Destiny

While I am starting to dip my toes back into World of Warcraft, I am still spending an excessive amount of time in Destiny 2. I am a huge fan of the new Altars of Sorrow event and it has rapidly become my downtime activity. Between activities? Lets hop down to the moon and see if there is a group up and doing the Altars. Of note Escalation Protocol also used to be my group activity of choice back when it was actually happening on the regular. There is just something about the zero commitment drop in nature that I really love.

I mean part of me wishes there was a sure fire way of getting a successful group of players together to do it, apart from queueing in groups. One thing I noticed is that when I queue solo, I get matched with groups way more often than when Thalen and I were trying to drop in and do some Altars as a pair. In most of those occasions it seemed like it was just the two of us attempting to do content clearly designed for a full fire team. Regardless it is a good way to get a handful of weapon drops. They are on a daily rotation and Reddit user Letuch created a spreadsheet to track the rotation and what some of the rolls you might be interesting in are.

Yesterday was shotgun day, and I have yet to get a roll I am super happy with. For now this is my current best option which is Quickdraw and Rampage. I also have a variant with Swashbuckler and Auto Loading Holster which might be interesting. The truth is this isn’t exactly my jam as far as weapons go because it is a strange archetype of slug based shotguns that fire a single high powered round rather than a spray of shrapnel. If you are dead on with this you can drop targets really fast and it is basically a legendary Chaperone.

I’ve talked about it before, but for now this has become my new kinetic shotgun of choice. It comes with 8 in the magazine, One Two Punch and Threat Detector and the reload speed is nonsense on it. This is the closest I have found to a shotgun that replaces my beloved Ikelos. Sadly for a lot of players this is going to be much easier to get given that no one seems to be running Escalation Protocol. I wish they would turn that into a playlist similar to the Vex Invasion so that people can still have access to the items. Occasionally Thalen and I drop down onto Mars to see if it is going on because I still lack two of the three available weapons, and he has none of them.

The other weapon that I have firmly in the not sure about it camp is the Apostate. I am not much of a sniper user at all, so I am not sure what represents a good roll here. Snapshot Sights and Range Finder seem like a viable combo given that this feels like the type of sniper you would want to try and quick scope with. That particular build seems to aid that process. Post in the comments if you have an idea what a better option might be for me to chase. In truth I am doing the event because I am enjoying it and the weapons are more or less just a bonus.

I posted about the curated roll for the Rocket Launcher that I got a few days ago, and in truth… I am probably never going to find a better roll on a rocket launcher than one I already have in my inventory. Bad Omens is the Gambit rocket launcher and at some point in my travels I picked up one that has both Cluster Bomb and Tracking, making it as close to a Destiny 2 Gjallarhorn as I think I am ever going to find. This is effectively what I use to nuke Invaders in gambit, because it is super easy to target in and destroy them.

On to other things… I am nearing the end of this seasonal journey. When it started and when the Mastery tree was introduced I was not entirely certain I would play enough to hit rank 100. However as of last night I am about halfway to 97 and will easily hit 100 this weekend when I play some Iron Banner. I gotta say there are a lot of issues with this sort of Fortnite style progression path, but it does give me some constantly focus and a drive to keep playing in order to get those final items. For me… it maybe adds the overarching sense of purpose that Destiny 2 was lacking once I reached the item cap. I’ve been sitting at 950 for weeks and knowing there are more things to unlock has kept me engaged.

I’m on vacation for the next days so as a result I am getting around significantly later than normal. I’ve been mostly playing Destiny 2 as my primary game and as a result I am spending pretty much every night working on various objectives. Tomorrow I want to do a post where I run down all of the various activities available to the players, because there is what feels like to be an obsessive amount of things to be doing at any given time. Also as a result of this… I really don’t feel like I have the play time to actually keep multiple characters up and running. In theory I planned on doing Iron Banner with the Hunter but I just keep finding things to do on my Titan instead.

If you were like me… you loved the Stranger’s Rifle and the later No Time to Explain version. In part it was for the rewind perk and full auto… but it was also just a really cool looking weapon. The Adhortative is effectively a time aged version of this same weapon class sharing the same base model with both of those weapons and the Osiris themed Machina Dei. It also can roll with what is reportedly the best combination of stats available aka Feeding Frenzy and Multi-Kill clip. I managed to pick one of these up yesterday without really chasing after it, so I will put it through the paces and see what I think of it. I still with it at least had the Full Auto perk that Strangers/NTTE did.

