Looter Shooter

This weekend was largely about catching up on the Destiny 2 storyline and progressing to the official end game stuff…  even though I had been at the level cap and slowly gaining gear for a bit.  As I mentioned before, I somehow completely lost the main story quest thread, and did not realize that the quests themselves were being presented as adventures in the Forsaken Shore area.  I have to confess that I largely ignore adventures…  which is a thing I am ultimately going to have to stop doing given that they seem to be a way of unlocking upgrades for the new sub classes.  So if I want to be the superest hammer bro with the superest hammer…  I need to start doing them more often.  Once I got the hang of it I enjoyed the whole choose your own adventure aspect of hunting down the six barons that are in no particular order.  Each of the fights was fun, and a lot of them I failed miserably the first time…  that is until I managed to catch on to whatever the gimmick of the fight happened to be.

Upon defeating the final boss of the expansion, you are sent on a sequence of events that ultimately reward you in unlocking a brand new patrol zone called the Dreaming City.  The first two screenshots are from areas within this zone and while it is gorgeous…  functionally it reminds me a lot more of the dreadnaught since there a bunch of little activities interwoven within the zones.  I started working on bounties for Petra Venj which lead me to encounter an event called the Blind Well…  which is finally that Court of Oryx/Archon’s Forge style event that I had been asking for.  It however feels a lot more like the opening event of the Leviathan raid than either of those.  It does however seemingly has the chance of dropping Last Wish raid weapons, because on one of the times through it I managed to get one to drop that I will talk about in a bit.  Huge thanks to my friend Waren for helping me get through this, but it also seems like the sort of thing like Court of Oryx that once you coax people into summoning that you end up doing a bunch in a row.  We did several Rank 2 and a couple of Rank 3 Wells before I needed to wander off and do other things.

Now I had heard a ton about the Tigerspite, and it was on the short list of weapons I wanted to get for certain.  The highlight of the evening however was getting one to drop at 555 from Blind Well.  Unfortunately this is way lower light than my Horror Story but I already love this weapon…  so it is probably going to see a lot of play.  I wish I had enough time to grind out another 600 Horror Story so I could use it as infusion fuel on this thing.  Granted it is far from the best set of stat perks as mine rolled with Dynamic Sway Reduction and Under Pressure which takes an already accurate weapon and makes it feel like a laser beam.  The “God Roll” seems to be Kill Clip and Outlaw, but the thing I have noticed in Year 2 Destiny 2 is that these randomized rolls…  still feel good when you don’t get an ideal combination.  I’ve encountered very few that were just complete garbage…  and honestly its more than specific perks are just not that good…  like Field Prep on anything but a sniper rifle or maybe a scout for example.  While not necessarily hive themed… this design reminds me a bit of touch of malice.

Currently the highest I can manage to hit light level is 549.3 according to DIM.  As it stands I think I have two more activities that reward powerful engrams…  doing 2 more strikes and doing the Ascendant Challenge in the Dreaming City.  I read up on that last night, but given it was Walking Dead night I didn’t make any attempts.  Supposedly it is soloable…  but I might try and coax someone into helping me through it this week.  The strikes however should be easy enough to grind out whenever I get home tonight.  Pending I get lucky, my hope is it pushes me to a solid 550 which is not bad for my first real week of paying attention to Forsaken content.  I have no clue what level I need to be viable to raid based shenannigans and such.  The Rank 3 Blind Well was a little on the tough side for example, but I sorta equated it to a Rank 3 Court of Oryx…  which if you are not geared enough is doable but not easy either.  I’ve been focusing heavily on getting acclimatized to Dreaming City, but I also feel like this is a bunch of stuff in Forsaken Shore that I have not seen either.

This is going to be one of those morning posts where I largely talk about a bunch of screenshots.  Last night I managed to max out my Colonel Sander’s Mask, which is of course the best of the Festival of the Lost masks you can get quite frankly.  Who doesn’t want to be Cayde-6’s faithful chicken companion… especially in the light of recent events.  I love the way that they added a perk system that levels up on these masks, because the buffs that they give you… largely make up for having no light level associated with them.  Now it gives me extra defense while in air, which is especially handy when you have the grounded debuff, and it also buffs damage dealt towards all mobs as well as increasing the drop rate of heavy ammo.  So far the furthest I have made it into the Haunted Forest is successfully clearing 8 rounds, which to be honest unless I was in with a stacked group of friends I am not sure if I am going to do better.

As far as Fragmented Souls… I am up to 86 out of the 120 needed for the Auto Rifle.  I can only seem to manage running a couple in a row before I need to go off and do something else for a bit.  I do however have a multi-part bounty that I should be finishing tonight that will reward me 40 at once, pushing me over the number needed.  As far as Auto Rifles go however… I am in love with The Misfit.  Normally I don’t really go for the low impact/high rate of fire auto rifles, but this one is awesome.  It had reasonable stability as far as that style of weapon goes and because of my roll rather fast reload speed.  It is far from a great roll however, because it has the perk that causes the weapon to reload on critical damage…  which sure is cool but would be so much better if it had pretty much anything else on it.  I think I would ultimately want one with Zen Moment which increases stability as you deal damage… and Rampage that gives you a stacking damage buff each time you take out a target…  since this thing melts minion type mobs.

