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Many Osiris Handle It

December 6, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was of course the release of the first expansion content to Destiny 2 in the form of the Curse of Osiris DLC. I was sick yesterday so completely out of it and did not realize until that evening that I could have been playing around in the expansion during the day. I did however have time to finish the main story line and am now in the after game that involves going around and doing a bunch of adventures on Mercury. I am not entirely certain what I was expecting but I enjoyed myself and found a lot of the new areas really cool to roam around. The level cap is bumping up from 20 to 25 and the light cap is bumping from 305 to 335. This means we all need to spend time pushing up that number once again, and have a whole slew of new weapons to help us with that process. Based on what I am seeing blues seem to still be bound to the 5 below your base light level as I am seeing 303 drops with a base light of 308.8. Legendary engrams which seem to be dropping like candy for me are dropping at my base light level and as a result seem to be providing a decent way of bumping up my overall power level. Unlike before I am not quite as rabidly focused on trying to squeeze the last bit of light out of each week as I have in the past. I am sure this will change but for the moment I am trying to take things easy as I may or may not have burnt myself out a bit.

In Destiny 1 we spent a good deal of time exploring the Fallen and the Hive and with Destiny 2 we have spent the bulk of our time dealing with the Cabal. This expansion sees us taking on the Vex in ways that we have not seen before. You get a decent idea over the course of the content we have seen to this point that the Vex that essentially hacks time to create the most favorable outcomes for themselves. However we have not actually really seen this in progress other than the tiny unexplained bits of the Black Garden. With Curse of Osiris we get to roam around in the massive simulation worlds that the Vex are constantly using to collect data to update their models. What is really cool about this is that we see simulated versions of all of the other races, that are very similar… but not quite exactly the same. Pay close attention to the way that the “Axis” versions of various troop types look because they appear to be almost Vex hybrid versions. As far as the length of the expansion… I would say it is probably about the same number of missions as the base game. You spend a lot of time roaming around and trying to sort out how to stop this one Vex simulated future from coming true.

As far as characters… Sagira is great and I like the fact that even after completing the main game we occasionally get to hang out with her again. Osiris was honestly not much of a character, and still remains this madman prophet that we are really no closer to fully understanding than we were going into the expansion. Brother Vance still has a fanatical devotion to Osiris even though he could not be bothered to pop out to the Lighthouse long enough to even see his acolytes. There is a nice passing of the Torch of sorts to Ikora, because really she is the Warlock we care about. Its not so much that the student has surpassed the master… its just that the student is done being a student. If nothing else this expansion brought with it one of the most badass final boss fights I have seen in awhile, and while it isn’t exactly technically complex it is fun as hell and makes the player feel awesome… even though it is really Osiris hacking reality to make it happen. It reminds me a lot of the way the Oryx fight in the Kings Fall raid felt… with this massive imposing figure that you are able to bring down by doing some stuff with some things. Unlike the main campaign I am actually looking forward to finishing it on each of my alts, as I attempt to get them ready to start pushing up power level once again.

As part of the main story we get another choice of a vanguard legendary, and I not shockingly went with the auto rifle that looks and feels a lot like the Jiangshi AR4 that I cannot seem to get the Gunsmith to give me. The bulk of the really interesting system changes go into effect next week with the December 12th patch, but we did get a fresh assortment of weapons to find and an armor ornament system. I’m looking forward to the next Iron Banner so that I can unlock the requirements to use those with my Iron Banner set. Additionally there was a refresh of the eververse store and with it a new set of fluff engrams, this time including a set of armor that I think actually looks cool. I was not a big fan of the weird formal armor set that came from the last batch, and even though I have collected a set of it on my Titan I doubt I will ever wear it. This time around however it is Vex inspired and looks pretty badass… but it has some hefty competition with both my New Monarchy and Iron Banner armor sets. All in all I think I am going to like the influx of content, but I am also not extremely focused on grinding to get everything instantly either.

Honestly the thing that has most soured me on Destiny 2… may or may not have anything to do with Destiny 2. A few weeks ago on patch day I started having issues running the game. Ultimately this thing would occur where the game would freeze for anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes in the worst cases… all the while the audio would continue playing in the background. If I happened to be watching a YouTube video on the second monitor its video would freeze as well, as would my ability to alt tab or interact with anything. Everything would recover itself and return me back to whatever I happened to be doing… and if I was in a group activity the game would rapidly catch me up to the same time frame as the other players… often resulting in my death. As a result I had been avoiding doing anything serious and anything that forced players to require on me not fucking up. I’ve searched the forums and crawled through the bowels of Reddit attempting various fixes, until this morning when I found something that is a possible culprit. Around about this same time I got forced upon me the heaping pile that is yet another windows 10 update. As a result it force reset a bunch of my settings, one of which flipped my system into power save mode for some ungodly reason. Before sitting down to write this post I played a bit of crucible because that seemed to always make it happen… and seemed to be doing just fine. I need to run around on Mercury a bit to do some further testing but I am hopeful that maybe this was the mystery sauce that was causing all of my problems. I would love to be able to return to doing group content without fearing that I would be a liability.

