Destiny Archives - Page 8 of 46 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Destiny 2 Sodium

November 29, 2017 by Belghast

To say the Destiny community is a little salty right now is a bit of an understatement, so as a result I am using a screenshot of the emote for today’s post. We are in this weird situation where anyone claiming to enjoy themselves right now is being angrily labelled a Bungie shill. The truth is my play time has decreased greatly over the last few weeks but this isn’t necessarily because I am not enjoying myself still playing the game, but instead because I have reached a point where I feel comfortable not grinding all the time towards my goal. I am a very loot centric player when it comes to MMOs or loot driven games, and now that I have reached the top of the hill… a lot of my drive to keep grinding disappears. Sure there are things out there that I want to do and want to obtain… but I have been grinding Destiny 2 since September 6th when it launched on the PS4. I leveled a set of characters on console and then hit the PC launch with the same gusto with it happened on October 24th grinding up a brand new set of characters there. Next Tuesday the latest batch of content will release and I am preparing myself to start the grind all over again as I attempt to top the hill and get to the next loot and level cap. In truth I am likely just backing off a bit to give myself some breathing room right before the next rush starts.

That said there are a lot of players who have eased up on the play time and this taken with the wave of frustration circulating add up to a fairly disgruntled player base that Bungie is going to have to appease. The core issue for me at least is that Destiny 2 has seemed to be a sequel to Destiny 1 at launch… not Destiny 1 in the state at which it arrived during year three after the significant improvements that came with Taken King and Rise of Iron. My working theory has always been that they started work on Destiny 2 at some point during the release cycle of Destiny 1 and never really took into account everything that happened to massively shift the game during Year 2 and Year 3. As a result when Destiny 2 launched it felt like it was feature limited and missing a lot of the quality of life improvements that we had come to expect. Additionally some poor decisions like shaders being consumables kept piling the frustrations and we made our way through the content. So I am going to talk about a few points this morning that either bother me or bother a lot of players.

Forced Throttling

One of the biggest personal frustrations for me is the lack of ways that I can see improvement in my character. Like I said above I am very loot centric and my core drive in this game as with most loot driven games… is to improve my gear score. There has always been a final slog to the goal in Destiny but in this incarnation it came way the hell too soon. Light gain felt really good up until about 265/270 and then the bottom completely dropped out leaving you with a handful of “Powerful Gear” milestones to do each week. I am absolutely certain that this is a mechanic that they put in place to make it so casual players could hang with the players willing to grind endlessly for gear. The problem is for those of us who would be playing the game nonstop… it gives us no real reason to keep doing so. It takes me about an hour per character to grind out the three easy powerful gear milestones each week (crucible call to arms, planetary flashpoint, and clan xp). So after those three hours of gameplay… there is really nothing else left for me to do that is going to move the needle forward. Even now sitting at 305 light… I would still be grinding and spending my time catching up all of my favorite weapons to the level cap. The problem is that everything drops 5 levels below your current light level, feeling like a slap in the face each time you see another useless bauble that will never be of use to help you climb the ladder.

Skill Based Match Making

This is a topic of great contention among the PVP haves and have nots. In Destiny 1 there used to be an algorithm that attempted to match you up with players in your same skill range, and it favored this pairing over connection quality. With Destiny 2 they reversed this decision and seem to be basing pairings entirely on connection quality and as a result I see a lot of people with Oklahoma and Texas themed names from my digital neighborhood… but also wind up getting thrown into some pretty horrible match ups. The number of times I have gotten thrown into a match with a full team of ringers that then proceeds to shred my team of randoms… honestly represents the majority of my times playing crucible. It feels horrible to keep being ground up and spit out by a bunch of folks that are queuing together. While tweaking the calculations for team making they really need to favor throwing randoms with other randoms and teams with other teams, because the current state of the only thing mattering is your connection really sucks. The only positive is that I have had to get better much faster by being thrown against a wall over and over. I am still not what you would call good, but I am passable and can usually do my Call to Arms in 4 to 5 matches and that is really all that matters to me.