Also in my travels yesterday I managed to get through the first part of the Thorn quest which apparently adds you a base model of the weapon before the next set of quests start tweaking it. I was never a huge fan of the Thorn but since it exists as an Exotic quest in Destiny 2 I sorta want to finish it. The next step is unfortunate because it clogs up my bounty inventory with three really long bounties the first involves grinding 35 Black Armory Forges, Blind Well Events or phases of Escalation Protocol. The next one requires getting 100 multi-kill streaks with any weapon and the last requires getting 50,000 points in a single Nightfall. I am hoping The Ordeal works for that last step.

As far as light gains go I am not taking any sort of a structured approach to this. I can technically hit 941 but keeping enough upgrade components has been a challenge to stay outfitted in the set that I want to be outfitted in. Right now I have latched onto a specific set of the Iron Banner armor because I like the look of it using this particular shader. My weapon load out tends to be Breakneck the gambit pinnacle auto rifle, The Hero’s Burden SMB with Kill Clip and Zen Moment, and for now at least A Fine Memorial with Threat Detector and Tap the Trigger…. but at some point soon I plan on making on a concerted effort to get a better roll on that weapon. Later today I plan on running a bunch of activities for screenshots for my big post tomorrow talking about all of the content available in game right now.

I had intentions of playing World of Warcraft all night, and while technically I was around for awhile crafting some stuff for folks who had sent me mats, I found myself fighting falling asleep at the keyboard. So once again I retreated back into Destiny because the pace of gameplay was what my brain apparently needed to keep me awake. It has been a really long rough week and I am super ready for the two days of respite that come with the weekend. Nothing in particular but more a correlation of a bunch of things all at once making me stay a little too long under the covers each morning after the alarm starts blaring. As such I am not sure if I have anything profound to talk about this morning, because I feel like profundity is lost from my brain.

I did however find a really cool area of the moon last night that is so far off the beaten path that you don’t see yourself on the map at all when you are here. I am not entirely certain if I arrived here sooner than I should have, and quite frankly I am not sure if I could get back here if I wanted to. I just started wandering until the fenestrated walls of the Scarlet Keep broke free and opened back up onto the smooth dunes of the lunar surface. What makes this area extra interesting is that it keeps going far further than you would think, and as you move outwards the mobs start to thin out to a point where you are wondering if you just wandered into something that was left unfinished.

There have been some general complaints about the size of the expansion content. I’ve more or less stopped completing objectives in favor of trying to hit the soft cap before I get any further. That however is wisdom talking and not necessarily some need for being stronger. I know there will be rewards that come from the quest steps, as I seem to be unlocking a full set of Eris themed armor through the process of completing steps. I figure I should probably be sitting at 900 before I make much more forward momentum in order to eek out as much light gain as I can in the process. Additionally there is a good reason to just keep grinding because I keep getting Seasonal objectives and Artifact progress.

As far as the overarching size of the new areas, I would say they are probably a bit bigger than the plaguelands were. Prior to the launch of Shadowkeep, Bungie had set expectations for this to be more in line of a Rise of Iron sized expansion and not a Taken King or a Forsaken and I am cool with that. After seeing what they did to revitalize the moon, I am super amped about the prospects of maybe just maybe them doing the same thing to the Dust Palace area of Mars or even more so the swamps of Venus. I would love to revisit a modern realization of Venus because it was always one of my favorite destinations for the sheer scope and imagery of the Ishtar Collective.

One of the more interesting things that has happened since the release of Destiny on Steam is that I am encountering a lot of weird names. Notice that someone has spelled out what appears to be “Fleshious” in some foreign character font, and quite honestly I don’t know enough to even guess which one. If I had to guess this is a parody of the destiny streamer named Blessious. The thing with Steam is they are real liberal on what you can put as your name and with it that is pulling over into game… emojiis and all. Ultimately prepare to enter the wild west when it come to naming conventions. Personally… I am just going to stick with Belghast and call it good. Steam however allows you to change your name pretty freely in order to accommodate clan tagging and such, and as a result you are going to see some crazy stuff.

Last night I spent the entire night playing Destiny 2, and I am now starting to feel a little guilty about not logging into World of Warcraft Classic at all. So much so that right now my plan is to play tonight and see just how far behind I am in the curve. There were a few players pulling ahead of me and I feel like I am probably going to be several levels behind the pack. Unfortunately… I have been having a blast in Destiny 2 and just have wanted to spend my entire evening playing that. It would be easier were I sitting at the level cap in WoW to alternate back and forth between the games.

