fps Archives - Page 10 of 22 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Faction Rally 1: DO Edition

October 3, 2017 by Belghast

Once again by the time this post comes out it is going to likely be of zero use to anyone, because if I am understanding the Faction Rally correctly… it would have just ended and we will be entering the phase where a winner will be chosen. I am doing something super dangerous in that I am staging this content on the weekend to post Monday and Tuesday. So by the time this actually goes live we should know which weapon we have available. I took the route of choosing a different faction for each character, and this has also given me the opportunity to collect all twelve unique faction based drops that are available from packages. Yesterday I wrote about New Monarchy, and last week about Future War Cult… so today is the time to talk about everyone’s favorite chromatically challenged faction… Dead Orbit. This faction will always have a special place in my heard due to the fact that the majority of my time playing Destiny… I was pledged to Arach Jalaal desperately hunting that cool emblem with the axes. In Destiny 2… I was swayed by just how damned good the weapon offering was in the Future War Cult camp. That said there is at least one gem in this lineup, but your mileage may vary.

Let me get this out of the way first. I do not like sidearms… they have always felt like crappier faster firing versions of hand cannons. In Destiny 1 the only time I broke one out and used it… was when I was working on a bounty that required me to get X number of kills with a specific damage type weapon that was not Arc. Even then the only reason why I used a Sidearm was simply because of the extreme ammo reserves they tended to have. With Destiny 2 they introduced a new class of Sidearm that burst fires… which quickly caused me to start ignoring every single firing gun out there. So needless to say the Eleventh Hour has a bunch of strikes against it out of the gate, but in truth it does have a few things going for it. This weapon is essentially a fast firing low impact weapon… that has an insane upwards kick if you are firing it as fast as you can pull the trigger. That said if you are slowing down and placing your shots a little more carefully this can two precision shot most minions and with a 17 shot magazine… you can pour through a bunch. Where this starts to become useful is the fact that it has Rampage perk giving you a stacking damage buff each time you take down a target up to three. I could see this being extremely good for clearing out thralls or something of the sort. The problem I have though is that there are just dozens of energy slot weapons that I would rather use than this. If you enjoy using it then by all means do so… it just doesn’t really have a place in my world and I will likely shard it once I have finished writing this review.

This is a fairly bizarre shotgun offering, and I am going to try and unpack why. First off this is an extremely hard hitting, slow rate of fire weapon with abysmal range and reload speeds that are amplified by the poor handling stat. What it does well is hit really hard… a single time. So if you think you can one-shot a target with this shotgun then it is probably going to do a great job of it. Now if you combine the tactical mag perk… with the field prep perk the equation starts to change a bit and while crouched you can reload this weapon extremely fast. Now initially I thought… maybe this works while sliding but after thirty minutes of trying to make this work it seems like you just straight up cannot reload while in the slide motion. So functionally in order to do this in the heat of battle I would probably slide behind some cover, reload quickly and then get back into the action. Where the gun shines however is that it has a pretty deep well to draw from in that if you choose specific perks you can have 6 in the magazine and 12 in reserve. For PVE this seems like a perfectly reasonable shotgun… but for PVP I think it is going to lose out every time to one of the full auto options. The best part though is the look and the sound it makes when it fires a shell.

I feel like Pulse Rifles are just in a really awkward place in Destiny 2. They have always lived in this weird place between scout rifles and auto rifles… and in the current meta both are undeniably in better places than this weird hybrid. Three Graves currently lives in the slowest rate of fire and highest impact flavor of pulse rifle, and it brings with it some really nice stability. What it severely lacks however is handling and reload speed… giving the gun a really sluggish feel as you shift between hip and ads modes. The outlaw perk can help with the reload speed because it decreases reload time after a precision kill… which is relatively easy to do given how much damage this thing puts out and how stable it is. The thing that never really gets better though is the handling… so for me to feel comfortable with this weapon I would need to slot in some mods to improve that. The biggest obstacle this weapon has is the fact that I have Innaugural Address the raid pulse… that just feels better to use.