Static Rolls

In Destiny 1 weapons had a randomized set of stats and perks that could come from a list of possible perks on that weapon. This lead to the process of grinding an activity on the hopes of getting a “god roll” weapon to drop, with whatever the community had deemed was the ideal set of stats for that weapon. A prime example of this was my “God Roll” Haakon’s Hatchet from Year 2 Iron Banner that came with Perfect Balance, Counterbalance and Range Finder giving it an insane stability of 80 and an aim assist of 79 making it a laser beam that just melted opponents. Similarly I had another one sitting in my vault that I never got around to dismantling that only had a stability of 58… which makes the weapon perform drastically differently. There are huge swaths of the Destiny community that are salty about the absence of random weapon rolls, and in truth this is one of the areas where I am extremely happy with Destiny 2. I love knowing that when I finally get Jiangshi AR4 to drop from gunsmith… that it will be the best possible roll of that weapon without having to try for it multiple times. I love knowing that if I suggest Better Devils to a friend, that I don’t have to specific that you need it with this perk or that perk or it is completely useless. I have a vault full of sub par Imago Loop hand cannons in Destiny 1 because I never actually got the perfect roll, and the same goes for Eyasluna another weapon I chased hard to always came up empty. I think primarily the salt is coming from the fact that static weapon rolls removes one more thing that people did in Destiny 1 and was not replaced with a similar grind to serve as a time sink.

Timed Nightfalls

While I have done them several times… I just do not like the new Nightfall system with its weird timed mechanic. The truth is there are a lot of people who just want back the way Nightfalls used to feel as being a harder version of the normal strike. This is compounded by the fact that there are no heroic strikes to serve as a bit of a middle ground. Personally I am just not a fan of anything on a timer because it stresses me the fuck out. In elementary school I slipped two groups in mathematics thanks to these stupid quizzes called mad minutes… where you had to get a bunch of problems done in a minute. I do not perform well when on a timer and as a result I either rushed through and made a lot of errors or had zero errors but took my time. When you put me on a timer and I know I am on a timer… I am going to perform like shit. This is in part why I rarely willfully did mythic+ dungeons in World of Warcraft because they stressed me out more than they were worth. I will do a Nightfall, but they are mostly like swallowing a pill… and now that I have hit 305 light… I have no real desire to keep doing them.

Strikes are Meaningless

In Destiny 1 I used to spend hours grinding the heroic strike playlist because it was a possible source of gear upgrades but also a way that I could get special unique strike specific drops. Later on they put in the strike scoring system and it ramped the reasons to keep running the strikes as they were a great source of faction and also rewarded loot from completing the bounties. The current state of Destiny strikes is that they are largely fun but also completely pointless after you get to 265 light. There is nothing that you can get from them apart from Vanguard tokens that make them worth repeated running. Similarly with Nightfall strikes, they are only worth doing once per week per character, and again this adds to the feeling that there is “nothing to do” that players are having. Its not that there are not things to do… its that there is a general sense of feeling like there is nothing “worth” doing. I miss hoard chests at the end of strikes that had the possibility of dropping really interesting things. There are still weapons in Destiny 1 that came from these chests that I never managed to get, and if I went back to the game it is the sort of thing I would work on trying for when nothing else was going on. Basically the game as a whole feels like it is lacking stretch goals that players can accomplish reasonably while doing solo play.

Still a Great Game

As you might be able to tell from this post… I have my own issues with Destiny 2, but all of this said it is still a game that I enjoy each time I log into it. I’ve been on a recent binge of leveling my Orc Warrior in World of Warcraft and very similarly that is a game that I have lots of problems with… but still enjoy. Mostly I think for me it is a sense of disappointment because after playing through Destiny 1 I have seen them do certain things better. Similarly I know that Destiny 1 Year 1 was an awful place and to see where they went over the three years of that game, have taught me that they can in fact improve and pivot while the game is still running. Today Bungie was supposed to do the final live stream reveal for the Curse of Osiris expansion, and they have cancelled it largely to go back to the drawing board a bit. It seems like they are instead planning on giving us more information about the future of the game and some of the ways they plan on changing it. My only fear is that they might over correct and do away with some of the things that I think are working well. Static rolls are great as far as I am concerned, and I would hate to see them go. The problem is which players should Bungie listen to and which ones should they not? All I know is that I feel like I lack goals that are in the distance that I can keep shooting for that also support solo play time when I just can’t handle being around other players. I’m curious to see where the game goes from here.

Xur Week Ten: 11/17/17

November 17, 2017 by Belghast

Destiny 2

This week we have a phenomenal week for Xur at least as far as I am concerned. He brought a bundle full of goodies that I either had never gotten to drop or did not yet have on the PC. As a result this week is an extremely expensive week for me personally. As is always the case he can be located on the Flashpoint location and in this case that is Titan. You can find him in the rig section in a building devoid of enemy spawns. That said be careful because they will absolutely stand at the doorway and shoot you while you are hanging out and doing your business with your face tentacled friend. You might need to do a little pre-clear before you duck inside. Let’s get on with the goodness.

