fps Archives - Page 6 of 23 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Xur Week Eight: 11/3/17

November 3, 2017 by Belghast

Xur this week is located in the European Dead Zone near the Winding Cove drop zone. He is located on top of a hill that has an actual path to get up there… but I never can seem to find it… so I end up hopping up the rocks. In some ways this is a disappointing week and in other ways… for Titans at least it is a potentially exciting one. This represents the first week I have been able to do the entire screenshot thing on the PC as I now have Titan, Hunter and Warlock up to the appropriate levels to get the items at the 270 maximum level. Lets get on with the items he brought for us.

Destiny 2

This weapon is a little disappointing because it is one of the items you can get from the quest at the end of Io. Additionally it seems to be an acquired taste. Some folks absolutely love this thing… and others completely hate it. It is essentially a pulse rifle that doesn’t fire like a pulse rifle, and in order to get the most out of it you sort of have to line your shots up like you were using a scout rifle. That said it does seem to be considerably more reliable on the PC than it ever was on console. If you can learn to use it you can shred things, but it takes a lot of getting used to.

Mask of the Quiet One has become this defacto crucible relic of choice for a lot of Titans. The perks do a few things… one of which is actually important and the other not so much. The lesser of the perks is that Void Ability kills grant health regeneration, which rewards a chunk of health back to your bar when you kill a target with any of your void abilities. This is useful for Sentinel Titans but fails to trigger on shield slams making it a little fiddly. The perk everyone cares about however is that when you are damaged you gain melee, grenade and class ability energy. Again this is rewarded as just a chunk of your energy bar and why this is so insanely popular in the crucible is the fact that you are ALWAYS getting damaged. Just the act of running around while trying to avoid taking damage… ends up seeing you take plenty of damage to make this item useful. I picked it up because I do not already have a copy on PC side, and is well worth hanging on to just in case you find it useful.

We’ve seen Nezarec’s Sin before from Xur and again it is a mid range item that to some extent gets out shined by several other Warlock exotics. The perk Abyssal Extractors activates on void damage and causes you to gain a tiny sliver of energy back to grenade, melee and class ability. This is interesting because the item says void damage and not void ability kills meaning you can proc it off of an energy or power weapon if you are carrying one of that type. The biggest problem with the item is that the tick rate of this ability really is not that fast, and for me at least gets outshined by Eye of Another World which grants 10% increase to your recharge rates for doing nothing. The only way Nezarec’s Sin would be useful is if you are really married to the voidwalker spec, and even then… you are probably going to be better off just going with the Eye still. It is worth getting the item for unlock purposes only.

Do you love the Crucible? Do you really like using Tripmine grenades? If you answered yes to both then these might be the right exotics for you. If not then they might still be worth just getting the unlock because they look awesome. These are essentially a worse version of gauntlets of the same name from Destiny 1. I say they are a worse version because the old ones used to give you an extra tripmine grenade charge, making it extremely useful for trapping up multiple spots in an area. In Destiny 2 they lost the extra charge and instead gained additional duration which is nowhere near as sexy. The other interesting benefit is that they now highlight targets damaged in your grenade blast, making it easier to see which players may or may not have been weakened and giving you the ability to track them through walls if you are going to chase them down. This is a situationally good item for players who really like the crucible and really like trip mines… if you are neither or these things then you can pretty comfortably pass them up. They are still largely worth the unlock slot to me however.

Destiny 1

In Destiny 1 this week Xur is located at the big gate near the speaker in the Tower. Once again he is offering the formerly exclusive Jade Rabbit scout rifle giving a weird second chance for Xbox One users to get this up. I am sincerely hoping that this is not going to be what he brings every week from now on since Destiny 1 has gone into maintenance mode. Of the items available Twilight Garrison is especially interesting because it gives Titans the ability to do a midair dodge attack.

Legacy Special Weapon Engram – 31 Strange Coins
Twilight Garrison – Titan Chest – 13 Strange Coins
Don’t Touch Me – Hunter Arms – 13 Strange Coins
Alchemist’s Rainment – Warlock Chest – 13 Strange Coins
Jade Rabbit – Scout Rifle – 23 Strange Coins
Invective with Storm’s Reproach Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust
Zhalo Supercell with Shock Hazard Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust

Stopping Bathers

November 2, 2017 by Belghast

I stayed up way the hell too late last night and I am going to pay for it today. Funny how knowing this is going to happen, doesn’t actually prevent it from happening over and over again. Yesterday was the day that the Leviathan raid opened for PC players and in a very impromptu manner we scraped together a raid out of six people who were 270 or better geared that happened to be around. The group we went in with: Tamrielo, Thalen, Phorsaken, Lleandryn, Muspel and of course me. So 1 Titan, 2 Hunters, and 3 Warlocks… what is with our clan and the proclivity for the “caster” archetype? We are odd ducks when it comes to raid content. In this era of Fat Boss and MTQ Capture… generally speaking we prefer to go in completely blind. While I have seen random tidbits here and there about the Leviathan raid… I had purposefully avoided any strategies in the thought that maybe just maybe Destiny 2 on PC might gain some traction and I could get folks interested in attempting the raid. We fairly quickly sorted out the banner mechanic for the first area, and then proceeded with attempting to learn the Royal Baths encounter. The biggest problem facing us last night was the fact we did not start until it was already very late for us East and Central players. We did however work on a seeming answer to how to get through the encounter, and in theory it will just involve us properly executing on the plan… something I was not capable of doing last night after about 11 pm.

