Action RPGs

Over the last few nights I have been super engaged with the start of the new Destiny 2 season.  One of the things I dig so much about it is how I can focus in on a different activity each night and vary up what I am doing…  but still enjoy whatever it is that I am doing.  I am not so much into the Crucible so I have not touched that this week yet, but one night I focused on the Planetary Flashpoint, another I really focused on Gambit, and last night for example I mostly focused on completing stuff in the Dreaming City including a bunch of Blind Well.  At some point I am sure I will at least do 3 strikes and 3 heroic story missions to get the powerful engrams included.  The only complaint I have to be honest is the fact that I keep getting Helmets instead of pieces of 600 gear that I actually still need for a given slot.

One of the things that came up in my little social community was some comments about loot boxes and how a friend of mine did not like the Destiny 2 implementation.  On one level yeah… it is less than optimal, but after living with it for awhile and having them tweak the formula… I no longer feel it is anywhere near as heinous as some of the loot box schemes I have seen.  What changed is there are a bunch of tweaks that were made, not the least of which is the fact that once you have earned an item you can always go into your collections tab.  This is any weapons that are static rolls, so basically anything pre-forsaken…  any ghosts, sparrows, ships, shaders, etc so essentially anything has less need for permanence which is making me way more liberal at scrapping things.  As a result I almost always have a decent balance of Dust… which you can see in the above picture is like 6044.  This morning I opened one of the Bright Engrams and got a skin for one of the Titan exotics, 3 shaders, and a bounty note.  The skin could be scrapped but I have not collected it yet so that was not going to happen, the shaders scrap at around 10 dust per… and the bounty note is turned in for Tess Everis specific bounties that reward glimmer and dust.

Essentially I feel like the game is giving us a bunch of options to get cash shop goods without spending any real world money.  There is always the problem that everything coming from a Bright Engram is super random…  but that is mitigated by the fact that each week during a given season Tess is offering a bunch of items for direct purchase.  Last week they had a ton of the exotic items but this week it looks like they are mostly selling legendary stuff…  2 emotes, 2 sparrows, 2 ships, 1 ghost shell, one armor piece and a couple of the exotic weapon skins.  Basically this helps to mitigate the randomness of the engrams and allows you to just straight out buy the item you were wanting.  Unfortunately this also means you need to be logging in each week to check out and see if Tess is selling that one thing you really wanted.

In a night of casual play I tend to get one or two engrams as the bar feels like it fills way faster than it used to.  You can see in the above shot that I am pretty damned close to getting one, and that happened to be the one I opened this morning and screenshot its contents.  One night this week I got 3, and last weekend there was a really heavy play day that I got four of them in a single day.  Essentially I am saying that they are way more generous with said loot baubles, at least compared to how it felt when the game initially launched.  This isn’t a “Belghast Luck” thing because experience game is experience gain for everyone, and sure maybe the fact that the first engram I opened this season gave me the sweet ghost rider sparrow…  is luck.  Anyways I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the cash shop in Destiny 2 and how it has gone from really horrible… to completely manageable.  Having a cash shop in a game is always going to incur some problems, but the tweaks they have made since launch have turned this one into a completely manageable situation.  The biggest change for me personally was when I realized I could re-buy shaders… which has made me way more cool with scrapping them knowing that if I really want a specific color I can buy it again.

For the last few days I have been on the cusp of coming down with something I think, but the problem is my schedule does not really allow me to take a day off right now to recuperate.  If I were to take off right now, deadlines would suffer… so as a result I have been taking some over the counter stuff to try and limp along until I can collapse.  Last night however I probably should not have taken that NyQuil, because this morning…  I am groggy as hell.  Last night however was the beginning of the 5th season of Destiny 2 and it seems like they are mixing things up a bit.  For the last few seasons in Diablo 3 there has been an overarching theme to a new season… and it seems like maybe Bungie is borrowing this concept.  The latest “This Week At Bungie” blog post goes into more detail about this, but there is a fairly packed roadmap content wise that we can look forward to.

As far as last night…  I focused on starting the Pinnacle Weapon quests that I actually feel like I have a shot at getting before the end of the season.

Pinnacle Weapons are more or less a unique weapon that you can grind for during the season.  There is one tied to Vanguard Strikes, another tied to the Gambit event, and another tied to how far progressed you make it rank wise in the Crucible.  Given that I love Autorifles because I am a noob…  I decided to spend a good deal of last night working on trying to get the Gambit based weapon called Breakneck.  I think in part I just like the old world feel of the weapons that The Drifter offers.  As you can see you need to play a minimum of 40 matches of Gambit, and also do a bunch of other things in the process.  Now my hope is that by the time I have played my 40… I will have long since completed the other objectives.  My goal is to play a handful of rounds of Gambit and run a few Strikes every night to begin whittling away at this objective over time.  The truth is that will probably hold for a bit and then I will spend a weekend grinding nothing but that activity so I can get the weapon.