Grind to a Halt

December 4, 2017 by Belghast

When we last visited my Orc Warrior on this blog I was just about to start the Warlords content, and this week when I have not been poking my head into Destiny I have spent it pushing forward in World of Warcraft. It’s honestly been a shock just how fast leveling went until I hit Legion content. The old world was a confusion slog where I jumped zones each time I saw an exclamation point show up on the adventure guide. This meant I was constantly jumping zones every few levels and most of that journey was a complete blur. When I started Outland I did the majority of Hellfire Plateau then jumped over to Terrokar Forest for a little bit before finishing up the grind in Nagrand. From there I jumped to Northrend and did a good chunk of Borean Tundra before jumping to Grizzly Hills and doing most of it and finally leaping over to Scholazar Basin to finish the run out. From there we entered the Cataclysm zones and did all of the 80-85 grind in Vashj’ir without actually completely finishing that zone. Then came Pandaria and I managed to do the entirety of the 85-90 grind without leaving Jade Forest. From there I went to Draenor where I managed to hit 98 by doing the entirety of Frostfire Ridge and finishing up with just a tiny tiny bit in Spires of Arak.

This is the point where the express elevator has come to a grinding halt and I’ve been confronted with normal speed leveling because all of my heirlooms petered out at 100. I chose to do Stormheim first largely because it is both my favorite and least favorite zone at the same time. All of the Norse themed Vrykul bits are awesome, but all of that faction nonsense is not. It did give me access to another Order Hall champion quickly however so I am down with that. At this point I have finished both the main story arc of the zone and the faction bullshit arc and am likely to move on to the next area. There are a lot of things I have noticed… not the least of which is how ridiculously huge this shield is on my female orc warrior. It is as thought they scaled the shield for the insanely bulky male models and then just called it good enough for the female ones. The second of which is how much more intricate and slower paced the Legion content is compared to Pandaria or Warlords. When I leveled through the content it seemed really quick, but what makes things slog a bit in comparison to what came before is how fragmented the quest hubs quickly become. This might also be an aspect of the map itself feeling so busy with so many world bosses and objectives hidden out there to slow your journey down. I cannot resist wasting a few minutes to find a chest that is nearby or going after a mini boss, and as a result my leveling pace has gone to hell.

At this point I am contemplating investing in a set of Heirlooms which will set me back quite a bit of gold. It isn’t as much about leveling quickly, it is more about not outpacing the gear I am wearing…. and also not looking like I am picking up scraps from the battlefield while I level. I’ve liked making outfits for my character up until this point and then progressing my way through the content without having to care too much about swapping out items. In a perfect world Warcraft would have heirlooms for every slot and I could simply level my alts without ever having to worry about swapping gear out. With the new races coming in I fully expect to be leveling a lot more alts, and in truth investing in plate 110 heirlooms now will probably helm in the long run given that I tend to play plate wearing classes more than any others. I am still really bummed about the direction they are taking with artifact weapons. I would have loved to see them turn them into leveling heirlooms much the way that the items that dropped off Garrosh in Pandaria served this purpose. It would have been a fitting end to a really awesome chapter of the game to be able to then use those weapons to level your alts. Still having a lot of fun but I am also ready for the ride to be over and for my character to get geared up.

Xur Week Twelve: 12/1/17

December 1, 2017 by Belghast

Destiny 2

This is potentially the last of these Xur reviews that I will be doing on this blog. It is not out of a lack of interest, but more than next week with the Curse of Osiris the reset time is changing and with it when Xur arrives. Right now Xur shows up in the middle of the night and as a result by the time I shower, get ready and sit down to blog is available for me to talk some shit about what he just brought. Starting next Tuesday however that reset time will shift from 5 am my time to 11 am … long after I have already been at work for a significant amount of time. This is a boon for the career YouTube types so they don’t have to wake up quite so early, but not really for me so alas this is probably the end of my recent Friday feature. The flash point zone this week is the EDZ which means Xur is hanging out near the Winding Cove drop zone. There is technically a cave that allows you access to the ledge he is on… but I never can remember where the entrance is and just end up jumping up the rocks to the right of where he is at.

Sweet Business is a really cool sounding weapon that winds up being a horrible idea. Maybe I am being a bit unfair but in truth I have never been able to get much out of this gun. Firstly it requires some wind up time while firing before it arrives at its final rate of fire and as such true damage potential. The perk payday in theory helps with the wind up because you can fire it from the hip relatively well and as such start firing ahead of when you are actually needing to deal damage to a target especially in the crucible. The magazine size of 99 seems really awesome… but given how fast this fires you will be empty and suffering the pretty horrible reload speed before long. Where the gun really lacks however is in the total ammunition you can carry. Payload might help your magazine but it doesn’t actually seem to help your pool of ammo and when I attempt to run something using this weapon I find myself always starved for kinetic ammo. Definitely pick it up if you do not already have the weapon, but I am not a huge fan of it.