As far as the night as a whole… there were many attempts made at the Nightfall. This one is considerably worse than last week mostly because of the prism modifier and always seeming to be dead when I could be doing the maximum amount of damage to things. For the first two attempts I was running a less than successful combination of dual auto rifles, and wound up swapping things up a bit to the Manannan Void Scout Rifle as my energy weapon and Merciless as my fire Power Weapon. The challenge I kept having was in sections where I really could not get close to the targets and they were hanging back at a range where the autos were just not that effective. We managed to get the kill and the items gained from the Nightfall and the first chest of the raid managed to push me up to 287 power level. I am thinking that it might be time to start doing the various exotic quests so that I can push up weapons from infusing the items I am going to get. I will absolutely funnel the MIDA Multi Tool into my Manannan and the Mini Tool into my Antiope-D. So technically we have not actually cleared much in the raid, but we have a game plan and the intent to come back Friday night and give it another shot. I at least hope that our gameplan is in fact the one that is going to work going forward, because we managed to get to a burn phase… just got killed by the adds while trying to do this thing. Hopefully we can smooth out the rough spots and get a win, and move forward in the Leviathan. Side note… please do not post strategies because I know the desire to say “you only need to do this” is going to be strong. We legitimately prefer to figure this shit out on our own. It is always a challenge to find a team willing to wipe for science.

Crucible Is A Mess

November 1, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve had a series of nights that did not go exactly as plan, and last night was no difference. I had a useless and impromptu 4pm meeting which lead me to get out of work significantly later then planned, and a series of errands that needed to be tacked on before I hit the house. By the time I actually hit the computer I was already stepping into turtle mode and largely stayed there the rest of the night. This did however give me the opportunity to work on the weekly milestones for both my Titan and Hunter. As has been my plan for a bit, I chose to do them in reverse order of importance to me… starting with the Hunter and finishing with the Titan and it seems to have had the desired effect. As of yesterday I could hit 275 on the Titan and as of last nights shenanigans I managed to push the Hunter to 281 and the Titan subsequently to 283. I still have Nightfalls to do on both of them and I am hoping tonight I will feel up to group interaction and attempt to get those knocked out as well. From there it is a matter of getting the Warlock up and running and geared enough to start knocking the content out as well. The sticking point right now is the fact that I am significantly worse in the crucible than I was on the console.

Essentially whatever I had learned on the console seems to need unlearning… and instead I am having to adapt to an entirely new set of circumstances. I am improving, but every so slowly and one of the aspects that does not help is the horrific queuing mechanism present in Destiny 2. Firstly there is still the problem of 4v4 being a worse mode than 6v6 for a bunch of reasons not the least of which is… if you are not roaming with the pack you are dead. In 6v6 there were lots of sub groups that would break off from the main group and roam the map in twos and threes… but in 4v4 you tend to either encounter no one… or a murderball that is the entirety of the enemy team roaming around together. This is only made worse by the fact that you are constantly being presented with teams of four players from the same clan. In 6v6 queuing with one or two members of your clan was largely diluted by the fact that there were 3 or 4 other people on the team. Queuing as a pair… means you now represent half of the team and it greatly skews the end results. I feel like the grouping routing should in theory favor placing solo players with other solo players… and full teams against other full teams. However because of the constant complaining in Destiny 1 we have a system that favors connection speed over literally everything else and ends up throwing a monkey wrench in any semblance of proper queuing mechanics.

I realize the intent was to have Quick Play be a casual queue and Competitive be a more serious one… but that does not appear to be working. Competitive modes would be fine for full team vs full team interactions, or for e-sports tournament settings. However as a casual player they are miserable just because you are committing to an indefinite amount of time per match. I know that when I enter the quick play queue I am agreeing to something in the range of 8-10 minutes of my time. With competitive this is entirely variable based on how many matches you have to play to reach the objectives of the mode… which are not even really clear in my head. One mode seems to be that you have to win 6 out of 10 matches to move get on with your life, and the other seems to be a slightly lower number. Regardless unless you are just straight up throwing each match you are stuck there for thirty minutes. I’ve played competitive exactly 2 times per character to unlock the Call to Arms milestone and never looked back. I am hoping with the advent of season 2… we see some significant changes in the way the queue system works because right now the crucible is not fun at all and something I suffer through each week to get gear. If you removed the powerful rewards… I would probably never play crucible again other than Iron Banner… and even then it is still a gear chase and not something I actually enjoy playing. I have proven time and time again over the years that I am willing to suffer some serious bullshit for the minor prize of seeing a single number go up a few digits.

