Destiny Archives - Page 32 of 46 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Scattered Gaming

March 28, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was an odd one. After a string of relatively nice weekends, we ended up getting one that was either cold and windy… or cold and rainy, both of which drove my instinct to stay inside and hibernate. The only problem is… with all this play time I largely squandered it and spent more time staring without purpose at games… than actually playing them. It feels like I am starting to go through another one of my “funks” because nothing seemed to fit “just right” as far as games go. I flitted between lots of different titles, playing them for a bit before shifting to something else… often times ending right back up in the game I started in. For a good chunk of the weekend I had the desire to play Destiny… but wanted to instead be hanging out downstairs which only left me the unofficial remote play app as a solution. Then there were games that I felt like I needed to make progress in like Division where I am still not at the level cap. Friday was largely devoted to Undertale, and I think after forcing myself to play that game… it maybe soured the rest of my weekend. So this morning I thought I would run down some of the progress I made in various games.

Undertale

I wrote about this at length but after hanging up my controller as it were… I opted to instead watch several of the different endings. I still feel fine in my decision to just abandon this game in an undefeated state. I guess I don’t have a primal urge to finish games, and more often than not I get to the ending and just don’t finish. I reach this point where I have gotten out of the game what I wanted, and I don’t see the point in expending that effort to push it across the finish line. In the case of Undertale the thing that was driving me forward was to understand the story, and now between the podcast and the various youtube ending videos… I feel like I do. Once that carrot was gone, the game play itself doesn’t make me want to ever touch this game again. On the podcast folks talked about ways to lower the impact of the mechanics, like the Temmie armor… but that isn’t even really an interesting option to me.

Destiny

I really did not do much in Destiny other than a little bit of Crucible. I am constantly amazed at how much I actually enjoy player versus player content in this game, when traditionally that is just not my thing. I think a lot of it is that in this game it feels like there is zero negative impact on the rest of the game. It is just another option I have to play, and gives me the same sort of PVE rewards that I expect to receive elsewhere. Other than specialty modes like Trials of Osiris it feels like I am rewarded equally for just doing whatever I happen to want to do at the time. I started down the path of the crucible simply as a way to get more Legendary marks, and then recently when I was grinding out sword kills I came to realize… I was actually legitimately enjoying myself. What is great about the crucible is that I get the central game play loop that I enjoy of shooting awesome weapons and charging around… without zero downtime. It seems like it is easier to get Three of Coins to proc on Crucible than it is while doing strikes… or it might simply be that Crucible itself is just about the perfect amount of time per coin use. While I have not actually gotten any of the really cool PVP drops… I do get a fair amount of strange coins, motes and random pieces of armor that end up getting deconstructed. Tonight I will hopefully be finishing up the rest of the Kings Fall raid that we had to abandon on Oryx last Tuesday, and beforehand it is my goal to hang out upstairs and run some more Crucible.

The Division

This weekend I managed to push Division a little harder than the rest of the games and caught up with my friend Tamrielo at least. At the start of the weekend I was sitting at roughly level 20, and as of this morning I am just about a third into 22. While I absolutely could play this and only give it partial attention at lower levels, as I have gotten into the twenties this is not really the case. As a result this weekend I managed to die probably more than I actually managed to accomplish anything. There are two missions that I know I attempted at least a half dozen times before finally giving it my full attention and pushing through. My standard operating procedure while hanging out with my wife downstairs is that I essentially have one eye on the game and one eye on whatever we happen to be watching… not literally but you know what I mean. The problem with this is that in doing so I am not exactly paying attention to the best possible tactical spot that I could be in while shooting incoming mobs. The addition of snipers really changed how the game works, and now that I have guys that rush me with shotguns as well.. I am having to be way more careful about how I take on content. That said I feel like I made some decent progress, but most of it was in short bursts of me playing for thirty minutes to an hour… and then logging out and doing something else. Thankfully much like Destiny… short batches of play time feel just as rewarding to me as multiple hour long sessions.

World of Warcraft

The other major happening of the weekend was me poking around on my Forsaken Hunter in World of Warcraft. Recently Blizzard added an achievement that you could unlock by leveling a character in WoW to 20, aka the free mode level cap. For doing this you end up getting Lady Liadrin as an alternate Paladin hero in Hearthstone. Not that I really play Hearthstone… and even more so… not that I really like playing Paladins in Hearthstone… I have this drive to get the achievement and unlock the extra shiny bits. The negative of this achievement is that it only counts if you have recently leveled to twenty after the launch of the achievement, that means my army of level 100s are doing me zero good for this goal. As a result I opted to level something on The Scryers Horde side since that is where the bulk of my lower leveled characters are these days. I largely played during the podcast on Saturday night, and as a result managed to get to I believe 18 before giving it up for the night. The goal is to spend some time this week pushing it over the line, so that I at least can feel like I got this out of the way. I honestly think this whole promotion is a brilliant idea to try and cross pollinate some of the players actively playing Hearthstone and get them to try World of Warcraft. I know Hearthstone is a major nostalgia bomb for me… but I wonder if it is the same for a player who has ONLY played Hearthstone, now being able to see where those cards they love are actually from.

