Looter Shooter Archives - Page 65 of 111

And Then There Were Two

October 31, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not quite work out entirely as intended. My hope was to get home and do a flurry of activities quickly in order to get my hunter Nightfall ready. This did not happen because I came home to a whole slew of other things that needed to be taken care of immediately. Then when my wife got home she realized that she had not stopped by the store to get Halloween candy for her classes, and I threw proper clothing back on and ventured out into the cold once more so she could get on with her lesson planning and grading. All of this mean’t that I did not even get a proper start to the evening until around 7:30 last night… which also meant there was no way there were enough hours to accomplish all of the things that I wanted to be doing. I bowed out of Nightfall shenanigans and instead focused on knocking out the milestones needed to unlock a second set of luminous engrams. The most tedious of these was the crucible, because not only did I need to do enough to get the Call of Arms… but I had yet to do the pvp required to even unlock it. Note to self… in the future do this as part of the leveling experience so you don’t have to burn through it when you finish 20 and complete the story. I cannot fully express how much I loathe “competitive mode” crucible playlist and I am continuing my track record of playing it exactly two times on each character to unlock the milestone.

From there it was grinding the Crucible and I still am not in a position where I function well in this mode on PC. The dynamics all feel vastly different and I wound up hooking up a controller to see if the aim assist would help. Turns out it did… and apparently I just cannot track erratic PVP targets with the mouse as I could with the controller. Either that or I simply need to rely on the crutch that is aim assistance. Regardless I am super happy with the way Destiny 2 PC feels with a controller and how easy it is to swap back and forth between the two modes. Effectively to start using the controller you just pick it up and hit a button on it, and then to switch back you just click a button on your mouse. So often on the PC you need to choose one or the other and it has to be toggled back and forth via some nested menu structure. Here you can so easily swap back and forth that it feels completely reasonable for me to simply choose to use controller with the crucible and mouse and keyboard for everything else. I am also assuming that most of the vehicle sequences are going to work much better with a controller, so I might simply start picking them up and doing that as well.

All of the last minute grind completely paid off because the extra set of luminous engrams allowed me to move my Titan’s power level ahead just a little bit. More importantly than that… I no longer need to grind Nessus because Hawthorne awarded me a 282 Uriel’s Gift… one of those weapons I had been desperately trying to get back. This means I once again have my crucible setup of choice in the form of Antiope-D, Uriel’s Gift and Hawthorne’s Field-Forged Shot Gun. There are still a bunch of weapons I am missing that I want to try and get, but unfortunately the two I am missing the most are both on the Crucible loot table. Here is hoping the next round of luminous engrams sees me getting a Better Devils and a Play of the Game, so that I don’t have to grind out faction tokens to get them that way. The nightfall this time is Arm’s Dealer again but with Prism… meaning that there will be a rotating buff and matching the damage type increases damage output… and not matching it lowers it. Additionally we have Killing Time as a modifier meaning every mob killed slowly adds time back to the timer. It should be interesting and way more challenging than last weeks grenade fest. In theory I will be trying to get the Nightfall on two characters from this point out, so hopefully folks really get into it. So far they seem to be enjoying it quite a bit because while I was doing my grindy bits there were Nightfall groups attempting to get it for various folks. This week also sets up a new goal… getting the Warlock leveled and through all of this content so she can start adding to the luminous bonanza as well.

First Week on PC

October 30, 2017 by Belghast

This is one of those mornings when I am not even sure where to start the post. It is like I have all of these disconnected thoughts in my head and am having a very hard time wrangling them together into something that follows any manner of logical progression. Destiny 2 released on the PC last Tuesday and since then I have played a significant amount of it, only really taking a single night off to go do something else. According to WastedOnDestiny.com I’ve played 32 hours of the game since release… which is officially more than I played Destiny 1 on the Xbox One. On the PS4 I managed to make it to 267 in that very first week, and on PC I managed to break the 265 cap and push on to 271 which makes me happy. I am nowhere near as lucky as my friend Raz was… who is sitting at something crazy like 282. There are ways to do this… but they involve madness and way more grinding than I was able to get in this week or really wanted to do. Additionally I started working on secondary characters and managed to push the Hunter to 18 while recording the podcast… and finished leveling it to 20 and making it through all but the final quest last night. I also started up my Warlock and got her to level 8, which was mostly about getting my 5000 clan xp to help level Greysky Armada. We managed to hit rank 3 which is extremely awesome and is largely made possible by the fact that myself and Wolfy started leveling the clan a bit on PS4 before the release of PC.

