destiny Archives - Page 15 of 48 - 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.

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.

Destiny 2: Favorite Weapons So Far

September 18, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a weird mix of leveling characters and slowly incrementing that light level up there. Saturday I spent most of my time working on the Warlock and I managed to get the light level up to 282, then I turned around Sunday and caught my titan main up and can now hit 283 if I swap a bunch of gear around. I potentially should have taken a new screenshot this morning, but largely I took this one to show off the gear that I finally stabilized with, or at least enough to feel like I could use some shaders to blend everything together. I’ve been using the Doom Fang Pauldrons as my exotic armor piece because of the benefits it gives to Sentinel. The shield throw is rather potent and giving me an ability to do more than one per super is something I can seriously get behind. The rest is a blend of Wild Wood armor and Kerak Type 2, which gives me the sort of heavily armored but also a bit piecemeal look that I was going for that the Doom Fang Pauldrons already had. Another thing that I spent a significant amount of time was sitting on Io and testing weapons out trying to determine what I want to keep and what I absolutely hate to use and can shard. As far as the “why Io” part it just happened to be where I was when I decided to start down this rabbit hole. The end result is that my vault is greatly less cluttered, and that I have settled on a number of what I consider my favorite weapons. I thought this morning I would talk about some of them.

Scathelock is the weapon that I keep going back to and for all intents and purposes can be called my primary gun. I loved this weapon in the beta and one of my happiest moments was when I got my first copy from Devrim Kay, and quite honestly from that point on its been in pretty heavy rotation. It is really hard to compare weapons from Destiny 2 to Destiny 1 but as far as feel goes this is somewhere in the range of my beloved God Roll Haakon’s Hatchet and Zhalo Supercell. It is extremely fast and relatively accurate… and if you land precision shots you can melt four or five oncoming minion type mobs without reloading. The only negative is that there is sometimes this weird pull to one side… which can sometimes make it a bit hard to track mobs that are moving. However I have learned to adjust and completely love this weapon, especially with the cool copper and black shader setup that I am rocking right now.

The other weapon that has become my default energy slot item is the MIDA Mini Tool. You get this weapon as part of the new quest chain that ultimately leads to the MIDA Multi Tool, and I absolutely love the look of it. My default crucible loadout tends to be auto rifle and submachinegun, and for the most part I tend to treat subs as the new shotgun. They offer you a way to completely melt a target at close range in a very short period of time. As far as for PVE purposes, this also melts enemy shields and tends to be a bit more accurate than the average submachinegun is. You are going to use this in close to medium range engagements however, because there is no way you are accurately hitting something across the room from you. This thing is awesome for melting Vex Minotaurs and Cabal Centurions specifically.

Yesterday I heard this weapon referred to as the new Gjallarhorn, and while in some ways I agree with that… I am afraid no weapon in Destiny 2 is ever going to be nearly as powerful as the Gjallarhorn was. Merciless however comes really close and if you absolutely need to destroy a boss target, then this thing is going to be your go to. It has a really tight cluster of shots as far as Fusion rifles go and this means that more than like a single shot is going to take down any non-boss yellow bar. When it comes to bosses however that’s where the perks of this weapon really shine. I talked about this a little Friday when I did my Xur post, but Conserve Momentum is the exotic perk and it causes non-lethal hits to speed up the weapons charge rate. This is EXTREMELY noticeable and after a few hits the weapon starts to feel more like a pulse rifle than a fusion rifle. It is going to be extremely useful for fights where you have a limited burn window to take down as much ammo off the boss as possible, and if you use hunter dodge or titan shield reload you can keep up the damage without breaking the effect. I’ve managed to get a couple of these so far from Exotics and I have a feeling as we go deeper into the game this is going to be that weapon everyone wished they had gotten when Xur sold it.

I am really not much of a fan of scout rifles in general. They are great for using as a psuedo sniper rifle, but I would just much rather have a harder hitting hand cannon or a more buzzsaw like auto rifle to whittle down mobs. The Manannan sorta plants itself in a territory that I actually really enjoy using. Once again it is super hard to compare a weapon stat for stat to Destiny 1, but this feels like a much harder hitting Year 2 Hung Jury SR4. Explosive payload makes this weapon help quite a bit on add duty which is where I feel scouts tend to fall down a bit next to the weapons I am used to using. It’s weird, that during Destiny 1 I was not really a big fan of most of the Omolon weapons… and WAS a huge fake of Hakke. This time around it is pretty much the exact opposite… where I am finding myself sharding very few Omolon weapons and sharding almost every single Hakke item I get my hands on.

Speaking of Hakke weapons… here is one that has absolutely earned its slot in my inventory. Hawthorne’s Field-Forged Shotgun… is a mouthful but so far it is hands down the best shotgun I have come across. The primary reason being that just like Destiny 1… Full Auto is where it is at and this thing is super useful for pouring a bunch of hits into a boss in quick succession. It has shockingly decent range and a decent magazine size for a shotgun. I’ve sharded a bunch of shotguns because they never really gave me much reason to use them… and I was completely spoiled by Destiny 1 weapons like the Invective or Party Crasher +1. This shotgun however absolutely sits nicely on the same level as those weapons, and if you get it… you might think twice before tossing it aside as you are probably not going to find a better shotty.

I’m going to close things out with something that I happened to find while cleaning out my vault, that I apparently hurriedly tossed in there without really trying it out. This is another one of the few Hakke weapons that I have kept and I did so largely because this hand cannon has damned near maxed out impact at 92 out of 100. The only weapon I have with that same stat is the exotic Sturm… that I just picked up and have yet to really use much. Basically think of this weapon as a Legendary Sturm much the same way as Eyasluna from Destiny 1 was a Legendary version of Hawkmoon. If I had to choose between using Sturm and using Merciless… then I am absolutely going to be equipping Pribina-D and having that exotic in the heavy slot. More than anything though this weapon proves that you should in theory at least give some test time to every single legendary weapon that comes across your path. You are going to find some gems that at first glance you thought nothing about.