Action RPGs Archives - Page 177 of 254

Weekend Weapon Haul

December 10, 2018 by Belghast

Pretty much the highlight of the weekend for me was that I got to join in the shenanigans of the Last Wish raid in Destiny 2. This mornings post is largely going to be a rundown of the items that I got to drop this weekend. It was also the farm weekend for the IKELOS shotgun, and unfortunately as of yet I have not seen one drop. I have lost count on just how many times I have killed the level 7 escalation protocol, but it has been enough that I am starting to doubt it exists. Like the paranoia in the back of my head keeps telling me that I must not be keyed for getting loot of the boss. I do however have a huge stack of shaders that drop every single time you down it. I sincerely doubt that tonight I will get enough kills of Escalation Protocol to make a difference, and in truth it seems to be hard to find anyone actually doing it. My friend Warenwolf managed to pull me into a group, so I am guessing this is regional? I wish there was a decent matchmaking option for it.

As far as the raid itself… it was some crazy nonsense. One of the things that Bungie does almost better than anyone else is create some interesting and imaginative raid encounters. I don’t want to go into too much detail but there were of course jumping puzzles and timed burns and of course some relay race sort of encounters to unlock sections of the raid. All of which seemed doable for me who was a complete nub, but unfortunately… I am also one of those people who simply does not grok something when someone explains it. I have to do it myself to be able to understand the nuance of it, and while I feel like I still have a long ways to go before mastering the encounters… I feel like I would also do a lot better the second time in. Thankfully none of the jumping puzzles were anywhere near as stressful as the ones in the King’s Fall raid. An interesting mechanic is that first timers get an extra piece of loot at the very end, and as a result I wound up getting 4 pieces of armor and 5 weapons… one of which dropped from random trash but that still counts. Now I am going to play show and tell with each of them.

A really cool looking rocket launcher that I will never actually use because it doesn’t have cluster bombs. I could say more but really… that is the core problem and I would have used it as infusion fuel if it wasn’t a raid weapon.

This is quite possibly the weirdest feeling auto rifle I have ever used, because it is so freaking slow firing… which you would assume to be extremely stable and it is not. On PC with mouse and keyboard controls it is completely manageable, uncertain what controller would be like with this weapon. It was fun the little bit I played with it, but it also takes the same slot as my beloved Misfit so I doubt it is going to see much play.

This is probably the favorite of the weapons that dropped because it has a decent stat package with triple tap and the ambitious assassin that all of the weapons appear to come with by default. I used this quite a bit this weekend trying to complete the crucible headshots step of the Cayde-6 quest chain, and had some luck. The problem with that step is that I am just not good at crucible anymore, but this is a perfectly reasonable weapon to be using. I also really dig the look and feel of it.

The biggest challenge this weapon has going for it is that it is a scout rifle… and all of the reasons why I would use a scout rifle are largely demolished by the inclusion of bows. This is likely never going to get play from me because even before the introduction of bows… I was not a huge scout rifle fan. That said I won’t infuse it because I tend to collect interesting weapons. It does however have rampage which is a positive that it has going for it if you can get into a situation where you can pick off adds easily.

While this technically didn’t drop from a raid encounter, I saw a shiny golden engram while we were doing the Riven fight and this was waiting in my mailbox after we left the raid. This weapon has some issues, but the majority of the problem is that this time around this is a heavy weapon. In Destiny 1 this was a secondary weapon, which would have greatly improved its utility were we able to equip this in the energy weapon slot. As it stands… it is competing with other Heavy Weapons and comes up very short against both the Thunderlord and the Sleep Simulant that are just better weapons. What made this interesting before was that it was a fusion sniper rifle… which I guess became the linear fusion category as a whole. If they ever tweak this weapon to be energy slot equipped then it will see some play, before then however… it just isn’t worth giving up that slot against arguably better weapons.

I still have not ignited the forge, but one of my attempts over the weekend got me a Two-Tailed Fox to drop, which again suffers from some of the problems that I just talked about. It is a really interesting weapon that is useful in specific niche situations… but I can’t see using this over the sleeper or the thunderlord. Still very happy to check this off the exotics bucket list.

Finally I completed the Nascent Dawn quest chain over the weekend and wrapped up the Polaris Lance. All in all I dig the feel of this weapon, but I would probably use the Legendary Masterwork version that you get in the quest chain step before the Exotic as it would free up the exotic slot for one of the two heavy weapons I keep mentioning over and over.

