Tales of the Aggronaut

Dead Orbit Won?

October 4, 2017 by Belghast

The guardians have spoken I suppose and told us that they don’t care about cool weapons nor do they care about the best looking gear… and instead they care about… honestly I am not sure what? Back in Destiny 1 folks went dead orbit because they had the coolest looking emblems, including one with a skull and crossed axes. Additionally the logo for dead orbit itself is a weird simplified skull. I guess this makes them the edgelord faction in spite of actually having a faction called Future War Cult. The problem with FWC however is that their gear generally looks like a bowl of fruity pebbles, but at least in my case it has sort of begrudgingly grown on me over time. I too was one of the Dead Orbit legion during Destiny 1 for a very long time, largely because I thought they had the coolest weapons… Year 2 Hung Jury was fucking amazing. However in Year 3… FWC pulled ahead of them and had a ton of really awesome to use weapons. Mix this with the fact that I had to swap to them to get my No Time to Explain weapon quest wrapped up, and I just sorta got used to looking like a Nascar driver. Why I stayed however is because Lakshmi-2 is hands down the coolest faction leader in the tower. Go Team Exo!

To be fair… I pledged a different faction on each character so I would have access to whatever weapon happened to win. I think that was the part of this whole equation that people forgot about… we were ultimately competing for a weapon. Thanks to Dead Orbit winning we got a weird weapon that does not stack up well against other offerings in the form of the Haunted Earth. This weapon is effectively in the same fire rate group as the Song of Justice VI that I talked about on Monday, so it is an extremely slow firing and as a result heavy hitting scout rifle aka 150 rounds per minute and 67 impact. It has considerably shorter range than the Song of Justice…. with 70 verses the Song’s 89. Where this gun gets a little odd is in the alignment of its perks. Firstly you have a set of sight options that are largely going to be personal preference… I opted to go with the default IS 5 Circle, but you can also get a longer zoom red dot scope. From there you have the choice of Tactical Mag or High Caliber rounds. Generally speaking I would want the ability to stagger and go with High Caliber, but the scout already has what feels like a small magazine and dropping from 13 to 12 just feels lousy but potentially worth it. The last perk is the real head scratcher in the form of Field Prep… which increases the ammo reserves of a weapon and causes it to reload significantly faster while crouched. If you can get used to using this… it is a fairly nice perk especially given how slow the reload of the weapon feels normally.

The curse of Haunted Earth however is that it is functionally a slightly slower and harder hitting version of the already existing Call to Serve scout rifle, and when you compare the two it just ends up being the universally worse option. Call to Serve is slightly faster firing in the 180 rounds per minute space, and as a result sacrifices a barely noticeable 5 impact to land at 62. It does however sacrifice a lot of range taking it from the 70 of Haunted Earth down to 47. It however picks up a ton of stability and handling at 46 and 60 respectively as well almost 30 more points of aim assistance. All of this however is just icing because the reason why you choose Call to Serve over Haunted Earth are the perks. Firstly you have a choice of two options to bump up the Magazine size, however in truth there is only one option here… so you want to take Appended Mag for 17 rounds which does nothing to slow down your reload speed unlike Extended Mag that only gives you one more bullet. The best perk however is Triple tap which causes you to gain a 4th phantom round every time you land 3 precision shots in a row. I talked about this perk a little bit in the review of the Dire Promise hand cannon. Effectively if you can land streaks of precision damage you can fire 22 shots before needing to reload, which is great in situations where you are burning something down that is effectively a static target like bosses often are. Basically there are no reasons why I would ever choose to use Haunted Earth over Call to Serve or even Song of Justice VI. So gratz Dead Orbit… you won and earned all of us another piece of vault clutter. If you like the gun however then by all means use it… but I have a feeling you will be swapping it out the moment you get something better.

Faction Rally 1: DO Edition

October 3, 2017 by Belghast

Once again by the time this post comes out it is going to likely be of zero use to anyone, because if I am understanding the Faction Rally correctly… it would have just ended and we will be entering the phase where a winner will be chosen. I am doing something super dangerous in that I am staging this content on the weekend to post Monday and Tuesday. So by the time this actually goes live we should know which weapon we have available. I took the route of choosing a different faction for each character, and this has also given me the opportunity to collect all twelve unique faction based drops that are available from packages. Yesterday I wrote about New Monarchy, and last week about Future War Cult… so today is the time to talk about everyone’s favorite chromatically challenged faction… Dead Orbit. This faction will always have a special place in my heard due to the fact that the majority of my time playing Destiny… I was pledged to Arach Jalaal desperately hunting that cool emblem with the axes. In Destiny 2… I was swayed by just how damned good the weapon offering was in the Future War Cult camp. That said there is at least one gem in this lineup, but your mileage may vary.

