Games

In part because of my self imposed exile from Blizzard products, over the last several nights I have played an awful lot of Destiny 2. The weird thing about it is that I am not really grinding my ass off to get that light higher. In fact this week I am not sure if I have actually earned any powerful engrams. Instead I find myself piddling around and working on various quests. One of my favorite of these are the weapon quests that start dropping on the moon that lead to purifying a weapon of a sort. I am not sure how many of these there are but I have picked up a fair number of them. However the moment I get a new one it suddenly becomes my key priority.

Last night for example I unlocked this super angry climbing pick. It really is a brutal looking weapon, but I am not sure if I could actually qualify this as a “sword”. Unfortunately I don’t really know what makes a good sword versus a bad sword, but this one seems to be one that you want to use the light attack on as you get a bonus when you do so… and you also get some ammo refunded to the weapon. This means I need to vary my play style because I generally go for the slow big hits rather than the blade flurry.

Another weapon unlocked last night is Every Waking Moment, which is a Submachinegun which I am coming to love more and more. This time it has dynamic sway reduction which really helps with the kick on a sub. Subsistence helps to reload the weapon on kill and then ricochet rounds extend the range a tiny bit and increase stability. The total package leads to a very predictable experience and this is quickly becoming my weapon of choice for anything serious, paired with either the Monte Carlo or my good ole Standby the Breakneck with Barrier Rounds equipped. Monte Carlo would never leave my hand were it not for the fact that I can’t equip barrier rounds.

If I need to swap things up a bit I got a new scout option. The previous roll that I liked has Subsistence and Multi-Kill Clip. This one has good ole Triple Tap and Explosive Payload making it theoretically way more useful for me when I end up using a scout rifle. The only time I run one is when I know I will need to sit back and plink things from a distance, at which point triple tap helps quite a bit. I am still not the biggest fan of the look of the Vex themed weapons that come from invasions and incursions but they are solidly rolled most of the time. Weirdly I seem to get more scout rifles than any of the other weapons.

Another weapon that I like an awful lot that I got recently is the Loud Lullaby which is the Eris Morn Hand Cannon. The roll I got is pretty solid with Opening Shot and Outlaw as well as Flared Magwell. I am playing around with this quite a bit, and it has become my go to when I get a hand cannon bounty. Previously I had been using a Duke and this is absolutely replaced that. There is also the side benefit that it looks really freaking cool.

As far as seasonal progress goes I am still way off from the end, but I have heard as you near the end it starts to pick up thanks to all of the XP Bonus perks that you pick up along the way. I love that the seasonal bits carry over between characters, and at some point I will start working on my Hunter who I managed to get to the 900s by pulling stuff out of the collection and seasonal rewards. Any time there is a piece of gear gained you get a copy of that item on every single character which is really nice. Mostly this is just a show and tell post, but this is what I have been up to over the last few nights.

Just as a heads up this post is going to contain some spoilers, so if you have not finished the main story then I would suggest you go no further. Last night I kept I head down and pushed through the rest of the main expansion story in Destiny. From a lore standpoint it presents some really interesting food for thought and makes me think we are headed down a specific path. Namely that we will be swayed by the Darkness as they spent the next several seasons trying to explain to us how we should come over to their way of thinking. There had been rumors about Destiny 3 potentially including Darkness powers, and I think it would be interesting if we as guardians figured out a way to harness both forces for good.

I’ve always assumed that the Darkness in the Destiny universe was somewhat of a hive mind. Which makes me wonder if maybe just maybe this isolated ship that crashed on the moon may somehow be broken off from that collective consciousness. I’ve been wondering if it like the Darkness that was present in the Black Garden have been fractured from the whole and are working by their own means. This could in theory give us access to the powers of Darkness without being consumed by it. As far as the pyramid ship itself… it had a very sithy vibe to it. There are some follow up quests that I picked up after finishing the last mission that may add additional story beats.

The only problem that I see however is that without a firm knowledge of Destiny lore, I am guessing the story attached to Shadowkeep is going to read as completely incomprehensible to everyone else. Eris does not exactly do a good job of explaining things as you go, in part because she herself is an unreliable narrator with a very specific point of view. Similarly I wonder if maybe this specific tangent of the Darkness has been trapped in the Black Garden, and ultimately that it wants us to free it. I didn’t get a vibe from the final quest that it was trying to kill us, but instead trying to test us and our resolve to see if we were worthy of its ultimate prize.

In the Shadowkeep trailer, Ikora Rey talks fairly opaquely about the relationship between the Vex and the Black Garden. Namely I focus on the bit of what she is saying that says that the Vex will do anything to protect it. It was through Quria, Blade Transform that the Vex learned of the Sword Logic and that by worshiping the Worms they could draw power. I think the ultimate end of that line of logic was that the power of the Worms came from the Darkness and that through worshiping the Darkness they could draw even more power. Did the Vex then go find a pyramid ship and capture whatever organism that the Darkness represents at its core, and install it then in the Black Garden on Mars as a sort of machine to power the Vex as a whole?