We also recorded a podcast this weekend as usual and some of the things we talked about are… Black Armory, Last Wish, The Game Awards, Hades by Supergiant Games, Epic Game Storefront, Super Smash Bros Ultimate. If you are someone who likes to listen to podcasts check it out… otherwise zero shame in giving it a skip. I personally find youtube the easiest way of passing along the link, but in the sidebar of the blog is an RSS feed for those who want to use a traditional podcatcher style app. Listening to me ramble on is an acquired taste so perfectly cool with folks skipping if that is not your thing.

Destiny Nostalgia

December 6, 2018 by Belghast

With my general disappointment I have over Black Armory and the direction the game seems to be going now… with focusing only on the end game and not actually giving us anything new that we can do the moment a content update drops. It got me feeling notalgic about Destiny 1 and some of the things I miss that have never quite made it over to Destiny 2. So I am going to take this morning as an opportunity to rifle through my vault and pull out the things I would love to see over here. This is mostly just me posting a bunch of pictures of weapons and talking about them, so if that is not your thing then today’s post is likely highly skippable.

Legendary Weapons

Destiny was largely a game about collecting the exotics, but there were a handful of legendary weapons that stood out and that I coveted. I figured a handful of these definitely needed to be talked about. There were a lot of them that I liked, but these were the weapons that I absolutely loved.

We are going to start things off with the weapon that I bring up so many times… my perfect roll Haakon’s Hatchet, or at least what I considered to be a perfect roll. It came from Year 2 Iron Banner and still has one of the overall best looking Iron Banner weapon visual aesthetics. It had Range Finder, Perfect Balance and Counterbalance so was insanely stable and while relatively short range… it could melt targets especially in the Crucible or Iron Banner. This also doubled as probably one of my favorite PVE weapons for just dealing a bunch of reliable damage to targets.

The Haakon’s Hatchet was eventually replaced with the Genesis Chain which dropped on my first time through Wrath of the Machine when I was super carried hard by my friends in Tequila Mockingbird. I admit a lot of why I used this weapon was because it looked cool and it had an interesting perk called Focused Firefly… which was essentially a much bigger version of the normal firefly that caused targets to explode when you to a precision kill. It also had this super satisfying noise that it made when you triggered one of these explosions… which I think is the real reason why I kept using it. It sounded sorta like the ping of kicking brass out of a Mosin Nagant in all of the WW2 era FPS titles with a bunch of reverb at the end.

I generally hated the look of all of the Year 3 Iron Banner weapons… there is just something about having a bunch of bits crudely cobbled together that didn’t do it for me. This is weird because in general the Fallen weapon aesthetic is very similar… but somehow works with all of its spiky nonsense. The main reason why I loved this weapon was its absolutely crazy high impact, and the fact that enhanced battery took the available shots up to 6… and with performance bonus it had a chance of refunding some ammo. This could just straight up melt any target in front of you, and was a pretty good option to help burn elites.

My heavy weapon of choice has usually always been a machine gun because it always feels like you have a lot more versatility due to the larger magazine size… or in the case of most of them drum size. Once again this gets a strike against it for the horrible asethestic of year 3 Iron Banner weapons, but it has a lot going for it when it comes to stats with Extended Mag, Hand-Laid Stock and Counterblance giving me a fairly high impact and very stable machine gun. Not much else to say about it… it was very much a utilitarian burn option that wasn’t flashy but got the job done.

Exotic Weapons

While we have ended up with a large number of carry over from Destiny 1 in the Exotics department, there are still a handful that I really enjoyed using that it would be nice to see reborn in one form or another.

I have to give an initial shout out to Hawkmoon, which was the very first Exotic that I ever got to drop. Now rumor has it that we are getting this back at some point in the upcoming seasons… but for the time being an equivalent does not exist in game. It was a high damage high capacity hand canon made interesting by the fact that two of the bullets would deal extra damage. Ultimately I replaced this in my line up with the Eyasluna which was essentially the legendary version of Hawkmoon allowing me more leverage in where I chose to use my exotic slot. It still bears mentioning however for introducing me to how cool exotics could be.

Another weapon that was also near and dear to my heart that absolutely no one else liked playing with… was the Fabian Strategy or the Titan exclusive exotic. I have always been a very run and gun player and as such was regularly closing the gap on a pack of mobs, which triggered crowd control and the front lines perk that increased weapon stability and rate of fire. The fact that a portion of the ammo was reloaded into the magazine on kills meant I could storm the castle and maintain a killing screen while taking out minions. This all fits my general play style and made me love this weapon far more than I should have given how many other people kept telling me it was garbage. Proof again that weapon choice is absolutely a personal preference thing.

