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Week in Gaming 11/1/2015

November 1, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye Summer

This is the week where we finally started to see some colder temperatures. Its funny that this has been the case for the last few years… that October for the most part has still be warm and sunny and if we still had our pool open… we probably could have swam in it all month long. We still have yet to see a freeze but this past week it was regularly in the 40s, when the week before it pretty much never dropped much down past the 70s other than the early morning. As a result this means our hibernation instincts are starting to kick into overdrive. We recorded the AggroChat podcast Friday night, which left us with all of Saturday to do whatever we wanted. The end result… is that we pretty much just stayed inside apart from a mad dash out of the house around 4 pm to run a few errands. I am perfectly fine with a weekend like this… my wife however has some inborn instinct that tells her that we if did nothing over a weekend… that the weekend is somehow a failure. Me… I see those as the most wonderful weekends ever.

Destiny

I had all of these plans to play some themed games for Halloween… but those plans pretty much died yesterday. Instead I ended up working on my Warlock and getting it to 21 from about level 8. I have to say the Warlock is growing on me over time… and I really really like Nova Bomb as a super goes. It is this awesome mix of the way the Havoc Fist super and Shadowshot super feel, where I can deliver death from above… but at a target instead of jumping down in the middle of everything. Having played all three classes… I have to say they have done an excellent job of giving them all something really neat and special about them that makes it rewarding to play. The hardest thing for me so far however has been adjusting to the Warlock jump. It just works so different than all of the others… and while I am starting to get the hang of it… I still have zero desire to do any of the platforming encounters with it. We will see when I get to the dreadnaught if I can figure out how to do the various chasm jumps with it. Hunter is simple… double jump, and Titan is similarly simple… you just have to sort out when you want to hover over your target before you land. Warlock… is just fiddly and annoying and I never can seem to do the sort of jump I need when I need it.

The secret of my success honestly was getting high enough level to where I could break out my Stranger’s Rifle and I plan on riding that puppy up as long as I can. That weapon is just so damned amazing… and I am ultimately going to have to sort out the process for getting the modern version of it. Sadly I don’t have much faction with Future War Cult, which is ultimately required to get the No Time to Explain exotic. As it stands right now my hunter is running up Future War Cult faction, but since I don’t play him nearly as much as I do my Titan it is lagging behind. I did manage to get my hunter up to 285 light, and I can now consistently him 297 light on my Titan. Getting 300 and beyond items just seems to be the problem, and I still decode so many 260ish items that are just trash. While I don’t mind so much if they are weapons… since I am consistently struggling to keep enough weapon parts on all three of my characters… but armor… I have more than enough to share. I want to take a moment to talk about how much I love the Bungie.net website for swapping stuff between my characters, and the fact that you can do it in the middle of a game play session. This is a really amazing feature.. and I have heard there are chrome plugins that streamline this process considerably.

For the last several weeks I have been on this mission to grind as many strikes as possible to get Exotic Engrams… and there was a method behind my madness. There was one weapon in this game that I wanted more than anything else… and that was.. the Zhalo Supercell. From the moment I saw it in a video, I loved the look of it as some sort of futuristic AK-47/Bolt Action Hybrid thing. What I loved more about it was the functionality of being able to chain lightning to all of the mobs around your target. The only problem being… I never seem to get weapon engrams. I get Helms and Gloves… and the occasional Chestpiece… but have pure hell getting any sort of weapon to drop. So you can imagine my excitement this Friday when Xur had none other than the Xhalo Supercell available. The only negative of course is that all Xur weapons start at 280 instead of the 290 that they are usually dropping for me as. I have managed to pour enough stuff into it to get it to 287 which will have to do for the time being. I love this gun, and more importantly I love the way it rips through mobs that always frustrated me. I’ve noticed when the lightning procs… it can hit Phalanx and Knights even if their shields are up which makes this gun freaking amazing. When I wrap up my post this morning I think I am going to stream/record for a bit and talk about some of my favorite weapons currently.

