Dawning Sorta

December 20, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday the new and revised Dawning Holiday started in Destiny 2, but I feel like in order to understand the rest of this post we need to talk a bit about what Dawning was in Destiny 1. This holiday originally ran from December 13th 2016 to January 3rd 2017 and was lumped in with a major update to the game. As a result it is a little hard to separate what is the Dawning and what is the content, but I am going to talk about it anyways. In Destiny 1 we had these things called record books that included a bunch of achievements and completing them unlocked loot. There was one of these specific to the dawning event and featured achievements that involved either the brand new strike scoring system also included with the patch or the triumphant return of the Sparrow Racing League (SRL). SRL is legitimately my favorite part of Destiny 1 and when it came back over the holidays last year… I ground my little face off running endless Sparrow Racing League matches. With this it also introduced a ton of new SRL themed gear and sparrows including these really awesome class items that left a neon streak behind you as you raced on your sparrow. In addition to that three exotics were introduced into the game, as well as a series of presents that were in the tower allowing you to open one each day and get a mixture of good items and complete junk. Needless to say there was a lot of stuff included in the holiday and a good deal of it like Strike Scoring became a permanent part of the game after that.

This year around The Dawning is running from December 19th through January 9th and as much as I hate to be one of those folks… seems to be largely a bunch of new Eververse Trading Company items. You are given one Dawning Engram by logging in and then there are milestones that allow you to earn one each week. When you XP up it appears that you still get a Season Two Engram rather than one of the special event ones, so your ability to actually get items from this event without spending some money seems to be at least somewhat limited. Instead of presents that give you stuff for free… you get to loot a quest item each day that requires you to do some stuff and then turns in at one of the tower NPCs for some dawning loot. The first one is a pattern that goes in your ghost shell slot and requires you to collect 10 phase glass on Io and kill 15 servitors… which largely meant hanging out and farming the Servitor events as they spawned in the EDZ. I turned in and got an exotic ship and a shader, but based on what I am seeing this appears to be essentially the equivalent of opening one of those Dawning Engrams… so wide loot table including full sets of class armor, 4 unique emotes, 10 unique ghost shells including 1 exotic, 10 unique ships including 2 exotics, 11 unique sparrows including 2 exotic, 4 unique shaders, and 6 unique transmat effects. At any given time there are seven of that assortment of forty five items available for purchase with bright dust on the Eververse vendor… pending my math is correct. Essentially this is an Eververse holiday with Eververse rewards… and a minimal method of earning them through normal game play rather than swiping your card.

The biggest problem I have with the event is the complete and total lack of the Sparrow Racing League. Instead we get Mayhem Crucible modes… which admittedly are amazingly fun, but no crazy swoop bike racing action. For the uninitiated Mayhem is a mode of the Crucible where your super regenerates at an insane rate… and grenade and melee are slightly increased as well. It means that it takes what feels like a minute to get your full super bar, and as a result you are running around doing really silly things the entire match. I played quite a bit of it last night and it was enjoyable to run around the map trying to out super all of the other supers. Oddly enough I got plenty of normal weapon kills also as I sat back and picked off weakened targets when two different super saiyans clashed in battle. As fun as Mayhem mode is… unless it sticks around as a new permanent fixture it is going to feel super hollow. The original Dawning added so much new permanent content to the game, that this version feels extremely lacking. Strike scoring is one of those systems that is desperately needed in Destiny 2 and with the bulk of the dawning items coming from cash shop purchases rather than a book of achievements… it just feels cheap. I am as big a backer of Destiny 2 as they come, but even I have to stop and think that this seems more cash grab than content.

The Visionary

December 19, 2017 by Belghast

I don’t have a whole lot to say this morning given that by the time I got home I pretty much crashed on the sofa and wound up officially asleep about 9:30. Last week I had several nights where I was not asleep until after 1 am and I think they are catching up with me. I played a little WoW and a little Destiny 2 but nothing really of sufficient effort to talk about it at length. The bulk of my evening was an hour long call with my folks where we talked through christmas plans or the potential lack thereof considering we are expecting an ice storm. We mostly agreed that if the weather was dicey… Christmas could be any day given we can get together. My mom used to be super big on doing things on the official day but seems to have mellowed out over the years. Mostly this morning I wanted to make sure my readers knew about something… namely the Fall of Osiris comic book over on Bungie.net. Personally I would have rather they just released it in one of the comic book e-reader formats for us to download and enjoy on our reader of choice… but the step through the panels format works well enough. I mean in theory we could recreate it in PDF or CBZ format considering you can easily open the images in another window and snag them that way. That might be a side project… but anyways it is 10 pages worth of story and well worth the read.

Buried in the middle of the comic is a panel showing the written Prophecies of Osiris. Of course Redditors immediately noticed that at the top of the text was a broken line that looked a lot like morse code, and then another one quickly decoded it. The end result is a code that when input into the Destiny redemption page rewards you with an emblem. Simply input the following text in the code redemption box…

XFV-KHP-N97

As a result you end up with “The Visionary” emblem shown above.