Red Death was my go to for whenever I needed to sustain my life in a situation where I knew I would be taking a significant amount of damage. This made it the ideal weapon for those affixes that would cause your shields not to regenerate normally, or anything where there was a aura effect that would be slowly damaging you over time. Sure we got Crimson which is effectively a Hand Canon version of this weapon, but it feels lousy to play with in my opinion and as such doesn’t really count for me. I would love to see the original Red Death back. Given the storied past of this weapon it feels like the perfect option for a lengthy chain to unlock it.

Now for the weapon that inspired this post… Thunderlord is awesome and does a great job of melting a bunch of minions because of its arc damage proc… but the best version of that was on the Zhalo Supercell. Not only was it a really stable auto rifle, but the chain lightning proc made it perfect for clearing waves of mobs. It also held a special place as one of the few elemental primaries that survived the year one cull, which made it amazing for arc burn weeks. I would love to see a version of this gun back with a similar proc, especially given how many horde mode encounters we are getting in the game now.

While I never got to experience the grandeur of year one Gjallarhorn because I stopped playing shortly after launch… I fell in love with this weapon during Year 3 and it is impossible to make a nostalgic post without mentioning it. There was just nothing cooler than watching an entire pack of mobs melt to wolfpack rounds. During much of Year 3 this was pretty much the dedicated exotic that I used for everything because even if it was not solar burn week… it still was the best option for killing all of the things at once. Sure one might say that made it too powerful, but it was insanely fun to play with so it deserves on this list.

Another weapon that I would love to have back that we will probably never get back… is Invective or the shotgun that regenerates ammunition over time. Sure this and the Icebreaker the sniper equivalent were a little broken… but I loved this weapon so much in The Crucible because I didn’t have to care about the meta of trying to camp the special ammo. It looks amazing as well which as we all know goes a lot way to making a weapon feel good to use. Party Crasher+1 was the only shotgun I used regularly other than this one, but for most of my iron banner nonsense it was this in the special, Haakon’s in the primary and some machine gun in the heavy slot.

Sure we got a version of this with the Curse of Osiris DLC called Machina Dei 4 but it is nowhere near as good as this classic exotic version. It also looks nowhere near as cool. I would love to see a version of the original return, because again… this was an epic quest in the original Destiny and would give ample opportunity to make it a seasonal quest to recover the weapon. Everyone loved the Stranger’s Rifle and this was just an updated version of that, so would love to see it back.

These next two are largely situational, but I felt like they were unique enough that I wanted to include them as well. Touch of Malice was a must have raid weapon for the Taken King expansion, given that there were many burn phases where you were given an invulnerability effect allowing you to effectively pour rounds into the target without reloading with this weapon. It’s special effect allowed you to drain your own life and convert it into a bullet to keep firing after you have essentially emptied your magazine. This mean’t that it was super useful in a few clutch situations, but also was a great way to kill yourself if you were not paying much attention. In either case it was fun for the entire family.

Lastly we have Bad Juju that had two situations where it worked amazingly well. String of Curses did two things… firstly kills caused your ammo to reload and give you a damage buff. Secondly this effect when procced caused you to gain additional super energy, allowing you to charge your super significantly faster if you could be put in a situation where you had to kill waves of mobs. This made this the go to weapon in situations where you needed to have your super up regularly, which came in super handy in Prison of Elders and similar activities where you were both fighting a bunch of stuff and also getting additional credit for using your super. Other than that I was not a huge fan of the weapon, but I liked it because it filled a specific niche in my armory.

What were some of the weapons that you miss from Destiny 1? I largely excluded the elemental swords because I would have had to have included all three of them… because they were all great in their own way. Drop me a line in the comments below about your favorite Destiny 1 weapon that we have not seen yet in Destiny 2.

Disappointing Armory

December 5, 2018December 5, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday the doors of the Black Armory opened… sorta. One of the problems with hype cycles is that you can often build something up in your head to be way more than it actually ends up being. Destiny has this traditional of releasing a DLC and with it comes some new storyline and a bunch of new activities, and at some point they decided to get off that train. I heard the words that they said… but I guess I didn’t take that to mean what we got? The Black Armory is effectively what would be termed as a “Minor Patch” in literally any other MMORPG, where you effectively get a new activity to do similar to a Holiday event. This however is supposed to be the major selling point of the Annual pass, that incidentally came with my super duper deluxe version of Forsaken. Had I purchased the annual pass separately I probably would think I got ripped off. I’m just setting the tone of the post ahead of time so if you are having an awful lot of fun with Black Armory and the Volundr Forge then by all means skip the rest of my post.