Hard Light as a gun has always been in the marginal category as far as usefulness goes. It was never a bad weapon but it also never really stood out in the pack. The year two Hard Light feels better across the board but still is far from the best Auto Rifle that you could be using in your energy slot. That said the it is still a really interesting weapon because of its ability to shoot around corners and the fact that it lacks damage fall off. That is however a deceptive thing to say given the way Hard Light works in that it fires a volley of projectiles that go bouncing around as they hit surfaces, meaning you can in theory “curve the bullet” and fire around corners. While the gun doesn’t have damage fall off there is absolutely accuracy falloff the further from your target you get because you increase the likelihood that it will encounter something else and cause the trajectory of the original round to shift. All of this is still in the fun and interesting but not amazing category until you bring into play another intrinsic ability of the weapon, and that is to shift the elemental damage type by swapping around your perks. This isn’t near as handy as the playstation exclusive sniper rifle that has a keybind allowing you to do it on the fly… but it does serve as an excellent prism/match game weapon that can shift to whatever element you happen to be lacking. If you do not already have this it is well worth the pick up and I know I personally am definitely going to be grabbing this for the PC since I’ve yet to get it to drop otherwise.

The Synthoceps are another fun and interesting item, but maybe not best in slot at anything. If you are a Titan you probably like punching things… and these gauntlets improve the way you punch things. The exotic perk Biotic Enhancements increases your melee range and improves melee damage when surrounded. That last bit can be a slight improvement if you only have a few targets around you to a massive improvement when you are fighting packs of things like thralls. If you combine this with something like the striker melee build… you can do a number of very interesting things and cause massive amounts of damage as a melee titan. Similarly this would benefit the sentinel spec path that causes you to regain health on melee kill, but not nearly as much given that spec cannot really chain melee abilities in the same fashion as Striker. This is an item that I had yet to get so I am definitely picking it up for the unlock, and more than likely going to try out a striker melee build around it.

Do you really still want to punch all the things even as a Warlock? Karnstein Armlets are a set of exotic gloves that are effectively all about punching things as a warlock. They have a built in version of the devour perk, though as I understand it significantly weaker that causes you to gain health recovery on melee attacks. Note that it says attacks and not kills so in theory just punching things are going to help slowly regenerate your health. While doing this punch happy life you are also slowly increasing the regeneration of your melee, grenade and class ability. I am absolutely certain there is a build out there that could make the most of this… and I feel like double dipping with devour is maybe a great option. Sometimes you look an an item and think to yourself… I can build something around this and that is definitely the case with these gauntlets. If nothing else I wanted to pick them up simply because I did not have the unlock in my collection.

The Lucky Raspberry is a returning item from Destiny 1 that more or less kept the same ability. Probability Matrix the exotic perk causes your arc bolt grenades to chain significantly further than in their default state. Additionally dealing damage with your arc grenade has a chance of recharging your grenade. This means that if you drop your arc grenades in a large pack of mobs, it is extremely likely you are going to get a proc and return your full grenade charge. This makes this item a beast for doing something like the Nightfall on the weeks where every kill counts towards gaining back time on the clock because you can wait until arc burn and become a mad bomber dropping grenades everywhere. The rest of the time however you are probably not going to see enough mobs tightly clumped to really make this worth using. Occasionally in the team shot environment of the crucible you can drop one and take out an entire team… but that is going to be the exception rather than the rule. Still a very interesting chest to pick up and at least add it to your collection.

Destiny 1

Xur had a similarly interesting day in Destiny 1 as he brought a couple of my favorite items. Firstly the Armamentarium is the chest piece that I want back for my Titan more than anything because it simply gives you a second grenade charge. Right now I am so enamored with striker titan largely because it is the only spec I can have this functionality back. Similarly once I found the Bones of Eao I never looked back because it started enabling me to quad jump as a Hunter, a piece of utility that beat out every other possible exotic that I might want in that slot. The Warlock helm is largely forgettable because it is their version of the Alpha Lupi chest that Hunters and Titans have… but Xur did bring the Universal Remote which is the very odd primary slot shotgun. Lots of stuff worth picking up if you don’t already have them… and I would say for Titan and Hunter these are absolute must haves. Enough so that I am legitimately considering grinding out the strange coins so I have them on my Xbox One account. Here is the full run down of what he is selling.