Another huge positive from this week is that one of the Armsday orders was the above Suros DIS-43 Scout Rifle. One of the rolls available had full auto… which makes this gun freaking amazing. It has good impact, solid range and really great stability which makes it pretty much the perfect scout rifle for me. This has now completely replaced Hung Jury in my current weapon load out. My Hung Jury essentially has maxed range which is nice… because I can use it much in the same way as I would a sniper rifle, but the Suros DIS-43 is just a much better all around weapon. I noticed it was available for Armsday orders again this week, and I put in for another one… so hoping that I can end up getting a third one for my Warlock. I have two of these now and they are just excellent. Hoping that everyone managed to get in on the full auto version from this past week because man… I am really enjoying it. My only problem with Suros weapons… is that I really don’t like the Red and White paint job. So this is another case that I would love to be able to repaint my weapons… like if I could put a Dead Orbit paint scheme on this thing… it would be perfect.

Secrets of Grindea

Another title that I played this week was Secrets of Grindea to get prepared for the Friday night podcast. I of course talked about this at length on the podcast, but this is a game where I went through a few different phases with it. At first… it didn’t really grab me. This was my pick for the month, and I largely picked it because some of the game footage I saw reminded me of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Secret of Mana. The early gameplay however… is kinda boring, and the first “boss battle” on the bridge felt a little uninspired. That was quickly followed up by the Giga Slime boss… which was absolutely brutal to do as a melee character. So I have to admit that knocked a lot of wind out of my sails as far as this game went. I did however manage to pick it back up this week and saw the game that I had not quite gotten to yet.

All I can say is… boy was I wrong to doubt this game. The quests are cute, and a parody of traditional RPG tropes…. without being cruel or slapstick about it. It is kinda a sly nod and wink to the fans of this genre… saying “we know” rather than trying to rub your face in it. We talked about this on the podcast, but this is essentially the game I had wished Citizens of Earth was. It is well written, has some interesting and often times hilarious characters, and presents a world for the grown up fans of the original Zelda games… not necessarily the same audience those games were targetting. The boss fights are really challenging, but each of them have a trick or a pattern that once you figure it out it becomes doable. That said I do think this game might have significantly more challenging encounters than Zelda did, because the above Hydra was essentially the point where the game broke me. After talking with my friends on the podcast… there was essentially a pattern that I was missing that hopefully means I can get in and wreck it now. There was not a single boss that did not take me multiple attempts… other that the first bridge encounter mind you. The game does a great job of check-pointing your progress so you start pretty close to where you died allowing you to get right back into the action and try again. Even though this is early access… I highly suggest checking it out… though admittedly you might just wait for the final version.

Devilian

The other game that I spent some time playing is Devilian, that was having another beta test weekend. I still have issues with the game, at least in the style of the character classes… and their gender locked nature. That said I do actually enjoy playing it, and I think it is a cool take on a normally Diablo clone environment. It feels like something different, and I find it significantly more challenging already than anything I saw in Diablo. Diablo gameplay felt “cheap” at times… where bosses would just straight oneshot you if you were unlucky or lacked the armor/skills to deflect the blows. This game requires you to react a lot more quickly to things happening and dodge out of the way of incoming damage. I’ve already encountered a boss that I just cannot currently beat, and I am hoping to come back to it once I have picked up a few more levels. I have this feeling that the boss is designed for multiple players to take him down… because he is right there out in the open rather than hidden behind a bunch of mobs.

The game is really damned pretty, and I will give it marks too for running extremely smoothly. I am still getting used to its somewhat quirky control scheme, but it makes sense. If I were in the permanent test group I would probably be playing this more regularly but with only having weekends to play it… it somewhat disincentives my time spent. My ultimate hope is that Trion has more control over this one than they do over ArchAge and that maybe just maybe they can get some of the changes in that will make the game more enjoyable. Like for example the game is desperately in need of some inventory management tools… like sort and compact. It feels so odd to be playing a game without those things at this point. I doubt the whole Gender locked classes thing will ever be solved, because that will mean a TON of art and animation work to get there. In truth, as I look at the other classes… it is highly unlikely that I would play any of them other than the berserker in the first place. I am just not much for ranged classes… and I have zero desire to play a character with a habitually open shirt. In truth I wish there was some sort of a “tanky” character like the Crusader in Diablo 3. That would probably ultimately be the class for me.

