Tales of the Aggronaut

Xur Week Two: 9/22/17

September 22, 2017 by Belghast

Since I did this last week I thought I would continue with it for at least another week because Xur brought something I had been wanting. This time around since the weekly flashpoint is Titan, Xur is located on the section of the planet called “The Rig”. To get here you will have to cross some areas of the map that have lots of mobs on them, but thankfully none of them seem to be willing to follow you into the actual room he is located in. Previously in Destiny 1 Xur arrived Friday morning and left Saturday at Midnight PST. This time around that does not seem to be the case because he was up on Nessus until the reset happened Tuesday morning. I am not sure if this was intentional or some sort of a bug, but regardless I would suggest checking him out today or tomorrow just to make sure.

This time around he has brought the Wardcliff Coil or for those of us that played Destiny 1 and followed the dataminers… the Dubious Volley. Honestly I think Dubious Volley is a much better name for what the weapon does, because it is essentially an anime missile launcher. What I mean by this is if you have ever seen something along the lines of Robotech where a bay of missiles opens up and then they sorta fire in a bunch of different directions… that is what this weapon does. In use from what I understand it feels a lot like a Gjallarhorn that ONLY fires Wolfpack rounds… but way more of them. One of the problems I have heard is that as the mini missiles are tracking in… if a mob moves close to you… it will in fact blow you up too. This is one of those fabled weapons that we never got in the first game… so I am absolutely picking this up so I can play with it now.

The Feedback Fence is an item from the first game… that in truth no one actually used. There were a few super edge case builds that you needed to run if you were going to optimize this… which is a bit sad given that they look amazing. Functionally to make it work you need to run around punching things… and then letting something else punch you to explode it. This makes it extremely unpredictable, and not that useful given that the cases you really want to unleash damage on a target… are most likely cases where they don’t actually melee you. The number of bosses that reliably melee you is pretty limited. I would suggest only picking these up if you simply need the light level and using them as infusion fuel.

Do you like Solar Grenades? If so then these are probably the gloves for you. I like grenades quite a bit but in general I am not a fan of the changes to the fire subclass for Warlocks, so as a result I am probably going to give these a pass. This is the second week in a row that we have had a solar specific item on Xur for Warlocks which is a little disappointing. I used last weeks chest piece only until I got a legendary chest that I could it into. All of that said, this does not take away from the fact that this really is a good item. It increases the duration of your solar grenades and causes solar melee hits to increase grenade energy regeneration. If you want to be a mad bomber this is probably going to be down your alley.

Once again I have not even started my Hunter yet so this is an image that I borrowed from the internet, and then overlayed the stat block. When zooming in on a target this helmet will place a little red X over it. When that target gets low health you begin dealing significantly more damage to the marked target. The drawback here is that if you focus on any other targets for any length of time it will shift the X and that may or may not be what you want to have happen. Another edge case that is super useful is in the tracking of a mob that might be running from you… like how some high value targets do these days. I am personally not that interested in this helm, and plan on just sticking with the chest piece from last week that increases my Arc Strider stuff. Folks are saying however that this is a really powerful pickup and I can see why because in theory it just gives you bonus damage on a target, which would be nice for boss burn phases once the boss gets within “execute range”.

290 Power and More Weapons

September 21, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I pushed through and hit another Milestone in Destiny 2, and that is hitting the 290 light barrier. While our clan lead seemed to hit this practically over night… it has been a long slog for most of us. I’ve talked about this before but the gearing process slows down greatly at 265 and then each additionally point of power seems to be a struggle to obtain. This is going to be the phase of the game that loses most people because if you have never dealt with how rough Destiny 1 was to get light… then this is going to seem like a chore. For the most part I am enjoying the process because I like watching the numbers go up. For frame of reference however… the game was released on September 5th and sixteen days later I have logged roughly 57 hours of play according to Destiny Tracker. Now for additional point of reference I spent just shy of 500 hours playing Destiny 1 on the PS4 and just shy of 50 hours on the Xbox One. Basically all I am trying to say here is that 290 power level is a significant investment of time, but in theory you could probably also get there just by focusing on the few powerful gear rewarding objectives that you can do each week. My process has involved a lot of doing random stuff hoping to get exotic engrams that then push me up every so slightly.

