profiles. However to be honest, Blizzard does a far better job of policing its own network than Steam does, because quite frankly it is not in the interest of Valve to clamp down too harshly. The only negative here about any of this is that it sounds like the PC client will not be available on day one… and will instead be a console launch only. Ultimately I was going to buy this on PS4 and PC anyways… so this is not a huge deal for me… however it is going to suck for anyone who wants to hold out for the PC.

My dream that is likely to go unrealized is that I could have a single set of character spread across all of the platforms. I am perfectly okay with purchasing a PC client, PS4 client, and Xbox One client… and not necessarily being able to cross play between them. However I would love if my characters which are attached to my Bungie account carried over and worked on each platform. Let me play with my PC friends, PS4 friends and Xbox friends with the characters I have spent so much time building. I mean I managed to get my Xbox One character up to 370 light… but that feels pittiful compared to my stable of three 400 light characters on the PS4 side, each with access to a vault full of awesome stuff. Compared to the 14 days on PSN… I have only played 21 hours of the Xbox One gameplay because not having all of my toys was always a major set back. Since the characters are bound to the Bungie account… they could absolutely make this thing happen. They just need the will to do so. So I have hopes and dreams… but I am fully expecting them to get dashed in the long run. At this point however I am just riding the hype train and so freaking ready for this game to come out.