Destiny Archives - Page 17 of 46 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Dark Math and Infusion

September 19, 2017 by Belghast

I finished the night last night at 287 power, putting me well within striking distance of at least 290 this week… and with some additional luck in getting some really good drops 300. For the moment I have standardized on the gear set that I am wearing and I have been eating everything that gives me slightly higher light levels to pour into it. This morning I thought I would talk a bit about the infusion game in Destiny 2 and my frustrations with it. The longer I play Destiny 2 the more I think of it as a continuation of the previous game to the point of largely feeling like a big smooth reboot. There is a lot of gnashing of teeth over this point but I have reached a sort of equilibrium in my attitude. I realize there are going to be some people that cannot get past this fact and I am guessing they really were not that big of a fan of the original game in the first place. There are certainly things that I am not the biggest fan of, but overall I am really enjoying my time spent wandering around… and weirdly looking forward to starting over with the PC launch and doing all of the things that I wish I had done this time around. For me at least the chronology of Destiny looks a little something like this.

Year One – Destiny Launch/Dark Below/House of Wolves
Year Two – The Taken King
Year Three – Rise of Iron
Year Four – Destiny 2 Launch

Now back to the original topic I wanted to discuss… Infusion. During Year One it was not really a thing even though there was a limited form of it available in the ability to “power up” weapons with ascendant shards… which was less a version of infusion and more a version of delayed gratification making you level your weapon further after getting it. Side note… they are doing something like this system with an exotic shotgun that you get from the raid but that is a discussion for another day. During Year Two they introduced the infusion system but made the calculations behind it extremely frustrating. The closer you got to the level cap the less light you were able to squeak out from each infusion. I remember keeping a vault full of random gear to step new items that I got up… without losing a bunch of potential light in the process. For those who didn’t live under the system… say you had a 300 light level exotic item.. and you wanted to infuse a 335 item into it… the resulting item would be 324. If the first item was a legendary item… you would end up with 328 making this weird penalty on using exotics. During the tail end of Year Two and all of Year Three this changed and you started to get the complete face value of every infusion, meaning in that same scenario… of a 300 exotic and a 335 infusion fodder… you would end up with a 335 exotic gaining full credit for the item you were pouring into it. The previous infusion system was pretty straight forward in that any primary could infuse into any other primary… with the same being true for armor pieces. Meaning I could throw my trash at my alts and help funnel their light level up.

Now we scan forward to Year Four and a bunch of things have changed that make the system as a whole way less beneficial to the players. Year Three was pretty much the pinnacle of the system as far as I was concerned, it felt good and didn’t cause needless strife to the players. In Destiny 2 however… they made a bunch of tweaks that seem like nonsense. Firstly they removed the element of simplicity, meaning it was no longer slot based infusions and instead depended upon the specific item type. This means if you need to bump up your auto rifle… you are going to need another auto rifle. Similarly it means that if you want to pour additional power into your hunter arms… you are going to need another pair of hunter arms. To further confuse things they added a system of mods into the game, and at face value these seem like awesome things. It lets you take one piece of gear and tailor it to your exact needs without having to wait for the ideal item roll to drop. Where this complicates things however is when it comes to legendary mods, because not only do they add perks to an item… they also had 5 power levels. This means that if you have a 200 item without a legendary mod and a 225 item with a legendary mod… feeding the 225 item into the 200 item will result in a new power level of 220 because the mod gets consumed in the process. The first time this happened to me I was confused as hell and extremely angry because it felt like they had taken a step back to the lossy days of item infusion.