Death and Taxes

March 24, 2016 by Belghast

A Very Bad Day

Tuesday night I slept fairly horribly, and spent most of it tossing and turning and unable to regulate my body temperature between too hot and too cold. So yesterday I went into the day on a low point, with being extremely groggy and fumbling through activities. Unfortunately this also seems to be the sort of day when something horribly goes wrong. About 10 am yesterday morning we had a freak incident occur where a publish went wrong in the content management we use at work, that caused the entire xml cache to jettison itself and our main public facing website started throwing a “no nodes” error instead of serving content. I proceeded to spend the next five hours trying to fix the problem by republishing every single piece of content on the site… which is roughly 20,000 nodes worth. We got the bulk restored really quickly, and then spent the next three hours fighting with a handful of tricky node trees, that seemed to be super picky about the order in which things were published. By the time I exited work… all I really wanted was a drink… or four.

When I got home however we decided to get the monkey off our backs of our taxes. We itemize, and we also have them prepared… not that I think we can’t do our own taxes but I will happily throw money at someone for the piece of mind that come an audit we can point the finger at someone else’s legal team to sort it out for us. There is a level of stress that taxes invoke in me that is far higher than just about anything… so doing them on the day I was already having a shitty day was maybe not a great idea. Then again it wasn’t like the day could get much worse. The problem being that as we were flailing about the house trying to gather the last two or three bits of information before going… my wife and I were fussing with each other in a way that never really happens when money isn’t on the line. All of the stress and anxiety, is generally for naught as we get our taxes done… and generally get back a decent refund. The bigger stress last night was that I felt bad for missing the WoW raid… but thankfully it sounded like they had enough people to pull together without me. I hear they even managed to down Iskar which is a brand new boss for our group.

Today however seems like it is starting off much the same way as yesterday. I got to bed at a decent hour and it felt like I was getting good sleep… that is until about 2 am when I woke up thinking the alarm had gone off. For whatever reason it seems like we fell asleep with the television on, and that noise made me think the alarm was going off. In the middle of my trying to get ready, I noticed the smell of smoke. Like enough to make me start freaking out about if the house was on fire. So I started roaming the house to see if the smell that permeated got worse anywhere to indicate where it was coming from. I woke my wife when I decided to leave the house and go wandering outside to see if it was something from a nearby house. The smell was far worse outside, but once again it seemed to be diffuse without any real direction that it was coming from. I finally hopped in the car and drove the neighborhood, and when the smell was the same up the hill from us… I finally reached a point of solace that it was very much “not our house” and was able to attempt going back to sleep. This morning on the news we found out that apparently there is a massive grass fire burning north of us, but still about a thirty minute drive… so that has to be one hell of a fire to generate that thick of smoke as far away as we were.

Hilt Punch

Ultimately I ended up getting settled in after taxes and getting some food in me, roughly an hour after the start of the raid. I could have of course logged into World of Warcraft, and gotten pulled into the raid as a late comer. After the day I had however I was not exactly fit to be around other human beings, so instead I opted to chill out upstairs with the PS4 and some Destiny. One of the missions that has been eluding me for awhile has been the continuation of the quest that upgrades my legendary quality sword to exotic. There is a step early on where you need to get 50 “yellow bar” kills with the sword in PVE and 25 kills of players in the crucible. While I occasionally poke my head into the Crucible… I am not exactly a regular PVP player. That said last night I felt as combative as I was ever going to be… and my clan had suggested doing it on a week when Mayhem Clash was one of the highlighted modes. Supposedly “heavy ammo drops like candy” or so someone said and in truth… sure it is more common than other modes but not exactly easy either. There were so many times I picked up heavy ammo and instantly got gibbed by another player coming up right behind me before I could even get my sword out. So instead more often than not I simply punched players with the empty hilt of my sword, which counts as a sword kill nonetheless. Ironically in a lot of cases… the hilt without any ammo… still one shot players.