Let me get this out of the way first. I do not like sidearms… they have always felt like crappier faster firing versions of hand cannons. In Destiny 1 the only time I broke one out and used it… was when I was working on a bounty that required me to get X number of kills with a specific damage type weapon that was not Arc. Even then the only reason why I used a Sidearm was simply because of the extreme ammo reserves they tended to have. With Destiny 2 they introduced a new class of Sidearm that burst fires… which quickly caused me to start ignoring every single firing gun out there. So needless to say the Eleventh Hour has a bunch of strikes against it out of the gate, but in truth it does have a few things going for it. This weapon is essentially a fast firing low impact weapon… that has an insane upwards kick if you are firing it as fast as you can pull the trigger. That said if you are slowing down and placing your shots a little more carefully this can two precision shot most minions and with a 17 shot magazine… you can pour through a bunch. Where this starts to become useful is the fact that it has Rampage perk giving you a stacking damage buff each time you take down a target up to three. I could see this being extremely good for clearing out thralls or something of the sort. The problem I have though is that there are just dozens of energy slot weapons that I would rather use than this. If you enjoy using it then by all means do so… it just doesn’t really have a place in my world and I will likely shard it once I have finished writing this review.

This is a fairly bizarre shotgun offering, and I am going to try and unpack why. First off this is an extremely hard hitting, slow rate of fire weapon with abysmal range and reload speeds that are amplified by the poor handling stat. What it does well is hit really hard… a single time. So if you think you can one-shot a target with this shotgun then it is probably going to do a great job of it. Now if you combine the tactical mag perk… with the field prep perk the equation starts to change a bit and while crouched you can reload this weapon extremely fast. Now initially I thought… maybe this works while sliding but after thirty minutes of trying to make this work it seems like you just straight up cannot reload while in the slide motion. So functionally in order to do this in the heat of battle I would probably slide behind some cover, reload quickly and then get back into the action. Where the gun shines however is that it has a pretty deep well to draw from in that if you choose specific perks you can have 6 in the magazine and 12 in reserve. For PVE this seems like a perfectly reasonable shotgun… but for PVP I think it is going to lose out every time to one of the full auto options. The best part though is the look and the sound it makes when it fires a shell.

I feel like Pulse Rifles are just in a really awkward place in Destiny 2. They have always lived in this weird place between scout rifles and auto rifles… and in the current meta both are undeniably in better places than this weird hybrid. Three Graves currently lives in the slowest rate of fire and highest impact flavor of pulse rifle, and it brings with it some really nice stability. What it severely lacks however is handling and reload speed… giving the gun a really sluggish feel as you shift between hip and ads modes. The outlaw perk can help with the reload speed because it decreases reload time after a precision kill… which is relatively easy to do given how much damage this thing puts out and how stable it is. The thing that never really gets better though is the handling… so for me to feel comfortable with this weapon I would need to slot in some mods to improve that. The biggest obstacle this weapon has is the fact that I have Innaugural Address the raid pulse… that just feels better to use.

Tons of players love The Old Fashioned, in fact it has shown up on a ton of the top X weapons in Destiny 2 lists. I am not one of those players, and when I first saw Dire Promise in the drop list for Dead Orbit I was not extremely hopeful. There are however a bunch of tweaks that have been made to this weapon that make it feel vastly different than the weapon that is so commonly sharded by me that I didn’t even have one available to directly compare against. Functionally you are losing a little impact and range, and gaining a ton of stability and handing as well as a tiny bit of reload speed as well as 2 bullets in the magazine. As far as perks… you are losing Kill Clip and gaining one of my favorites from Destiny 1… Triple Tap which is shockingly hard to find on a D2 hand cannon. If you feel like you can sacrifice a little stability… you can even push this gun into the 13 in the magazine club. This means that if you can consistently hit precision shots… you could in theory fire 17 78 impact shots without reloading… meaning that is a ton of damage in a very short period of time. While I doubt this is going to dislodge either Better Devils or True Prophecy as my Hand Cannon of choice… this is definitely going to be something I swap to situationally.

Now that you have seen all of the weapons available from the Faction Rally this go round… what are your thoughts? Do you like me feel like Future War Cult had the strongest offerings or are you thinking I short changed one of the other factions?