Where things get even weirder is the fact that in the past there were hard item level caps that you could not breach. For example right now in Destiny 2… blues stop giving you upgrades initially a 260 and purples at 265. That however is a somewhat fungible barrier, because as your power level trickles up… so does the level at which items start dropping. I am not entirely certain why things drop at the level they start dropping… but for example last night the maximum power I could hit was 287 but the blues I kept seeing were 277. The lowest power item I have equipped is a 282 helm… so I do not think it is based on that given that there was a period of time where I kept getting items that I could infuse into my lower armor pieces to keep pulling my total up a bit. There is some manner of dark math happening behind the scenes and I think that is what is making this process feel less certain and because of that less “good” than the previous system. We reached peak infusion during year three and all of these tweaks just feel like they were screwing with a solved problem. I am hoping at some point we revert back to just having slot based infusion rather than item type based. The whole item levels and drops thing however I am not even sure how to straighten that out because it seems super wibbly wobbly. All of this said however… Bungie has tweaked things significant given time and I have a feeling that they will also tweak this product to roll back some of the weird parts. It is just a little frustrating at this point however to be entering what is legitimately year four of the game, and it feels like they forgot some of the lessons they learned during the first three years. I mean maybe this is the influence of Blizzard, since they seem to love fixing systems that were not broken by ripping up the pavement and installing brand new and improved pavement that requires a completely different car to drive on it. Whatever the case I am still loving the game and have been spending almost every non-work waking moment playing it… but there are just frustrations that build up as with any new experience. I thought I had gushed for awhile… and its probably time for me to start unpacking some of my baggage as well.

Happy First Xursday!

September 15, 2017 by Belghast

One of the tidbits of information that we knew going into Destiny 2 was that Mister Shadow Tentacles himself… Xur the Agent of the Nine would no longer be showing up in a social space. That meant that we would need to find him somewhere on a planet. At first I thought this would be somewhat of a scavenger hunt, where we had to scour the planets to find where he was hiding. However that does not appear to be the case because they put a familiar IX logo on the director map. This week Xur is located on Nessus in the Watcher’s Grave area, and in this case he is up high in a tree next to a golden vex scannable item. The other things that we didn’t know were the level of items he would be bringing…. and the cost. We knew that legendary shards would be the universal currency for lots of different things and now replace the familiar chase item… Strange Coins. It appears that everything is 270 and I have verified with a few videos of Xur that regardless of the players power level he seems to be handing out that same static level. The basic set up is similar to Destiny 1 in that he is bringing a single weapon and a piece of armor for each class. This week we have…

Merciless – Fusion Rifle – 29 Legendary Shards
Raiden Flux – Hunter Chest – 23 Legendary Shards
Doom Fang Pauldrons – Titan Arms – 23 Legendary Shards
Wings of Sacred Dawn – Warlock Chest – 23 Legendary Shards

If you only have the Legendary Shards to pick up a single item… I would say buy this thing. I was lucky enough to get it as an Exotic Engram drop while leveling… and this thing is amazing. It has a weird perk on it that speeds up the recharge rate until you get a kill. This combined with a perk that increases your damage if you reload after getting that kill.. makes it a machine to melt mobs. Especially on bosses the fact that it keeps getting faster lets you pour some insane damage into the boss in a very short period of time. This thing completely decimates the ship that flys in on the Cabal extraction event for example. This was one of the first legendaries that I infused up, simply because I like using it that much.

I went ahead and picked these up because I didn’t already have them. Effectively when you are in your super mode… kills with the shield bash reset the cooldown of your shield throw. I could definitely see this being useful since in general you only get one throw per sentinel super. Similarly melee kills help give you super energy… and since I run around punching everything already this should be a good exotic for me. The only problem is… I am currently using another exotic just for the light levels so in theory I need to find something to replace it with before I can rock these.

For the Warlock Xur is selling the Wings of Sacred Dawn, which is one of the fanciest chest slot items I have seen in game so far. The truth is however that I largely just bought this for the item level to help give my Warlock I am currently leveling a power boost, so I can start double dipping on those sweet sweet powerful engrams. The perk is Tome of Dawn, which causes you to suspend midair while aiming while you are in your super. Precision hits extend this effects duration allowing you to stay up in the air frozen longer. Since I don’t really like Dawnblade as a subclass and went Voidwalker the moment I got it as a drop and have never looked back… this really is all about the 270 light level for me and nothing else. If you like Dawnblade your mileage may vary.

