Dawning Sorta

December 20, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday the new and revised Dawning Holiday started in Destiny 2, but I feel like in order to understand the rest of this post we need to talk a bit about what Dawning was in Destiny 1. This holiday originally ran from December 13th 2016 to January 3rd 2017 and was lumped in with a major update to the game. As a result it is a little hard to separate what is the Dawning and what is the content, but I am going to talk about it anyways. In Destiny 1 we had these things called record books that included a bunch of achievements and completing them unlocked loot. There was one of these specific to the dawning event and featured achievements that involved either the brand new strike scoring system also included with the patch or the triumphant return of the Sparrow Racing League (SRL). SRL is legitimately my favorite part of Destiny 1 and when it came back over the holidays last year… I ground my little face off running endless Sparrow Racing League matches. With this it also introduced a ton of new SRL themed gear and sparrows including these really awesome class items that left a neon streak behind you as you raced on your sparrow. In addition to that three exotics were introduced into the game, as well as a series of presents that were in the tower allowing you to open one each day and get a mixture of good items and complete junk. Needless to say there was a lot of stuff included in the holiday and a good deal of it like Strike Scoring became a permanent part of the game after that.

This year around The Dawning is running from December 19th through January 9th and as much as I hate to be one of those folks… seems to be largely a bunch of new Eververse Trading Company items. You are given one Dawning Engram by logging in and then there are milestones that allow you to earn one each week. When you XP up it appears that you still get a Season Two Engram rather than one of the special event ones, so your ability to actually get items from this event without spending some money seems to be at least somewhat limited. Instead of presents that give you stuff for free… you get to loot a quest item each day that requires you to do some stuff and then turns in at one of the tower NPCs for some dawning loot. The first one is a pattern that goes in your ghost shell slot and requires you to collect 10 phase glass on Io and kill 15 servitors… which largely meant hanging out and farming the Servitor events as they spawned in the EDZ. I turned in and got an exotic ship and a shader, but based on what I am seeing this appears to be essentially the equivalent of opening one of those Dawning Engrams… so wide loot table including full sets of class armor, 4 unique emotes, 10 unique ghost shells including 1 exotic, 10 unique ships including 2 exotics, 11 unique sparrows including 2 exotic, 4 unique shaders, and 6 unique transmat effects. At any given time there are seven of that assortment of forty five items available for purchase with bright dust on the Eververse vendor… pending my math is correct. Essentially this is an Eververse holiday with Eververse rewards… and a minimal method of earning them through normal game play rather than swiping your card.

The biggest problem I have with the event is the complete and total lack of the Sparrow Racing League. Instead we get Mayhem Crucible modes… which admittedly are amazingly fun, but no crazy swoop bike racing action. For the uninitiated Mayhem is a mode of the Crucible where your super regenerates at an insane rate… and grenade and melee are slightly increased as well. It means that it takes what feels like a minute to get your full super bar, and as a result you are running around doing really silly things the entire match. I played quite a bit of it last night and it was enjoyable to run around the map trying to out super all of the other supers. Oddly enough I got plenty of normal weapon kills also as I sat back and picked off weakened targets when two different super saiyans clashed in battle. As fun as Mayhem mode is… unless it sticks around as a new permanent fixture it is going to feel super hollow. The original Dawning added so much new permanent content to the game, that this version feels extremely lacking. Strike scoring is one of those systems that is desperately needed in Destiny 2 and with the bulk of the dawning items coming from cash shop purchases rather than a book of achievements… it just feels cheap. I am as big a backer of Destiny 2 as they come, but even I have to stop and think that this seems more cash grab than content.

The Visionary

December 19, 2017 by Belghast

I don’t have a whole lot to say this morning given that by the time I got home I pretty much crashed on the sofa and wound up officially asleep about 9:30. Last week I had several nights where I was not asleep until after 1 am and I think they are catching up with me. I played a little WoW and a little Destiny 2 but nothing really of sufficient effort to talk about it at length. The bulk of my evening was an hour long call with my folks where we talked through christmas plans or the potential lack thereof considering we are expecting an ice storm. We mostly agreed that if the weather was dicey… Christmas could be any day given we can get together. My mom used to be super big on doing things on the official day but seems to have mellowed out over the years. Mostly this morning I wanted to make sure my readers knew about something… namely the Fall of Osiris comic book over on Bungie.net. Personally I would have rather they just released it in one of the comic book e-reader formats for us to download and enjoy on our reader of choice… but the step through the panels format works well enough. I mean in theory we could recreate it in PDF or CBZ format considering you can easily open the images in another window and snag them that way. That might be a side project… but anyways it is 10 pages worth of story and well worth the read.

