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Xur Week Four: 10/6/17

October 6, 2017 by Belghast

Happy Xursday! Since this seems to be a fairly popular feature I will be doing a run down of what Xur has this week. Since the Flashpoint is in the European Dead Zone he is found over in the winding cove area. For characters who have yet to hit 20… you can get there by just going west out of town and winding along the coastline… but in truth I would warn against doing this because his items degrade in power based on your level. This time Xur is a little tricky given that the previous three weeks he has been in some sort of a sheltered area, and this time he is up on top of a cliff that you are going to have to do a bit of wall jumping to get to. Another thing to watch out for… the area he is in is patrolled by a group of dregs on pikes. Additionally there may or may not be a public event active at the drop zone in the winding cove area. Essentially this is probably the most dangerous area Xur has been so far, just be careful if you AFK because Vandals could in fact hit me with their wire rifles from where he is located.

First off he is offering the Vigilance Wing, a weapon I am extremely excited to see because I have yet to get one from an engram. This is an odd Osiris themed weapon that you occasionally see in your “killed by” notes in the crucible and now that I see the perks I understand why. The exotic perk for this weapon is Harsh Truths which does several things. Firstly it fires a five round burst which is a bit unique because most pulse rifles fire three round bursts, and hakke weapons are the outlier with four round bursts. A five round burst for reference means a single precision burst kills a second tier mob like a Vandal. The second part of the perk is that when a nearby ally is killed you gain health regeneration and increased movement speed… something that happens constantly in the crucible. Seeing as I just literally got this weapon today I have yet to take it into the crucible so I am uncertain how much difference this makes. I did however run around the EDZ and complete a public event to get a feel for it and my opinions are a bit mixed. Statwise it is probably most similar to the Lincoln Green, with a very odd 530 rounds per minute rate of fire and surprisingly high 33 impact for that rpm. Traditionally the high rate of fire weapons have an extremely poor range but this one has 68 and a medium range sight to go with it making it fairly decent in longer range engagements. The other side of the coin though is the unique sun themed sight means it is extremely annoying for close range fights. The last stand perk plays well with harsh truths in that it gives the weapon improved performance if you are the last member of a fire team. It seems like it is well worth the legendary shards if for no reason other than to get the unlock and a good Kinetic pulse rifle is a bit of a rare item to find.

The Insurmountable Skullfort is another of a list of items that has returned from Destiny 1. Its bizarre because almost all of them were considered second tier items, which makes me wonder if the devs were simply unhappy with the amount of play time that they got and carried them over to potentially give them some new life. Transfusion Matrix causes kills with arc melee abilities to trigger health regeneration and restore melee energy. What this means in play is that there is a really interesting build you can do with a Striker Titan where you have near 100% up-time of the insanely powerful arc shoulder charge ability. This is literally the only reason to use this exotic and is probably well worth the pick up so that you have it in case you ever want to try that build out. Personally since I love my Auto Rifles… I am likely to almost always use the Actium War Rig because it benefits whatever spec I might be in at that time and doesn’t hamper me from switching freely.

Nezarec’s Sin is another really limited use case item because its exotic perk does one thing. Abyssal Extractors causes void damage kills to increase your ability energy recharge rate. I feel like the primary use case for this item is going to be in the crucible and specifically in control or similar modes where you are wanting to stand your ground or camp out a location. This is of course a useful for Void warlocks, but also is triggered by void weapon damage. This means you could in theory build a specific layout with a void energy and a void heavy and be constantly dropping your healing puddle on the ground. I ran this item for a bit of a time and the ability recharge rate increase is significant. Overall however I tend to prefer Eye of Another World that highlights priority targets and has a flat increase to the recharge rate of melee, grenade and your ability. The helm however is well worth a pick up in case you really need to be the one providing an on demand puddle.

And we have our very first repeat item of Xur in Destiny 2. Foetracer helm was offered in week two and my feelings are probably much the same. The exotic perk is Relentless Tracker which causes any mob you scope in on to acquire an X target that you can see through obstacles. Additionally marked targets like this take additional damage when they get to low health range. This is a generally useful item and I am sure there are specific cases where it is extremely solid especially for low health target damage. Personally I am a huge fan of Knucklehead Radar because I like having my radar up while I aim down sight regardless of the weapon I am using. The Foetracer however is probably a much better damage option because at least it does something to increase your output. I didn’t pick these up in week two, but I did this week largely to get a collection unlock. Probably a solid item if you are needing a reasonable exotic to use.

