Destiny Archives - Page 18 of 46 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Traditions End

August 25, 2017 by Belghast

For the last several years there has been a tradition I have observed… and that is going upstairs and checking to see what is available on Xur for the week. For the unindoctrinated… Xur is an Agent of the Nine… a group that we know next to nothing about in Destiny. He also is somewhat of a garbage collector and brings trinkets for us to purchase each week either in the Tower or Reef social space. Various activities in the game reward a currency called Strange Coins… and these are then exchanged for various items that always include an exotic weapon and a piece of exotic armor for each class. The armor rolls are notoriously bad but it is still a reasonable way to get a jump start in light levels, and I absolutely abused this fact on my Xbox One account when I was leveling it. One of my favorite sources of Xur info is from Patrick Casey, and at the head of this mornings video he made a comment about how he is just about to never have to see this squid faced guy again. Not sure why… but it just sort of finally hit me… our time with Destiny is almost over. Within the next few days the PC Beta for Destiny 2 will begin… and then shortly after that the official launch of Destiny 2 on PS4 and Xbox One. This really is the last weekend when Xur really matters at least for me in particular because starting on Monday I will be playing Destiny 2 on my PC systems… and starting the following Wednesday I will be playing it on my PS4.

Destiny 1 as a whole has been an amazing experience, and I am looking forward to seeing Destiny Item Manager (the first screenshot) updating to start showing me all of my baubles that I begin collecting in Destiny 2. A huge chunk of my experience has been my clan, and it is awesome to see the clan page updated to fly a brand new banner in preparation for what things are ultimately going to look like in Destiny 2. I’ve worn the tag even when it didn’t really matter… like on my Xbox One account… and was proud to see it rise out of the ashes of Axioma. Right now my future in the Destiny universe seems a little up in the air. I am not entirely certain if I will be playing as a PS4 primary or PC primary… and even then I have no clue what my clan situation is going to look like. This is where my various gaming worlds begin to collide. Destiny 2 existing on the PC is going to bring a lot of long time friends out of the woodwork that are interested in playing the game. At that point I am not sure if it is better to flood TQMB… or just start something on my own. I am not even sure if you can have split clans based on platform… or if your Bungie account can only join one period. I would like to remain in Tequila Mockingbird on what seems like the platform that they will be most active on… aka the PlayStation 4.

It seems really weird to be thinking that I might be standing in the Tower for the last time. Sure Destiny 1 will remain in existence for a period of time… and I can always go back and experience things. The problem is… will I actually want to? Destiny 2 looks to be the first game with a ton more things to be doing… and it feels like something worth sacrificing an entire world for. Sure I have gotten used to seeing The Traveler floating just off in the distance… but I will get used to the new visuals of the European Dead Zone. I will miss my vault full of weapons that I have accumulated through hours of grinding… and bending the arm of Squirrel and Jex into helping me do random stuff. Destiny has been a magical time for me… and it feels like I have been away far too long. I am ready to dust off my controller skills and venture forth into the new world when it opens on September 6th. While I feel a little misty about the thought of abandoning the current one… I know bigger and better things are just on the horizon. The challenge I always struggle with in gaming is that I have more friends than I can ever possibly play with at the same time… but I always try and juggle this as best I can. I am certain that as we enter the new game I will figure out a way to balance playing with my awesome friends in Tequila Mockingbird… and all of the new people who will be giving the Destiny franchise a fresh chance.

Last Banana

August 4, 2017 by Belghast

It has been a very gaming light week for me, and I wound up heading to bed something like 8:30 or 9 ish which is very much not normal for me. Functionally I am coming off of a few really rough weeks at work where I have been in firestomper mode 24/7. As a result I get home and I am just too drained to deal with human beings… or in truth the possibility of human beings. This is where my “I” streak comes out with a vengence, and it has lead me to play a lot of games in a very low key and solo manner. Last night however I decided to go ahead and play some Destiny. Right now the very last Iron Banner before the release of Destiny 2 is going on… and with it the chance to get the sniper rifle and hand canon… neither of which I have a decent roll for. Additionally with the thought about going into Destiny 2… I am finding myself more than a little nostalgic for Destiny 1 at the moment. I’ve never been one to really work on the book achievements, but I am finding myself doing so at least in a limited fashion. September 6th begins a new adventure into the Destiny universe… and with it we are leaving behind all of the trappings of the last. As flawed at times as the original might be… it still very much feels like home.

