destiny Archives - Page 48 of 60 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Deforestation

March 16, 2016 by Belghast

So Much Change

So one of the things you will pick up on if you have read my blog for terribly long, is that I don’t exactly handle change well. I can do pretty well with juggling new information or new ideas… but when it comes to fundamental changes in my home or work lives it stresses me the hell out. Basically I need a place of stability somewhere, and right now that is very much not home. There has been this sequence of changes that are all positive, but all worrisome for me personally. The worst of it was during the renovation work on the house, namely the fact that it drug on as long as it did and that there were constantly other people inhabiting my space. Last night however… it reached a new point when I got home from work. We’ve never done much of anything with our backyard, and this year we are trying to change that. We set up the patio off the new door to our bedroom, changed out the deck boxes, got a bunch of new chairs… and even a wind chime (something I have always wanted) all in the name of making the backyard space more usable. I don’t have a great “before” picture of my back yard, but I will be using one from this winter as a point of reference. You see the trees that we have around our back deck? Those are apparently not trees at all, but are intended to be a hedge. The hedge in the photo is supposed to be about a foot and a half or so tall in front of the other hedge that is now a tree. As a result of this we talked to a friend who does landscaping with the hope that he could sort things out for us and get things back under control.

The problem is I was not exactly prepared for the reality of what that meant. There is what looks like the limbs of an entire forest dotting the backyard, and this panoramic shot was taken before they were actually finished. They have since taken out the bulk of the second tree and cut it back hoping that it will start greening up again in a more manageable fashion. Neither my wife or I were really prepared for the fact that we went from having lots of green blocking the view of the green belt behind our house and the neighborhood across the way… to having almost zero. I have faith that things will grow back and the end result will be much better… but man does it look like shit right now. I guess this is what happens when plants are allowed to grow unchecked for twenty years. At some point I guess I need to learn how to trim things like I probably should have been all this time. I grew up in a house without any real landscaping so I guess I just assume that things needed to be left alone and allowed to do whatever they hell they wanted to. This just adds one more stresser to the pile that seems to be growing. On a positive note that garage is awesome again, and I have been going out each night to work out in our gym… that we have not really had access to for a decade it feels. I even went out quickly for a bit after the raid last night to work out some of the excess post raid energy, which was kinda awesome.

War Priest Challenge

Last night was also my second time attending the Axioma Clan Rookie Raid night. I have to admit I have been looking forward to this since going to the last one on the previous Tuesday. While I have been enjoying The Division, there will always be a special place in my heart for Destiny and I have been logging in and playing for a bit pretty much every day. I have to admit part of this has been easy access on my laptop while downstairs using Twisted’s Remote Play app. The only problem that I have so far is the fact that there is no way to really chat over PSN party chat, which means that while I can do random strikes with strangers… I can’t really group up with friends reliably. Otherwise the connectivity is good enough that I could in theory use it all of the time. Now I doubt I would want to trust it for something like the Kings Fall raid when timing is extremely tight on things like the jumping puzzles. Speaking of that I failed considerably less this week… at least on the ships. On the annoying bit where the giant penis shaped pistons push you off of the wall… I think I actually did worse but I am choking that up to the fact that I am normally in bed by the time we got to that area. The raid itself started an hour and a half later than the previous week, which was a bit of a thing… given that I get up at 5:30 each morning, and my friend Squirrel had to get up at 4.

Defiance of Yasmin – 310

Midha’s Reckoning – 308

Kingslayer Shell – 300

War Numen’s Boots – 303

War Numen’s Mark – 305

Sootpearl – 310

Regardless I had a great time last night, and I felt like more of a useful member of the team. I still failed quite a bit at various things… like for example on the Daughters fight I ended up getting torn, which meant I had to do the jumping puzzle. The only problem there being that I had never done the jumping puzzle before. I sadly failed and wiped the raid, but I feel like I could probably do better next time. Of all of the dumbass things that I did the cake is the fact that apparently in the two years I have been playing this game… I never realized that a Titan could cancel their jump by pressing x in midair allowing you to pretty much drop straight down at will. All of this time I have been doing jumping puzzles by trying to time just the perfect amount of momentum to carry me over a gap and still be able to land safely on the other side. Once I was told this… and actually Grokked what people were saying… the jumping puzzles seemed way easier. Once again the loot gods were favorable, because I managed to pick up a bunch more items… the highlight of which is probably a 310 raid sniper rifle. I also managed to pick up a 308 fusion rifle, but given that I have Telesto… and I don’t really even like fusion rifles I will probably eat it to power up another sniper rifle. A couple of the other items will likely get fed to my hunter or warlock to help them get their light up. Now that I can hit 304 light, I need to apparently farm all of the strikes in the hopes of getting Exotics that should have a fairly decent chance of dropping at 310, that I can then turn around and use to power up my other gear.