Legacy Chest Engram – 29 Strange Coins
The Armamentarium – Titan Chest – 13 Strange Coins
Bones of Eao – Hunter Boots – 13 Strange Coins
Light Beyond Nemesis – Warlock Helm – 13 Strange Coins
Universal Remote – Primary Shotgun – 17 Strange Coins
Dragon’s Breath and Tigershark Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust
Nemesis Star and Meteorite Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust

Snipers and Hellboars

November 16, 2017 by Belghast

One of the core problems with Destiny 2 is that progression is all about luck. What I mean by that is especially as you wind down towards the end of the power curve, everything lives or dies upon what you happen to pull from your powerful engrams each week. Once upon a time SquirrelPope told me that he started getting random world 300 blues when he hit 299.5 on his base light level. I’m at 299.8 at this point and have yet to see one and nor have I actually seen any of the supposed vendor engrams that go as high as 300. At this point on my Titan I need a chest and a class item to hit 305, which admittedly is way sooner than it happened during the console release. That said everything is luck of the draw for me and this week my luck was just about as bad as I could possibly get. In total I got six sniper rifles among the nine powerful gear packages that I have opened on my characters. Sniper rifle being the only weapon that I consider utterly useless because I have yet to find one that is even close to being worthy of that power slot. Grenade Launcher is traditionally a stinker as far as slots go, but even there I have Berenger’s Memory and Play of the Game that I like using. If I absolutely had to use a sniper… so far the only one that seems even viable is Gentleman Vagabond from crucible packages but even then… there are so many other good weapons that I could be using in that slot.

#Destiny2 PSA: You are likely using Scorch Canons wrong. After firing hold trigger down. After 4 seconds scorch round will double in size. Release for massive explosion. Conserves ammo, does more damage than spamming.

— Bel 🆚 Slug Emperor (@belghast) November 15, 2017

I tweeted this comment out last night and I thought I would post it on my blog as well this morning. I promise I meant this to be helpful and not ragey, but it does frustrate me when I see players effectively wasting the scorch cannon rounds spamming the crap out of them. I admit that I did not know this was even possible until I got to run the Wrath of the Machine raid in Destiny year three, so I went that long effectively using them wrong myself. The scorch cannon at face value looks like a rocket launcher with a lot of ammo, but it is way more than that even though the bosses that use it never actually use them to their full power either. With Titan being the weekly flashpoint planet, you are going to encounter a lot of scorch cannons considering 2 of the 3 available events on that planet involve Fallen Walkers. The weapon has a somewhat hidden alternate fire that involves holding down the trigger after you have fired the round and letting the munition grow in size before releasing and letting it explode. You are going to have an auditory and visual queue to this and while you can continue to let this go and keep gaining strength as Squirrel pointed out last night, my personal experience is that the 4 second rule seems to be the most efficient for killing those walker tanks. What I do is fire a round and then duck behind cover while holding the trigger allowing the munition to grow in size and about 4 seconds into holding it visually doubles in size. At this point I let it go and let the damage get dealt while lining up a shot for another round. Basically doing this will burn your target faster and easier I might add than spamming rounds and also give you more than enough ammo to take out both tanks with a single Scorch Cannon. The AOE explosion is also fun for dealing with waves of yellow bar captains and such, but unfortunately this is a tidbit of ancestral knowledge that has not yet circulated through most of the population given that I see most players wasting these weapons. As a result I just wanted to toss this thought out there and hopefully it sticks.

As far as last night goes however… after my crushing disappointment of being in sniper rifle hell… I decided to chill out on the sofa with my new favorite orc. At this point I am just shy of level 64 and am still in the Hellfire area cleaning up the quests. In theory I should be able to completely skip Zangarmarsh and go to Terrokar, doing the every other zone leapfrog across Outland much like I have done with Legion content. There is something extremely relaxing about Warrioring it up and all the while chatting occasionally with the Facepull crew horde side. Mostly World of Warcraft is serving as this super relaxing comfort gaming time for me, and with work being as stressful as it has been lately I guess I am finding I need it. Right now it is looking like I won’t really get to take much time off for the holidays other than the default days they give us off. I have too many deadlines crashing in together at the same time, and this is also throwing a massive monkey wrench in my traditional Pax South plans. Right now unless something massively changes I will not be attending this year which is a bit of a bummer considering I’ve gone every year since its inception so far. It also means I will miss out on meeting up with friends and hanging out… and the biggest bummer of all is that I just found out my friend Cuppy is on a panel this year. I would have loved to have seen that, but then again I am absolutely horrible at actually attending panels at Pax. I tend to miss them while wandering around doing other things. Even if not for Pax I am hoping to make it back to Austin as some point in the future.

