Steelfeather Replacements

Hey Friends! So yesterday I was talking about the “inbetweensies” and one of my working theories as to why I bounced off Destiny Monday night was the impending reset. This more or less seemed to be correct because last night I pretty much played nothing but Destiny and had a grand ole time. I wish I could shape my mindset because in theory anything that was able to accomplish on Monday would have been a bonus, but instead I only saw the looming deadline that came with the weekly reset and resigned myself to not even try. This is what my brain does when you tell me something is a limited time event or something that is eventually going away. In theory it SHOULD get me to fly into action and do the things before the deadline, but it ends up having the opposite reaction.

This has been the case anytime something comes into game for a limited time. I think that I will buckle down and farm before the deadline comes up, but instead I end up bouncing under the anxiety of maybe just maybe not being able to get everything I wanted out of the event. The same is true with timed content in games. If you tell me that I am on a timer I will fuck up endlessly, but if you just sorta hide the existence of the timer then I will breeze through whatever it is. Anxiety is a thing and the older I get and the more removed from constant group interaction…. the more I find myself struggling with it. Like maybe it is just that my real world daily life is full of more high pressure interactions than it used to be, that I just do not want them at all in my gaming life.

This is the beloved Steelfeather Repeater that I have talked so much about in other posts. The roll that I ended up with that I considered a God Roll has Feeding Frenzy and Multikill Clip and I have loved this weapon so damned much. So one of my goals moving forward with this season has been to find a viable replacement for a Kinetic Auto Rifle. Pretty much I always have an Auto Rifle slotted and then alternate the other weapons around this, so as such I need something in that first slot to go along with my Gnawing Hunger which is my Energy Rifle of choice. I did a bit of research into some of the options and then last night I happened to get a few of them to drop.

I did not play at all during the season when Seventh Seraph weapons were actually dropping. As a result this Auto Rifle is completely new to me. For starters this appears to be based on the Khvostov which is one of my all time favorite weapons in Destiny. I got what I would consider a reasonable roll with Fourth Time’s the Charm and Vorpal Weapon. Looking however at what is actually available to roll on the weapon… it seems that I got one of the better rolls that I could have. The only thing that I guess I would have really changed were the barrel and magazine options. I guess this weapon can roll with Rampage so maybe I also want to see a copy of that weapon drop as well.

I did play when False Promises was a weapon that was dropping during Season 11, but for whatever reason I never really liked it that much. This is in a very slow archetype and it just doesn’t feel like it shreds in quite the same way that other Auto Rifles do. However last night I pulled a pretty solid roll that I am going with for now as I keep trying this weapon out. Feeding Frenzy and Rampage are solid, but I would have rather had High Caliber rounds in the magazine perks slot. It is a fine enough weapon and sorta reminds me of a Suros Regime on the slowest fire mode, which again was not really a thing I enjoyed that much.

Another thing that I managed to pull last night was the new Gambit exclusive Hand Cannon, or at least new to me. I remember once upon a time being desperate for a void Hand Cannon when I was grinding some past achievement, but I don’t know if that is still a gap in the itemization. It seems to hit really hard but could use a slightly larger number of rounds and faster reload speed. I have a feeling that Rangefinder and Multikill Clip are far from optimal for this weapon. Rapid Hit seems like a better choice all around since you are probably going to be firing off the full nine rounds anytime you are using it. Wellspring apparently can roll on this weapon so that might be interesting as well.

Finally I got a Seventh Seraph hand cannon, which again is new to me since I did not play during that season. I love the look of this thing but don’t so much love the way it plays. I wish it was a little harder hitting. The even rounds makes me think of the Hawkmoon, but this thing does not really hit terribly hard which is unfortunate. It was fun playing around with it last night but ultimately I would probably use the Gambit option to this one. The God roll appears to be Corkscrew Rifling, Appended Mag, Threat Detector and Feeding Frenzy. Maybe I will see something a little closer to that as I continue opening engrams.

This week is apparently Shadow Price in Nightfall Ordeal so I am probably going to spend some time in the coming evenings attempting to farm one of those up. Even if I don’t get an optimal roll it should at least tell me if it is going to be a weapon I like or not. I tend to have a pretty visceral reaction to weapons in Destiny, where I either like the thing they are doing or don’t at all and it comes down to a mixture of weapon look, animations and weapon sound. You could hand me the most optimal weapon and tell me it is the perfect roll but if it doesn’t “feel good” to use it… then I simply won’t and it will rot in my vault. So far of everything I have gotten I find myself using the Carbine the most, because it “feels” right.

The Inbetweensies

Hey Friends! I find myself in an old familiar rut that I have been in several times. Essentially I flail around at night trying to figure out exactly what I want to be playing, because nothing sounds quite right. This generally happens when there is a game on the horizon that I absolutely want to be playing but it isn’t yet available. Right now that game is Outriders and it is ultimately the game that I want to be playing. The challenge there that makes it all the more frustrating is I have access to play the demo as much as I want, but I also know that if I grind that demo into the ground it will ultimately spell doom for my long term engagement with the game.

I played a bit of Destiny 2, but found myself losing interest the longer that I played. Weirdly I think last nights problem was the fact that I didn’t engage this week until Sunday night, aka two days from reset. I think maybe tonight will be different since I won’t feel quite the pressure to wrap things up and get weekly rewards from things. I did manage to finish up Gambit and get that powerful engram. I am finding myself enjoying Battlegrounds quite a bit. This season has an enjoyable pattern of play where you do some other activities to get Cabal gold to “smash that like button”… aka hammer of proving and break a chest in the battleground. I am still bummed about Steelfeather Repeater being one season away from grandfathered into being a permanent weapon.

