Light Grinding Alts

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I guess I am fully back in Destiny 2 at this point, because I did a thing this weekend that is slightly mind numbing but effective. In Destiny you are afforded a small number of opportunities to get improvements in your light level (yes I still call it light level). Because of this… it is beneficial for you to run three different classes through all of the various opportunities for light gain. The challenge however is for you to get the maximum benefit from doing this… you need to in theory start with your least favorite character and work your way up to your favorite.

The challenge is that prior to this weekend neither my Hunter or Warlock had really been dusted off in several seasons. So there was a significant amount of catch up to be done before I could even really begin the light grind. My Hunter was somewhere in the 800s and my Warlock was I believe around 930? If you can’t tell the pecking order of my characters goes something like this… Titan > Warlock > Hunter. I am not sure WHY the Hunter is my least favorite, but I think it has a lot to do with most of the grenades being largely PVP focused. You see almost nothing but Hunters in the crucible and in part this is because the class seems to largely be stacked towards that goal. Trip mines are not terribly useful in PVE burn encounters.

The highlight of my weekend is easily getting my ideal roll for Bad Omens that is good for the next few seasons. The Gjallarhorn was a legend because it had a very good combination of perks, namely that it had tracking and wolf pack rounds, which caused it to take out a lot of smaller targets around the main target, or at least deal a bunch of extra damage. The only rocket launcher that I have found to date that comes close is Bad Omens with Cluster Bomb and Tracking, which while not nearly as powerful does effective the same thing. Considering how useful this combination has been… I am exceptionally happy to have a copy that will stay around for awhile.

This season has largely been about finding non-expiring weapons that I enjoy, and can continue enjoying for several seasons. I’ve always liked the Night Watch Scout Rifle, but this whole expiration thing has given it a new importance in my mind. Right now of the various copies I have gotten my favorite is the one that has Rapid hit and Rampage. This seems like the ideal configuration for when I am often using a Scout Rifle, aka standing back at range and whittling down a bunch of mobs in a Nightfall or something similar. I do wish I had lucked into getting the ivory skin like I have for the other gambit themed weapons.

My workhorse of the season is the Gnawing Hunger Auto Rifle. It also seems to be what everyone is running because I have seen some statistics showing this is the most widely used crucible weapon right now. There are a lot of really good rolls on it, and right now I find myself leaning towards Subsistence and Rampage. This particular combo works nicely together as Rampage kills create a stacking buff and Subsistence makes those kills refund ammunition to the magazine to keep the chain going.

The weapon that I am the most surprised by that I am enjoying an awful lot is Lonesome, a sidearm that is also Gambit Themed. I’ve never really been a big fan of sidearms, or at least I never could seem to get the level of work out of them that some of my friends could. The specific combination that I find myself enjoying the most is High-Caliber Rounds, Full Auto and Multi-Kill Clip. I find I use this weapon in the same manner that I would a shotgun, or submachinegun when waves of things are running up on me. I am certain this is not a god roll by any means, but I like it a lot and the full auto takes away the spammy nature of the weapon.

So as I said at the start of the post, it seems like I am fully engaged in this season. What I really want however is to figure out a reoccurring time and set up some raids. I have a handful of players at the ready, but will have to work through the time commitments and find a sweet spot. Ultimately what I would like to do is work my way through all of the raids that are available between now and September. That means getting in and beating all of the following:

  • Leviathan
  • Eater of Worlds
  • Spire of Stars
  • Last Wish
  • Scourge of the Past
  • Crown of Sorrow
  • Garden of Salvation

Like I said I have part of a team tentatively assembled but if you want to be included in this nonsense, let me know. My fearless friend Squirrelpope has volunteered so many times in the past that I am probably going to try and figure out a way to include him, because he would serve as one hell of a tour guide.

AggroChat #305 – What Makes Game Value

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Featuring:  Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we have an assorted topic type show, but the main discussion ends up centering around games and game value.  What makes one game feel like a valuable experience and another game just seems like a waste of time.  We talk a bit about the Phantasy Star Online 2 America Day holiday and how they have a really strange impression of our country.  Kodra talks about his adventures in the deeply edge case Sudoku.  We also have a discussion about when the right time to group is in a game versus largely solo play.  In the middle of all of this there are several references to Guild Wars 2 and Destiny 2 for reasons.