Sleeper Awakens

March 11, 2016 by Belghast

Real World Rifts

TheDivision 2016-03-10 08-30-19-40

Yesterday I took the day off to manage getting a dumpster delivered. This was one of those odd situations where they would not really give us a time of day for it to be delivered, but instead wanted to call on their way. As a result I felt like I was pretty much in a holding pattern until that event happened, largely because we wanted it dropped off in the yard… not in the drive way. So I treated yesterday like a normal work day, except instead of shuffling off to work after posting a blog post… I booted up and played The Division for a bit. I had been months since I attempted to stream anything, and I was also kicking the tires of the new OBS Studio… which seems to obfuscate a bunch of the settings. So the first few minutes of the stream were apparently a slide show narrated by my voice. After that I fiddled with some settings until I finally landed on a combination of levers that seemed to produce a nice watchable streaming experience. The thing about The Division is that I feel like I am constantly doing something… even if it is not the thing I intended. One of the aspects of Rift that I loved was the fact that the world was constantly spawning rifts and invasions that I had to deal with. It felt new and fresh… up until the point that it didn’t anymore. The happenings in The Division are varied enough that I hope they remain fresh, but I worry that there will be a time where I start avoiding the little things going on around me… just so I can complete the thing I am actually trying to focus on.

The other potential issue due to the dynamic interactions is that most of the time I feel like I am not actually making any progress. I might set off in search of this or that… and get distracted by six things that happen along the way. For example last night I was trying to do one of those missing agent location quests, where you pick up on their trail and follow them to what unfortunately usually ends up being a log book. While on the final step of one of those chains… I also got the shout over the radio that looters were attacking a supply drop. Instead of going over and defending I tried so hard to keep following the trail of clues. All the while I was actually feeling like a horrible person for not helping those NPCs. The game makes me feel the weight of my decisions in a way that most games don’t, and I think it is because this game bridges the uncanny valley gap so damned well. The world I am wandering around feels so real to me… that I could step out of the screen and into the real Manhattan and not really notice the difference. It also makes me wonder how amazing a game like City of Heroes would have been… if it were rendered with this level of detail. Right now I am feeling so completely behind in everything I am doing, but I am currently knocking on the door of level 10, whereas lots of other folks are hitting the level cap. I am not really going to worry about grinding my way up, because really… I don’t want to burn out on this title.

Completing Quests

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The strange thing about yesterday was that I had the entire day to play The Division, but instead I largely focused on working on stuff in Destiny. I have been a slacker when it comes to completing any of the end game content, especially if it requires tedium. For example one of the big goals is collecting Calcified Fragments, and they are hidden damned near everywhere on the Dreadnaught. Most of them can be obtained “in the open” while doing patrol missions, but a handful of them are only exposed during strikes or story missions. Even others involve doing events like Skyburners Deployment Code or Wormsinger Rune. The other night while doing the Kings Fall raid, the nice folks made sure that I got all of my fragments from there, which took a big obstacle out of the way. There is a long drawn out quest called “Hunger Pangs” that involves doing a bunch of silly stuff for Eris Morn. Several of the steps are gated by the number of Calcified Fragments you happen to have collected at that point. To do the final part of the quest you have to have found 45 of the 50 total fragments that currently exist in the game. So yesterday during the day I managed to solo most of the quest line, including a rather tough version of the Undying Mind strike. I was however stuck on the final quest, which is a pretty insane version of the Phobos quest that starts the Taken King. Thankfully Squirrel and Jex helped me out last night, and I now have a shiny new Touch of Malice which will come in handy during the raid.

Destiny_20160311062341

Since they were looking for something else to do… I coerced them into also helping me out with my Sleeper Stimulant quest. I had been on the final stage of this quest since I believe last October, but didn’t have a ready group of people to talk into helping me with it… and had zero luck pugging it. The quest requires you to run a Nightfall level version of the Saber strike, which is somewhat insane to survive given that you get bombarded by Fallen ships at the start. I had always heard that if you could simply manage to make it through the first sequence… that the rest of the strike was really not that bad. I agree at least in part, that is until you reach the final boss. That encounter was absolutely insane… but we managed to take it down pretty easily. Then feeling our Wheaties turned around and attempted the exact same strike as the weekly Nightfall. The combination of Match Game and Fresh Troops made it so much worse. Towards the end we were ping ponging around the room trying to stay alive long enough to resurrect the next fire team member, usually only ending up getting wrecked ourselves in the process. Through a bit of dumb luck and perseverance we managed to pull out the victory on our third attempt at the final encounter. After that I was needing to log, because in truth I only really intended to do the Malice event but ended up staying upstairs on the PlayStation for like three hours. Was a pretty great night and I feel better having knocked a couple of big goals off of my list in the game.