Spending an hour or two doing Clash had a few awesome side effects. Firstly I gained a fat stack of glimmer, more than enough to purchase the ship above from Petra in the Reef since I had recently reached rank 3 there. It also meant that after bashing my face against it for a bit… I managed to get all 25 of my kills… strangely enough the last six were gained in a single match, and single ammo pickup. I just got lucky and managed to time my jumps just right as to slash folks as they came at me in the air. This allowed me to knock out the next step pretty quickly, which was a special boss on the Dreadnaught. I remember when I read up on the quest folks talking about how challenging that encounter was and that how they really needed to use sword block effectively. In truth I would start out each foray by blocking an attack and then landing a succession of quick hits… but then would jump away and wait for my shields to recharge before repeating. Doing that it took roughly three engagements before I had that boss down. Now I am on a step that seems considerably more time consuming than any yet… where I need to collect special materials from the moon that supposedly occasionally drop from helium filament canisters and chests. At the same time I need to use my solar abilities, which is pretty easy given that I am rocking the Armamentarium for double the grenades and some item that allows me to pretty much do nonstop solar punches. Supposedly this means I need to kill 500 mobs with solar abilities and farm at minimum 100 helium fragment containers to get the drops. My goal is to finish that part so that the next Armsday I can pick up the final piece which is the Sunless Cell strike… and convince Squirrel and Jex to help me get through that. It feels good to get the crucible step out of the way… but I also know that next up is working on First Curse. That said I actually really enjoyed playing the Crucible and managed to get a couple of legendary engrams out of the process and a handful of exotics including a 310 Twilight Garrison.

Sometimes We Fail

March 23, 2016 by Belghast

The Rookie Raid

For a little bit now, one of the highlights of my week has been the Rookie Raid night with my clan in Destiny. I think mostly after playing the game for roughly two years… I was really wanting to raid, and getting to step foot in Kings Fall each week has been a blast. There are still a lot of things that I absolutely screw up, but I feel like I am getting better. I have always been one of those people that learns by doing, and it simply takes several repetitions before something actually gets cemented in my head. The highlight of the night was the fact that I actually made it through the ship jumping puzzle on the very first time… and it only took me two tries to get over to the wall and get into the chest nook just after the ships. This is serious progress because some of those jumps on past attempts took me dozens of tries to actually get. Similarly I seemed to make it through the piston wall without a ton of issues this week which also felt good. I ended up jumping to the final platform… and then got confused thinking I went the wrong direction. So I guess even I shocked myself that I had made it through with I think two deaths this week, instead of the literally dozens in previous outings.

I’ve had to develop the practice of sitting down with my character once I have reached the final platform of a jumping sequence. I wouldn’t go so far as the say that I am afraid of heights, because in real life I can look out over balconies or off the roofs of buildings without much issue. I can climb up on things without much issue either… well apart from the fact that I have zero dexterity. However for whatever reason in video games… I get disoriented and almost dizzy when dealing with jumping sequences. There are certain games that have triggered this feeling more than others, like Mirrors Edge. However there are other games that are just as parkoury for lack of a better word… like Dying Light that don’t seem to bother me at all. It has to be something about the perspective or some technical detail that does it… but whatever the case… Destiny absolutely triggers these feelings. So as stupid as it sounds, I feel like every time I don’t fuck up a jump… it is a pretty major victory for me. It takes so much mental stamina to get me through one of the jump sequences that when I finish… I am constantly afraid that I will do something stupid that leads to me plummeting back down below and having to do it all over again. So my little practice of sitting makes it seem like it is far less likely for me to somehow get bumped and fall.

Oryx Cheats

One of the cool things about this week is that I got to learn a few slightly different roles during the fights. Namely I moved from platform duty to Ogre duty, which is way more my style. When our group does Oryx we do it “challenge” style which involves making sure the Ogres do not move before they die, allowing all of the blight orbs to spawn in essentially the same place. This allows us to pop them all at the same time, and deal almost all of the damage to Oryx in a single turn. That is at least when things work out. As one of the Titans assigned to this duty, we run complimentary bubbles making sure Weapons and Blessing are both up and dropped in the same place. This allows us to take advantage of our Touch of Malice and keep from killing ourselves in the process. The goal is to dip back into the shield between ogres to replenish the shields and give us more life to spend while pummeling the adds. This works great… until we have to go into the fight without a super bar. We somehow managed to make it through that round but it was getting super dicey as far as the whole “not killing ourselves” part. It was during the Oryx fight however last night… that shit just got weird.

302 – Elulim’s Frenzy

304 – War Numen’s Fist

310 – Armamentarium

I had heard before of the bugs in the Kings Fall raid… but luckily in the previous two weeks we had never really encountered any. This week however they struck back with a vengeance, starting with several of us mysteriously dying to “misadventures”. Other times the platform sequence got messed up, or our runner was unable to grab the orb for some reason… having the platform disappear beneath them before the transfer actually happened. The scariest was when we saw an ogre appear in the default T state that models are generally modeled in… and then disappear quickly… coming up through the ground with the normal animation. Essentially there was something seriously wrong with the server, and even though we tried several different tricks to right the ship… we ultimately had to call it to time. The goal right now is to pop back in Monday night and see if we can wreck Oryx given that we have a check point right at the boss. Sometimes we fail… but even in failing I had a really good time. The loot on the other hand is starting to get more scarce, and I got some relatively low light level versions of things… but I did manage to pick up another much needed slot in the arms. I’ve posted a gallery of the various things, including the 310 Armamentarium chest that was waiting on me at the mailbox. I am not really sure where along the way that dropped but but it is much appreciated because I love having the extra grenades. However as long as I am running Defender, I kinda feel like the Saint-14 helm is a must have.