Fun with Squirrels

October 28, 2015 by Belghast

Groupy Stuff

Last night I had an absolute blast in Destiny. During the day I mentioned that I really needed to do some Court of Oryx stuff on the Dreadnaught, since the Stolen Runes in their initial state do not stack… and I happened to have like four in my inventory. My friend SquirrelPope chimed in to mention that he could also do with some CoO goodness, but we didn’t necessarily make any firm plans. When I got home I started piddling around on my Warlock and shortly after dinner my good friend Carth showed up and we started up a PSN Party. Around about this time I decided to swap back to my Titan and I got a PSN friend invite from Squirrel and next thing I know it we are on the Dreadnaught doing summons. Over the course of the night we participated in probably a half dozen of the level 300 summons, and at least a dozen if not more of the 240 ones… then a good smattering of the low level ones mixed in as well. We were there long past the point where our bags were overflowing, and it managed to get me a level 300 artifact and Squirrel one as well for his hunter alt. We took a trip to decode our goodies on the Tower before regrouping.

From there we chain ran a bunch of strikes and I managed to get a couple of exotics as a result. The other night Carth managed to pull a Telesto fusion rifle, and I had commented that I really would not mind getting one since I didn’t have a great fusion rifle option. Sure enough in our travels last night one of my exotics was a special weapon and that was precisely what I pulled. The other item I got was extremely situational, No Back-up Plans arms which give you a force barrier anytime you kill someone with a shotgun. This screams like something perfect for defender titan in the crucible. Going to hold onto them because in theory they are a decent enough item, even though I skipped getting them when they were on Xur a few weeks back. It was one of those nights of incremental movement in my light and not necessarily anything big. The big two things were that I was able to push up Hawksaw from 293 to 296 and my Sol Edge from 296 to 298 making me extremely happy in both cases. With the focus on secondary weapons for my exotic slot, now that I have both Telesto and Invective I also robbed my Hunter and got my favorite version of the Zarinaea-D Auto Rifle to replace my Fabian Strategy that I am apparently going to shelve. I mostly liked the Fabian for the survival that it granted me… and I really notice it when I am not using it.

Armsday

Arminius-D – Rank 3

Judith-D – Rank 2

Uffern HC4 – Rank 2

Lyudmila-D – Rank 2

Suros Dis-43 – Rank 2

It’s Wednesday, which means its Armsday… otherwise known as the… I can’t remember what I ordered so for the love of god get these packages out of my inventory day. Last week I put in orders for pretty much everything and you can see my actual picks above in the image gallery. This is the first time I have actually used an image gallery so… hopefully no strangeness happens with my blog layout as a result. Of these honestly… the only one I can really see myself using is the Judith-D hand canon and maybe one of the pulse rifles. The Auto Rifle is pretty much guaranteed to turn into legendary marks because it has next to no impact. As far as the shotgun goes… I have an invective and the ability to give all of my characters an invective… why would you use any other shot gun? In all seriousness I am probably going to eat my 4th Horseman and give an Invective to my Hunter, because having a shotgun that regenerates ammunition auto-magically is a pretty spectacular thing. The only thing that I really need to round out my special weapon options is the damned Black Spindle… and next time it comes up I am probably going to pester Squirrel and Carth to make several attempts at getting it. I want that damned thing so badly, and similarly I am hoping we see a return of the Firewall mission required to get the Sleeper Stimulant as well at the beginning of November.