Faction Rally 1: NM Edition

October 2, 2017 by Belghast

Admittedly by the time I post this it will be of extremely limited benefit given that as far as I understand the Faction Rally should in theory reset on Tuesday. For the unindoctrinated the Faction Rally is this event happening currently in Destiny 2 that involved choosing one of the three factions from Destiny 1 and representing them. The goal of the event is to collect tokens while doing almost any activity in the game, and then turn these in 20 at a time to the faction leaders. For my Titan I decided to rep Future War Cult, and I wrote a post last Thursday about the weapons that were available. Each faction is offering four unique weapons from their packages and I thought it might be cool to attempt to get them all and do similar write-ups. Now I had done this a week ago when the faction rally went live… it might be of some significant benefit. Now however I am largely just doing for the fun of it, and it seems useful info in the long run.

We are going to start off this New Monarchy edition with what was ultimately the hardest weapon for me to actually get to drop. This weapon has gone through a name change since it first started dropping occasionally from Cayde-6 treasure caches to when the Rally proper began. The Song of Justice VI formerly the Sentencer IV is a nearly max range high impact scout rifle that trades these stats for really low stability and handling. It is also relatively slow firing in the 150 rounds per minute class until the more popular and broader 200 rounds per minute class represented most noticeably by the MIDA Multi Tool. It lives in a really weird place, but after spending some time using it while doing patrols and such I can see its charm. It will probably never take the spot of my Manannan SR4 largely because I love explosive payload more than I can rightly express with words… it does have a few of its own nice perks. Armor Piercing rounds is extremely nice for destroying mob shields, which I have not seen on that many weapons so far. Additionally it has auto loading holster which causes the weapon to reload itself while holstered, making this work extremely well in situations where you are not using this as your primary weapon. I could see it working nicely on strikes when you are using an energy auto rifle as your primary weapon, and just swapping to this any time you need to snipe something at a distance.

I am a huge proponent of the Auto Rifle and have loved them since the first moment I got one in my hands in Destiny 1. In Year Three one of my favorite weapons was the Suros made Genesis Chain, which was a slow rate of fire high impact Auto Rifle… that looked valuely like this weapon. I got my hopes up and then they were quickly dashed when I saw what archetype this weapon fit into. The 600 RPM bracket already has a few really good competitors in it and I think the problem is… this gun just isn’t nearly as good as either of them. The key problem is the lack of stability… this gun kicks weirdly and often times unpredictably making it significantly harder to control than Scathelocke or Ghost Primus that both live in this same archetype. Now if you do not have access to either of those weapons… then sure this is a good option and once you get used to its quirks you can make it perform fairly well. The biggest problem however is there just is no viable reason to use this over one of the other weapons I mentioned… other than it just looks aesthetically cool. However if that is really your thing… then grab a Martyrs Make and slap a New Monarchy Shader on it… because you are going to have a much more enjoyable experience.

Up until now New Monarchy has been the tale of weapons that are just flat out outclassed by other options. I think however we are going to finish strong starting with the Royal Dispensation II. Sub-Machineguns for me at least are the new shotgun… when you absolutely need to wreck someone up close and personal much the same way as I used to do with my beloved Invective. There are basically two competing categories the 600 rpm class and the 900 rpm class. In the grand scheme of things I tend to prefer the slightly slower rate of fire because they are much more controllable and easier to keep trained on the precision damage markers. That said this gun is shockingly stable for as fast as it is firing, and when combined with the Grave Robber perk… gives you some really up close and personal power. When I run a submac it is because I am getting up in peoples faces and the fact that if I get a melee kill it reloads part of my magazine… means I can stay there and be effective for longer. The gotcha however… is with 900 rpm and 33 shots in the magazine… this thing unloads extremely quickly. This gun is effectively the Foggy Notion with slightly better handling speed and slightly worse reload speeds… but that little tweak seems to make the gun feel so much better to use. Well worth holding onto and playing with to see if you like it, because at the end of the day that is all that really matters.

Up until this gun entered my life I carried around a pretty heavy crush on Hawthorne’s Field-Forged Shotgun… because Destiny 1 spoiled me on insisting that if I was using a shotgun that it had to have full auto. I was honestly shocked that I had not encountered anything else in game that seemed to have it… and then I saw this weapon. One of the big problems with the Hawthorne shotgun is the rate of fire… not that it is too slow but it is way the hell too fast. I cannot count the number of times I have fired shots into the void because I couldn’t pick my finger up off the trigger fast enough to stop from firing one round too many. The Unification VII fixes this with its 55 rounds per minute rate of fire as compared to the frankly too fast 90 on Hawthorne. Additionally we gain a significantly higher impact per shot and slight range increase… at the loss of some reload speed and one round in the magazine. What cannot be properly accounted for however is just how badass this weapon looks and how good it feels. The weapon has High Caliber rounds, which causes it to stagger mobs which is always going to be useful.