First Week on PC

October 30, 2017 by Belghast

This is one of those mornings when I am not even sure where to start the post. It is like I have all of these disconnected thoughts in my head and am having a very hard time wrangling them together into something that follows any manner of logical progression. Destiny 2 released on the PC last Tuesday and since then I have played a significant amount of it, only really taking a single night off to go do something else. According to WastedOnDestiny.com I’ve played 32 hours of the game since release… which is officially more than I played Destiny 1 on the Xbox One. On the PS4 I managed to make it to 267 in that very first week, and on PC I managed to break the 265 cap and push on to 271 which makes me happy. I am nowhere near as lucky as my friend Raz was… who is sitting at something crazy like 282. There are ways to do this… but they involve madness and way more grinding than I was able to get in this week or really wanted to do. Additionally I started working on secondary characters and managed to push the Hunter to 18 while recording the podcast… and finished leveling it to 20 and making it through all but the final quest last night. I also started up my Warlock and got her to level 8, which was mostly about getting my 5000 clan xp to help level Greysky Armada. We managed to hit rank 3 which is extremely awesome and is largely made possible by the fact that myself and Wolfy started leveling the clan a bit on PS4 before the release of PC.

On Friday night we decided to give the Nightfall a go, which in truth I was uncertain about given that I only actually completed the Nightfall once on the PS4 side… and even then it was a bit of a pain in the ass. I also remembered us being significantly higher than the 250ish we were when we tried it. Together Tamrielo, RustySpork and I managed to get the boss down with about 3 minutes left on the clock, which is not good enough for the rat king… but makes me happy nonetheless. Yesterday afternoon I gave it another attempt with Mor and Grace and once again finished… but just barely with me taking down the boss via a couple of pulse grenades and auto rifle fire at about the 1 second left on the clock mark. Mor was just barely at the 240ish requirement for zoning in, so I feel like in the future so long as we are bringing in 260s we should be fine for this. This week also was a bit of an aberration in that it was extremely easy to cheese the objectives because of the modifier giving us insane grenade and melee regeneration. Striker Titan with double grenades meant I could clean out a bunch of adds almost as fast as I could throw them. They still hit insanely hard though and I just don’t have the recovery yet that I really should for doing harder content. This largely comes from just wearing a bunch of scraps instead of something resembling a full set of gear. I am really hoping in a few weeks I can get the full set of Titan Iron Banner gear again because it makes for a really excellent base for shenanigans.

I would have finished the Hunter but instead I took a lengthy break Sunday afternoon and worked on doing the weekly milestones on the PS4 side of the pond. I have to say after playing so much PC… the console version just feels sluggish and odd. Everything seems to move more slowly, which makes the crucible much easier… but everything else feel really odd. Not only was the visual fidelity much lower than even my laptop running at greatly downgraded settings… but just the movement speed of my character felt slower. I noticed this when doing some of the intro missions where you are limping through the city… on the console there was a specific point I could make it to before my character was forced to pause for a moment. On the PC I could make it considerably past that point before I was forcibly halted, so my running theory is that the PC version just has faster movement speeds. Weirdness aside I did manage to get used to the controller again and finish up Clan XP, Call to Arms and Flashpoint milestones which were enough to finish pushing me to 305. I feel much better hibernating the character now that it is sitting at the level cap rather than being just slightly under it. I will probably keep logging in at least once a week to finish off these easy milestones however because I feel like I need to keep contributing some Clan XP to TQMB in addition to all the work I am doing PC side with GREY. Eventually once I have gotten my PC characters to a more manageable state I am sure I will start doing those three main milestones on six characters… 3 on PC and 3 on PS4. It takes me roughly an hour to do all of the things needed to earn those three luminous engrams, and after a point that becomes my routine of logging in a new character each night and getting their progress.

I am absolutely loving playing the game on PC because it fits my play style considerably better. With the console it forced me to be in the room I have my PS4 set up in, but with PC I can either be playing it on my gaming desktop or downstairs on my laptop. The laptop doesn’t run it perfectly and I am having to throttle it down to 720 p and a few other considerations… but it runs well enough for me to be able to do almost anything I might need to do. For something like a Nightfall where there is a timer on the line I wouldn’t want to push it… but It is more than fine for some strikes or crucible. My activity of choice however is still doing public events and random token farming through chests and patrols. My goal for tonight is to attempt to push the hunter through the various things needed to unlock her three easy luminous engrams, and then to maybe get her through the Nightfall. From there my goal by next weeks reset is to have my Warlock finished off so I can start triple dipping on the powerful rewards front. While it has been a pure joy starting over on the PC… I do still want to arrive back at where I left off… and hopefully in a much faster time frame than the seven weeks it took to get me there on console. I am booned by the fact that the game seems to have traction among the AggroChat crew and with that means that there is likely going to be raiding before too much longer. I am assuming the raid will open up tomorrow much like it did on the console side, and then I am assuming next week we will have faction rally once more. Destiny 2 on PC is pretty much everything I had hoped it would be.