Effectively the Black Armory DLC adds a new area of the tower that is locked behind a door… that you apparently need to get a key from Spider to open. So your first mission is to go over to the Tangled Shore and talk to spider… or what I call a Forsaken purchase check… meaning it starts in an area that you cannot get to unless you already own the Forsaken expansion. You take your purchase acknowledgement back to the tower and you will find that there is a door you can now access buried in the bowels of the tower industrial complex… because apparently no one had a key to the door directly adjacent to Ikora Rey until today. We get to meet Ada-1 a surly robot that gives us a lecture on Guardian privilege before sending us out into the world to use said privilege to re-ignite the forges that she apparently had stolen from her.

There is some faffing about in the EDZ as we collect some bits with some rather obtuse directions about how to get a weapon core. To save you all the hassle of trying to figure this out here is an image of what you are looking for, since when you go out there yourself it is likely going to be farmed down… and you wind up wondering exactly what it is you are hunting for. To drop the shield you kill the single drone thingy orbiting it and then can loot the weapon core from it. The other piece will be to kill some Fallen and in truth by the time you get to this location… you have probably passed enough to complete the quest. I found my cache in the outskirts near the bridge leading to the area where those first Hawthorne missions occurred. There is supposedly an area in the Gulch that also has caches but I didn’t find any there myself in part because I had no clue what I was looking for.

There is a bit of killing Hive and getting Multikills with heavy… and then some High Value Targets… but essentially you can complete all of this with a few rounds of escalation protocol. From there you travel to the Volundr forge to create this weapon that you just gathered the parts for… and it is also a new area tacked onto the map. This time you head to the Sunken Isles drop zone in the northwest area of the map, and head into the tunnel complex which will eventually lead you to a new area of the map shown in the above image. You would think this works like the various other public events, in that you can just happen into a group completing it and join in the fun… but you would be wrong. Bungie gave us match making… that inexplicably we have to travel to the planet and wander around a bit to actually enter.

Interacting with the doodad in the world will dump you into a matchmaking queue, and here is where the frustration begins. With Black Armory the light cap moved from 600 to 650 which is to be expected, but this first activity you encounter has a suggested light level of 610 which in itself is a bit misleading. Basically they have thrown us at something that we really can’t successfully pug on day one. Sure there are folks who are forging their weapons but I would hazzard a guess that it is a really small minority. Squirrel who is among the most hardcore of my Destiny friends failed out just as surely as I did, in part because the minion class mobs are just bullet sponges and it takes two full reloads of shotgun blasts to take down one of the special glowing mobs that drop items needed for the event. Essentially you have a minute to ignite the forge by killing glowing bastards that drop the ubiquitous orbs we are constantly transporting… and toss them at the forge that is conveniently shaped like a four square goal. Each time you dunk a donut you get back some time on the clock, and to progress to phase two you need to have collected twenty of these mcguffins.

Unfortunately this is where the bullshit starts a bit because while the suggested light of wave one is 610, it increases difficulty… and the final phase includes a boss that has a suggested light level of 630. So essentially read this event as something that we are not supposed to be caring about until 630 unless you are willing to bleed copious amounts of blood on this cutting edge content. The problem is… this is our expansion content… a few quick quests and then an activity that we are not supposed to be doing until we have pushed our light up significantly already. It feels like if Warmind had ONLY included Escalation Protocol and nothing else… because that is sorta what happened here. We got another world event that this time has a match making system, but nothing much else to show for it. Maybe in their heads they were counting all of the stuff we got at the start of season 5 as being “part of the dlc” but it feels super hollow when we already got to unwrap that gift, and now all we have left under the tree is a squishy package of socks. Notice how EVERYTHING is disabled on ADA-1 until I complete this first step of igniting the forge.

After completing a handful of Powerful rewards bounties/challenges and getting a few Prime Engrams I have managed to push my light level up to 604 in the first night. That is still woefully short of being within striking range of making a real attempt at this event. Conversely I remember rolling up in the Archon’s Forge event and succeeding for a few rounds on the first day it opened. Right now Black Armory feels horrible and if this was how they were going to supposedly fix the Engagement and Monetization issues that Activision talked about in their conference call… then I think they are mental. If this is what a DLC is from this point out… then the Annual Pass is not worth it in the least. Sure this will be a lot of fun at some point, but when you add tasty pie into the game you expect to be able to at least have a single slice by the end of the night. The pie unfortunately is mincemeat, and tastes like sadness and soggy raisins.