The match type for this last Iron Banner is Control, which is also in part what is pushing me back to play some. Control is my favorite game mode because it gives me a reason beyond killing other players to be engaged. Deathmatching was something that I was a fan of when I was in High School… but once I have gotten older I find myself craving some larger objective to be working towards. While I would love to have role based gameplay along the lines of Enemy Territory… holding points on a map at least gives me some measure of that core focus. What ends up happening in truth is that players form what I call a “muderball” and then ping ping back and forth across the map capturing points. In Destiny 1 this game play is actually to some extent rewarded because the more people you have standing on a point… the faster it shifts to neutral and then to captured. In Destiny 2 however… points capture at a fixed rate so it is going to be interesting to see if players actually spend some effort focusing on defense rather than just constantly retaking points. I saved the above screenshot largely because this was as good as it got last night as far as kill to death ratio.

As far as a load out… it just feels like the special weapon slot doesn’t mean much of anything anymore. The limited amounts of ammunition you get, and the fact that it seems like Invective no longer recharges at a reasonable rate meant that for the most part I was using nothing but primary. I tried a few things as the evening went on. At first I had some early success with Oversoul Edict, but as the night went on I wound up breaking out my friend the Genesis Chain. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Suros aesthetic but I absolutely love this weapon… especially if you get head shots and trigger the firefly explosion effect. I love the way that sounds… its like a tiny “fuck yes” as you are running away to find the next engagement. What cracks me up about me and Destiny… is that I tend to bond with whatever weapon everyone else says that you should just shard. This lives in an archetype that no one seems to like and is functionally just a better version of “An Answering Chord” that is a available on the Vanguard Quartermaster. However it just feels better and seems to work better for me than that weapon ever did. I mean I also love the Fabian Strategy… which is a weapon everyone else seems to hate so my particular tastes seem to consistently go against the meta. Last night I managed to finish all of my quests from Lady Efrideet, but I have yet to get any weapon drops so I am thinking I might want to go ahead and try and make rank 5 during this final Iron Banner in the hopes of maybe seeing some decent versions of the Hand Cannon along the way.

Assorted Turtling

July 27, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was an exceedingly stressful day, and that combined with the fact that my wife is out of town… lead to a sudden bout of turtling. For those unfamiliar with the nomenclature… I go through these periods where I feel like I need to pull my head into my shell to attempt to remain sane. I’m thankful that I have a few friends that get it, and don’t give me too much hassle about it, but every so often I just reach this point where I need to disconnect from humanity. Last night was one of those nights and I cycled restlessly through a whole bunch of games to see if I could find something that would fit well enough to pass the evening in. The negative is that in theory this should have been a night I was tanking in Final Fantasy XIV, but I just could not handle communicating with others… or having anyone I cared about relying on me. The irony is that I wound up for a bit early in the evening in Destiny… and absolutely wound up carrying two other players hard through a random strike. I took a screenshot not because it is impressive… but because it shows the massive difference between my participation and that of the other two. This was on the Wretched Eye strike… and I wound up kiting the Ogre… and DPSing most things down… and resurrecting the other two people constantly. Now I know what Squirrel and Jex feel like when I run with them.

From there I wound up back downstairs and watched the last episode of Handmaid’s Tale… which is maybe not the best idea to watch when you are already feeling depressed. While doing so I ended booting up Rift and playing around some there. I am still level 67 and working on the Gedlo Badlands, which is not exactly my favorite zone so far. Moonshade Highlands is my jam, and I have never been that big of a fan of desolate desert landscapes… especially not ones where everything is on fire. That said I did make a lot of progress knocking out various quests and while it still feels like my experience bar isn’t really moving… the constant ding of planar levels seems to help the feeling of being mired. I have been running around with a heavy Warlord hybrid build, and while I have been absent it seems to have been buffed significantly. Previously I had a lot of problems with struggling to kill a given mob in time before it killed me. Now I seem to be able to run around and wreck things pretty safely. My biggest complaint with Starfall Prophecy now Prophecy of Ahnket… are the legendary morphs of abilities. Each of them seems to read like it is going to be universally better than the original… but after taking a few of them they seem to FEEL worse. The biggest problem here is that you cannot undo them without paying for a respec…and then you have to remember what the hell you chose as a spec down to the point where you screwed up and chose the wrong legendary morph. Personally I think the system should just be a toggle, and that you can have X number of legendaries toggled on equal to the number you have earned.

