destiny Archives - Page 42 of 60 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Combo Breaker

May 20, 2016 by Belghast

Ending the Streak

The other day I talked about how the three plus year streak has been looming over my head like this impassable object. After long thought I’ve decided that the sooner I break it the better, and as a result I will not be making posts this weekend. I mean that is in part a lie since I will be posting over on AggroChat Sunday morning in the form of our weekly episode. However tomorrow morning I am going to chill out, and eat my breakfast in peace with zero thought of what the hell I am going to post that morning. That is at least the theory… I have a feeling that in practice it is going to be a lot harder to NOT post than it is to post. The end goal is basically to reach a point where I am posting a new post every workday morning, so I can continue the routine of drink coffee and write about stuff. That means weekends and holidays I get to myself, or more than likely it just means I start gaming a little earlier on those days. My hope is that some time off is actually going to present topics that I want to talk about, rather than trying to wrack my brain for a new post.

I have to tell you I am a little nervous about this “new experiment” following up the previous “grand experiment”. It makes solid sense to just post week days since those are the days that folks generally read on. However at this point I am just used to the comfortable routine. So in theory the next time you will hear from me is Monday morning. As far as my weekend plans… I think I have a pretty chill one ahead of me. Tonight may or may not be a thoroughly awkward family dinner, largely because I have not decided if I am actually going or not. We just had one of these a few weeks back, but there is a family member in town that folks have not seen in some cases years… so folks are pulling together an impromptu dinner. Past that I am hoping the report of non-stop rain is exaggerated and I get to spend a little time out on the back porch. I have bubbles that need blowing. Last weekend I went to a birthday/adoption party and they had bubbles for the kids… and it made me remember just how damned much I love blowing bubbles. So I bought myself a small bottle of the soapy mess for hanging out on the back porch. Viva adulthood and the ability to buy your own damned toys!

Light Level Cap

It has been a little over a month since I last set foot in the Kings Fall raid, or at least it seems like it. There was a bit of a change around that ended up with Squirrel trying to start an earlier raid team beginning at 8 pm which is more sane and rational for those of us who get up at 5 in the morning for work. However that never really took off in the fashion that we had hoped, and it also lead for the official “rookie” raid night to get moved to Wednesdays. As a result of this switcheroo I simply didn’t raid for several weeks, and this week was my first time signing up again largely on the promise of a “guaranteed” 335 artifact from the War Priest Challenge Mode. Unfortunately that Guarantee like oh so many things in Destiny, was not really set in stone and I wound up getting yet another damned 334 item. I did however have a lot of fun running the raid, and after some time away from it all of the jumping puzzles that stress me out so much didn’t seem quite so bad. I even managed to run the orb on sisters without screwing up too badly.

Last night Squirrel, Jex and I had what has become somewhat of a tradition… a night of Challenge of Elders and whatever the hell else any of us happened to need. So on paper this should have been one of the easiest weeks, with precision shot bonus experience. However in many cases we struggled to survive and I think it was largely the inclusion of “fresh troops” into the mix. I died so damned many times last night, and we were just shy of being able to get to the 90,000 bonus in two rounds. I would have felt bad about my performance were it not for the fact that both Jex and Squirrel died quite a bit as well. The frustrating thing about CoE is it has become one of those “unskippable” activities each week because it is one of the few reliable means of getting 335 loot. I say that… however almost every single item I got this week was a damned 334, which is completely maddening. There seems to be some bug that hits where instead of giving you upgrades it starts giving you side grades. That said I did manage to get a Titan Mark as end of match loot, and then after CoE we went to the Dreadnaught for some Court of Oryx. After summing three Tier 3 events… the final one dropped my 335 Artifact taking me to the current light level cap. This is extremely exciting for me, because this represents the first time in my history playing this game that I have EVER been capped on light. Special thanks to Squirrel, Jex, Wet and the entire Axioma Clan for helping me get here.

