Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start off with one of those discussions that almost happened before we started recording. Tam has reached the point where he was ready to tangle with the fourth boss in Valheim, which disturbingly spawns right above where most of us have made our home. Tam tells the tale of this battle and the heavy losses that were incurred. From there we talk about Haven which is a co-op JRP style game featuring the relationships and interactions of an established couple. Finally we wrap things up with some discussion of the Outriders demo and how Bel is excited about it and Ash is tentatively excited as well due to is similarities to Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer.
This weekend was an extended weekend for me, having taken two days off to match up with my wife who is on fall break. As a result I had more than my average amount of play time and the timing happened to line up perfectly with the first Iron Banner for the Season of the Undying in Destiny 2. This time around there was a quest chain that I wrote about the other day that walks the player through collecting four weapons and a full suit of the Iron Banner armor. After this however it became my first mission to make sure I had completed that on all three characters. The above collage shows them all in the gear set that I picked up with some shaders applied to make them look cooler.
The most curious part of the weekend is that I somehow capped my Valor twice and reset it… and am now grinding it up a third time presently sitting at the Brave II rank. Partially this is due to the fact that the weekend included a bonus to all valor gained, and partially due to the fact that I played an excessive amount of crucible via the Iron Banner. I am guessing that the bonus valor also somehow equated to bonus XP because I skyrocketed from around 33 at the start of Iron Banner to 60 as of last night. I also managed to hit the less permeable cap of 960… aka 950 gear and 10 bonus light coming from the artifact. From this point on I believe the gains are in single point increments.
I was completely all over the place this weekend when it came to the activities that I dipped my toes into. While podcasting I opted to grind the Menagerie a bit and attempt to get a good roll of the Austringer, something that I had apparently completely failed at doing during the Season of Opulence. I am not even sure what a God Roll looks like, but my friend Teyeger01 suggested either Rampage/Rapid Hit or Rapid Hit/Kill Clip… the later sounds most excellent. I pulled an Outlaw/Rampage which seems like a perfectly reasonable option for the time being and one well worth using. For the time being I am completely out of Desire runes and will probably wait for Thalen to unlock the chalice before grinding some out again seeing as he was not benefiting from my runefinder buff.
Speaking of which, I spent a good chunk of the weekend running around with Thalen and doing whatever he had on his list of activities. I now fully understand why Squirrel always wanted me to drive the activity we were doing, because after a point it doesn’t really matter what it is we are actually doing. It is the act of running around and getting to play big brother guardian that is really fun. I wish I could have somehow carried people to the Iron Banner armor, but the way those objectives were set up to do not exactly lend themselves to being helped out by another guardian. So many of the checkmarks are depended upon getting weapon kills of a specific type, which means you need to be the one that actually finishes the Guardian off. If they were assists… maybe just maybe I could have helped folks like Pix through the Iron Banana because apparently I am better than I realized?
Speaking of killing Guardians… I finished off my Malfeasance… which is a Hand Cannon that I am probably never going to use. Right now I am heavily favoring swapping back and forth between Austringer and Ace of Spades when I want to play with that weapon type. The problem with Malfeasance is its special perk procs an explosion after the fifth hit on a target. Very few targets can handle five hits… even Guardians tend to drop somewhere in the 3 to 4 hit range. This means the only time you are ever going to get use of the perk is on some tanky Majors and Boss type encounters… which are situations you are probably going to use a heavy or a special on. So basically this weapon feels like it needs some tweaking… if it was 3 hits and then an explosion this gun would be amazing. Regardless it is another Exotic quest checked off on my list, and another quest out of my log.
At the start of this week I would have said without a doubt that this was the best feeling Iron Banner I had experienced to date. Then things shifted… and I eventually found out that Bungie made tweaks to the way the matchmaking was working. Originally as a solo queue player I was almost always getting matched with other solo queue players, which felt amazing. The problem is the vocal minority of the “sweaty” pvpers complained that they were sitting in orbit with a full team for hours and not getting matches. Bungie made some tweaks to the system and suddenly on Saturday I started getting matched up with 4 or 5 players from the same clan against my rag tag group of solo queues. Basically I am glad that I got most of my progress towards the armor sets done before that point, because on my Hunter it took way longer than it did on any of the others.