Another weapon that I am using that I love…  but is less than optimal other than the Haunted Forest is Go Figure, that rolled with insane amounts of range on it.  This means I can sit back and psuedo snipe things with a pulse rifle.  This is actually decent in the crucible since it has High Caliber Rounds and High Impact reserves and a silly amount of range.  For everything else however I tend to go with Ricochet Rounds for more range and stability.  I think more than anything the weapon just looks badass, and you have to admit it to yourself… that occasionally you use a weapon just because it looks cool.

As far as heavy weapons go, I have been playing with the Exotic Sword that I got to drop a few nights ago.  This isn’t necessarily optimal, but for the case of grinding Haunted Forest it melts a good deal of the nightmares…  other than the Hydra one which is just a pain in the ass to deal with regardless of how you are fighting it.  I am not exactly a fan of the look of this weapon, because it feels more like a dagger than a sword…  but the whole combo that allows you to hurl the blade towards an enemy is kinda cool.  It has relatively low ammo which is its weakness because it expects you to be using the perk that gives back ammo to the weapon when you perform a kill.  At some point I will stop using it when I find another shiny bauble, but for now it works well enough.

In the honorable mention category… I really love bows… and while I am not the biggest fan of the look of this bow it is extremely nice.  This one in particular has Explosive Head which cause the arrow to explode shortly after hitting a target, and Rampage which I talked about earlier.  The combination… is that you can just snipe a large amount of targets in a very short period of time especially in a PVE setting.  The Explosive Heads are great for taking out large groups of mobs like Dregs when clustered tight together, and Rampage lets you stack up the buff a bit to take out yellow bars.  This is situational for me… but I like using bows a lot when dealing with story content because it allows me to take down a bunch of the targets before they get close enough to notice me.

Lastly…  all the wearing of the Colonel Sanders mask…  made me nostalgic so I had to go visit the best Cryptarch…  Tyra Karn at the Farm.  I really wish that she had moved with us to the Tower, because I really do prefer using her…  but it seems like an awful lot of effort to go to the farm just to decrypt the few engrams we get that need decrypting.  Had they mirrored everything at the Farm that they have at the Tower I would end up opting to use the Farm 100% of the time…  but alas the vendors I need are at the Tower.

Last night I dove head first into the Haunted Forest activity associated with the Festival of the Lost event.  There is absolutely no hyperbole intended… but this might literally be the best content they have created for Destiny 2.  The only unfortunate part is that it is associated with a limited time event, and it isn’t available for that much longer.  When they first talked about the Infinite Forest I pictured this mode where you go through a random series of changing and shifting segments until you face a boss at the end… that then gives you a chance at loot.  Basically I pictured it working a lot like the Court of Oryx or Archon’s Forge events in Destiny 1… and then was completely disappointed when it released and was ultimately nothing like that.  What we got felt super repetitive and didn’t have any real hook to make you want to keep roaming around in there.

The Haunted Forest is 100% recycled content, but re-purposed in such a way as we are descending into the nightmare visions created by the Vex that we saw bits and pieces of during Curse of Osiris.  Firstly instead of a washed out digital landscape, we have dark and brooding levels with very sparse lighting allowing for monsters to seemingly jump out from the Darkness.  Additionally there is effectively the stand in for Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head in the form of a giant Hive Knight that is indestructible and chases after places hitting you with a giant axe and doing nonsense amounts of damage.  Each time you dip into the Haunted Forest you are trying to kill a certain percentage of the projections of the various enemy factions within Destiny 2.  When your bar hits 100% you get transported to fight a Nightmare, or a version of one of the Ultra boss monsters that exist in other areas of the game.  Upon defeating the monster a timer starts that gives you a certain amount of time before the Haunted Forest collapses upon itself, and effectively you are trying to see how many times you can get to the Nightmare boss and defeat them before you run out of time.

There is a reward chest at the end after defeating your final Nightmare that rewards a currency specific to the Festival of the Lost called Fragmented Souls.  These are then used to purchase the paper masks and if you can manage to save up 120 of them… a item level 600 Auto Rifle called the Horror Story.  It is the last item that I am grinding for.  In previous iterations of Festival of the Lost the masks were purely cosmetic, but this time around they have a purpose and can be leveled up through doing content.  So while they add no item level, they do have a bunch of perks that tweak your gameplay in the Haunted Forest.  For example I went with Vampiric Touch that increases damage to challenging enemies and triggers Health Regen on precision kills.  There were three other options and each one was effected by a different type of kill, and I’ve managed to get a single upgrade so far that increases the drop of Heavy ammo, which speeds up the killing of Nightmares.

It also seems like you have the chance of getting Legendary drops from the various mobs inside of the matrix.  Can we talk about how much better it feels to have engrams decrypt immediately showing you if you got something useful in the process?  I managed to pick up Go Figure a really bad ass Pulse Rifle, and mine rolled with range boost which makes it silly to effectively snipe things with pulse shots from across the map.  It also has High Caliber rounds and High Impact Reserves making it stagger like crazy.  I am super in love with this weapon so far and I thought it looked coolest in the white and black color scheme that I ended up choosing.  So far… I am greatly enjoying my time back in Destiny 2, because things feel “better” in ways that I am not exactly sure how to quantify.  Time will tell if I feel the same once this event is over, but for the moment…  I am grinding Fragmented Souls for that Auto Rifle.