I had to swipe an image of this one online, because I have not even begun to start my Hunter leveling… since it is probably the class I like the least in Destiny 2. I went ahead and picked this up however because I had the shards… and once again it will be a power level boost when I finally get around to leveling and equipping a third class. The perk on the item is called Synapse Junctions… which causes quick successive attacks with Arc Staff to increase damage output and the duration of your super. In truth this is probably a good item for me since I mostly like the Arc Staff super ability. Again however… its really about the 270 light.

One of the slight disappointments comes not from the exotics themselves… because I really do think that he brought a decent load out of items. What I am a little disappointed in is the fact that he ONLY brought the exotics. Previously in Destiny 1 there were a ton of other items that he sold… most of which are no longer still in the game. What I would have loved to see him sell in their place however were maybe some really nice gear mods to help those players who have yet to hit that 280 plateau get there. Additionally I would have loved to see him offer Fireteam Medallions as an alternate way other than Eververse dust currency to get them, since they appear to be the replacement for three of coins. The best method of getting Exotic engrams appears to be running one of those and chaining heroic events. Speaking of which… I need to do a lot more of that. Anyways regardless of anything else… I am just happy to see the Friday tradition of finding Xur continue into this new game.

Destiny 2 Heroic Event Triggers

October 23, 2017September 12, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday Pete asked if I could do a post about the various heroic event triggers, and this morning I am going to attempt to do just that. Last night I was able to get a few reasonable screenshots of the objectives for several of the events. Others I have simply looked up and will attempt to explain because I don’t have good imagery for them. At this point though I now feel relatively comfortable in my knowledge of how to launch any of the events into heroic mode. I am posting a picture of my own character at the start of this post largely because I am happy that for once I have most of a matched set of gear.

Glimmer Extraction – Fallen Event

This is more than likely the very first event you ever complete in Destiny 2 because it spawns right out in front of the church. Essentially a Ketch will drop off a Glimmer Harvesting team and you have to take out the extraction teams. Each team will consist of 3 mobs followed by a mini boss type mob. Then the ketch will drop another ship in a new location. There will be three different locations that the Fallen attempt to harvest and if you take down all of them you defeat the event. In the Heroic mode however things change. In the above screenshot you can see a little engine looking thing with a stream of glimmer going into it. There will be one of these at each location the Fallen attempt to harvest, and to trigger heroic you need to destroy them before you have defeated a given waves miniboss. From there the goal changes to guarding a pile of glimmer until your folks can transmat it out. Someone has to be standing on the pile at all times to make sure the bar is progressing.

Weapons Exchange – Fallen

This event is pretty straight forward. In Destiny 1 we learned the ins and outs of fighting Fallen Walkers… hit the armor plating on their legs until one section falls of and then the carapace covering the control module slides open and you can pour damage into the unit. In this event there are 3 energy fields protecting a total of six scorch cannons. Each time you bust open the carapace on the Walker, a number of arc orbs will spawn at its feet. In order to trigger the heroic phase, you need to take those orbs and carry them to the receptacles that look like the object in the screenshot above. It will take two orbs per shield, and once you have dropped all three shields… a second walker gets dropped on your location. The goal is to have the first walker almost dead when you drop the shields so that you can grab a scorch cannon and finished both off extremely quickly.

Ether Resupply – Fallen

This event is another one that is pretty straight forward… kill the giant Servitor. During the event a number of smaller servitors will spawn in and start interacting with the bigger one. The first one has to be killed because he shields the Servitor from any damage. There is a second phase where three spawn in… and in theory you can leave these up if you are just taking down the Servitor normally. However if you kill them it starts the heroic phase… which causes the Servitor to take greatly reduced damage… talking 10-15 damage per shot in a vulnerable spot reduced damage. The goal here is to get the servitor down pretty close… then kill the three mini-servitors… then drop the big guy to close out the event.