As far as things to talk about this morning I don’t have much. I thought instead I would share a few new weapon pickups that I am enjoying. Each week I do the crucible milestone so that I can get the luminous engram associated with it. During one of the many matches I had to play to get 100% completion to get my loot… I managed to get this gun to drop. As far as I know this is only available from the crucible itself or from turning in crucible tokens for faction with Lord Shaxx. This gun is amazing in PVE and I imagine similarly amazing in PVP given its propensity for one-shot killing almost anything but yellow bars, and even then a single shot will usually strip their shield. I was using it last night while running around on Io and straight up 2 shotting Vex Minotaurs… one to drop the shield and one precision shot to kill them. It did similar magic on Taken Centurions, except their shields seemed to take to shots to drop them. If you get this gun, I highly suggest you play with it a bit before sharding it because I think you are going to like it. I also love the name because its a play on two infamous guns from Destiny 1: The Devil You Know and The Devil You Don’t.

As the reward from completing the nightfall, I managed to pick up an Origin Story. I have no clue what weapon I chose at that step in the quest chain… but I know it was not this gun and whatever I did wound up as infusion fodder somewhere along the way. At this point in my life I was deeply connected to Scathelocke and could see no other weapon taking that primary gun crush position for me. However after hearing people talk about this gun, I decided to play with it a bit before using it as power level fuel. I am certainly glad that I did because my god this gun is amazing. It is a much slower rate of fire archetype as compared to the Scathelocke… so if that is the Haakon’s Hatchet then this is closer to the Suros Regime or Genesis Chain. This has quickly taken my primary slot and the only time I am not using it… is when I am rocking Better Devils.

A weapon that I have loved for awhile but was not using a lot at the time of the last post is Uriel’s Gift. I try really hard not to run double auto rifles because it limits the things that I can do, however there is a period of time when I did. Now that I have started using Better Devils a lot more this is filling in as my secondary slot. Similarly I am using this a lot in crucible because it just has an insane time to kill. Out of the gate the gun has really good stability in spite of what looks like on paper a relatively low stat… or at least it has a very predictable recoil pattern. This allows me to choose High Caliber Rounds to get the stagger effect against enemies. This has been the game where I suddenly greatly favor Omolon weapons. In Destiny 1 I always thought they looked cool, but never really liked the way they felt. This time around I am digging both. Functionally my two primary setups are Origin Story/Manannan or Better Devils/Uriel’s Gift and I swap back and forth between those as needed.

This has been the version of Destiny where pulse rifles are just not that good. I’ve tried a bunch of them and none of them really feel like they used to… or have the ability to shred enemies like they used to either. Of the pulses I have tried, I have largely standardized on using the Nergal because it feels the best and seems to perform the best out in the field. I’ve actually used it a bit in crucible and it works well enough… the problem is it is just outshined in every way by the Auto Rifle options I have now. I have this feeling that we are going to see an Auto Rifle stability nerf which will clear the way for the pulse to shine a bit more. Previously Pulse was the stable multi shot option… and Autorifle was all about learning how to ride a bucking bronco into battle. If you are looking for a pulse however I highly suggest you check this one out. I get it regularly from the gunsmith, and it seems to be on a pretty generic drop table.