On Friday night we decided to give the Nightfall a go, which in truth I was uncertain about given that I only actually completed the Nightfall once on the PS4 side… and even then it was a bit of a pain in the ass. I also remembered us being significantly higher than the 250ish we were when we tried it. Together Tamrielo, RustySpork and I managed to get the boss down with about 3 minutes left on the clock, which is not good enough for the rat king… but makes me happy nonetheless. Yesterday afternoon I gave it another attempt with Mor and Grace and once again finished… but just barely with me taking down the boss via a couple of pulse grenades and auto rifle fire at about the 1 second left on the clock mark. Mor was just barely at the 240ish requirement for zoning in, so I feel like in the future so long as we are bringing in 260s we should be fine for this. This week also was a bit of an aberration in that it was extremely easy to cheese the objectives because of the modifier giving us insane grenade and melee regeneration. Striker Titan with double grenades meant I could clean out a bunch of adds almost as fast as I could throw them. They still hit insanely hard though and I just don’t have the recovery yet that I really should for doing harder content. This largely comes from just wearing a bunch of scraps instead of something resembling a full set of gear. I am really hoping in a few weeks I can get the full set of Titan Iron Banner gear again because it makes for a really excellent base for shenanigans.

I would have finished the Hunter but instead I took a lengthy break Sunday afternoon and worked on doing the weekly milestones on the PS4 side of the pond. I have to say after playing so much PC… the console version just feels sluggish and odd. Everything seems to move more slowly, which makes the crucible much easier… but everything else feel really odd. Not only was the visual fidelity much lower than even my laptop running at greatly downgraded settings… but just the movement speed of my character felt slower. I noticed this when doing some of the intro missions where you are limping through the city… on the console there was a specific point I could make it to before my character was forced to pause for a moment. On the PC I could make it considerably past that point before I was forcibly halted, so my running theory is that the PC version just has faster movement speeds. Weirdness aside I did manage to get used to the controller again and finish up Clan XP, Call to Arms and Flashpoint milestones which were enough to finish pushing me to 305. I feel much better hibernating the character now that it is sitting at the level cap rather than being just slightly under it. I will probably keep logging in at least once a week to finish off these easy milestones however because I feel like I need to keep contributing some Clan XP to TQMB in addition to all the work I am doing PC side with GREY. Eventually once I have gotten my PC characters to a more manageable state I am sure I will start doing those three main milestones on six characters… 3 on PC and 3 on PS4. It takes me roughly an hour to do all of the things needed to earn those three luminous engrams, and after a point that becomes my routine of logging in a new character each night and getting their progress.

I am absolutely loving playing the game on PC because it fits my play style considerably better. With the console it forced me to be in the room I have my PS4 set up in, but with PC I can either be playing it on my gaming desktop or downstairs on my laptop. The laptop doesn’t run it perfectly and I am having to throttle it down to 720 p and a few other considerations… but it runs well enough for me to be able to do almost anything I might need to do. For something like a Nightfall where there is a timer on the line I wouldn’t want to push it… but It is more than fine for some strikes or crucible. My activity of choice however is still doing public events and random token farming through chests and patrols. My goal for tonight is to attempt to push the hunter through the various things needed to unlock her three easy luminous engrams, and then to maybe get her through the Nightfall. From there my goal by next weeks reset is to have my Warlock finished off so I can start triple dipping on the powerful rewards front. While it has been a pure joy starting over on the PC… I do still want to arrive back at where I left off… and hopefully in a much faster time frame than the seven weeks it took to get me there on console. I am booned by the fact that the game seems to have traction among the AggroChat crew and with that means that there is likely going to be raiding before too much longer. I am assuming the raid will open up tomorrow much like it did on the console side, and then I am assuming next week we will have faction rally once more. Destiny 2 on PC is pretty much everything I had hoped it would be.

