Yesterday I talked about the initial quest of delivering cookies to Zavala to cheer him up, but the rabbit hole goes way deeper than that.  When you turn that quest in you pick up a second one from Eva Levante to get a secret blueprint from Amanda Holiday for a new sort of sparrow.  I also covered all of the recipes yesterday but the quest asks you to deliver Vanilla Blades to Shaxx, Chocolate Ship Cookies to Amanda Holiday and Eliksni Birdseed to Hawthorne as well as bake a grand total of 12 gifts.  Now I am not sure if these need to be unique gifts or if you just need to bake twelve in total.  Regardless I set about making one of everything yesterday and delivering them, and currently the only gift that has not been delivered is the one for Xur who of course will not be available until Friday.

Your reward for baking one of every possible recipe is that you can “Masterwork” Eva’s Holiday Oven.  This essentially lowers the dawning essence cost from 15 per item to 10 per item…  which is nice…  but still it seems like this holiday is way more about grinding dawning essence than any of the other individual components.  It does make it way easier to craft individual items once you have learned all of the patterns which show up in a drop down as I am showing off in the above screenshot.  Something interesting of note… the counts seems to be tied to your account and not individual characters because as soon as I collected the quest on my Hunter this morning for the purpose of getting screenshots… I was able to Masterwork the Holiday Oven and showed that I already knew all of the patterns.

Once you have baked all of the cookies and delivered them to everyone needed in Eva’s quest you can go to Holliday and get your Dawning Cheer sparrow.  It does in fact look as silly in game as it does in this screenshot and it has a bunch of seemingly unique animations that make it seem way more cumbersome to drive than various other options.  Now the thing with this sled is it is not quite complete when you get it… there are three talents that you have yet to unlock and those are started by completing a few quests for Amanda Holliday.

I’ve photoshopped them all together so you can see the requirements.  Essentially in order to get all of the talents you are going to need to start making a TON of gifts…  120 in total but thankfully they seem to be cumulative and not separate achievements.  This is one of those situations where I am not sure if this is also account based, but I plan on getting the hunter through the first part and getting her sparrow tonight as a test to see if you can effectively bake them on all of your characters and count towards one total.  Essentially you are going to need to at a minimum give another round of Gifts to Ikora, Sloane, Devrim, Asher, Banshee and Failsafe…  and then a bunch more gifts on top of that to whoever you want until you reach the magic 120 in total.

Now the positive is each time you turn in a gift you get a chance at getting interesting gear…  as I picked up a new roll of the Avalanche HMG that I talked about yesterday by turning in a package to Sloan last night.  All in all I like this version of the Dawning quite a bit, but I miss the sparrow races greatly.  They really need to bring that concept back to Destiny 2.  I am however enjoying doing stuff… and then getting random bonuses from doing said stuff…  which in truth is going to keep me engaged in this event way longer than it probably should.  I want the nonsense tricked out sparrow that causes glitter to spawn when you do stuff…  so I guess I will be baking 120 gifts?  So far Crucible and Gambit seem to be the best use of my time for the purpose of farming Dawning Essence…  and I have objectives that I need from both of those so I might be farming those tonight.

 

 

As I assumed yesterday, the Dawning was in fact waiting on me when I got home from work and logged into Destiny 2.  For the uninitiated The Dawning is effectively the Destiny universe Christmas event, covering the tail end of December and the beginning of the new year.  It has meant a lot of different things, including really awesome sparrow racing in the past.  Unfortunately that event did not make a return, but instead we get a fun mini game that asks us to go out into the world and do various things.  It also signals getting bonus seasonal bright engrams each time you level up, so doubling the opportunity for bright dust and related rewards.  Unlike past years however this feels way more rooted in game activities and not just another attempt to pry money from us in the cash shop.

The event signals the return of Eva Levante to the Tower, who for those of us that date back to Destiny 1 will remember was the shader and emblem vendor.  Weirdly in Destiny 1 she was associated with the Festival of the Lost more than The Dawning… but I vaguely remember her also being the starting place of this event back in the day as well.  What Eva asks of us this year is to collect various ingredients and make baked goods for the denizens of the tower and all of the various NPCs scattered throughout the solar system.  She also offers a series of daily bounties that reward ingredients and at least one of them rewarded Powerful Gear, but I assume that is a weekly or one time reward only.

Eva has given us a portable oven that fits in our inventory and asked us to go out into the world and start collecting ingredients.  She starts us off by giving us the ingredients and a recipe to make Gjallardoodles for Zavala, to sort of show us the ropes of how the system works.  After finishing that we are asked to collect the ingredients for Vanilla Blades for Lord Shaxx and Eliksni Birdseed for Hawthorne, and both of the quests tell us specifically what ingredients to go collect.  Effectively every recipe has three parts, a common material that drops from a specific enemy type, a rare material that drops based on the sort of damage you are dealing to the mob, and then dawning essence which drops from various activities from Public Events on the planets to match made activities like Gambit or Crucible.  Here is a quick rundown of the drops for various mobs and damage types.