Racing Juggernauts

September 20, 2017 by Belghast

This is going to be a bit of an odd post, but it is something that has been kicking around in my head lately and something that we have discussed a bit on AggroChat. Back in 2015 when I attended Pax South 2015… I walked away with one game on my lips… Gigantic. It was what I felt at the time a fresh take on the whole MOBA genre and the state at which the game was in at the show… I fully expected it to be launching within the next six months. Sure Blizzard had just announced Overwatch a few months earlier… but this was here and playable right now. We scan forward several years… and Gigantic finally launched on July 20th of 2017. It launched into a climate that has Paladins, Smite, Battleborn, and a plethora of other similar games vying for the same eyeballs on the same screens. Most importantly though when Overwatch officially launched on May 24th of 2016 it sucked every last drop of oxygen from the room. Sure there are a ton of differences between each of these games, but in the eyes of the customers… I am not actually sure any of them matter. They all fall into this broad category of cartoony stylistic shooter… and the one that gets the most time on the lips of players… is Overwatch. I’ve not played Gigantic in a long while in part because there is some nonsense of multiple competing versions for Windows… but in truth because that moment passed and I moved on to other things. To be fair I am not playing Overwatch either.

When Dauntless was announced at The Game Awards in December of 2016, I thought it looked really interesting namely because there really isn’t a great PC resident Monster Hunter experience. Sure there is Godeater but it is sorta doing its own thing that is not entirely connected to the Monster Hunter fame. I realize Toukiden also exists but neither has really developed the same sort of following. At Pax South 2017 I got to lay my hands on the game and give it a shot, and while I was completely horrible at it… the experience seemed like something that with time I could get into. However soon I started to see a very painfully similar pattern emerging with this game that I did with Gigantic. At E3 2017 Capcom announced Monster Hunter World and with it for the first time in the franchise PC support. At this point Dauntless was on a clock, they either had to get to market first or would have all of their available oxygen sucked out of the room as well. A few days ago it was announced at the Tokyo Game show that Monster Hunter World would be shipping in all markets on January 26th 2018. While they say the PC version will follow later… this still adds additional pressure to Dauntless to release and firms up the time table of when they have to launch. The game is currently in Closed Beta but has never really had a more firm launch window other than “2017” of which we are starting to run out of months.

For me personally… that time is already over. Once Monster Hunter World was announced to be coming to PC, I for the most part stopped caring that much about Dauntless news. I was going to get my Monster Hunter game on the PC and it was going to come from Capcom and share all of the traits and lore and history of the Monster Hunter franchise as a whole. Dauntless on the other hand has to fight an uphill battle of coming up with a brand new IP and then trying to infuse enough into that world to make it feel alive and exciting and not just a sequence of arenas where you fight boss monsters. Even the monsters themselves are a challenge because they have to come up with a whole slew of brand new creatures with their own mechanics and tactics… whereas Monster Hunter world can draw heavily on fourteen years of experience and fourteen related games worth of monster battles. Basically the oxygen is gone for me personally, but if they hope to get Monster Hunter devotees their clock is ticking down quickly because the moment the actual Monster Hunter is available on PC… a whole lot of the unique gimmick factor of Dauntless goes away. I might be overly grim here, but I watched this all play out for Gigantic and I have a feeling we are just about to see a repeat of that story.

Dark Math and Infusion

September 19, 2017 by Belghast

I finished the night last night at 287 power, putting me well within striking distance of at least 290 this week… and with some additional luck in getting some really good drops 300. For the moment I have standardized on the gear set that I am wearing and I have been eating everything that gives me slightly higher light levels to pour into it. This morning I thought I would talk a bit about the infusion game in Destiny 2 and my frustrations with it. The longer I play Destiny 2 the more I think of it as a continuation of the previous game to the point of largely feeling like a big smooth reboot. There is a lot of gnashing of teeth over this point but I have reached a sort of equilibrium in my attitude. I realize there are going to be some people that cannot get past this fact and I am guessing they really were not that big of a fan of the original game in the first place. There are certainly things that I am not the biggest fan of, but overall I am really enjoying my time spent wandering around… and weirdly looking forward to starting over with the PC launch and doing all of the things that I wish I had done this time around. For me at least the chronology of Destiny looks a little something like this.