I am curious how you feel about the New Monarchy offering this time around? It has been leaked that each faction has a significantly deeper pool of available weapons than these four, so it is going to be interesting to see what arrives each time this event runs.

Xur Week Three: 9/29/17

September 29, 2017 by Belghast

Since this is becoming a regular thing I am doing… Happy Xursday! This time around he is located on Io given that it is the flashpoint planet this week. You can find him in the Giant’s Scar area of the planet in a cave off the lefthand side of the path coming from the fast travel location. Once again the mobs seem not to be willing to follow you into that cave so you can duck inside to relative safety. This is going to be the week where we see if Xur really does stick around until the reset, or if that was just a bug since we have had a patch since last week. There was no specific mention of Xur but as is always the case with MMOs… patches often times have a bunch of unannounced changes. Lets get into the item rundown.

Starting off we have the weapon Riskrunner, and for those who played the beta this was the exotic that Warlocks got from Lord Shaxx during the homecoming mission. It is a really unique feeling weapon given that it fires what looks like an eruption of lightning. As far as overall usefulness… it is extremely situational. The special ability Arc Conductor causes you to deal more damage and gain increased arc resistance… upon taking any arc damage. While in this overcharged state, getting kills with the weapon add additional time to the buff. Without this buff the weapon is largely just another legendary tier sub-machine gun and is quite honestly outclassed by weapons like the MIDA Mini-Tool. However if you can somehow be regularly taking arc damage… then you can churn through encounters with this gun and it becomes a formidable beast. Now if you just like the player fantasy of firing a lightning gun… then screw all of this and use it because it just looks badass.

Last weekend I leveled my hunter at least in part to be able to take proper Xursday shots rather than swiping them off the interwebs. As a result I am leading off with the Hunter item this week, the Mechaneer’s Tricksleeves. These are mobility/resistance arms that have the perk Spring-Loaded Mounting which increases the ready time and reload speed of sidearms. These are one of the choices you can make during the main story quest, and I thought they were really limited in their utility. You have to love sidearms an awful lot to spend your exotic slot on an item that improves that one weapon. That said… there are a fair number of really good sidearms in the game like Last Hope that seems to tear people up in the crucible. I personally do not like sidearms at all… but I did pick these up this week simply for the unlock. There is just not a lot more I can say about these… if you love sidearms or you also want the unlock… go for it.

The Titan armor is one that I have gotten several times from exotics… and keep infusing away to increase my power level. That is not due to the fact that it is not a good piece of armor but instead just to play the increasing your level game. For whatever reason I am just not feeling the Sunbreaker Titan as much as I was in Destiny 1, that said… if you do this is an amazing item. Functionally the perk is giving us back “Simmering Flames” from Destiny 1. Sunfire Furnace causes all of your solar abilities to recharge faster while you are sitting on a fully charged super, which in truth I seem to do more often than not because I am looking for the idea time to unleash it. That means more solar grenades and more solar melee abilities which are really the bread and butter of play for me personally. I went ahead and picked this back up because while I had this unlocked it was at 205 light… and I had shards to burn. I might play with it a bit and determine if it is useful enough to start playing more Sunbreaker.

Do you “Gotta Go Fast” and “Faster Faster Fa Fa Fa Fa Faster”? These are a weird item that I have used quite a bit largely because they were the highest light boots I had on my Warlock for a good long while. The perk Strange Protractor causes your sprint to move a heck of a lot faster… like it is noticeably faster. While sprinting it also causes your energy weapons to be automatically reloaded. This again is one of those situationally good items. I found it really useful in the crucible since I tend to mostly use Uriel’s Gift… and it also meant sprint cancelling a reload caused me to get the full reload. If you greatly favor energy weapons or just want to go really fast… then these might be the boots for you. Personally my exotic armor slot goes to Eye of Another World which highlights priority targets and increases the regeneration speed of my melee, grenades and class ability. If these sound like great boots for you however pick them up, or at least get them so you have them unlocked in your collections.

What are your thoughts? Did Xur bring something you really wanted or did I completely miss the special utility of a given item when I talk about them? I’d love to hear your feedback about this weeks offerings and in truth if anyone is actually finding this a useful thing for me to do on Friday mornings.