Clipped Wings

December 14, 2017 by Belghast

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Last night I had every intent of coming home and playing some Destiny 2… but instead I logged into World of Warcraft to “check what gear was up on world quests” and never really logged back out. I’m still very much stuck in “must complete the emissary caches” mode and as a result I had one in Argus for the Argussian Reach faction that I lacked enough quests to complete. As a result I started unlocking more of the planet until I finally got enough to finish it out. This however was super time consuming because doing anything on Argus feels needlessly tedious due to the packed base pop and terrain that goes out of its way to keep you from going from point a to b. For my troubles I got a big fat nothing… or in truth a little bit of gold that feels insanely lackluster given the amount of effort I went through to be able to complete it. So the real question I ask to you more seasoned players that did not take a massive break after Nighthold… did they just fucking nerf emissary caches into the ground? In the past these used to be a significant source of gear upgrades, and also used to drop legendaries like candy. At this point I have no legendaries and have not seen a single piece of gear from the six caches I have turned in since starting up playing again. Is this just a bad streak or did they simply remove any reasonable rewards from these things?

I’ve managed to move the needle a little further forward and am sitting at 884 and I think 15 concordance on my two primary weapons. I still have Tomb of Sargeras LFR to do this week but in truth it seems like grinding Argus is going to be my best bet for gear level movement. The only problem there is that I hate Argus and want to nuke the planet from orbit. I mean in all reality it isn’t that bad but it just feels shitty to return to land mounts again after being able to fly literally everywhere else. The base pop reminds me of a lot of what it feels like to roam around in a Rift zone where everything is super aggro and ready to reach out and thump you if you get too close. The main difference is that at least in World of Warcraft it is completely reasonable for me to round up 30 mobs and grind them down…. because I did this thing today out of laziness and not wanting to stop. The only really works if you can keep healing yourself like the protection warrior can, but nonetheless it is a viable option. In Rift if I had more than a couple of mobs I would have fallen over, which makes the game feel super tedious to play. If I apply myself and gobble up every quest I can do on Argus each day… I may be able to purchase a single piece of 910 gear which is a slow way to upgrade but potentially preferable to hoping for lucky double platnium bonus warforged gear from LFR.

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Towards the end of the evening while rewatching Force Awakens I did wind up grinding a bit in Destiny 2 and managed to complete the Mercury Flashpoint. When I turned in with Cayde-6 I managed to get my very first Masterwork item… and I maybe just almost accidentally called it Warforged. The positive it is at least an Auto Rifle which is something I will use. Grace said last night that when she got her first… it was a sidearm… which is something that no sane and rational person would ever want to use. I was absolutely certain that the game would give me a sniper rifle or something else that I generally loathe. Then again if that were the case the decision to shard it and get crafting materials would have been simple… in this case I have the strong desire to start using it even though Solemn Hymn isn’t exactly one of my favorite weapons. As far as the perk on mine, it gives a small range boost which is reasonable enough for the moment. Were it a warforged Better Devils I might work on trying to get the best possible roll, but for now I am okay with a ranged boost. I have a late night tonight because Star Wars… but I might be able to hop on when I get home and give it a proper testing.

Schmoradric Cube

December 7, 2017 by Belghast

This mornings post flavored non-post is brought to you by my favorite item in Destiny 2… the Schmoradric Cube. This is one of the items that you get in place of actual loot occasionally in one of Cayde-6’s treasure map chests. These appear to be more interesting than they were… but I am still not entirely certain if they are worth the price tag. Last night I looted the majority of them in a single sitting without doing my previously back to orbit thing to make sure I didn’t hit the empty chest bug. Each one rewarded three to four EDZ tokens and a couple of blues and at least one of the “fake” cash items that you can take back to Cayde and sell. One of the chests rewarded me with a legendary engram and another with an emblem that I did not have. This is nothing like that one week when I got four legendary engrams, an exotic and a faction exclusive weapon… but it does feel like you are at least getting something rather than the big fat nothing I occasionally got before. So if you were one of those folks that decided they simply were no longer worth your time… they at least feel interesting now. The real highlight of the night though was getting back the Wolf emblem above, which was a favorite of mine from Destiny 1.

The other positive from last night is that for the most part I am certain that the power mode setting is what was causing my insane freezing. I talked a bit about this yesterday but for whatever reason during the Fall Creators update to Windows 10, it reset my power settings to power saving mode. The behavior I kept seeing is that every 10 to 15 minutes Destiny 2 would lock along with anything else going on on my system while the audio continued to play. After scouring the forums I finally found a post on Tom’s Hardware when I started looking for issues related to the Fall Creators update but not necessarily Destiny 2. Throughout the night I played some crucible and a lot of planetary stuff and never once encountered a lockout except for occasionally some respawn lag which was something that occasionally happened even during the best of times. So in theory I cam considering this “fixed” as I was able to watch videos on YouTube (or in truth listen to them) while grinding out the Crucible Call to Arms last night. Past that though… I had one of those nights where nothing went right and it was not until 9 pm that I finally got settled into a computer and playing something. Tonight is more or less also going to be a non-gaming night because I am going with some friends to go see the Disaster Artist… the same crew that I watched the RiffTrax version of The Room with. It should be amazing, but it also means I won’t get home until significantly later than normal.