Tons of players love The Old Fashioned, in fact it has shown up on a ton of the top X weapons in Destiny 2 lists. I am not one of those players, and when I first saw Dire Promise in the drop list for Dead Orbit I was not extremely hopeful. There are however a bunch of tweaks that have been made to this weapon that make it feel vastly different than the weapon that is so commonly sharded by me that I didn’t even have one available to directly compare against. Functionally you are losing a little impact and range, and gaining a ton of stability and handing as well as a tiny bit of reload speed as well as 2 bullets in the magazine. As far as perks… you are losing Kill Clip and gaining one of my favorites from Destiny 1… Triple Tap which is shockingly hard to find on a D2 hand cannon. If you feel like you can sacrifice a little stability… you can even push this gun into the 13 in the magazine club. This means that if you can consistently hit precision shots… you could in theory fire 17 78 impact shots without reloading… meaning that is a ton of damage in a very short period of time. While I doubt this is going to dislodge either Better Devils or True Prophecy as my Hand Cannon of choice… this is definitely going to be something I swap to situationally.

Now that you have seen all of the weapons available from the Faction Rally this go round… what are your thoughts? Do you like me feel like Future War Cult had the strongest offerings or are you thinking I short changed one of the other factions?

Faction Rally 1: NM Edition

October 2, 2017 by Belghast

Admittedly by the time I post this it will be of extremely limited benefit given that as far as I understand the Faction Rally should in theory reset on Tuesday. For the unindoctrinated the Faction Rally is this event happening currently in Destiny 2 that involved choosing one of the three factions from Destiny 1 and representing them. The goal of the event is to collect tokens while doing almost any activity in the game, and then turn these in 20 at a time to the faction leaders. For my Titan I decided to rep Future War Cult, and I wrote a post last Thursday about the weapons that were available. Each faction is offering four unique weapons from their packages and I thought it might be cool to attempt to get them all and do similar write-ups. Now I had done this a week ago when the faction rally went live… it might be of some significant benefit. Now however I am largely just doing for the fun of it, and it seems useful info in the long run.

We are going to start off this New Monarchy edition with what was ultimately the hardest weapon for me to actually get to drop. This weapon has gone through a name change since it first started dropping occasionally from Cayde-6 treasure caches to when the Rally proper began. The Song of Justice VI formerly the Sentencer IV is a nearly max range high impact scout rifle that trades these stats for really low stability and handling. It is also relatively slow firing in the 150 rounds per minute class until the more popular and broader 200 rounds per minute class represented most noticeably by the MIDA Multi Tool. It lives in a really weird place, but after spending some time using it while doing patrols and such I can see its charm. It will probably never take the spot of my Manannan SR4 largely because I love explosive payload more than I can rightly express with words… it does have a few of its own nice perks. Armor Piercing rounds is extremely nice for destroying mob shields, which I have not seen on that many weapons so far. Additionally it has auto loading holster which causes the weapon to reload itself while holstered, making this work extremely well in situations where you are not using this as your primary weapon. I could see it working nicely on strikes when you are using an energy auto rifle as your primary weapon, and just swapping to this any time you need to snipe something at a distance.

I am a huge proponent of the Auto Rifle and have loved them since the first moment I got one in my hands in Destiny 1. In Year Three one of my favorite weapons was the Suros made Genesis Chain, which was a slow rate of fire high impact Auto Rifle… that looked valuely like this weapon. I got my hopes up and then they were quickly dashed when I saw what archetype this weapon fit into. The 600 RPM bracket already has a few really good competitors in it and I think the problem is… this gun just isn’t nearly as good as either of them. The key problem is the lack of stability… this gun kicks weirdly and often times unpredictably making it significantly harder to control than Scathelocke or Ghost Primus that both live in this same archetype. Now if you do not have access to either of those weapons… then sure this is a good option and once you get used to its quirks you can make it perform fairly well. The biggest problem however is there just is no viable reason to use this over one of the other weapons I mentioned… other than it just looks aesthetically cool. However if that is really your thing… then grab a Martyrs Make and slap a New Monarchy Shader on it… because you are going to have a much more enjoyable experience.