I also played a little Secret World Legends, which is something I seem to do just about every day… or at the very least I am logging in to get the rewards. I am not completely sold on the game but I am enjoying it enough to keep showing up and experiencing it. The combat feels fresh enough to make going through a bunch of quests I did long long ago feel worth it. My key complaint however is the game still does a piss poor job of clearly identifying which quests you have completed and which ones you have not. That was one of my biggest problems with the game is to log in and roam around through a sea of cutely named quests… that all sort of blend together in my head making it impossible to sort out if I have or have not completed them. This was even worse when it came to expansion content going into the game, and blending in among all of those other quests that I did a year ago. So far blade and elemental is fun enough, but I find myself really missing the shotgun… and with the way gear levels up in this game I feel like I am really not in a great place to switch gears at any point soon. I do have an extremely low level shotgun sitting in my inventory and I might try swapping it out at some point soon just to see if it is viable. I’ve moved on to the Savage Coast but there is honestly still a lot in Kingsmouth that I have never really gotten around to completing. My biggest complaint overall is as compared to the original… the drop rates of anything meaningful in the world is nonexistent. All of your gear seems to come from lootbags gained through doing quests… so I have a feeling that a big part of the “endgame” is going to be repeating quests on the daily reset to get more stuff to fuse into your gear. That doesn’t really bode well for those players that are not a big fan of grindy mechanics.

No Time To Explain

May 25, 2017 by Belghast

Once upon a time in Destiny year one, there was a weapon called The Strangers Rifle. It was funky looking, had a unique feel and sound to it… and you got it whenever you finished the primary storyline of Destiny… then spent forever collecting stuff to level it up completely. It was also gained from someone that we really know little to nothing about… other than the fact that she doesn’t have time to explain why she doesn’t have time to explain. However this weapon got left behind in the past largely because The Taken King introduced the ability to upgrade weapons through infusion. However they did introduce a hidden quest that involved a bunch of madness that I mentioned at least briefly back in April of 2016 in a post. Apparently they have changed it up a little bit… but once upon a time you had to wait for the Paradox mission to appear as the daily heroic. Then during the course of the mission you had to collect three ghost fragments and return the Future War Cult Ghost to Lakshmi-2 in the tower. From there you had to pledge the Future War Cult and gain 1000 reputation to unlock the next part, which involved killing Taken Minotaur until a Simulation Core dropped. Then we reach the part I was stalled on for over a year for various reasons… killing Atheon in the Vault of Glass on any difficulty.

Last night the awesome folks in Tequila Mockingbird… but more importantly Squirrel and Jex helped pull together a raid for the purpose of getting me my Atheon kill. We did it on old school difficulty, largely for the purpose of trying to steamroll through it and then move on to getting in a Crota kill. After the raiding I lucked out during the next part, which is to find a chest that spawns in a weird version of the Twilight Gap crucible map. Thankfully I knew my way around the map and I decided to head over to B first… and sure enough sitting right beside what would normally be the capture point was a chest containing the piece I needed. From there I went on to do the Blood of the Garden quest, which did not exactly work how I was expecting it. Firstly I did not realize I was not in the final area of the map… and I knew there was an anger mechanic that was supposed to spawn the Taken Ultra that I needed to kill to get the final component. However I didn’t remember how high I needed to get my anger and I wound up slaughtering wave after wave of Minotaur until I somehow managed to get the anger to over 200%… and when nothing still spawned I noticed the arrow on my mini map pointing to the next area. Sure enough the big Minotaur was up and way easier to take down than attempting to survive that constant deluge of a dozen regular Minotaur at a time. Finally I went back to the tower and claimed my No Time to Explain exotic pulse rifle… to which I had to sacrifice both an exotic that I was no longer using… and a 400 primary to bring it up to modern standards.

That was the part of the evening that went amazingly well… the other part of the evening was struggling to do Crota. First off I had only actually been into the raid once before… and back during the “we overpower this so much, what are mechanics even” phase. As a result we struggled more than a bit, because we were doing it on heroic where resurrections are not a thing that happens. Additionally we lost a member of our fire team a little bit into the raid, and wound up replacing him with an unknown quantity. Said new person was moody as hell while we were actually failing to mechanic, and then when we called it a night made sure we knew how mad he was. Before he left chat he said something along the lines of that he bailed on his normal raid to come get an easy Crota kill, and now he screwed up and missed the raid invite. No one promised him an easy kill, and even though we were failing a lot… we were laughing and having fun while doing it. That is ultimately the important part, and sure I didn’t manage to finish my Necrochasm quest… but I had a lot of fun learning bits and pieces of the modern version of the Crota raid. In truth I think if I went back in again I be more prepared for what I needed to get through on the other side. All told however I managed to pick up a couple of cool weapons in the process including a spiffy new Oversoul Edict… so I think in the grand scheme of things the night was a complete win far as I am concerned. Once again huge thanks to Tequila Mockingbird for hanging out and making stuff happen, and Squirrel for prodding them into doing so.