Excavation – Cabal

This is one of the least straight forward of all of the events. The goal of the Excavation event is to stand hear the mining lander and progress the bar to 100%… all the while avoiding waves of progressively more difficult mobs and missiles that are coming in from the command ship hovering over the location. At various points in the fight a Thresher gunship will fly in and start attacking anyone defending the location. In order to trigger the heroic phase of the event you need to take down this gunship… and in my experience you have about two flyby phases to do it in before you have progressed the event to 100% and ended it naturally. Essentially everyone needs to focus fire this thing down whenever you see it. If you are successful a major cabal centurion boss will spawn in… and wreck him to earn your heroic chest.

Injection Rig – Cabal

I am not honestly sure what the non-heroic goal of this event is, because from the start it is telling you to drawn down the Infiltrator Valus… which is what happens if you trigger heroic mode. While this event is going on there will be a giant cabal shield that spawns over the drill, and every so often giant vents will open at up to four spots on the rig. If you are in the bubble you start burning, and the ultimately goal to trigger heroic mode is to destroy all four of these vents before you end up dying in the process. About the most that I have seen taken out in a single go are two vents at a time, so that means it will take a few passes to get them all down. It helps if you have a really good ranged power weapon like a fusion rifle or rocket launcher. If you are successfull Infiltrator Valus will spawn and you wreck him to get your chest of goodies.

Spire Integration – Vex

Much like the Fallen Walker event… this is a reboot of a classic event from Destiny 1. In the Spire Integration event your goal was to prevent wave after wave of Vex from integrating with the spire that you were guarding. One of those does in fact exist in this event, as does the objective of preventing anyone from integrating with a wiggle room counter of 10. However to progress the event to the Heroic mode you need to also help build shields around these additional spires. There will be 3 glowing rings scattered around the event… standing in one will begin to capture the point and raise a vex shield around you. Once you have captured all three of these the Heroic mode will trigger and you have to destroy progressively more nasty Vex until the timer runs out. Prepare to have Minotaurs and Cyclops to spawn in addition to all of the normal yellow bar Vex types. Stay alive and prevent 10 integrations to win your heroic loots.

Taken Blight – Taken

This one is really hard to explain visually so I am posting a picture of the objective you are trying to destroy. Essentially the goal of this event is to destroy an number of taken blights that spawn in. In Destiny 2 the blights work slightly differently in that they are protected by a bubble and in order to actually damage the blight you have to step inside of it. During this event while standing in one of these bubbles you will get a brief buff called “Blight Receding”. There is another giant blight bubble that will spawn near the other blights… and this one is protected by a shield and if you attempt to hit it you get “invulnerable”. However while you have this Blight Receding buff you can deal damage to it. Functionally you need to alternate ducking inside the bubble to get the buff and going out and damaging the big blight until it is destroyed. If you are successful this will trigger the heroic mode and summon a Taken Major for you to destroy. If you defeat it then you get shiny loots.

Witches’ Ritual – Hive

This one only spawns on Titan and I believe only in one specific location near where you spawn in at the arcology. The goal is to prevent a pair of hive wizards from opening a portal… the only problem is the wizards are shielded and invulnerable. You will notice however there are two hive sigils on the ground, and standing in one causes the corresponding wizard to lose its shield. After you take down the wizards a bigger more powerful wizard will spawn in. In order to trigger the heroic version you need to then recapture the sigils and use it to destroy two crystals that were previously invulnerable to attack. If you do this successfully another Hive Major will spawn in the Darkblade Knight. Defeat it to get your tasty loots.

The Shader Situation

September 8, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday I briefly mentioned the issue happening right now with Shaders, but I had a few people ask me directly what exactly was going on. So I thought I would take a moment this morning to explain the issue from my perspective. In the original Destiny Shaders were an item that dropped that when applied effected the color scheme and sometimes physical properties of your armor. It was a purely cosmetic system, but one that the players latched onto with both hands. The Shaders themselves dropped from all manner of activities and occasionally were attached to achievements. This happened with enough relative rarity that when you got one… you noticed and immediately started playing with it. Each Guardian could carry a total of nine shaders with them at any given time… and I personally found myself swapping back and forth between shaders on a regular basis to fit my current mood or to coordinate which whatever weapon loadout I happened to be rocking that night. To say I was engaged in the system is probably a bit of an understatement given that I had 103 of them according to the achievement that tracks such progress. I was by no means the most prolific however because there were folks in game who had literally every single one… and you can see in the above photo… the ones that are greyed out are ones I had not found yet. The system itself was pretty limited and some shaders looked good on some armor sets… but absolutely horrible on others. However it was something that gave us some license to stand out in the tower from the other Guardians also wearing Iron Banner gear.