Up until now New Monarchy has been the tale of weapons that are just flat out outclassed by other options. I think however we are going to finish strong starting with the Royal Dispensation II. Sub-Machineguns for me at least are the new shotgun… when you absolutely need to wreck someone up close and personal much the same way as I used to do with my beloved Invective. There are basically two competing categories the 600 rpm class and the 900 rpm class. In the grand scheme of things I tend to prefer the slightly slower rate of fire because they are much more controllable and easier to keep trained on the precision damage markers. That said this gun is shockingly stable for as fast as it is firing, and when combined with the Grave Robber perk… gives you some really up close and personal power. When I run a submac it is because I am getting up in peoples faces and the fact that if I get a melee kill it reloads part of my magazine… means I can stay there and be effective for longer. The gotcha however… is with 900 rpm and 33 shots in the magazine… this thing unloads extremely quickly. This gun is effectively the Foggy Notion with slightly better handling speed and slightly worse reload speeds… but that little tweak seems to make the gun feel so much better to use. Well worth holding onto and playing with to see if you like it, because at the end of the day that is all that really matters.

Up until this gun entered my life I carried around a pretty heavy crush on Hawthorne’s Field-Forged Shotgun… because Destiny 1 spoiled me on insisting that if I was using a shotgun that it had to have full auto. I was honestly shocked that I had not encountered anything else in game that seemed to have it… and then I saw this weapon. One of the big problems with the Hawthorne shotgun is the rate of fire… not that it is too slow but it is way the hell too fast. I cannot count the number of times I have fired shots into the void because I couldn’t pick my finger up off the trigger fast enough to stop from firing one round too many. The Unification VII fixes this with its 55 rounds per minute rate of fire as compared to the frankly too fast 90 on Hawthorne. Additionally we gain a significantly higher impact per shot and slight range increase… at the loss of some reload speed and one round in the magazine. What cannot be properly accounted for however is just how badass this weapon looks and how good it feels. The weapon has High Caliber rounds, which causes it to stagger mobs which is always going to be useful.

I am curious how you feel about the New Monarchy offering this time around? It has been leaked that each faction has a significantly deeper pool of available weapons than these four, so it is going to be interesting to see what arrives each time this event runs.

How I Should Have Done It

September 27, 2017 by Belghast

This is a post I had planned on making for awhile, and now that we are a little less than a month away from the PC launch… I figure the timing works fairly well. At this point I have leveled and geared three characters through Destiny 2 on the PS4 and during that time I have sorted out some of the things that work and some of the things that don’t. My first trip through any game is a meandery mess as I let myself get distracted by every little bauble that comes across my path. Quite honestly… this is fine because I enjoy the hell out of that first trip. If you also like to sometimes revel in being inefficient… then by all means please ignore anything I am about to write. However more than anything this is my game plan for how I intend on leveling during the PC release and how I intend to claw my way back to the relative positive I currently am on the PS4. This is going to be a much different experience for me than someone starting out in Destiny 2 for the first time. Not only did I have the experience of playing over 500 hours of the first game… I also now have this bundle of experience playing on the PS4 which I have sorta used like a beta test environment. When I pulled up my Warlock and Hunter I tested out some of these methods, and have reached a point where I think I am good with a clear path going forward.

The natural path through the game is to follow the main story quest and then add in as much side content as you can along the way. My first trip through the game I did all of this and dinged 20 well before finishing the main story arc. My friends however focused on only the main story and wound up beating the game around level 15 leading them to do a bunch of grinding to open up the end game. Firstly you have to understand that grinds are more or less fun for me… and Destiny 2 has a grind that is better than any I have seen in a long time in the form of the Heroic Public Events. Public Events spawn at regular intervals and as you open a planet up you are going to notice that at least one is up at pretty much all times. Titan the second planet you reach seems to have the best public event grind available, largely because Titan as a whole is very small surface area wise… but has a bunch of added complexity in the form of overlapping Z axis areas. There are three public event areas that spawn in the planet… One in Sirens Watch and two in the sections known as The Rig. These are either going to be Fallen Weapons Exchange… aka Fallen Walkers or Witches’ Ritual. Both of these are extremely easy to convert from a normal Public Event to a Heroic, and I highly suggest you check out the guide I posted some days back on how to convert each event. In addition to public events there are five or six high value target spawns that appear in this relatively small area as well as countless chests and harvestables making Titan an amazingly compact farming destination.