It makes me realize how much better the Crucible would be for me personally… if there was a freelancer play list. I am almost always going to queue as a solo player, because that tend to be how I play crucible most of the time. On the first few days before they applied this tweak… Iron Banner felt amazing. On the days after the patch was applied… I got one of two games… competitive or shut outs that I got “mercied”. Even when you lose in a close game… it somehow feels better because you had a chance. The weirdest realization for me personally… is that even in the scenarios where I was getting completely tromped… I was doing reasonably well. I think of myself as a very shitty PVPer… but maybe just maybe I have improved over time. I did enjoy myself and I find doing the Crucible bounties a little less tedious than it used to be.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we talk Untitled Goose Game, Link’s Awakening, some more WoW Classic Discussion and Bel makes a heartfelt plea to get folks to watch a 4 hour long video.
Here comes some random commentary. I have for the most part been in support of the Epic Games store and snagging some of their exclusives… like for example Hades and Ashen. Those are games for which pre-orders had not started on any platform and announcing that they would only be available on this somewhat new storefront was perfectly reasonable. I was largely okay with The Division 2 but I felt it was a little shady to shift gears a few months before the launch of the game. I had not pre-ordered, and if I had been planning on doing so… I would have probably just ordered through the UPlay store to cut out the middle man. However what just happened with Metro Exodus is in the “shady as fuck” territory, given that the game is roughly two weeks from launch and had been in pre-orders since at least E3. That is way too late in the game to be massively shifting gears like that and THQ Nordic the sub company should have known that they would be screwing things up for THQ Nordic the parent company.
Still I am largely cool with Epic Games store as a vehicle for grabbing games. Sure it feels a little spartan, but it is still a way better store front and client than Origin… a point that has been reminded of late given how much I have had to fiddle with that client thanks to Anthem. The problem I have is with the practice of taking pre-sales way the hell ahead of the games release, because frankly the term pre-order is a lie when it comes to digital software. You are not plunking down $5 to reserve your copy of a game… you are handing over your credit card information and often times being charged up front for the purchase. The thing is… whenever that process starts those vendors should be locked in stone and unchanging. If you didn’t want to support Steam six months ago… then you shouldn’t have allowed sales of your product to begin.
In truth I don’t so much fault Epic for making offers, but the company for taking that offer in Bad Faith. I get a regular stream of offers from people wanting me to place links on this site to whatever the hell it is that they are pushing… often times some sort of a casino. I don’t take the quick money because I feel like it would be violating the trust my readers have in me. I don’t necessarily have a dog in this fight however because while I have been looking forward to Metro Exodus… it was never really a day one title for me and instead something I would play considerably after release. However for those who were harmed by this action… I get the outrage. The biggest part I am confused by however is how they have stated that Steam Pre-Orders would be fulfilled and the game would be updated through that platform… but the game itself would no longer be available there. That just feels really odd and awful.
As far as gaming last night… I got the Blue Mage to 40 through lots of grinding that was relatively boring and not worth talking about. Then I swapped over and played some Destiny 2 where I completed a bunch of bounties… one of which being the weekly for Eververse. I lucked out and managed to pull the Last Word ornament… which will sit there waiting until I complete that quest chain. I did manage to push through the step where you collect a bazillion hive cores or whatever it was we were collecting. I also managed to make a little progress on the Malfeasance where I believe I am on the final step involving killing Guardians and getting invasion kills in Gambit. I had fun… but man movement felt weird after getting used to Anthem.
Speaking of which… who all will I be seeing in the weekend test happening Friday-Sunday? I’m BelghastStern over on Origin so hit me up with a friend invite.