With a new season, comes a new set of cash shop engrams… and throughout the night last night I unlocked four of these…  one of which happening to give me this sweet Ghostrider themed sparrow.  I also pulled an exotic ship that is themed after Warmind/SIVA but it isn’t anywhere near as cool looking.  This however immediately became my new main sparrow as I ride around on flaming nonsense.  All it is missing is a bunch of skulls.  I really like the Scorn as a faction, and I love how all of their tech seems even more improvised than even that of the Fallen.  All in all it was a good night and a largely quiet one as I slowly whittled away at collecting powerful and prime engrams.  I have finally reached the point where I am pretty regularly getting 600 light items…  so my hope is in the next few days to be able to hit that item cap before Black Armory bumps it up by 50 again.  It really is a great time to be playing Destiny 2.

If you prefer to consume this information from a Bungie Vidoc… they also have you taken care of as a nice one released yesterday attempting to differentiate between the content players will be getting for free and the content locked behind the Annual Pass.

Last night I did not join in FFXIV Eureka shenanigans, largely because I was not feeling terribly sociable.  This is was and will probably continue to be a trying week, as is often the case when we come back from a significant break.  In my case I was out five days, and while I spent a good chunk of the first day at the hospital…  it was still enough time to get thoroughly out of the habit of going to work on a regular basis.  Instead I spent my night roaming around in Destiny 2 and doing puttering sort of activities, in part because I had knocked down the vast majority of the major stuff over the weekend.  The thing I did not realize however is that yesterday was also the final day of the season, and I am a little bummed out that this was apparently the first season that Greysky Armada will not have maxed out guild rank… and will not be earning the banner pole.  I myself have done next to nothing to contribute to this, so in the grand scheme of things I am okay with this… just a little sad.

Instead of doing things on my Titan main, I opted to instead piddle around on my Hunter who has not really been dusted off since the launch of Curse of Osiris.  It is really weird to have the start of three different content blocks…  Curse of Osiris, Warmind, and Forsaken all on the director map.  I play this game incorrectly… and what I mean by that is my preference is to level to the new numerical cap before starting any of the story driven content.  My thought process is something like this…  if I grind the levels on something like strikes or heroic public events… I can use the story as a light leveling experience, meaning anything I happen to get along the way is actually useful gear instead of something that I immediately relegate to the shard bin.  This may or may not be worthwhile but it is the pattern that I find myself falling into over and over again.

Traditionally I have focused on doing nothing but Titan public events, since by the time you down one of them there is often times another one just about to spawn on the other half of that relatively small map.  With the advent of planetary bounties, I have started focusing on those instead and knocking out a full round of the planets that I have access to.  Each time you turn in one of the bounties it appears to be a significant jump in experience and as a result I am sitting at level 37 out of 50…  and wondering if the Black Armory is going to bump up both Light Level cap and Level Cap.  Grinding in Destiny is my jam, and I find it extremely peaceful to roam around and knock out patrols and public events.

This process has been bolstered by the fact that apparently the gun I ground for during the Halloween event, may not have a minimum level cap to equip or at least it is equipable at my lowest level which is 30.  I was swapping gear around through DIM…  and if you don’t know about Destiny Item Manager you should totally stop what you are doing and check it out.  Without really realizing what I was doing I swapped my 600 item level Horror Story over to my Hunter…  and it equipped without issue.  This means that immediately I started getting gear that is way higher than I probably should at the equivalent level.  Sure some of it isn’t necessarily usable due to level restrictions… but some of it is and as such this weapon that is an arguably worse version of the Origin Story…  serves as a light level booster.  Similarly I tried it out on my 289 Light Level Warlock… and once again I could equip it just fine.

With the opening of a brand new season….  I will likely be putting the Huntress to bed once again, however the sheer fact that I am interested in playing my alts tells you a lot about the improvement to the current state of Destiny 2.  When the PS4 version released I ground up all three of my classes to 305 light, and used them as a sort of spring board each week to help me level up my weapons…  which in turn then drug up the level of my armor.  With the PC release… I only had the oomph to get the three characters leveled… but never spent time gearing them other than the Titan.  I lost steam… and Curse of Osiris did not really help that, and at which point I seemingly became a player that only really played my main.  Now I am back in the mood to fiddle with the other classes and see what sorts of trouble I can get up to with them as well.  Essentially the desire to play is greater once more than the total package of content available to me on any one character…  which is saying an awful lot given that there are so many opportunities for Powerful/Prime engrams.

Like I have said before…  Destiny 2 is in its best state ever, and one that I feel probably rivals the state of Destiny 1 during Year 3 (and honestly the current state since it has largely been frozen in time).  If you have access to the game I highly suggest checking it out again.  If you have any questions or need help, feel free to holler at me through one of the many channels folks have to holler at me through.