So my goal come Destiny 2 PC release is to push my way through the European Dead Zone as fast as I can, and then get to Titan. After a mission or two the planet opens up completely and instead of following the main story… I am going to farm my little heart out on Titan until I hit level 20. Now I just did this method on my Hunter that I leveled on Saturday, and through level 10 I was managing to get a full level off of each Heroic Public Event. From 10 to 20 it took roughly two events per level, but considering you are able to hop back and forth between the events easily this went fast as well. During the bits of downtime I hunted chests and high value targets… basically anything that I thought might give me some blue gear drops, glimmer or experience. Now the reason why I grind to 20 on Titan is that it is extremely fast, but also pushes me into endgame power levels as quick as possible. I noticed while playing the main story content, that these missions seem to drop a significant number of pieces of gear… considerably more than just wandering around the open world. Ultimately the name of the game is trying to get to 260 power as soon as humanly possible from blue drops. Putting my leveling in on Titan lets me start doing this as I work my way through the rest of the story quest. The other benefit of this process is that it gives you a nice stack of faction tokens that you can cash in once you actually hit 260… in order to boost you to 265.

From there we start to enter the dark territory of the slow endgame grind. The primary means of jumping over this is going to be utilizing the “powerful gear” quests that are available once a week and give you luminous engrams. The other primary means of defeating this curve are to find pieces of gear that have legendary mods installed in them. Hoard these like they are the most precious thing in the universe, because until you get to 280 power your only means of getting them is going to be pure dumb luck from either a random legendary gear drop… or from turning in weapon parts to get packages from Banshee. Once you have a full set of items with legendary mods… you can begin to start infusing your way to the next goal which is 270. It is my intent not to turn in any luminous engrams until I have reached 270 on my first character. This is likely going to mean a bunch of grinding to get items with legendary mods in them, but ultimately I am trying to get as high of power as I can in that first week… and there are limited number of luminous engrams that I can get per character. You can get one for each of the following activities…

Crucible Call to Arms – This has taken between 8 and 10 Crucible matches on average for me.
Clan XP – Get 5000 xp… if you follow this method the first one will be a gimme since all of the story missions will count towards this.
Flashpoint – Do 3 Heroic Events on the weekly planet… or 6 regular events or a combination of them.
Nightfall – This is not always the easiest of engrams but if you have a group capable worth doing.
Raid – This again requires a full team of six players, and is just a bonus to the actual reward which is raid loot.

The other part of my plan… is to push up my Hunter and Warlock as quickly as possible… potentially before I even start decoding Luminous Engrams on the Titan. I would love to be able to keep all three classes at roughly the same gear level so that I functionally get three times the engrams each week. With the PS4/Xbox One launch there were a bunch of players doing a thing where they created three of exactly the same class so that every piece of gear could transfer to the new character and keep pushing the total power levels higher. That trick has been officially broken by Bungie because their intent is for us to play individual classes instead of duplicates. However in my experience after running Titan, Warlock and Hunter together is that the luminous engrams seem to benefit all three. Sure the armor pieces won’t transfer over, but the weapons absolutely will… which will allow you to start getting higher gear to drop… which will allow you to start slowly infusing up the gear you already had on that character. In truth, once I hit 265ish on the Titan I plan on starting the Warlock and pushing it to 20 as soon as possible then handing over the weapons I have been using on the Titan to help push up the new characters power level faster. Once again when I get the Warlock to 265… I plan on doing the same to the Hunter and then and only then once I have a trio of characters… do I intend to start decoding those luminous engrams. The piece of knowledge that we have learned since the launch of the PS4 is that you can let those engrams sit on the vendors up to the point of the reset…. and then instead of losing them the game just automatically decodes them for you. Basically you are at no risk of running into issues by letting them sit there, and waste potential power levels if you decode them too early.

