Destiny

It was a thoroughly frustrating weekend, so instead of a post in the games of the decade series, you are instead getting a general Destiny post. I took off work Friday and thought I was being awesome, running around and taking care of a bunch of things like renewing my drivers license. Then Friday night I got a text that would ultimately dominate the entire weekend. I have a warning set on my account to text me any time a transaction over $300 is placed against my bank account. At 6:13 pm I got a text saying that a “check” for $797.51 was written against my account. I knew I did not have any bills queued up for that amount, so it lead me to go sifting through my bank account where there were three other unauthorized transactions.

This lead to a back and forth with the bank call center Friday night, and by the end of the evening them realizing that it wasn’t just some sort of a printing error and that someone had faked out checks against my account under what appeared to be the actual name of the person commuting the fraud. Saturday this meant we had to go to a branch location that had lobby hours and close out our original account and open a new one… which then meant I spent the rest of the day trying to make sure everything that I had set to bank draft for utilities and such was pointed at the new account. We also had to file a police report, which I don’t actually expect to go very far… even though we were more or less able to find the guy with a series of google searches. It appears the guy used his real name, real date of birth and potentially real drivers license number when writing the checks and there is a felon that matches both name and birth date in the OKC metro where two of the checks were written.

Between flurries of dealing with the stress I played an awful lot of fairly incognito Destiny, and apparently am really bad at paying attention to messages that are coming in while I am playing. Poor Squirrel tried to reach me on practically every platform to see if I wanted to run a Nightfall. Thalen similarly tried to ping me multiple times over the weekend, and I was seemingly unaware of any of it until much later. My mind was likely going through the permutations of “which account did I forget to move over” while mindlessly grinding away in Destiny. I did however in my travels manage to pull the Exotic sparrow from the Arms Dealer nightfall which was kinda cool.

The hero of the weekend is Martyr’s Retribution… or Marty as I have heard the community referring to it. This is a brand new type of grenade launcher that fires a Titan thermite grenade out along the ground that follows the grenade being ejected. As a result of this behavior you use this basically like you are throwing an extra grenade to help soften up any enemies in front of you. This can be used to devastating effect in the crucible where I racked up several medals in the very short time I spent doing that this weekend. The most important trait for me personally is Auto Loading Holster, which allows me to play in a way where I fire this off, then immediately swap to my primary and then after getting some kills swap back to fire off another round that has been reloaded for me.

Another good get for the weekend is a significantly better roll of the Breachlight sidearm… which coincidentally pairs very nicely with Marty. I love this sidearm and having one with outlaw and multi-kill clip works well. I did really like Vorpal blade as far as new weapon perks go, but this one is overall better suited for my play style. I would have rather had something else in the second column than Drop Mag, but I guess this is the way of Destiny. There is always a more perfect roll out there somewhere waiting to be found.

The other take away I have from the weekend, is that I have started to see a bunch of weapons that I have not seen at all since Year 1. The Old Fashioned for example is one of those, and while this is not an amazing roll with hip fire and pulse monitor… it was interesting to see it show up regardless. This maybe means that we finally have the full compliment of weapons available from banshee again, as for some time it seems like I kept getting the same ones over and over. I am hoping to see a weapon that has eluded me completely on the PC… the Jiangshi AR4 Omolon Auto Rifle. It seems as though according to the Wiki you may be able to get Uriel’s Gift in random roll variant which would be similarly awesome.

I hope the new week brings me some stress relief… but I know it probably won’t considering I have to do a ton of stuff to close out the year since as of next Monday I will be off for two weeks.

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.