Division Thoughts

March 10, 2016 by Belghast

Busy Week

The last few days have been unexpectedly busy, which is at least a little unfortunate since The Division launched late Monday night/early Tuesday. Work as always gets in the way of my fun, but even more than that there have been various activities that I needed to be coherent for. On Tuesday I had a blast doing the Kings Fall raid in Destiny, but that also meant a night that I could not really devote much time to Division. Last night I had the World of Warcraft raid, and we managed to duplicate our progress from the previous week… this time with fewer ringers. Granted we still had ringers… just about half as many as we did the previous week so the progression felt more “real”. Today I took off work because I am having to coordinate the delivery of a dumpster. Then tonight, Friday night… and Saturday afternoon we will be cleaning out the garage which is our spring break project. It is going to be awesome to reclaim that space because for the last decade it has been a space where we just threw anything that we wanted out of sight. So there is an old dresser out there, a couple of benches… countless insanely large boxes that we didn’t want to haul to the recycling dumpster at that moment. So in theory I think most of it will go really quickly. The only major concern I have is that I also know there are various chemicals out there as well, and have no real clue what to do with those.

All of this said I have still been trying to squeeze in as much Division as I possibly can during the week and have managed to hit level eight so far. I’ve been loving the insane amount of clothing that I have managed to pick up while wandering around. With all of the options I have cobbled together an outfit that feels uniquely me… in a way I have not experienced in a game since The Secret World. The only problem is… the character models themselves are pretty limited. See the glorious beard that I am wearing? That beard is only available for a single face… which seems insane considering that I might want to have a beard like that on any model. A similar situation is the state of glasses in this game… I ended up going with the round Lennon lenses because they were the only ones that I felt actually fit my face. There were however zero options for actual glasses… like corrective style which I would have happily put on my character instead of permanent sunglasses… even in the middle of the night like the above picture. These frustrations however are relatively minor, and after not being able to get into the game on opening night… I’ve played pretty reliably ever since.

Rewarding Exploration

One of my favorite things in video games is to wander around unfettered by obligations and just explore the world. This is my Bethesda games are such crack for me, because I can absolutely jump off the beaten path at any moment… and am generally rewarded for doing so. One of my subtle frustrations of the beta was the fact that so many areas like the sewers and subway system seemed to have no real purpose. In the live game however… these locations are chock full of interesting encounters. On Tuesday night I was playing for a bit ahead of the Destiny raid, and popped into a sewer… largely because in beta these served as ways to get over to the next city block pretty easily. However while down there I encountered a chest that notified me that I had discovered a gun runners cache or something of the sort. When I opened it up, it had a very nice level 4 blue SMG that I have yet to be able to replace at level 8. I feel similarly awesome when I wander through abandoned buildings and explore them looking for treasure, and this time around it is great that I am not constantly hitting walls that I cannot cross into other areas of town. Sure there are absolutely some places where I really should not be yet due to my level… but I like that the game lets me go there anyway.

The problem with being so exploration based… is that I feel like I am getting absolutely nothing accomplished. I can happily wander around the streets doing random encounters that I happen across for hours… and then realize… oh shit I really meant to be doing this or that objective. I am slowly whittling down the objectives that I have open to me… and I think today I will work on some of the missions that involve rescuing this person or taking out that baddie. I remember there being a whole slew of things around the Hudson camp that I did during beta that I probably want to go back and explore. Granted I might be over level for them… but it should be fun in any case. The big thing that I have to talk about this game is that while I kinda wish you had random encounters with other players… after getting some grouping going I finally understand why that isn’t a thing. When we were running around as a group the other night it was a VASTLY different experience to me wandering the streets solo. With Ashgar and Tam, we were constantly running up against huge groups of mobs, and I have to say…. huge groups of cleaners are the absolute worst. Those damned fire bombs that they throw out… I guess I had gotten used to the looter smoke bombs not being that bad. In any case I hope to do some more grouping over the next few nights, but at this point everyone is going to be massively out of my level range I fear. I wonder how the game handles staggered level ranges… I think a lot of the difficulty we had the other night was due to the fact that Ash and I were level 4, and Tam was level 8. So I cannot imagine what it would be like with a larger disparity. All in all however I am still enjoying myself and having a good time.