Buried in the middle of the comic is a panel showing the written Prophecies of Osiris. Of course Redditors immediately noticed that at the top of the text was a broken line that looked a lot like morse code, and then another one quickly decoded it. The end result is a code that when input into the Destiny redemption page rewards you with an emblem. Simply input the following text in the code redemption box…

XFV-KHP-N97

As a result you end up with “The Visionary” emblem shown above.

Conflicted Feels

December 18, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend we ended up recording a full on spoilers Last Jedi show because it seemed to be a reasonable thing to do. Functionally all of the AggroChat crew had already seen the movie and were ready to start talking about it. In this discussion however I seemed to be the odd man out in the way I feel about the movie. In truth I wasn’t really sure how I felt about it on Thursday night when I saw it, and as I saw it Saturday with my wife I started to get more critical of it. When we walked out of the theater my wife was similarly not sure how she felt about the movie, and then as we were walking to the car said she was a little disappointed. The problem is that seed grows over time and there are certain things in the movie that really bother me. It has a film with a lot of really awesome moments, knitted together by a bunch of other stuff that I am not really sure how to think about it. Essentially I am at a place where I feel like this is the weakest of the modern Star Wars movies and I place it firmly behind Empire Strikes Back, Force Awakens, Rogue One and A New Hope. There are individual moments however that could easily elevate the movie above all of those… were the rest of the film that strong as well. I remember thinking Thursday night… that the movie seemed really long but I mostly chocked that up to being after midnight when we got out of the theater. When we watched it as a matinee on Saturday morning however… it felt somehow longer. My biggest frustration is that the movie really answers none of the questions I had in a satisfying manner, but I won’t go further than that. If you want to hear the whole spoilery conversation check out the podcast episode because I elaborate on a lot of things there… and end up being the single person who seems to feel this way out of the crew. I want so bad to love this movie… but I am just struggling with it much the same way as I did the prequels. I was born and bred with Star Wars in my veins… seeing the first movie as a toddler in the theater… but I am struggling hard to maintain that hype and love.

While sitting around questioning how I felt about the direction of the Star Wars franchise… I spent a significant amount of time playing World of Warcraft. The irony here is that Warcraft is another franchise I often have deep problems with but keep returning because there is a nostalgic core there that I still love. Belghast the Female Orc Warrior on Scryers dinged 110 last weekend and since then I have been focusing on gearing up. This largely has meant a lot of running world quests and more specifically unlocking a good deal of the content on Argus. In the last week and some change I have managed to raise my item level to 896 which means that I can run the LFR version of Antorus. In addition to this I have mostly just been focusing on slowly raising my level by knocking out the world quests that give me things that are useful. Additionally I am trying to burn through all of the Argus quests that I come across in the hopes of gathering enough of <insert newest currency name here> to be able to purchase 910 items. Luckily the world quest drops seem to be scaling quite a bit as I ratchet my level up there and as a result I am creeping closer and closer to 900. The biggest challenge right now is the fact that I have yet to see any Legendary items in spite of doing a bunch of stuff that could in theory get me one. Either they have greatly nerfed the drop rate… or I am just super unlucky. In truth what I need to focus on is finishing my Order Hall campaign, because the fact that I have not done so is starting to hold me back in a bunch of ways. I think tonight pending I feel like doing group content… I will sit down and force my way through it because I know there are still a bunch of missions that I need to run. Essentially I need to finish Valsharah and do some dungeons before I can get to the next set of order hall quests.

In Porg We Trust

December 15, 2017 by Belghast

This morning I do not have a whole lot to say because yesterday I got home at midnight. I had a work dinner thing and then afterwards several of us went to see Star Wars The Last Jedi. It is still way in the “too soon” territory for really talking about this movie at length. I was weirdly not super hyped about this movie before its release. Like I always knew it was on the horizon and that I would eventually go to see it over the Christmas break, but I wasn’t clamoring to see it the way I had been the previous movies. More than anything I think I just lucked into seeing it on opening night… which is confusing because technically tonight is the opening night but Thursday is now the universal pre-opening night? I am more into world building than I am into individual stories, and unfortunately after the movie I feel just as clueless about a lot of things as I did going into it. That said it was a fun experience and I look forward to watching it again. In theory I will be taking my wife to a matinee tomorrow morning, since she could not attend last night. We also did not have the most ideal seats given that we were on the front row staring up at the movie, so there is some aspect of scaling and grandeur that I likely lost. The big takeaway from the movie is that the porgs are in fact every bit as adorable as they seem in the pre-launch hype. I feel like there isn’t enough love for the crystalline fox things, because they were pretty great as well. As far as characters go… all of our favorites from Force Awakens improved over the course of the movie… and I am completely in love with Rose. I thought for certain we were going in for a Empire Strikes back sort of movie… but in truth it ended in a very different manner making me extremely interested in where we are going for episode nine. All in all I had a great time and will likely see it multiple times while it is still in the theaters.