Year One – Destiny Launch/Dark Below/House of Wolves
Year Two – The Taken King
Year Three – Rise of Iron
Year Four – Destiny 2 Launch

Now back to the original topic I wanted to discuss… Infusion. During Year One it was not really a thing even though there was a limited form of it available in the ability to “power up” weapons with ascendant shards… which was less a version of infusion and more a version of delayed gratification making you level your weapon further after getting it. Side note… they are doing something like this system with an exotic shotgun that you get from the raid but that is a discussion for another day. During Year Two they introduced the infusion system but made the calculations behind it extremely frustrating. The closer you got to the level cap the less light you were able to squeak out from each infusion. I remember keeping a vault full of random gear to step new items that I got up… without losing a bunch of potential light in the process. For those who didn’t live under the system… say you had a 300 light level exotic item.. and you wanted to infuse a 335 item into it… the resulting item would be 324. If the first item was a legendary item… you would end up with 328 making this weird penalty on using exotics. During the tail end of Year Two and all of Year Three this changed and you started to get the complete face value of every infusion, meaning in that same scenario… of a 300 exotic and a 335 infusion fodder… you would end up with a 335 exotic gaining full credit for the item you were pouring into it. The previous infusion system was pretty straight forward in that any primary could infuse into any other primary… with the same being true for armor pieces. Meaning I could throw my trash at my alts and help funnel their light level up.

Now we scan forward to Year Four and a bunch of things have changed that make the system as a whole way less beneficial to the players. Year Three was pretty much the pinnacle of the system as far as I was concerned, it felt good and didn’t cause needless strife to the players. In Destiny 2 however… they made a bunch of tweaks that seem like nonsense. Firstly they removed the element of simplicity, meaning it was no longer slot based infusions and instead depended upon the specific item type. This means if you need to bump up your auto rifle… you are going to need another auto rifle. Similarly it means that if you want to pour additional power into your hunter arms… you are going to need another pair of hunter arms. To further confuse things they added a system of mods into the game, and at face value these seem like awesome things. It lets you take one piece of gear and tailor it to your exact needs without having to wait for the ideal item roll to drop. Where this complicates things however is when it comes to legendary mods, because not only do they add perks to an item… they also had 5 power levels. This means that if you have a 200 item without a legendary mod and a 225 item with a legendary mod… feeding the 225 item into the 200 item will result in a new power level of 220 because the mod gets consumed in the process. The first time this happened to me I was confused as hell and extremely angry because it felt like they had taken a step back to the lossy days of item infusion.

Where things get even weirder is the fact that in the past there were hard item level caps that you could not breach. For example right now in Destiny 2… blues stop giving you upgrades initially a 260 and purples at 265. That however is a somewhat fungible barrier, because as your power level trickles up… so does the level at which items start dropping. I am not entirely certain why things drop at the level they start dropping… but for example last night the maximum power I could hit was 287 but the blues I kept seeing were 277. The lowest power item I have equipped is a 282 helm… so I do not think it is based on that given that there was a period of time where I kept getting items that I could infuse into my lower armor pieces to keep pulling my total up a bit. There is some manner of dark math happening behind the scenes and I think that is what is making this process feel less certain and because of that less “good” than the previous system. We reached peak infusion during year three and all of these tweaks just feel like they were screwing with a solved problem. I am hoping at some point we revert back to just having slot based infusion rather than item type based. The whole item levels and drops thing however I am not even sure how to straighten that out because it seems super wibbly wobbly. All of this said however… Bungie has tweaked things significant given time and I have a feeling that they will also tweak this product to roll back some of the weird parts. It is just a little frustrating at this point however to be entering what is legitimately year four of the game, and it feels like they forgot some of the lessons they learned during the first three years. I mean maybe this is the influence of Blizzard, since they seem to love fixing systems that were not broken by ripping up the pavement and installing brand new and improved pavement that requires a completely different car to drive on it. Whatever the case I am still loving the game and have been spending almost every non-work waking moment playing it… but there are just frustrations that build up as with any new experience. I thought I had gushed for awhile… and its probably time for me to start unpacking some of my baggage as well.