Light and Poms

March 21, 2016 by Belghast

Losing Light

This marks the second weekend of attempts to get a black spindle, and I am quickly reaching a point where I no longer want it. The first weekend was a tale of me largely spending the entire day either waiting to get a group or making attempts on it. For whatever reason Bungie seems to keep choosing Sunday as the day for Spindle runs… which is not exactly prime time for people playing the game. On top of that… Sunday is normally a day that I have stuff that needs to get done, and instead for two different weekends my world has focused around trying to get a Black Spindle. I reached a point yesterday where I wanted to reach through the internet and punch whoever it was that designed this mission. The individual parts aren’t all that bad… but combined together is just maddening. If you could simply respawn at a checkpoint before the 10 minute timer starts on the Ketch it wouldn’t be so bad. I would happily grind that until we finally got it… but instead it is the frustration of having to clear to a boss… then do the run across the temple… then unlock the various chambers… then FINALLY go up into the ketch and do the “real” mission. So you have 10-15 minutes of bullshit before you reach the point at which it is omg serious mode.

We tried several different methods of attempting to down the boss, the main one being that we jump to the middle and burn him down with swords. Towards the end we started trying to just whittle his ass down while keeping the adds under control, and honestly neither really worked well. Anytime we ducked outside of the entrance tunnel we would get wrecked, and almost one shot. I guess that is the biggest frustration is that the room has no place where you can really set up OTHER than the entrance tunnel and clean out the adds. The geometry of the room means that someone is always getting hung on something and stuck awkwardly out in the open… which means they are essentially dead. I am not sure what is up with the mission but it felt like we did significantly worse than the last time… and this time around I am 304 and decked out in raid weapons that deal extra damage to taken. I know I am the albatross around the neck of the group, but I am not exactly sure what I am doing wrong there. At this point I am not likely to spend another weekend of attempts on this stupid weapon… when I have two sniper rifles that I enjoy using already. Sure this is the best sniper in the game, but if it quite literally makes one of my party members slam their controller down against the desk breaking it… it is not worth the hassle or frustration.

Pom Pom Squad

The highlight of the weekend however for me was getting a Pom Pom Beanie on Friday evening while playing Division. Strangely enough this seems to be the chase item for most people because they are actually rather rare. I have given food and water to every single person that I meet along the street asking for it… and have a huge amount of clothing options… and have gotten exactly one pom pom beanie. Now these also can apparently appear on the appearance vendor that unlocks with the security tier, but I have yet to see any there. What is awesome about mine is the fact that it fits so perfectly with the colors that I already choose… black and green. Other than that last night I got a string of awesome weapon drops… and I finally abandoned my beloved LSW for a couple of ACR variants and eventually a P416… which all seem to feel the same when firing them. I also found an upgrade for my SRS marksman rifle but unfortunately the upgrade was only a green so it won’t last nearly as long. That seems to be my combo of weapons of choice… a fairly accurate assault rifle that fires well in single shot/bursts and a marksman rifle for headshots. This allows me to either spray and play, for random two mob encounters on the street… or get more strategic for larger groups.

I am consistently amazed at the wide variety of feelings this game can make me feel. There are moments when I feel stirrings of patriotism and sentimentality like when I come across a memorial like the one above, or improvised banners hanging out of windows that say slogans like “Can’t Keep NY Down”. Then other times the game gut punches you with feels when it comes to finding a phone message from before the infection, or as society was crumbling. Like last night I picked up a message from two parents that were coming into town to see their child because they missed them… and it feels all the more tense knowing that they had no clue what they were walking into. We had a lengthy AggroChat show talking about the morality of this game… and for whatever reason it stirs something completely different in me. I absolutely feel like the good guy, the one trying hard to bring some sort of order to a fallen city. Sure the only thing that separates me from the looters is the badge I am wearing… but I am also saving countless random people from executions or muggings as I roam the city streets. I might be more vigilante than righteous crusader, but I am okay with that. I think you miss some of the nuance of the game if you are constantly focused on this objective or the next, and aren’t really participating in the events that happen on the street. I cannot count the number of times I have rolled up on a group of Rikers with their guns drawn on a civilian, and even though it is a nameless faceless NPC… I saved them from certain death. Had I been a little slower on the trigger finger they would be dead on the ground, and those are the moments I feel heroic. Those are the moments when I don’t question what I am doing in this game.