fps Archives - Page 11 of 23 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Destiny Roegadame

September 25, 2017 by Belghast

I had this post that I was contemplating making this morning, but I’ve decided that maybe today is not the right day. I woke up with a headache that sort of feels like my brain case is trying to split in two… so it maybe isn’t the best time to be getting into subjects that require a delicate touch. So instead this morning you are going to get to see some of what I did this weekend over in Destiny 2. Firstly you get a shot of my current Warlock outfit… I am in the one in gold and black with the crazy horns. Now it was announced last week that they nerfed the luminous engrams for multiple characters of the same class. I am beginning to think that maybe they also nerfed said rewards for ANY characters. I spent a good deal of time on the Warlock completing the few “easy” engrams… namely the Weekly Flashpoint (Titan), Clan Experience Reward and Call to Arms Milestone. The last two line up neatly because you get a predictable 500 xp per crucible match, which helps to chew away at that 5000 xp needed to get the Clan reward. I held all of the engrams until I had completed all three and then equipped my strongest power gear and turned them in one at a time so I could in theory adjust as needed. Now when I do this on my Titan I usually see a significant jump in power… and when I turned in on the Warlock they all for the most part dropped at the same light level as me or maybe one higher. Ultimately I am not sure if doing multiple luminous engrams per week is really worth it… but if I can get my Hunter through the main story in time I might try at least one of hers to see if I get the same results.

That brings me to the fact that I started my hunter this weekend, and wound up deleting my Destiny 1 character and re-rolling as a Female Awoken. Some interesting things to note… that even though I deleted my character I got specific story hits as though I was a legacy character. I am guessing those flags are set at an account level and not a character by character level, so I still got referenced based on my past deeds even though I ultimately deleted my previous hunter. My Titan being Exo is really the important part of the equation, and the fact that my other two characters were Exos… was largely due to the fact that there are no beards in Destiny. Since Hunter is such a nimble and graceful class, I always thought in the back of my head that I probably should have rolled a female character… and in part I am just correcting that original error. As far as rolling Awoken… this is the closest I can get in Destiny to having a Roegadame… which is always the correct choice if you have it.

This is ultimately a test run for how I am likely going to level when the PC release happens. I quested my way through the European Dead Zone to unlock Titan, and did the first quest there which unlocks the planet as a whole. From there I ran public events until I reached 20, which for the first 10 levels took a single event per ding… and afterwards took roughly 2 per. So if I functionally get to titan around level 5 that means within 25 public events I should be sitting at the level cap. The reasoning behind this is that you get an awful lot of random gear drops while doing the story content. Now the specific rewards like Exotics have power limits and will not float up as your level increases… but all of these random drops absolutely will. There is a significant part of the leveling process that is going to involve grinding something until you hit 260 light… the cap that you can get to with blue items. From there you will need a stockpile of faction rewards to get to 265… and in this case I had a fat stack of Titan tokens to turn in when I got there artificially by equipping the chest I had purchase from Xur and all of my Titan’s weapons. I started the Hunter around 11 am yesterday afternoon and wound up dinging 20 around 5 pm… with time between to do laundry and cook and random tasks like that. Now I just need to finish out the main story, which in theory I should be able to do tonight.

When I logged my character in earlier to take a few screenshots I noticed that my Clan has defeated the Raid. When this happens everyone in the clan gets a specific engram that is a level 10-15 version of one of the raid weapons. I just so happened to have a base 290 pulse rifle sitting in my bank that I sacrificed for science… and infused to bring the weapon up to usable levels. All in all I like this pulse rifle quite a bit, and while it is going to take some getting used to the action and the sounds it seems to be really solid. The important thing however is that I am super proud of my clan for defeating the angry penis head… which if you have seen Emperor Calus… it is a fairly apt description that I sadly cannot claim as my own. I am not sure which team specifically got the kill, but awesome work because I know it took a lot of people over the course of two weeks to really nail this all down and get the fight across the finish line. Now the rest of us casuals have some shiny baubles as a result. I think tonight I will be working on the Hunter main story so that I can at least test the flashpoint engram to see what sort of levels I get it to decode at.

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.