Common Items (Green – Mob Based)

• Cabal Oil – Kill any Cabal Enemies
• Chitin Powder – Kill any Hive Enemies
• Dark Ether Cane – Kill any Scorn Enemies
• Ether Cane – Kill any Fallen Enemies
• Taken Butter – Kill any Taken Enemies
• Vex Milk – Kill any Vex Enemies

Rare Items (Blue – Kill Damage Based)

• Bullet Spray – Kills made with “Machine Gun” type weapons – Auto Rifle/SMG/HMG
• Delicious Explosions – Explosive kills aka Class Grenades/Rocket Launcher/Grenade Launcher
• Electric Flavor – Arc Damage based Kills
• Flash of Inspiration – A kill that generates an Orb of Light – Supers or Masterworks
• Impossible Heat – Solar Damage based Kills
• Null Taste – Void Damage based Kills
• Perfect Taste – Precision Damage Kills – aka Headshots
• Personal Touch – Melee Based Kills or Melee Abilities like Thrown Weapons
• Sharp Flavor – Sword Kills… not sure if Hunter Knives can proc or not

These are then combined with Dawning Essence which drops from pretty much anything, and crafts an item that begins a quest chain.  Now a lot of these won’t show up on the map as a quest but it will cause the icon for a given vendor to start blinking.  You turn in the baked goods and get a package that usually includes some Dawning Essence and a Blue or Purple.  There are Triumphs associated with finding each of the recipes and delivering it to the respective NPC.  As I said before you are only given three recipes from the start, but as you experiment with putting different items together you start unlocking the specific vendor items.  If you put together two items that don’t make a tasty treat…  you end up with Burnt Edge Transits which Master Rahool will take off of your hands.

Recipe List

Collecting materials can be time consuming… since they do not by any means drop every single kill.  So as a result here is a list of all of the recipes, since if you are like me you are going to ultimately want to craft one of each to get the triumph for the holiday event.  All of the recipes will take 15 Dawning Essence to craft so not listing that, just know it is a requirement for everything.

• Alkane Dragee Cookies (Sloane – Titan) – Chitin Powder and Bullet Spray
• Burnt Edge Transits (Master Rahool – Tower) – Any two ingredients other than those of the recipes below aka the failure state item
• Candy Dead Ghosts (The Spider – Tangled Shore ) – Dark Ether Cane and Flash of Inspiration
• Chocolate Ship Cookies (Amanda Holliday – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Null Taste
• Dark Chocolate Motes (The Drifter – Tower) – Taken Butter and Null Taste
• Eliksni Birdseed (Hawthorne – Tower) – Ether Cane and Personal Touch
• Gentleman’s Shortbread (Devrim Kay – EDZ) – Ether Cane and Perfect Taste
• Gjallardoodles (Zavala – Tower) – Ether Cane and Delicious Explosion – This was a freebie though and the mats Eva gives you
• Ill-Fortune Cookies (Petra Venj – Dreaming City) – Dark Ether Cane and Impossible Heat
• Infinite Forest Cake (Failsafe – Nessus) – Vex Milk and Impossible Heat
• Javelin Mooncake (Ana Bray – Mars) – Chitin Powder and Sharp Flavor
• Radiolarian Pudding (Asher Mir – Io) – Vex Milk and Electric Flavor
• Strange Cookies (Xur – Varies Weekly) – Taken Butter and Electric Flavor
• Telemetry Tapioca (Banshee-44 – Tower) – Vex Milk and Bullet Spray
• Traveler Donut Holes (Ikora Rey – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Flash of Inspiration
• Vanilla Blades (Lord Shaxx – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Sharp Flavor

Now yesterday I was musing exactly how we would be getting the Legendary Heavy Machinegun associated with this event, and if it would be some sort of a grind like the Haunted Forest was during Festival of the Lost.  It apparently is super easy to get because it becomes your reward for essentially doing the very first quest which is to craft Gjallardoodles for Zavala.  Aka you can get this weapon on pretty much all of your characters “just for participating”.  As I thought however it drops at 600 light the same as the Festival of the Lost Auto Rifle, but it appears to not be equitable by lowbies the way that weapon was.  I am going to try doing the intro quest tonight on some of my alts and seeing how this weapon varies.

One minor thing that I have noticed however is that it is impossible to deliver every recipe if you do not have the DLC content since  Ana Bray is associated with Warmind, Spider with Forsaken… and Petra Venj with having beaten Forsaken unless you can turn in to one of her earlier incarnations that hangs out in Spiders Lair.  The season of giving challenge however asks you to deliver 12 baked goods… and with Master Rahool not counting towards this because it is a failed state of the quest…  that leaves 15 possibilities…  so they have effectively made this available to folks without the expanded content.  You just cannot get all of the triumphs/achievements associated without expansion access.  Largely good on them for allowing vanilla players to be able to get all of the rewards.  Ultimately you are going to spend the majority of your time farming Dawning Essence since you need so much to craft any given item.