With the lead up to Destiny 2 there was so much talk about how improved the Shader system was going to be. It was announced that we would be able to apply shaders individually to armor pieces and even our weapons. As a long time supporter of cosmetic systems this seemed amazing, because it would finally give us some level of granular control over our appearance. In Destiny 1 it was annoying when your chest-piece looked amazing with a specific shader applied, but your boots or arms looked completely horrible. This was especially true when rocking the various combinations of black and white like I regularly did… and it would have allowed us to swap around until we found a specific shader that worked for each individual item. While playing the “Demo” I found it curiously lacking that they didn’t show off the new shader system, but given this was a build of game originally shown at E3 I thought maybe it was simply left out because the system had not been finished at that point. It was not until launch that we actually saw the system at work… and realized that shaders were not a single use consumable item. The above image is of my shader “collection” in Destiny 2, and all of these so far have come through the starter packages that you keep getting handed by the Eververse vendor at the Farm each time you reach a specific level plateau. Why the community is going to war over this minor point is the fact that Bungie took what used to be a very good but limited system… and turned it into a potential cash grab.

Yesterday Luke Smith released a sequence of statements on his Twitter account talking about the issue… and the answer feels less than satisfactory. Luke is literally the only person who thinks that doing “shader farming” is a good idea. That sounds miserable especially when it means that you now somehow need to rope five of your friends to follow you down a rabbit hole just so you can have pretty armor for the week. It is hard enough to convince people to run old school World of Warcraft raids when only transmog items are on the line… let alone run a 2-3 hour long Destiny raid that never really trivializes… for armor paint. Now up until this statement I was taking a wait and see approach and in part I still am. I noticed that all of the planet faction NPCs had shaders on their loot table that you can get from engrams. Maybe as he says as we start to grind faction we will be swimming in armor spray paint, but more than likely there is still going to be a sizable number of shaders that are only available through bright engrams. Bright engrams for reference are the new RNG loot box that the Eververse sells for Silver. Right now the equivalent conversion rate is $5 to 3 Bright Engrams… and while these drop organically each time you fill up your xp bar again post level 20… that is going to be a less than enjoyable grind to get them. While I have not actually opened an actual Bright Engram, I have been opening the assorted packages that Eververse gives you in the farm and through those I have received a bunch of shaders enough to make me think that this is going to be the easier way to get them.

As of last night I hit 15 and probably will push through to 20 tonight, so I should start to see this supposed increased shader drop rate shortly. What is frustrating to me is that everything else about the game is really amazing. However that amazing is slightly tarnished by the fact that I know one of my favorite systems has turned into something I looked forward to using… to something I will probably hoard and never actually use. You change out gear in Destiny constantly… and even on my maximum light cap 400 characters in the original game… I was regularly tweaking and fiddling with my build out each time I got some new interesting piece of loot. There is never going to be a point where you can set your armor selection in stone, knowing that you will likely never get something that works better for you. Each patch Bungie tweaks this or that making it likely that you are going to be swapping gear our to optimize whatever you happen to be going for this week. There is never going to be a point where you have enough of your favorite shaders… nor will you have the freedom to swap them around at will just to do silly things like have everyone raiding in Glowhoo or that hideous McDonald’s looking shader. Shaders were fun and one of those few non-gear rewards that you loved seeing at the end of a Crucible match or after a strike. Gone are the days when you cannot wait to try on the new shader you just got to see what it looks like. Now instead it is going to be a stack in your inventory that keeps going up in number… but you still feel like you maybe shouldn’t use yet because there is a really awesome item waiting around the corner that you might want it for. So that in a nutshell is the situation with shaders and why the Destiny 1 player base is frustrated by it.