The thing that excites me the most about this Armsday is not necessarily the weapons I got this week… but instead my hope for weapons next week. For ages I have been hearing about how amazing the Suros Ari-45 Auto Rifle is… and it has now appeared as one of the packages for next week. I’ve put in at least two of these orders, one on the Titan and one on the Hunter… and it would be pretty great if I managed to get my Warlock up to 38 this week and be able to put in another order on him. I have a feeling like the Zarinaea-D it is going to be one of those weapons that I would love to have multiple copies of. My only fear however is that maybe just maybe the hype surrounding this weapon is not going to live up to my expectations. I have very specific tastes in weapons, and it is as much about the “feel” for me as it is the actual stats. I like the Zarinaea-D because I love the “feel” of it… sure it is a laser beam of accuracy.. and packs a decent punch with good sights, but the sound is really what makes me love that weapon. I have been running around with a version of the Suros Ari-45 on my Warlock as I level him, and while it is cool and a fun weapon to use… it is no Zarinaea-D.

Open World Dungeons

October 27, 2015 by Belghast

Throwback Zones

One of my favorite aspects of Destiny is the patrol zones. I can quite literally spend multiple hours in a given night roaming around on one of the planets or the dreadnought just doing “stuff”. I guess in some way they remind me of the way that dungeons used to be designed during the early days of MMOs. Back in Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot all of the dungeons you encountered were these wide open places that had no predetermined path through them. Players tended to carve them up into smaller sub dungeons, that were focused around getting to a specific spawn… and I remember spending many an hour with a group of friends essentially leveling our characters by hanging out in these dungeons. This is precisely what the patrol zones feel like… an almost dungeon experience with so many little offshoots and places you can disappear into if you know where you are going. I realize that essentially all of the Patrol zones are big loops, but there are several places where you can get off the beaten path, and honestly end up with relatively pristine hunting grounds if you just know where to look for them.

One of my favorite examples is on Venus, there is this place with a fairly rapid spawn Vex major Minotaur. On the days when you have the Vex Major/Ultra duty this area becomes heavily camped with players fighting over the ability to kill all of the yellow health Vex that spawn there. However if you just got a bit farther and get off the beaten path there is an area that is completely ignored that happens to have three praetorian spawns… aka major Minotaurs. I feel like the game rewards exploration and willingness to muck through dungeon like areas to see what is at the end of the path. What makes patrol so interesting to me is that you can visit most of the areas you can find in the strikes and missions that happen on that same planet, just if you make the effort to go there. I also love that Patrol mode tends to reward you richly with engram drops for your diligence and time spent wandering around looking for interesting bits. The dreadnought is this concept on overdrive, because there are so many hidden nooks and crannies filled with chests for you to find. At some point I am going to write up a blog post that explains all of the hidden goodies that I know of on the Dreadnought.

Halloween Is Everywhere

As strange as it might sound… there is in fact a Halloween event happening in Destiny. Doing actions while wearing a paper mache mask gives you candy… and when you fill up a candy bag you can turn it in for a loot box that will drop masks and candy… which acts as a short term buff. The only problem is… that this shit takes up inventory space.. and last night I actually ended up having an exotic shard mailed to me because apparently I had filled up the very spartan 20 slots of material space. If you manage to get a legendary mask, those can be kept past the event. However if you find a blue mask that you really like there is a way to save those as well upgrading them to legendary by using materials gained through disassembling other masks. On my first bag opened I got a legendary Speaker mask, which honestly is good enough for me. The masks are equippable head slot items… but have no stats so essentially by wearing one you are losing stats. There are a series of quests you can complete by wearing masks while doing activities out in the world. I am doubtful if I will actually complete any of them.

Other than that I had a night full of farming Vanguard Strikes, and managed to pull six exotics throughout the night. They broke out like this… 2 Helms, 2 Arms, 1 Chestpiece and 1 Primary weapon. Sadly the primary weapon was Last Word that I already had… and honestly is no longer that good of a hand cannon any longer. At the very least there is never a reason why I would use it over Hawkmoon. Engrams are so amazing when they drop… but so disappointing when they turn into something that you have no interest in. There are so many primaries that I really really want… like the Zhalo Supercell for example but the likelihood that I will actually pull one of them is pretty slim. I pulled a ton of engrams… so many that I had fifteen items waiting for me in my mailbox at the end of the night and that was after disassembling dozens of items that dropped while running the strikes. I did manage to raise my light level by one as well as picked up a few things that I thought were interesting like the unique legendary arms from the bond brothers. I also managed to level my defender a bit… which I am still finding relatively miserable to play as. Pretty much anything that is not “Super Hammer Bros” is going to be a let down at this point.