Twenty Again

October 26, 2017 by Belghast

I do not have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning so the post is going to be brief. Last night I went to the simulcast of Rifftrax Live Night of the Living Dead because there was no way I was going to miss that. Predictably it was pretty great and had also been a really long time since I had seen the original black and white film. There is a group of us from work that do this was a semi regular thing and its always a lot of fun. This however meant that I was giving up play time on “night two” of the PC release to spend time doing stuff in the real world. By the time I got home I was pretty out of it, but I did manage to limp across the finish line to level 20. This morning I spent a few of the tokens I had banked up and managed to get to 211 power level. That means tonight is all about actually finishing the main story because I dropped off before the transition to the planet Io. I have a bunch of goals… not the least of which is to finish the story so I can unlock the “end game” and all of the group activities. The other goal is to gather up enough purple stuff so that I can have the legendary shards ready and waiting for Xur to arrive tomorrow. The theory is to buy the 270 weapon and armor to give myself a boost so that when I start decoding the higher tier engrams that my light level is greatly inflated. Other than that… not a whole lot to talk about this morning so going ahead and cutting this post off.

A Smooth Landing

October 25, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was of course the launch of the PC version of Destiny 2. After years of rough launches I did not attempt to take the day off because I have been bit hard by that in the past. However it appears like everything went relatively smoothly and starting about noon I saw friends poking their heads into the game for the first time. Sure there were some issues, namely that the Clan roster seemed to be non-functional for all but a few people… but I remember us going through that at the PS4 launch as well so maybe that is one of the more fragile systems. There is a reported rash of bannings but I am uncertain how big of a deal this really is given that the internet tends to “memeify” everything to raise the sodium levels. To the best of my knowledge no one that I know got bit by whatever bug is occurring. It has been blamed on discord or obs or any other manner of software… but I know folks who streamed all day long yesterday and most everyone I know is running discord… so I sincerely doubt it is one of those. After years of seeing players cry foul… only to be busted by devs for doing some nefarious shit I am taking this with a giant truck load of salt.

I did not make it anywhere near as far as I had hoped to make it last night. I got a bit of a late start and then had to walk away from screen for a bit to go retrieve sustenance and consume it. At this point I am up to the start of Io in the quest chain and dinged level 14 just before logging for the night. I had visions of hitting level 20 and then potentially wrapping up the extremely long tail end of the story tonight after coming back from Rifftrax. That is just not a thing that is going to happen, however I should be on pace to at least get to 20 on Thursday night. I have to admit a lot of my evening was spent getting used to the keyboard and mouse controls. I didn’t want to simply plug a controller into my PC and continue on like I had been on the PS4. I wanted to get adjusted to playing the PC version, and it took way longer than I had hoped to begin remapping my reflexes. I was super pumped when I noticed that apparently it kept my keybindings from beta so I did not have to try and remap everything. It has been weird learning how to do things like the shield throw with a keyboard and mouse, when previously it was just so instinctive.

Everything comes out so much crisper and clearer on the PC that I noticed something I had apparently never noticed before on the console. I had no clue that Sloan had a bunch of Warhammer 40k purity seals on her left shoulder pad. At first I thought maybe this was an addition to the PC, but after checking the PS4 they are in fact there. The lower fidelity of the PS4 experience just made them not stand out nearly as well as they do on PC because the lighting is massively better. The game really feels like it was meant to be played on a PC and there are moments where you just have to stop and enjoy the vistas now that you can see clearly off in the distance. I sat and watched the ocean and the lightning storms for a few minutes while standing around idly on Titan and they were breathtaking. All in all I think it was a pretty damned smooth launch and the PC version is living up to all of my hopes. I am going to still take awhile to rewire my impulses because right now I feel way more sluggish with keyboard and mouse than with the controller. However I guess it is to be expected considering I played heavily for over three years in this world using thumb sticks.