So instead of doing the thing that just went into the game… I instead did the thing that I had been neglecting terribly. I had to do some Vanguard strikes for the poweful reward anyway, so I opted to take along my Ikelos weapon and knock the “do five strikes” step out while I was chaining them. From there I went through the process of unlocking 15 memory fragments… which weirdly enough I happened to have just enough Resonate Stems from grinding random stuff on Mars to be able to craft all 15 keys. Essentially once you have those it just becomes a scavenger hunt which took a little over an hour to get to all 15 locations. From there I ran the special quest… and Xol becomes trivial with the Thunderlord and I finished my night with a shiny new Sleeper Simulant that I immediately infused a 610 rocket launcher into to make it viable for shenanigans. All in all I still had a good night, but I am sorely disappointing in The Black Armory… and concerned for the state of the game if this is what a DLC means from this point out. Prior to last night I said that Destiny was in the best place it had been since initial release… now it feels like this one action took us a massive step or two back.

Haphazard Huntering

December 4, 2018 by Belghast

A blank screen is probably the hardest thing to confront when you are not exactly feeling up to doing a proper blog. I am feeling a bit better than I was yesterday but still not really amazing. In fact my fingers don’t seem to be in unison this morning and I keep having to backspace to fix issues where I hit the wrong letter in the wrong order. As such be warned there are probably going to be a bunch of spelling errors. For much of my day off I was dealing with email that never seems to stop even when I am out of the office, and for whatever reason yesterdays volume seemed to be more extreme than normal. However in between the email arrival sounds I sat on the sofa playing Destiny 2 and watching a marathon of American Pickers on History Channel. I grew up as an only child and my default mechanism for not feeling alone is to turn on the television and largely use it as background noise. Given that for the most part I had whittled down all of the engram options for the Titan I spent my time on the Hunter working on pushing its level up enough to someday be relevant.

By the time the PC version of Destiny 2 released… I had already ground up three characters to the then level cap of 305 light and struggled to do the same on another platform. As such my Hunter and Warlock have long been neglected with both having completely the Red War campaign but nothing past that point. As such I worked my way through the Curse of Osiris content and a few missions into Warmind yesterday when I finally decided to start pushing the story instead of doing nothing but public events on Titan. I still stand by that as an amazing way to level, because I have a stack of token to turn in on that destination if I ever get this character up high enough to make use of them. There is something relaxing about playing Destiny as a whole and I can happily run loops around a planet because the moment to moment game play feels like an extension of my mind with little to know translation involved. I can just perform the actions that I want to without thinking about doing it… the only challenge is getting used to the three vastly different jump patterns. I still am of the firm belief that the Titan jump is the best, but pretty much every other class devotee would fight me on that.

Past that I spent a bit more time running around in Final Fantasy XIV and doing some more Palace of the Dead. It is like I suddenly forgot that no one runs anything higher than 51-60… because I kept trying to figure out why my 91-100 queue was so damned long. Once I switched up my tactics and started pushing the 51 bracket over and over the progress sped up significantly. The only negative is that I had a bunch of runs where we encountered no hidden treasures along the way. One of my favorite things about Palace of the Dead was how often I wound up with interesting transmog bits as a result. I am looking forward to pushing the Dark Knight high enough to be able to get into Heaven on High to see if there are also interesting transmog bits there as well. I figure I will grind up through the brackets at least once to be able to unlock everything along the way. I remember in Palace you needed to have beaten 100 to turn in any of the weapons, and I figure Heaven does the same shtick.

Lastly I didn’t share this in yesterdays post because I am not entirely sure what I am doing with it. However I figure since it is a slow morning I will talk a bit about it here. I had this weird revelation when someone jokingly referred to me as “Old Man Bel” that all three words had three characters and could be stacked in a pleasing pattern. So while I was fiddling with making all of the sidebar images this weekend I also knocked this out. I am not entirely sure what I am going to do with it, but I made it so I thought I would share it. The illustration behind the lettering is of course by the amazing AmmosArt, and I talked a bit about her ESO Bel commission from awhile back. I have more commissions that I want to get made, especially a Monster Hunter Belghast but I have to sort out exactly what weapon I want to be using and which of my armor sets to have equipped… the truth is probably my favorite look is a weird mix of the Dober set and the original Samurai layered armor. Like I said I have no clue what will happen with this branding, especially since I don’t actually stream on a regular basis. That is still something I hope to do more of, but I find myself completely out of spoons most nights by the time I get home… so much so that for the better part of this year I have completely avoided voice chat in any form. It doesn’t help that the majority of my crew are time shifted by 2 hours… and are getting online as I am going to bed. Regardless I did a thing and I am sharing a thing.