Valheim and I are in a weird place right now. I’ve pretty much done everything that I want to do with the game for right now. I have two massive bases and have been just sorta flitting around the map building a portal network and weird outposts. I may be finding myself winding down until the new biomes go into the game, which is a very familiar place for me as I went through similar patterns with Minecraft over the years. Mostly I have not taken down the final boss that is in the game right now, because I have heard in numerous places that when you take that boss down… Goblins become a normal spawn. I’ve already felt like my advancement has adversely impacted the server that I play on… and because of that I really don’t want to subject lowbies to such a painful encounter as random packs of Goblins.

Speaking of Minecraft… I guess I am winding down there as well. I hit it pretty hard and heavy for awhile between trying to record a daily series on YouTube while experimenting with Hardcore mode, to playing on BotchCraft to playing on my own private Realm. I think for now I am probably in a holding pattern until 1.17 drops officially and I swap over to a brand new random seed to explore the cave update nonsense. I’ve spent some time over in the Nether and found two blaze spawners that are beside each other… which leads me to want to try building a blaze farm… but that has yet to happen. Right now I mostly log in… say hi to my cats and log right back out.

So what did I do instead of all of the above last night? I apparently reinstalled Final Fantasy XV and attempted to get back into it. I feel like I am desperately searching for something to hold my attention for a month until Outriders launches. I also installed Bravely Default 2 on my Switch, but have not touched it. I could go for something mostly single player for awhile because I know when Outriders launches I will be engaged with lots of people once again as I attempt to do groupy content. I think in the back of my mind I am looking for another Dragon Age Inquisition style experience to tide me over until it is time to poke my head out of my hole again.

Being in-between the game you want to be playing and the games you have access to is maddening at times… but also a supremely first world problem. My life seems to always been perforated by moments of being unsatisfied with everything. I wish I could get rid of that feeling because it is not terribly enjoyable to go through.

Fort Bel, Outriders and Destiny

Morning Friends! Surprising to no one I played an excessive amount of Valheim over the weekend. We talked a bit about it on the podcast but I am quickly realizing that for me it is just a different sort of gaming experience. Like when I have played Minecraft in the past, the adventure is fine… but at the end of the day it always ends up being about the building. So since I am slowly moving on past my first foothold in the shared server environment, I thought I would at least talk about it a bit this morning. While my foothold has evolved into something that everyone just generally refers to as “Fort Bel” the truth is it started out as me trying to stay out of everyone else’s hair since I was further progressed.

I posted a walkthrough video of Shade’s Folly aka my starter place on the island. The goal was to run down the coast and sorta do my own thing while everyone else caught up, and as a result I never really assisted much in the building of what became the main town hub for our island. What was originally the building shown on the lefthand side of the screen, I eventually added the second building… and then proceeded the erect a giant stone wall around the entire compound and build further structures directly connected to that wall. This also caused me to create a more shared crafting area and open up my storage reserves to pretty much everyone on the server.

The longer I have been here however the more stale it has gotten. There isn’t that much more I can do with my current location because I risk taking up more space and encroaching upon the territory of those who built around me. Additionally I am on the border of the nearest entrance to the Black Forest and I don’t want to “unwild” that region any more than it already is. As a result I have gone out onto the ocean in search of new areas and at some point I will probably do other walkthrough videos talking about each of them. The biggest of these is Dawn’s Rest or what folks are just mostly universally referring to as “Castle Bel”.

I also played quite a bit of the Outriders demo this weekend, and hit the level cap. I could in theory do like the YouTube community has been doing and grind their faces off against a tiny amount of content trying to farm things… or I could just stop playing. I am likely going to more or less stop playing. I’ve spent a tiny bit of time trying out the other classes but I am pretty certain that Devastator is the class for me. So far my second favorite is Trickster… but they both sorta do the same thing where they are up close and personal with targets which seems to fit my enjoyment pattern with aggressive gameplay and bad decision. Really looking forward to the launch of this game at the end of the month.

The thing that I was NOT expecting this weekend is that I ended up firing up Destiny 2 and playing some of it last night. It is amazing how much more enjoyment I get out of the game now that I know that the weapons I am earning won’t be irrelevant now that the gear Sunset has officially been called off. Unfortunately one of my favorite Auto Rifles is in the sunset, so I will be trying to find a new favorite Kinetic Auto since Steelfeather Repeater is already sunset. Anything that is not currently sunset should be fair game however, so I am hoping to get a few Shadow Price variants to see if I like that weapon. I vaguely remember it from Destiny 1, but not extremely well.

Like every weekend it went entirely too fast. Time moves extremely strangely in the time of the self imposed lockdown. What did you get up to this weekend? Did you check out Outriders? What were your thoughts.

AggroChat #336 – Cover is a Trap

Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we start off with one of those discussions that almost happened before we started recording.  Tam has reached the point where he was ready to tangle with the fourth boss in Valheim, which disturbingly spawns right above where most of us have made our home.  Tam tells the tale of this battle and the heavy losses that were incurred.  From there we talk about Haven which is a co-op JRP style game featuring the relationships and interactions of an established couple.  Finally we wrap things up with some discussion of the Outriders demo and how Bel is excited about it and Ash is tentatively excited as well due to is similarities to Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer.

Topics Discussed

  • More Fun in Valheim
    • Tam vs Moder vs Kodra vs Sol
  • Haven
    • Charming game with realistic coupling
  • Outriders Demo
    • Cover Mechanics are a Lie
    • Fun Aggressive Gameplay
    • Unintentionally Racist Character Creator
    • Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer Comparisons