 

Pretty much the highlight of the weekend for me was that I got to join in the shenanigans of the Last Wish raid in Destiny 2.  This mornings post is largely going to be a rundown of the items that I got to drop this weekend.  It was also the farm weekend for the IKELOS shotgun, and unfortunately as of yet I have not seen one drop.  I have lost count on just how many times I have killed the level 7 escalation protocol, but it has been enough that I am starting to doubt it exists.  Like the paranoia in the back of my head keeps telling me that I must not be keyed for getting loot of the boss.  I do however have a huge stack of shaders that drop every single time you down it.  I sincerely doubt that tonight I will get enough kills of Escalation Protocol to make a difference, and in truth it seems to be hard to find anyone actually doing it.  My friend Warenwolf managed to pull me into a group, so I am guessing this is regional?  I wish there was a decent matchmaking option for it.

As far as the raid itself…  it was some crazy nonsense.  One of the things that Bungie does almost better than anyone else is create some interesting and imaginative raid encounters.  I don’t want to go into too much detail but there were of course jumping puzzles and timed burns and of course some relay race sort of encounters to unlock sections of the raid.  All of which seemed doable for me who was a complete nub, but unfortunately…  I am also one of those people who simply does not grok something when someone explains it.  I have to do it myself to be able to understand the nuance of it, and while I feel like I still have a long ways to go before mastering the encounters…  I feel like I would also do a lot better the second time in.  Thankfully none of the jumping puzzles were anywhere near as stressful as the ones in the King’s Fall raid.  An interesting mechanic is that first timers get an extra piece of loot at the very end, and as a result I wound up getting 4 pieces of armor and 5 weapons…  one of which dropped from random trash but that still counts.  Now I am going to play show and tell with each of them.

A really cool looking rocket launcher that I will never actually use because it doesn’t have cluster bombs.  I could say more but really… that is the core problem and I would have used it as infusion fuel if it wasn’t a raid weapon.

This is quite possibly the weirdest feeling auto rifle I have ever used, because it is so freaking slow firing…  which you would assume to be extremely stable and it is not.  On PC with mouse and keyboard controls it is completely manageable, uncertain what controller would be like with this weapon.  It was fun the little bit I played with it, but it also takes the same slot as my beloved Misfit so I doubt it is going to see much play.

This is probably the favorite of the weapons that dropped because it has a decent stat package with triple tap and the ambitious assassin that all of the weapons appear to come with by default.  I used this quite a bit this weekend trying to complete the crucible headshots step of the Cayde-6 quest chain, and had some luck.  The problem with that step is that I am just not good at crucible anymore, but this is a perfectly reasonable weapon to be using.  I also really dig the look and feel of it.

The biggest challenge this weapon has going for it is that it is a scout rifle… and all of the reasons why I would use a scout rifle are largely demolished by the inclusion of bows.  This is likely never going to get play from me because even before the introduction of bows… I was not a huge scout rifle fan.  That said I won’t infuse it because I tend to collect interesting weapons.  It does however have rampage which is a positive that it has going for it if you can get into a situation where you can pick off adds easily.

While this technically didn’t drop from a raid encounter, I saw a shiny golden engram while we were doing the Riven fight and this was waiting in my mailbox after we left the raid.  This weapon has some issues, but the majority of the problem is that this time around this is a heavy weapon.  In Destiny 1 this was a secondary weapon, which would have greatly improved its utility were we able to equip this in the energy weapon slot.  As it stands… it is competing with other Heavy Weapons and comes up very short against both the Thunderlord and the Sleep Simulant that are just better weapons.  What made this interesting before was that it was a fusion sniper rifle…  which I guess became the linear fusion category as a whole.  If they ever tweak this weapon to be energy slot equipped then it will see some play, before then however… it just isn’t worth giving up that slot against arguably better weapons.

I still have not ignited the forge, but one of my attempts over the weekend got me a Two-Tailed Fox to drop, which again suffers from some of the problems that I just talked about.  It is a really interesting weapon that is useful in specific niche situations…  but I can’t see using this over the sleeper or the thunderlord.  Still very happy to check this off the exotics bucket list.

Finally I completed the Nascent Dawn quest chain over the weekend and wrapped up the Polaris Lance.  All in all I dig the feel of this weapon, but I would probably use the Legendary Masterwork version that you get in the quest chain step before the Exotic as it would free up the exotic slot for one of the two heavy weapons I keep mentioning over and over.

We also recorded a podcast this weekend as usual and some of the things we talked about are…  Black Armory, Last Wish, The Game Awards, Hades by Supergiant Games, Epic Game Storefront, Super Smash Bros Ultimate.  If you are someone who likes to listen to podcasts check it out… otherwise zero shame in giving it a skip.  I personally find youtube the easiest way of passing along the link, but in the sidebar of the blog is an RSS feed for those who want to use a traditional podcatcher style app.  Listening to me ramble on is an acquired taste so perfectly cool with folks skipping if that is not your thing.