Toasty on MMORPGs

May 5, 2016 by Belghast

The Decline

One of the more interesting trends that I have picked up on, has to do with my own blog. It feels like the more I talk about Destiny, the lower my reader numbers dip. I guess it makes sense, as I started this blog out with World of Warcraft and moved towards other MMORPGs as well. Destiny has a slightly different audience and not necessarily the sort of one that really reads blogs. The Destiny community is largely contained within a combination of Reddit, Twitch and YouTube. I don’t have a lot to say about this, but I just found it interesting. On one hand I hate that I am alienating a bunch of readers, and on the other hand in order for me to keep doing this daily blogging thing… I have to be writing about what is interesting me. At this very moment that is Destiny and Diablo, and nothing much in the traditional MMO camp. Now I have logged into a bunch of MMOs in the last few months, but none of them really seemed to hold my attention past that initial login. Each time there was something that would ultimately cause me to log out. It might be that my bags were a mess, or that I couldn’t remember what I was last doing. Ultimately I found a ready excuse and used it to “nope” the hell out of the game. The problem however I think is somewhere in me.

Right now I am finding myself enjoying games that shower me in loot, and games that allow me to have engaging solo experiences. Granted I have been spending a lot of time mooching off of folks as they run high end content in Diablo 3, but when I log into that game I can go off and do something by myself that feels like I am moving towards some goal. In Destiny no matter what I do I can always be working on getting that next faction package, or even spending time in the crucible hoping for that next 335 item. These two games specifically play extremely well by myself or with friends, and that is just something that I can’t say for MMORPGs right now. In most cases the only real way to get good gear is through raiding, and that takes a time commitment I am just not willing to do right now. There is no path for me to piddle my way to victory, and at the moment I don’t want to commit to much more than that. Raiding in Destiny has felt far more “à la carte” and I think the small six player raid size helps that. It seems easy to pull together a raid group, and even easier to pull together a three player team. For example we spent last night doing Challenge of Elders and it honestly felt just as engaging and rewarding as doing an MMORPG raid group.

Burnt Out Genre

For awhile now I have kept thinking that sooner or later I will get over this funk. That I will get that drive to go off and play an MMORPG. For example I really want to have the desire to play Final Fantasy XIV and to “get the band back together”. However there is just some wall keeping me from getting back into it and enjoying it. I’ve patched up the client a few times, but I know when I do log in… someone is going to do the “Bels Back!” thing and I will feel guilty when I log out a few minutes later because I and confused as to what to do. It is not a time issue, because I still have the same amount of time I ever did… it seems to be an attention span issue. Diablo 3 and Destiny both reward me for spending ANY time with them… and there is always an explosion of shiny colored loot just waiting on me around the corner. The grind of an MMO is a much more slow burn, with large gaps of time between those moments of excitement. For years I played MMORPGs as a way to hang out with friends, but thanks to tools like Slack, Discord, and Band… I can take my group of friends with me wherever I happen to go. I no longer need to rely on the MMO as a chat client, and when that happened I guess the games lost a part of their hold on me.

I guess it hit me last night when technically I was scheduled to be raiding in World of Warcraft, and I didn’t even remember that it was a thing I was supposed to be doing. The leader said over chat that I was just burnt out on WoW, which is a bit true… but its more than that. I feel like I am burnt out on MMOs in general. I’ve been rabidly playing this one genre since 2000, and I feel like maybe I just need other types of games in my life. The parts of the MMO that I really liked, which were the acquisition of new stuff and the feeling of constantly evolving your persistent character… those things have been exported to pretty much every single genre out there. I guess I realized this was happening when nothing that was coming out, that actually excited me… was an MMO. There are plenty of things to be excited for out there, and I think Black Desert is one of those games that I would have loved… were I not over-saturated on MMORPGs. I am not really sure if I have a point this morning. It sucks that I am driving away readers, but I just don’t think I can write with the same love and excitement that I used to about MMORPGs right now. I keep hoping at some point I will climb out of this hole, and be able to log into Final Fantasy XIV and be excited again for story and world building, However in the meantime… you are probably going to see a lot more talk of Diablo 3 and Destiny because that is where my attention and excitement has landed.