I get the distinct impression that the Darkness represented within the Hive ship crashed on the moon doesn’t want to harm us, but instead wants to use our abilities to some end. I think that end is ultimately to send us into the Black Garden to free whatever vestige of itself is trapped there. Maybe you learn more details after the raid, but since I have yet to do that it is all speculation. I just have a feeling that our contact and the artifact that we collected, is leading us down a path that will eventually end in the ability to channel both the light and the darkness.

This morning is mostly just going to be a long string of pictures and commentary about those pictures. I spent the vast majority of the weekend playing Destiny 2 and the Shadowkeep expansion content. If you could custom build an expansion to my interests you would end up with this one, largely because it has a lot of overworld activities going on and things to grind for. We are going to start this off however by showing off my favorite ship. Weirdly I have a massive collection of Exotic ships and sparrows, but it is a Legendary ship that I have somehow latched onto called the Pitfall Souter E5D. I really like the design on this one better than the exotic version of this drop ship, and it feels very Titan-y to me.

I hit the soft cap over the weekend and have since pushed up to 905 without the artifact, or 910 with the bonus. This is setting up a situation where we have the whole Year 1 thing with legendary items giving you more light than they actually do which feels real weird. I would have greatly preferred that they just took this new adjusted light number as your actual light number. That said I am still pretty regularly getting prime engrams that are slowly pushing that number up.

As far as the seasonal track goes, I am sitting at level 17 with about halfway through 18. This has been interesting, but I wish when you got gear off the track that it counted as a powerful engram rather than just being miscellaneous debris. The whole acquiring new items through the track is a bit lackluster when it is just the same set of gear that you got at step one. As a result you see that there are a lot of steps where I have chosen not to collect the reward. Same goes for all of the glimmer as I am not having any issue getting glimmer, and there might be a point in the future where I wish I had a large stack of it.

On the Artifact itself I have mostly been unlocking Autorifle/Submachinegun and Hand Cannon perks, and trying to make sure I have a reasonable coverage of Anti-Barrier and Anti-Overload rounds available. These come into play during the Vex Invasion activity that you can queue for. Various mobs you encounter have either a Barrier or an Overload that causes them to keep from being damaged until you drop that shield, and as a result the easiest way is to hit them with a weapon that has the equivalent “anti” effect. Right now I have Anti-Barrier on my Auto-Rifle and Anti-Overload on my Submachinegun. This tends to be my favorite combo right now and has largely replaced Auto and Shotgun for me.

Lets just stop to appreciate how damned cool the Vex Invasions look when they are happening on the moon. Full on Terminator vibes going on and lots and lots of vex to violently dismantle. Generally speaking they seem to happen a few minutes after a public event finishes. As such I have had the best luck going to an area, completing the public event… and then waiting around for a few and before long the vex will start dropping in. The only negative of these events is that they are really really hard to solo and you don’t get a chest to drop until you have taken down three of these little incursions in a row. If you are too slow the boss will “escape” and you won’t make it to round three.

I was never a huge fan of the Monte Carlo in Destiny 1, in either version. However the Destiny 2 version is freaking amazing and I managed to get this in one of the first activities I participated in after hitting 900 light. So far a lot of people seem to be reporting getting it pretty early in the cycle, and the Vex Invasions are supposedly a good way of farming Exotics if you end up doing a bunch of them in a row. The queued event drops a chest after each wave of the encounter that has Vex themed goodies, and supposedly these also have a reasonable chance of dropping exotics.

There are a bunch of weapons that can drop while doing assorted activities on the moon, and when they do a quest will start allowing you to “cleanse” the item. This generally involves doing a specific thing a number of times, getting kills with that weapon type, and then finding some MacGuffin deep in the bowels of some area of the moon. You then return these to the Lecturn next to Eris Morn and you collect a weapon. You can spend some currency to get new rolls of these weapons at pretty much any time, and can skip the MacGuffin step since you have already collected it. By far my favorite of these so far is the Arc Logic Auto Rifle, which happened to roll with Rampage, Subsistence and Extended Mag making it fairly potent. This has become my Anti-Barrier weapon of choice.

Probably my favorite of the Vex themed weapons so far is the Imperative Scout Rifle that rolled with subsistence, multi-kill clip. I am sure there are better rolls of this weapon available but this one is serviceable for situations when I need to hit things at range. I hope that we are going to get some access to secondary skins for these weapons because the leaf covered thing is kinda cool for a few minutes, but eventually wears then when you realize that you can’t do much to apply shaders to them. The leaves themselves will always stay the same shade. Right now these serve the role of really easy to get weapons as they seemingly drop like candy from the queued Vex Invasion activity.

I really should spend some time tonight pushing through the storyline, as I have yet to get to the end of it. This is the problem with opening up the world and letting me do things without completing the story… I ultimately don’t put any emphasis on actually finishing. With Forsaken I was pushing ahead in the story because I wanted to unlock access to the Dreaming City. As far as I know finishing the story doesn’t really unlock anything new that I don’t already have access to. I should do this thing however just to get it done.