Holy Crap A Sword

November 14, 2017 by Belghast

This wee the Faction Rally event has been going on in Destiny 2 and as I stated earlier in the week I was absolutely expecting Dead Orbit to win. They had the worst weapon during the first Faction Rally and won regardless, and I just assumed that was going to be our fate in life from this point out. However it feels like Bungie attempted really hard to stack the deck in favor of New Monarchy by offering up the only faction based sword weapon as the prize for repping the faction. Basically in my opinion Future War Cult has the best weapons on average and New Monarchy has the coolest looking gear and shaders… then Dead Orbit is the also ran faction of having both gear and weapons that look scavenged. However Dead Orbit has black/grey/white shaders which at least in Destiny 1 tended to make everyone want to faction with them. Hell I did it for awhile until I started on this whole Future War Cult kick. Basically I had resigned myself that I would log into the game this morning and we would have a crappy grenade launcher waiting for us to purchase for far too much glimmer. Instead I have a sword slung across my back and some pep in my step as a result.

Last night we ventured forth into the Leviathan again, and as a bit of a favor to myself and Grace we used a brand new raid seed so that we could get in and at least get some tokens for the week. Sunday night while I was downstairs playing WoW and watching Walking Dead a crew made their way into the Leviathan and made a repeat performance at dogs, and then put in some work on figuring out the Gauntlet event. Last night we once again downed dogs, this time on our second attempt and were able to move on to work on the Gauntlet as well. I like that all of the fights so far feel extremely repeatable, as in once we get the dance down we seem to be able to do it without much effort. The most challenging part seems to be that the dogs themselves are erratic as hell and seem to behave oddly at times making it a little slow. I fully expect that once we have the fights down solid we will be able to clear all of the Leviathan in an hour, which means we can do multiple trips in each week to get folks through it without a lot of effort. I realize we are months behind in doing so… but I am looking forward to being able to beat Calus on our own terms and unlocking raid engrams for the rest of the clan.

The bulk of last night was spent sorting out the mechanics to the Gauntlet and then attempting to refine what we had learned and turn it into something that was effectively repeatable. The last few attempts were really close to winning and the ultimately challenge seems to be during the “everyone runs” phase of the fight, keeping those of us who have not been running the orbs up to that point alive long enough to get enough orbs through the gauntlet to actually win. The last several rounds we were getting both runners through the tunnel each time, meaning in theory we needed fewer people to actually make it to the end of the fight successfully. However the death timer is ultimately what got it as myself or someone else failed to make one of the jumps. Functionally in my case this is going to be one of those “practice makes perfect” situations because I learn largely through doing. The other thing that I need to do a little research on is how best to handle the waves of adds because I was doing the Axe platform and it felt like I was just straight up getting shredded by grenades all the time. I did notice that my adds seems to stop coming out sooner than the other platforms so I am wondering if there is something to that. The last few attempts Tam and Shiana that were doing the runs were floating to help out the other platforms clear adds and it went so much more smoothly. I look forward to finishing this fight so we can get started on the Slug Emperor himself.

Lastly I thought I would share this over on my main blog. For those who are unaware we have another site tied to our AggroChat podcast that effectively rolls up and syndicates all of the content from all of the hosts. What this means in practice is it is generally my daily posts, perforated by the occasional post by Grace and then our Sunday podcast releases. For the past two years our banner has not at all represented the cast of the show and there has been a project to fix this getting the always amazing @Ammosart to do individual character shots. Firstly we have Ashgar as a high tech bear, then myself as a Destiny Year 3 Iron Banner guardian, Grace as the octopus pirate queen, Kodra as Commander Keen, Tamrielo as a Red Mage, and finally Thalen as a sort of futuristic marksman. Basically I had each member work with Ammo directly to do whatever representation they wanted to use going forward, and I think the set turned out great. I finally got off my ass and pulled it together in a new site banner and will start using them on the title cards that I create each week for the podcast.