The King Fell

March 9, 2016 by Belghast

The Ship Boss

Since the launch of Destiny I have had a desire to do the raid content… because that is the sort of thing I would do in any of the MMOs. Unfortunately Destiny never really gained the sort of traction that I would have liked among my circle of friends. Initially Tam and Ash and Kodra all played… but petered out pretty quickly. With the launch of The Taken King there was a bit of a resurgence, but similarly did not last terribly long. Another friend that would have probably happily joined in raid time fun… plays on a completely different console. I had gotten to the point where I kept considering trying to brute force a raid to happen by coaxing various friends who I know that play the game casually into joining me for madness. Then out of the blue my good friend Squirrel almost strong arms me into joining the raid with his clan Axioma, which in truth I jumped at the opportunity. Last night was that raid and I have to say I am hooked. Firstly the group of folks I went in with are amazing, and super chill about newbie failures. I cannot fathom how the first people to do this raid figured out some of the crap that you need to do. I swear it took me a solid thirty minutes to get through the ship encounter, where you have to jump from one ship at the right time as another one is fading from underneath you. All the while Wet was super supportive and coaxing me through the process, and while I felt horrible to taking so long to grasp the jumps… it was kinda awesome that they were willing to let me keep attempting it.

The entire night I was admittedly largely clueless and doing everything I could to listen to the directions and execute them to the best of my ability. When playing with a new group of folks, there is always the strong desire to “not fail miserably”. That said I still managed to cause us to wipe a few times, and regardless of the situation everyone was really relaxed and just kept plugging forward. I have to say this has done more than anything to validate my decision to follow Squirrel and jump clans, because it seems like this really is an amazing group of folks. I am just floored that I have gone from being a pre-raid super casual, to having defeated Oryx in a single night. I fully expected the rookie night raid thing to be a much harder slog, but I am guessing we had more than enough ringers to make the entire process feel more manageable. I would happily sign up for this every week, and while the loot is a huge draw… I really enjoyed the process of doing the fights and want to see them keep going more smoothly. My favorite of the fights was probably Golgoroth just because there is something special about taking down a jump sized Ogre. We managed to do the “challenge” version of Oryx… which suddenly makes me wonder just what the challenge versions of the other bosses are. I somewhat doubt that I will be able to attend the hard mode content, but I have to say normal mode was a freaking blast.

Shining Light

I think the thing that I appreciate the most about the King’s Fall encounter is the way that even though I was a first timer… I was still forced to do “real” mechanics. Sure the fact that everyone else was adept at the fights gave me significant more wiggle room, but I still had to do a job in the encounters. Being “carried” is not nearly the thing that it is in other games. For example when I got my Moose in World of Warcraft… my friends in the Praetorian Guard straight up carried me to victory. You could have completely removed my warm body from the equation and none of the fights would have gone any differently. Last night it felt like I had a purpose and I had a role to play, and when I failed to complete my assigned task… we wiped or at the very list struggled for a bit. I think this is largely because of the small raid size of only having six players. The bigger the raid the more padding, and just like in a ten player raid in WoW everyone has to be on point to succeed at a fight. We apparently took roughly three hours to clear the entire raid, but I have to say that the time flew by because all of it was fresh and new and exciting. I am sure the more you do this the less that will be the case, but for right now I am completely enamored with these encounters.

Scroll of Eimin-Tin – 310 Artifact

War Numen’s Mark – 307 Mark

Anguish of Drystan – 310 Auto

Smite of Merain – 310 Pulse

More amazing than pretty much anything however is the fact that I am finally off high center in this game and now have breached the 300 light barrier. You have to understand that I have been struggling bit by bit to get over the 300 light barrier for roughly six months in this game. Now admittedly that is not six months of constant play, but at very least I am spending a little bit of time on my titan every single week. Honestly after having played this game for as long and as often as I have… I am not sure there really is a viable way to hit 300 light apart from the raid. Above is a gallery of the items that I ended up snagging. The only thing not shown is a 300 ghost shell, which I have subsequently passed on to my hunter since I had a better option already on my Titan. The highlight of the evening however is the two weapon drops from Oryx. I guess because we did the challenge mode we were guaranteed a weapon, and I just happened to roll well and get one from the other chest also. Having both the raid Pulse Rifle and Auto Rifle would have honestly been the two weapons I would have chose had I been able to snag any of the ones available. Those tend to be my two favorite weapon types in Destiny, and while I have heard that the Auto rifle is less than amazing…. I want to give it a shot for myself. Basically over the next week I need to spend some time leveling all the new stuff that I managed to pick up. It was one hell of a night, and I greatly thank the Axioma Clan folks for taking me with them.