Topics Discussed

  • Phantasy Star Online 2 “America Day”
  • When to play a game with friends
    • What point do you transition from solo to group play
  • Kodra’s adventures in edgecase Sudoku.
  • What makes up game value
    • Getting the most out of a game
    • The length of AAA Games
  • Side Discussion about Guild Wars 2
  • Side Discussion about Destiny 2

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Warlocks are Slow

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There are times when I make significantly bad decisions. This is potentially one of them. I’ve been back and enjoying Destiny 2, and of course my brain has decided that I should totally sabotage that progress with playing the game “optimally”. There is a correct way to deal with the seasonal light grind, and that is to grind up all three characters and focus on your least favorite two first before moving on to your main character. The theory being that any light gain in your weapons along the process will help to boost your “main” character further each week. My main is of course my Titan, and probably my least favorite character is my Hunter… so I have instead been focused on grinding all of the weekly objectives on my Warlock.

Don’t get me wrong I do enjoy the Warlock quite a bit, but Titan and Warlock jumps are polar opposites. When I switch between the two I have to do a sort of mental remap of my reactions, during which I am performing horribly. I decided to use this period of time to get the two crucible objectives knocked out. Basically whenever I am having fun, I swear my brain purposefully goes out of the way to destroy that notion. Thankfully I was hanging out with my friend Grace on voice and more or less stopped caring about performance while we chatted away. At some point during the night I noticed that both my instincts and performance suddenly improved and I once again started taking down enemies. Since they apparently disabled skill based matchmaking… apparently I improved rather than just being de-ranked enough to no longer get put up against good players.

The impending weapon sunset is having interesting effects upon me. Firstly I am being way more brutal with deciding whether or not I want to keep a weapon. I have a bad problem with digital hoarding in games that allow me to do so, and my vault is filled with artifacts from the launch of the game. The fact that most of this is going to be useless in a few months makes me realize that I need to have a massive house cleaning and shard all the things. Essentially anything with a power cap of 1060 is going to stop being relevant when the next season changes. I believe everything in this screenshot minus the exotics is going to effectively become trash as soon as the seasonal reset happens.

This means that there are a lot of weapons that I really enjoyed using… that are just going to stop being useful. Take this Hero’s Burden, I got it from Iron Banner some seasons back and have used it a ton over the seasons whenever I didn’t want Riskrunner taking up an exotic slot. It is going to be sad to see it go, but I have a vault filled with tons of these things that just no longer have the value they once did. Sure I could keep it and run around completing bounties with it, but what is the point long term because I know that there is going to constantly be a refresh of new items to chase. Essentially I am going to have to start thinking of Destiny 2 in the same way that I think of seasonal content in Diablo 3… that it is entirely disposable.

What pains me however is to lose access to what has been one of my favorite auto rifles to date… what I consider to be the perfect roll of Steelfeather Repeater. At least in the case of this weapon it looks like I probably have one more season left in it after this one is over given it has a cap of 1260 rather than 1060. This seasonal reset could be really good, if Bungie plays it correctly. When Forsaken came out all gear in our vaults was magically upgraded to 750 light, and I think Bungie needs to do this each time a season changes. So when the next season releases we should all bump up to 1060 light, which was the previous cap so that everyone starts each season on a level playing field.

I admit that a significant amount of why I have not played my Hunter is because she is currently sitting at 857. The baseline starting point for this expansions content is 1000, and Bungie would love to sell me the ability to catch up to that point quickly. It is not however worth 2000 Silver to boost up to that point, but it also represents a non-zero amount of time to sit down and grind that level up. If I am having that feeling about a third string alt, then I imagine there are a lot of players who have not participated in months or years that are feeling the same way. I know my friend Warenwolf had not played since the gear boost to 750 and as a result had a lot of catching up to do before he became “viable”.

Ultimately I would love to see them get into a cadence so that each time the game moves forward in level, your characters get mailed a set of gear that represents the minimum level required to start the next grind. Eight blues don’t really do anything to destabilize the game or the gear economy, but they go a long way to making players feel like catching up is within reach. This makes it significantly easier for those of us who are playing the game actively to successfully talk our friends into returning to give it one more try. As it stands now however… the progression of the game feels like a runaway train to anyone who has not been actively playing, which is bad for bringing folks back into the fold.

Venturing Forth into Pandemia

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Every so often I end up writing a real world post, and this is that morning. As a result I tend not to syndicate these terribly widely because it isn’t exactly the sort of thing for mass consumption. These are just me talking with you my long term readers about what happens to be going on in my life. To prime the pump here is a delightful picture of Kenzie and Josie… and it makes me realize that Josie certainly has grown significantly. Also it makes me realize how bad the giant hole that the cats have tore in the stairwell landing looks. The hole started its life as a worn spot in the carpet because they put down really cheap carpet when they flipped this house and we have not gotten our shit together to the point to decide what the hell to do about it. The cats however helped make that hole basically an exposed spot of bare plywood.

