Axioma Clan
This weekend largely was a weekend for playing Destiny, or at the very least this was the primary activity for Sunday. The whole sequence of events started when my friend Squirrel mentioned that it was Black Spindle day, and that we needed to get that done. Which itself is a continuation of a conversation I had yesterday with him and several members of his clan. I mentioned it at the tail end of Saturday’s post, but one of the activities that I have really wanted to do over in Destiny is the Oryx raid. One of the challenges seems to be that you get stuck trying to get to 300 light level without access to the much higher light level raid items. For what feels like six months I have been hovering around 298 light, with no amount of activity seeming to push me over that barrier. As a result when Squirrel invited me to partake of a Tuesday night “newbie” raid for King’s Fall I jumped at the chance. Granted Tuesday night is also the prime night for playing The Division since it launches what I believe is essentially midnight EST tonight. That said I am more than happy to blow off that first night of a new game to be able to do the thing that I have been really wanting to do in Destiny. It had gotten to the point where I was going to try and twist a bunch of arms to try and get them to build a raid team to at the very least let me see the content. The prospect of being able to attend a more regular thing however… seems pretty great. It probably won’t be something I can do every week, but this week works out nicely.
So we zoom forward to yesterday, and I get the message that it is Black Spindle day. Now when I got this message it was like 8 in the morning and I was still having to wrap up the post production stuff for AggroChat, and then knock out my own Aggronaut blog post. Sadly by the time I finished everything… the Australian leader of the clan had gone to bed, and we were left with the normal non-primetime Sunday morning group of players. That did not stop Squirrel and I from running a Nightfall and a ton of Heroics back to back. From all of those strikes I managed to pick up a couple of decent exotics, and a few blues that are worthy of feeding into other things. I picked up Claws of Ahamkara for the Warlock, which gives me an extra melee attack which is always amazing. For the titan I picked up a new favorite chest piece, the Armamentarium which gives me an extra grenade. Finally I picked up the above weapon, the Thunderlord which fills a hole in my itemization that I had been looking for. I snagged Truth the rocket launcher and am extremely happy with it, but I had been wanting an Exotic Heavy Machine Gun… and bam I manage to pick one up today. Now I just need to go through the frustration of doing crucible with a sword to finish getting my exotic sword there.
The Spindle Hunt
The problem with yesterday is that I had a fixed time frame that I could do things in. I ultimately needed to be downstairs by 8 pm and so I could wrap some things up, and preferably be in bed at a decent hour. That gave me all day yesterday, but unfortunately for most of the time we were online we lacked a viable third. I am so thankful to Squirrel for the constant attempt to stir the chat and try and find someone. You might have noticed that among other things this weekend you will see that I now have the “Axioma” tag under my name, so that is something that happened as well. During all of my running around I also managed to get another level of Dead Orbit faction which rewarded me the sweet ship that you can see in the above image. Both of us ended up needing to take breaks every few hours, to go off and do a small bit of adulting here and there. The funny thing is… it is amazing how fast two hours can just evaporate when you are chain running heroics. It doesn’t seem like each of them takes that long, but when you stack a bunch of them end to end it really adds up. Finally around 5:30 we managed to get a spindle group together, which meant I needed to quickly learn the role of the Defender Titan on the fight. Please note… while I have a Defender spec, I don’t often play in it other than PVP… and even then its just for the Helm of Saint-14 procs that stun people in my bubbles. I am neither proficient or even effective as one most of the time… so I had a lot of ground to catch up.
We grabbed another Axioma member Jex who was also awesome in helping me sort out what I should be doing. For those who don’t understand the Black Spindle, it is an exotic sniper rifle that comes from the end of a daily heroic mission. The gotcha is that you have to do some stuff that is not intended to actually get it, and it is hands down the roughest thing I have done in this game so far. Essentially at the end of the normal mission you have to rush out of the final chamber and down a series of corridors, where you can’t really fight anything… but instead just need to keep moving forward and avoiding taking as much damage as you can. I believe there is some sort of time limit that you are under during that part, and you have to reach another area before it is considered safe and you can ease up a bit. You have essentially moved into the area where another strike takes place… and from there you proceed as normal for a few rooms until finally you take a detour down the path that would normally lead to the Ketch in the Shadow Thief strike. Now is where the difficult part begins… you take the elevator up into the Ketch and when you enter the first room with mobs, a timer starts. You have ten minutes to get to the end of the strike, take down the boss and destroy all of the taken. We were so damned close… and on my last attempt we literally had TWO mobs up when the timer ran out. There are a bunch of things that I can do to help… namely get my damned exotic sword so that the next time this is available it will be a little easier. Similarly I hope I pick up some gear in the raid on Tuesday so that my overall light level will be higher. I was frustrated that I felt like given another attempt or two… we would have gotten it. However I had pretty much all day to make attempts and simply ran out of time before I needed to pop off the PS4. There will always be a next time.
Yesterday was an extremely strange day, because an event happened that was largely unexpected. As I have talked about over the last several months, my laptop is definitely seeing its age. At the time I got it, it was an amazing power house of gaming with dual GT 650m video cards… that could pretty much run whatever I happened to throw at it. The problem is the laptop is from 2012, and in that time a lot of stuff has changed and we have gone through three generations of video cards. So long as games were largely based on the PS3/Xbox 360 architecture everything was peachy, but as games dropped support for that generation and started to focus on the PS4/Xbox One it began to struggle. The first game I can remember that it flat out would not run in a way that I could stand to play it… was Dragon Age: Inquisition which is shockingly taxing on a video card… especially one of this age. Then came Fallout 4… and a long string of games that I had to run at 720p with greatly stripped down resolution options to get them to run at all. So since before Christmas I had been watching the local Craigslist to see if there were any options out on the market that could be snatched up on the cheap. I have a mixed past when it comes to Craigslist, because I have been able to get some insane deals like a Playstation 4 in early 2014 for only $200. I have also gotten insane run around that seemed to last for weeks over a couple of laptops that the other party simply flaked out on.
At some point last year, lots of folks in my feed showed up with this Japanese app on their phones called Neko Atsume. From what I can tell it roughly translates to Cat Collector, and it is one of those passive things that I tend to refer as a “maintenance game”. The thing is…. I like cats. In fact as I write this post I have one on either end of my desk sleeping on their blankets. I for the most part avoided the game until recently when for some strange reason I decided to give it an install. Firstly I’ve talked about my problems with mobile gaming in general. I tend to install a game, play it a few times… and then never touch it again. Largely my life is not exactly mobile friendly, and if I have access to games…. I am generally at home when I can use a more traditional gaming system. This game however… fits that realm of do something… leave it sit for awhile… check back in on progress for a minute or two. I’ve found myself popping it open while waiting on a meeting to start, and the jolt of happy kittehs doing stuff seems to help my mental state.