Slight Progress

October 26, 2015 by Belghast

Titan Improves

This weekend once again was mostly a Destiny weekend for me, as I worked on both my Titan and my Hunter trying to slowly inch up their gear. On the Titan I hit a bit of a milestone, and finally pushed forward to get my light level… aka item level to 295. The funny thing about this is it seems to be a significant number, because I have noticed that a lot of things simply feel easier now. I spent a good bit of the weekend running the level 36 strikes, but as per Cortical’s suggestion I tried a few 20 strikes. The strange thing about them is… in some ways they seemed more difficult. At the very least the level 20 strikes seem to throw more cheap mobs at you, and I guess if you have really good AOE damage you can shred through them. Ironically I died far more often in the 20s than I normally do in the 36s so I think I am going to return to doing the slightly “harder” ones. I would rather have harder bosses and easier trash I guess. It also seems like once I hit 295 I started getting slightly better drops. I still have yet to see a single item over level 300, so I am not sure at all how I am going to bridge that gap.

I guess Nightfall would be the next big jump forward for me, but I have to say I am slightly gunshy. Heroic was maddening at times, and I am guessing there are lots of mobs in Nightfall that will straight up one shot you. It feels like to do those really well you need to know the placement of the mobs and predict every sniper or big gunner type mob to take them out quickly before they whittle down the party. The other side effect that I am really not digging is the way that the community seems to love to glitch out content rather than complete it. Most of the times I have been on the Restorative Mind map… something happens and the other two players disappear on me… only to end up with me getting teleported to the final boss room moments later. So there has to be some sort of shortcut that I am just not understanding, or some glitch somewhere that lets them bypass the gates. I guess I get the reason why Destiny “Sherpas” are a thing.

Hunter Viable

The progress I am happiest with however this weekend is that of the hunter. It seems like it was only a week or so ago that I was 285 on the Titan, and I have now reached that point on the hunter as well. I am still largely focused on Nightstalker, but I did pick up the Bladedancer helmet this week. I also picked up a chest engram and pulled a Crest of Alpha Lupi which works pretty well. I am also really really loving my Zarinaea-D Auto Rifle, that I got the first week Armsday orders were available to me. I’ve had a couple of these now but the one my hunter uses seems to be the best so far. I am running a combination of Partial Refunds, Rodeo, and High Calibur rounds on it… and it is a beast at taking down mobs in general. I also really really like the LD Watchdog sights on it. I’ve heard the Suros legendary auto rifle is the one to get,but so far I have had little to no luck pulling that one. I did manage to get a Villainy pulse rifle from Future War Cult faction package, but I have yet to really put it through the paces.

At some point this week I guess I am going to work on my Warlock. At this point I am only level 8 on him, and I don’t have a cheaty item that will zoom me to 25 this time. The early game is really somewhat bland… and while I have weapons for 20ish in my vault… I don’t have much stocked away to make the low levels go smoother. The only negative about boosting the hunter is that I had made essentially no progress on my classes, and had to basically start leveling from 25 on… with nothing much to rely on other than the basic super and basic grenade. At least on my Warlock I have a fair number of the abilities ready to go, and that at least should make things good more smoothly. I have this overwhelming desire to have one of each at high levels, and since I went Solar sword on the Titan, and Void sword on the Hunter… I guess that means I am going to go Arc sword on the Warlock and throw sonic booms. Largely I just like the idea of eventually being able to swap swords between them based on the need. I wish there was such a thing as a Legendary kiosk like there is the Exotic one… because man… there are certain Legendary weapons I wish I could have on every character.