This is “four” a new addition to our outdoor cats that visit us from time to time. Four is pretty young and seems to largely be unbothered by our presence. While taking this photo my wife was a few yards away sitting on the patio off our bedroom. Four is completely chill and flopped on the concrete under the table and while he bolts for a moment when there is movement… seems to reset back to the default operation he was previously doing rather quickly. I love the existence of our outdoor cat family, but I have noticed that their presence has meant a lack of the usual bunnies and birds. I just want them to be friendly enough to visit us while we are out there.

Here is the point at which we pivot drastically from adorable cats… to Covid 19. March 20th was my last day in the office during what my friends and I have started to refer to as “The Before Times”. So I was fully remote for 13 weeks, but now have been feeling a certain amount of pressure to at least start showing up a few days a week in the office. It is not so much that I was given an ultimatum, but effectively if I did not start returning before the 30th of June, I would need to come up and clean out my office. I am not exactly sure WHY we need to clean out offices because after two days in the office it still feels like an absolute skeletal crew up there. I had a spare mask I was not using and decided that Giant Cthulhu Pop needed to do his part… or at least could hold it for me.

When I say that there is no one there… this image illustrates that point. This is on the floor of the parking garage with the tunnel that connects to our building In the before times… this would be wall to wall cars and I would not be able to find a spot to park. Even at 7 am in the morning when I normally roll into the parking garage, I would have had to have parked one floor away in either direction to find a space. The building itself is on mask protocols and social distancing, with things like elevators limited to only four people at a time. The thing is… I never rode in an elevator with more than just one other person. On a normal morning rush… there were lots of times I was in an elevator with ten people crammed in.

Ultimately I had planned on shifting to a few days a week in the office and the rest of the days remote as my normal schedule. The problem is… I kept waiting for things to get better but they just haven’t. The above image represents the general curve of infections that we have experienced in the county I live in. The blue diamonds represent phase 1, 2 and 3 of reopening the state and the green stars represent memorial day weekend, the beginning of the protests, and the trump rally. As of yesterday we had a single day high of 259 new cases identified in the county and of course… this was the week that I decided to poke my head out of my hidey hole and go back to work. I am more than a little terrified that I might have been exposed to something have have brought it home to my wife who has also been remote this entire time.

I didn’t exactly feel unsafe while in my office, because everyone there was equally mandated to be wearing masks anytime there was a chance of interaction. However that also means that most of us were unmasked at our desks sharing the same recirculating air. In some ways I am glad I left the house because I had developed a tangible fear of doing so. During the entirety of the thirteen week period, I had only been in two buildings with more than a few people at a time. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to schedule hands free grocery pick up, and only needed to go to I think three stores… all three of which had a minimal number of people in them. However the longer I went without venturing forth… the more insurmountable that task seemed to be. I now absolutely understand how someone finds themselves afraid to go out into the world.

I did do something silly while I was in the office, and took a photo of my sheet of cheapo Dollar Tree stickers. This is kinda dumb but one of the things I would do, when someone did something really cool is that I would slap a sticker on the opening of their cube. I kinda miss being able to do that, so I sorta want to try and turn these into icons that I can use in teams. It is silly but weirdly people really seemed to like getting “good job” thumbs up stickers, so I guess that is something that you never quite grow out of. I did have to alter my pattern of giving them out, because at first I was just sticking them on the top of the cube wall… until I realized that most of my employees couldn’t see up there.

The problem now is I am trying to decide what I should do. Do I continue going back into the office next week on Tuesday and Wednesday… or do I resign myself to just going up and cleaning out my office over the long holiday weekend? The reason why I am so concerned is illustrated in the above chart, which shows the raw data points that have not been smoothed into a curve. Our previous high was 143 on June 20th… and then 4 days later it spiked up to 259 on the 24th. The periodic dips that you see make up for the fact that there just isn’t much testing that occurs over the weekend. I live in a part of the country where masks are just not worn… the few stores I have been in my wife and I represented the sole mask wearers and got a lot of nasty looks as a result. This is why I generally feel like it isn’t very safe to leave my house, let alone return to anything resembling a normal daily cadence.

Something has to change or things are just going to get out of control. I am not sure if that thing means a rolling back of the opening or something like mandating that masks be worn in public. Whatever the case something needs to change now because we are already past the point of making a significant difference any time soon. I fully expect that this is our lives for the next few years, and I wish I had the magical thinking that some of my coworkers do about the recovery bouncing back within a few months. Also… I would really prefer not to die, which is what escalates my fear given my multiple warning signs suggesting that if I did catch it… I would probably have a really bad time. I realize this is a bit of a downer post, but sometimes my blog is therapy and I needed to get some of these thoughts out of my head this morning. I did give you cats before I careened off the cliff though.