Ultimately my goal is to exit that first week of Destiny 2 on the PC with a Titan, Warlock and Hunter completely leveled and farm up three sets of luminous engrams. This might be insane and it might be a hell of a lot of work… but considering how fast the Warlock and Hunter went… that initial character seems to be the challenge. The other benefit I have going into the PC release is that I already know which weapons I like and need to hold onto… and which ones I can shard because I just don’t enjoy whatever it is that weapon is doing. Similarly I know which pieces of gear I should probably go after on each class, and what talent trees I favor to unlock first. I carry into this new release a bunch of ancestral knowledge that is going to hopefully make the transition path smoother. Now everything I said today… I ultimately suggest you ignore on your first time through the game. I had this amazing voyage of discovery when I first set forth into the new areas of Destiny 2, and I don’t want to rob anyone else of that experience. That said… I have had that moment and I just want to push up characters so I can be ready for everything that the PC release is going to offer. I’ve had my moment of wandering around in awe of everything… and am ready to buckle down and push like mad to get where I want to be. My goal is to break the 280 light barrier in that first week, which is going to depend on a lot of luck. Considering four weeks into the game I am just in the mid 290s… it is probably going to be a challenge to get there again but one I am ready for.

Third Week Summary

September 26, 2017September 26, 2017 by Belghast

Today is reset day in Destiny 2 and brings a close to the third week of gameplay. At this point my maximum power on the Titan is 291 and I am really hoping to get some good luck in week four with the luminous engrams. At this point that is realistically the only way I move the needle forward other than the occasional extremely lucky exotic engram or loot from nightfalls. This week in particular seems like it is going to be interesting for the Nightfall because there is no way to extend the timer. The really interesting thing happening in the tower however is the faction rally, where the three faction leaders return and ask you to pledge your loyalty. The rally itself involves collecting faction tokens for your respective faction in the hopes that at the end of the rally your side has gotten the most. Most of my clan has chosen to go Dead Orbit… and in truth I think they are likely going to win because at least in Destiny 1 you saw a lot more of those faction emblems than literally anything else. I personally have been a huge fan of the Future War Cult starting with the No Time to Explain quest line, and in Destiny 2 it is the only faction that has weapons I am extremely interested in. As a result I went FWC on my Titan main, New Monarchy on the Warlock and Dead Orbit on the Hunter. Of the weapons available however… the only one I have any interest in is the FWC Pulse Rifle with the new version of firefly.

The real important happenings of the week is that I leveled my Hunter to 20 and wrapped up the main story last night. Then after doing that I managed to unlock flashpoints and knock that out as well as the clan xp luminous engram. That means for the week as a whole I finished up a grand total of eight luminous engrams, pushing my total power up slightly across the board. I am amused at just how fast you can pull up a second or third character. Functionally what I have done is latched onto a single item from Xur and then all of my higher level weapons from my main. This has allowed me to get to the 260 or so power level point extremely quickly, and then keep pushing it up by carefully infusion gear. Similarly this time around I had legendary mods to rely on which is something I didn’t quite have when I was doing this for the warlock. Granted I don’t have them for every slot, which is why for example I still have some blue boots on the hunter above. However I feel like I am in a really good place to be going into the faction rally. Before sitting down to write this post I knocked out a single heroic event on Io and got 8 faction tokens, so I am wondering if we are just going to be flooded with new loot from the faction vendors. I am perfectly okay with this is that is the case, and I plan on doing a bunch of heroic events tonight to get some of those sweet sweet future war cult weapons. I am specifically after the omolon auto rifle, because it looks like it might be the same class as my beloved Uriel’s Gift.