All in all I feel like this was a pretty solid week for Xur. I’ve been wanting to play with the Vigilance Wing as it is an exotic that I had never seen from an engram, so I am super happy about him offering that. The two weapons you can get from an engram that I am still missing is the Sweet Business Gatling gun auto rifle, and The Prospector grenade launcher. As far as armor pieces go… there are still a sizeable number of unlocks on each character that I will hopefully see Xur offering in coming weeks. I am mildly annoyed that on week four we are already getting duplicates, which reminds me all too much of the number of times we have seen weapons like the Hawkmoon or Last Word being sold. What are your thoughts? Are you impressed with what Xur has been offering or are they all old news to you by the time you can get your hand on them? I am interested in your thoughts. One last thing… I decided to start including Destiny 1 Xur in these posts because I feel sorta bad about that incarnation stuck in a game that people aren’t hyped about anymore.

In Destiny 1 Xur is located in the Vanguard area of the Tower. I am not going to go into a lot of detail on this, but the major items he has to offer…

Suros Regime Auto Rifle – 23 Strange Coins
ACD/0 Feedback Fence Titan Arms – 13 Strange Coins
Celestial Nighthawk Hunter Helm – 13 Strange Coins
The Stag Warlock Helm – 13 Strange Coins
Legacy Primary Weapon Engram – 31 Strange Coins
Monte Carlo Weapon Bundle with Superspy Ornament – 30 Strange Coins and 25 Silver Dust
Zhalo Supercell with Not A Toy Ornament – 30 Strange Coins and 25 Silver Dust

Leveling Addendum

October 5, 2017 by Belghast

A few days ago I wrote a post entitled “How I Should Have Done It” where I attempted to lay out the way I plan on leveling with the release of the PC version. Today I am going to talk a little bit about a brief addendum on how I should have been pushing my light levels all this time. Yes I realize it is now called “power” but after three years of the original Destiny I just cannot bring myself to say that. Functionally for me I have one class that I care about significantly more than the others… and that is Titan. I am what you would call a Titan main, and some other players may or may not have similar inclinations. After 270 the only real way you make forward momentum is through the weekly milestones and the Luminous Engrams that they drop. I am running at least three milestones on each of my three characters, and as a result I am slowly ratcheting up the light levels of them all. However I noticed a pattern… I would start out on my Titan and then slowly work my way through my other two characters and the gains from each would help push up the next character. What I should have done is started doing these every week in effectively reverse order of preference. That way my Titan main gets the maximum benefit from the other two characters Luminous Engrams. Instead what is happening currently is my last string character… usually my hunter… winds up reaping the bounty of potential light level increases because I wind up handing her all of my weapons that got upgraded while pushing the other two characters.

The other thing that I wanted to talk a little bit about this morning is some more of that “Dark Math” that I spoke off some weeks ago. This is one of the things that drives me insane with Destiny 2 is that the math doesn’t always work out like it should. Part of the confusion is that the light level on your character sheet is a lie. What I mean by this is that all of those legendary mods that you may or may not have in your gear are artificially inflating the total. You can use a third party tool like Destiny Item Manager to see what your “base” power level is, but generally speaking it is 5 light lower than what is showing in your character sheet. So right now on my character sheet I show 301 light, and in DIM it is telling me that my actual base level is 296.4. When things get really confusing is that drops don’t work entirely like advertised. In theory as I have seen it explained it should work something like this…

Blue/Purple Drops/Engrams/Faction Packages — These should drop -5 light levels from whatever your current base power level is.
Exotic Engrams — These should drop at base light level +5 so effectively somewhere around the same level as shown on character sheet.
Luminous Engrams/Powerful Rewards — these should drop base light level +10 or 5 over what is shown on your character sheet.

I’ve been told that the Exotic Quests that you can complete reward an item that is 18 levels over your base light, but I didn’t throw that in the bullet point list because I don’t with 100% accuracy that this is actually a thing. The problem is that these are largely just guidelines… and you are going to see +/- 1 level when actually getting gear to drop. For example the above shown engram is decoding at 291 as it should… 296 base light minus 5 gives you 291. However all last night I got handfuls of 290 items instead of 291, and each time I have been at a plateau it sort of fluctuates back and forth between the number it should be and just slightly lower than that number. Its the fudge factor that I find maddening, because no matter how locked down you think you have the formulate there is always this chaotic nature to it. Side note… I am superstitious and feel that Tyra Karn gives me better loot if I go back to the farm and decode my engrams there.

One of the big positives of the night is that I managed to get my first max light item. The only problem is… it is kinda a crappy one. I mean I am not a huge fan of the grenade launchers in Destiny 2, and while there are a few really good ones like Play of the Game… most of them are awkward to actually get to perform. Fighting Lion is one of those awkward to get to perform ones… and even worse it is by some quirk of exotics an energy slot weapon and not a heavy. Sure it is cool to have the damage potential of a heavy weapon in your energy slot… but I like energy weapons. When I am not rocking either The Number or Uriel’s Gift I miss it horribly… so I am largely holding onto this only because it is the highest available light item for that slot I have. I have yet to do the Luminous engrams on my Warlock and I am hoping maybe just maybe I get another max light weapon while doing that. I really need to get some nightfalls in this week because I could use the extra chance at decent gear that they offer.

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?