A Little Closer

May 4, 2016 by Belghast

Best Laid Plans

I had these grand plans for last night, and as is always the case when I seem to plan something… that is precisely what won’t actually happen. The original goal was to pop into Destiny “for a bit” and get CoE finished on my Titan for the week, so that I could end up doing it later in the week on both the Warlock and Hunter. I’ve managed to get the light levels up on both enough to be able to start getting decent loot. The other goal was to chill out downstairs and play some more Diablo 3 since I am one piece of gear away from being able to rock the Invoker set over the Akkhan set, which I think is going to improve my quality of life greatly. That said I am starting to maybe get the hang of playing Akkhan but still missing several items that make the build really viable. I am however loving the flail that gives me an army of phalanxes to run around with me. I think maybe that is ultimately going to be the best option for running with the Akkhan set since they seem to shred everything in my path. I did get to play a little Overwatch last night however when my friend Tamrielo got home, and was pleasantly surprised that he too enjoys the game. I am not sure if he is really a convert but it at least gets why the game feels better than Team Fortress 2, which was something I had trouble putting into words. I managed to get in a few matches before my wife got home, and we ended up walking to go get dinner.

When we got back I started in with the Destiny bounties, and ultimately ran a Prison of Elders to get my weekly loot box for completing that activity. Last week I experienced a glitch, where after running a CoE I could not seem to be able to get the loot box, so I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. From this point onwards it was me trying to get Jex and Squirrel together in the same group at the same time, which is not something that happened until about 8:30. This weeks Challenge of Elders is a little tougher than past examples because the bonus damage and bonus scoring have no real synergy. For example in past weeks you had bonus damage from primary weapons, and bonus scoring from headshots… so those two worked nicely with you simply focusing on primary weapon headshots. This time around the bonus damage was melee based, but the bonus scoring was super kills. Meaning we spent a good deal of time wandering around waiting for our super bars to tick up so that we could get bonus scoring. We managed to get the 30,000 score step pretty easily in our first attempt, but did not score high enough to be able to get the 90,000 within two matches.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

It was round about this time that the monkey wrench was thrown into the works, as Squirrel had signed up for the Crota’s End retro raid. So Jex and I ended up getting pulled along after our first Challenge of Elders match into that. Other than simply not being what I had planned to spend my night doing, I was totally down with this because I had never seen that raid. For the most part I think I did okay and didn’t screw anything up horribly. One of the group was hunting for the Crux of Crota that is used in the long quest chain that ultimately winds up rewarding you the Necrochasm Auto Rifle. As a result we saved off a number of check points, which meant jumping off the back wall into the abyss so many times. However this also meant that instead of just doing the raid on my Titan I was able to swap to multiple characters and get lots of stuff. The only negative here is that apparently you get rewarded the two shaders and emblem ever single time you kill Crota if they were not already in your inventory. What I did find odd is that every single time the Word of Crota hand cannon dropped, but with slightly different perks. The only potential gotcha here was that I had to break out a rocket launcher with tracking and/or the horseshoes and hand grenades perk. Thankfully I had a truth, that I ultimately leveled up… even though I never actually use rocket launchers.

In other news I am now down to the point where I need a helm, primary, class item, and artifact at 335 to max out. So the end result allows me to sit fairly comfortably at 334, which should help quite a bit when getting drops. As far as Challenge of Elders loot, I wound up getting arms and another copy of the Her Fury sniper rifle with crappier stats than the one I have been using. Speaking of sniper rifles this seems to be my week to get them, because I also managed to pull a LDR 5001 from a Vanguard package. This seems to be the sniper that a lot of the youtubers are actively hunting god rolls for, but I don’t even know for certain what a god roll would look like. The one I got has Partial Refund, High Caliber Rounds, and Firefly which is decent… but I would have rather had triple tap somewhere in there because that comes in so damned handy for boss fights. It is probably a great option for like heroic strikes or non-boss PVE content, but not having triple tap really places it below my existing 1000 Yard Stare or Her Fury. The main reason why I was interested at all is just because it is really damned cool looking. Also you can see from the above ship shot that I managed to get a ship from Variks, which for whatever reason I thought was a Trial of Osiris ship when I had seen people using it. Was ultimately a really great night, just one that didn’t got as planned. That however is perfectly okay because sometimes the end result is much better.