Yesterday I posted a picture of these ominous Hive themed Yeti coolers on the moon with Symbols on the front. When I encountered them they appeared to be locked, and when Deej made some post yesterday about our moon findings… I replied with a picture of the chest as a joke. However I got some very serious replies, including what exactly we are supposed to do with them. I apologize for the crappy quality picture but I am trying to illustrate something badly. You notice there are symbols on the front in a specific order I personally refer to them as E A and 0 because the first looks like an E without the back and the last looks like when you draw a zero with a slash through it to differentiate between it and an O.

This is going to require some squinting maybe, but if you look in the upper left corner of the image you will see the E symbol and if you look in the middle of the right hand side you see the A symbol. How spread out they are is the reason why you got a rather crappy image to illustrate this point. Behind where my camera is currently is a column with the 0 symbol. Essentially to open the chest you shoot the symbols in the order shown on the box. If you are doing it right the symbol will begin to glow with that ominous shadowy hive energy. When you have shot them all you end up with a normal chest that you can open and usually a piece of gear.

Another thing that I spent my evening doing is punching things. Like I normally punch a lot of things already, but what I mean is that I used finishers to punch them into oblivion. I had not quite figured out the finisher system the night before last, but I have it on lock now. Essentially when an enemy gets low you will see a glowing orb over their head and they will start to shimmer a little bit. This is the indication that they are primed and ready for your finisher, much in the same way as it works in the 2016 Doom game. My finisher was set to the G key but I rebound it to 7 which is the key that I use on my mouse as my combo point dump in MMORPGs.

The interesting side benefit of using a finisher is that apparently it counts as the damage type of whatever sub class you have equipped, but also doesn’t consume a melee charge. This meant that when I landed on Titan and got a Destination Bounty of kill 30 things with Void damage… and I had no Void weapons on me… I was able to punch things to death for fun and profit. Normally speaking I would have just logged into Destiny Item Manager on my second monitor and swapped over a void weapon. However while that appears to be fixed now, for awhile that was not updated to work against the new user interface. I would imagine that it will also count for those “Void Class Abilities” bounty objectives as well, since your damage is being dealt by the class, but I am not 100% certain on that.

The highlight of the night however is that I found out that you can in fact get back into the Cosmodrome without deleting a character. When you log into the game a bunch of stuff happens, especially if you had the Solstice of Heroes armor waiting on you. Banshee gives you several objectives so I completely missed that you also gave me an exotic quest called “Pain and Gain”. This involves going into the Cosmodrome and in the area is a Fallen Walker that you can defeat over and over. Doing so drops one of the items that you pick up from the New Light experience.

So you can essentially farm the walker until you have gotten all of the items that you would have gotten had you deleted your character. The first time I took down the walker the chest that spawned gave me the Arcadia-Class Jumpship from Destiny 1. The second time I got the item I was hunting for… the Khvostov 7G-02 or the weapon you start the game with. This is still among the best feeling guns in the game and I am really hoping we get the exotic quest at some point during this expansion cycle to go get the version of it from Destiny 1 that had swappable perks. I loved that weapon so much. The other item I could have gotten was the white “Generalist Shell” but honestly I didn’t care enough about it to stick around and kill the walker a third time. Supposedly it is capable of showing up on the Heroic Mission playlist as well.

If you keep going with the mission you end up discovering a completely new area of the Cosmodrome which involves a really nonsense jumping quest. Thankfully I was forged in the fires of the Dreadnaught and managed to do the entire sequence on the first try. In the grand scheme of things none of the jumps are terribly difficult. The hardest bit is trying to figure out where you should jump to next especially in the last set of jumps before arriving at the treasure room. You are rewarded a copy of the Risk Runner exotic which I had and if you keep moving you end up fighting a boss that awards you its catalyst which I did not have. Risk Runner has become one of my favorite weapons in Destiny 2 and more or less takes the place of a shotgun as one of my secondary weapons of choice.

All in all I am having a blast in Shadowkeep, and I feel like I have really not even scratched the surface. I need to do a strike which I have not done to progress the storyline. Instead I wound up doing a Nightfall… which thanks to the new mode allows you to matchmake and queue for them. There are things I miss… like all of the different ways to get powerful gear. I feel like this is going to turn into a rant at a later point when I am sitting at 900 light and have no real way to get higher. However for the moment I am having a blast. I really want to get the 100 levels of the seasonal pass thingy as well, so we will see how the grinding goes.

Tonight however… I plan on likely being back in WoW Classic to try and catch up with what has been going on over there.