Flowers and Rank 5s

May 2, 2016 by Belghast

Backyard Whim

One of the interesting developments that has happened this summer is that we are spending a good deal more time outside than we have ever before. I mean we have lived in our house for seventeen years now… and we’ve never really taken advantage of our backyard. My wife and I tried to sort out why this was, and I think in truth it was that the back of our house looked bad. Before moving in during the inspections they found a lot of termite damage on the wooden siding, and the bulk of this was located on the back of the house. The repair job looked adequate at first, but as it aged… the back wall ended up looking like a patchwork quilt that even with a fresh coat of paint just looked “wrong”. So in many ways I think it just put us off from being outside and having to look at it. With the recent renovations and new siding, we also had a door installed off of the bedroom. Years ago we created a quick and dirty patio with pavers, and now it feels like everything has finally come together. Sunday morning for example by the time I had woken up and gotten out of bed, my wife was already on the patio off the bedroom reading. There have been many times during the weekends that we end up eating lunch on the back patio as well.

Now I am not exactly certain where it came from… but recently we have talked about trying to put flowers sprinkled around the backyard. Granted we have always had a brown thumb, but this resurgence of backyarding… has made us want to at least try it. This reached a boiling point Saturday when while running errands we found a couple of planters that we really liked at Sam’s Club, and you can see one of them in the foreground of the above image. Given that Sams always has a rotating stock we went ahead and picked them up, thinking that if we waited they probably wouldn’t have two of the color we wanted later. Now I had zero intention of doing anything with them this weekend… I mean because I had Iron Banner and Diablo Season 6 to play. However before I knew it Sunday we were making a trip to go get rock and potting soil, and plants. We are massively cheating in that the start of each of the pots is a hanging plant, but so far so good. Now we just have to make sure they keep watered, but the hope is that since we are spending so much time out in the backyard anyway… that it won’t be that big of a deal. For those that are curious I created a nifty panoramic shot of the entire back yard.

Rank 5 For All

Even though we spent a chunk of the afternoon working on flowers and such, I still managed to make it upstairs on the PS4 by around 4pm. This allowed me some dedicated time to play the Warlock, and push forward towards Iron Banner rank 5. I closed with the weekend with my Titan and 333 light, Hunter at 324 and Warlock also at 324 which is significant movement. I have a feeling that those last two points of light on the Titan are going to end up being pure hell. However on a similar photo from the 22nd… I was sitting at 324 on the Titan, and 314 and 304 on the Hunter and Warlock respectively. So I have to say… I am pretty damned pumped about the rapid progress. The Iron Banner as a whole was very good to me, especially in the equippable gear and infusion material categories. I managed to get all of the available gear for this week, minus a pair of legs for the Warlock. There are numerous copies of the Auto Rifle, Rocket Launcher, and even managed to pick up a sidearm and sniper rifle from Rank 5 packages. It has been interesting playing all three classes this weekend, and I have to say that in truth… I think maybe the Warlock and Hunter are just inherently better at crucible than my Titan. It feels like they have a lot more tricks up their sleeve, whereas the Titan is just pure brute force. Warlock Blink seems to be the best escape method for getting out of an engagement, and Hunter throwing knives seems to be the best finishing move ever.

As far as the sniper rifle goes that I managed to pick up, I am not exactly a huge fan. It has Eye of the Storm, Speed Reload and Spray and Play which in theory would make it an insanely fast sniper rifle, but given its low impact… I question how useful it really is. For crucible at least you would have to land so many shots to make the kill, and it is hard enough to nail a single shot let along multiple at range. I will probably end up holding onto it just because it looks really cool, but I have a feeling that sooner or later this will get infused into something else to bring up its light levels. As far as new snipers go, I am still a much bigger fan of the 333 Her Fury that I managed to pick up from my Challenge of Elders this week. High impact, paired with Triple Tap and Armor Piercing rounds makes it something enjoyable to use. Tonight I have plans to hang out upstairs at least for a bit and try my luck at getting more of that tasty Iron Banner loot. It would be amazing if before the end of the weekend I manage to get more of the 335 items to help push up other gear. As far as the rest of my Destiny schedule for this week it feels a little up in the air. I did not set foot into Kings Fall last week, and I would really love to remedy that this week. The thing that sucks is that I am now in a position where the only benefit I will see is from a hard mode run, given that all three of my characters are now over the 320 light level that normal drops.