Do you want to punch things? Do you want to punch all the things? Then these might be the gauntlets for you. In the grand scheme of things they probably are not that good, but are pretty fun to at least play with while running around doing planetary content. The biotic enhancements per does two things really, firstly it greatly increases the range of your punch allowing you to hit targets at roughly the distance warlocks can. On top of that it gives you a version of surrounded where the damage your punches deal increases based on the number of targets around you. This is insanely fun against boss type encounters with a lot of minions and would potentially pair nicely with either the Sentinel or Striker trees that allow you to gain health regen on kills. Definitely a pick up if you do not already have it… and in truth I am even going to log into the PS4 and buy this since it is the only Titan exotic I am lacking there.

Arc Bolt is one of those grenades that only seems to work in really ideal conditions. This chest is all about making that grenade be able to chain a little further, giving you some wiggle room on what those ideal conditions actually are. The problem is… there are WAY better hunter exotics than this one and in truth until Arc Bolt gets some sort of a rework it isn’t exactly worth building an item loadout around. The positive however is this version does come pre-slotted with an arc grenade recharge mod so at least they realized the only edge case anyone would ever want to use this item. It’s worth picking up for unlocking but not really much more than that.

Do you like Nova Bombs? Do you want to always be Nova Bombing? Me too… sadly this helmet won’t actually let you do that thing. The perk Actual Grandeur in theory grants you super energy on Nova Bomb kills. The rate that I have seen is that if you are able to Nova Bomb and kill five targets, it will take your super bar roughly to the halfway point. So sure this does a decent job of regeneration but it also falls drastically short of the dream of being some sort of Evil Ryu throwing void fireballs. In my experience if you are dedicated to Voidwalker you are far better off with Nezerac’s Sin or even the Eye of Another World. Once again, pick it up for the unlock because Bungie occasionally balances exotics to make them better and you might as well have it in your collection.

Destiny 1

This week Xur is hanging out at the Reef and offering a few items, including a Helm I never managed to get on my Titan. This week he is offering.

Legacy Primary Engram – 31 Strange Coins
Eternal Warrior – Titan Helm – 13 Strange Coins
Young Ahamkara’s Spine – Hunter Arms – 13 Strange Coins
The Stag – Warlock Helm – 13 Strange Coins
Monte Carlo – Primary Auto Rifle – 23 Strange Coins
Monte Carlo with Royal Flush Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust
Trespasser with Crucible Assassin Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust

Bungie Mostly Gets It

November 30, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday I made a post talking about some of my frustrations and some of the frustrations of the community at large. In lieu of giving the final Bungie Curse of Osiris reveal live stream, they opted to instead give us an extremely dense blog post paired with a podcast episode expanding on the theme. As a programmer by trade I am generally slow to assign malice to the actions of game developers, especially when said problems get patched out of the game. There have been so many times in my own life that I have thought something was going to be a really good idea, and in the end it only served to hurt my user base. As a result I haven’t really talked about the whole XP gain issue because it didn’t really directly effect me. I essentially told myself there were three reasonable bright engrams that I could get per character and past that I didn’t attempt to go out into the wilds and grind for more. I didn’t even really have time to participate in the Clarion Call event that was happening over the Thanksgiving weekend because family and reasons. Also as a programmer I read yesterdays post as a game company attempting to peel back the curtain and show the players the mess that is hidden behind it. I more or less accept their explanations and I figured this was something I should state up front before I dig too far into the specific issues. I highly suggest you read both the blog and listen to the podcast because hearing the voices of Luke Smith, Mark Noseworthy and Eric Osbourne explain why things are the way they are… really drills home the point that they did mean the best. None of them are really polished orators and there is emotion in those voices that helps to add accent marks to the commentary.

One of the biggest announcements is that there is a brand new tier of weapons coming. Yesterday I talked about the whole static roll thing and mostly how I was bracing for the return of randomized stats. In truth I was preparing for the worst because I actually like static rolls on gear because it lets me know directly what I am shooting for, and not always wondering if there is a better roll around the corner. I feel like they sort of shot down the middle and landed in a happy place that I can accept as reasonable. Masterworks will be legendary weapons that roll with an extra mode that provides some amount of randomized stats. The above image is lifted from the Bungie blog post and shows a Uriel’s Gift with a bonus 10 to reload speed and also shows that they are starting to track how many kills you have made with a specific masterwork weapon. They announced a couple of things about this that make them more reasonable… firstly you can re-roll the stat node until you get the one you actually wanted. Secondly you can break down masterwork weapons that you do not want to get upgrade materials to turn your normal legendary weapons into masterworks themselves. Functionally this gives players what they said they wanted… in the ability to get different versions of weapons but also makes it sane and rational for those of us who actually liked fixed rolls in being able to upgrade our existing stash to the new version. Also it allows us to slowly work our way to perfecting the roll with whatever combo we were wanting on it by re-rolling that node.

Another big announcement is that they are adding duplicate protection for exotics, so that the game will by nature favor giving you exotics that you do not already have over exotics that you have seen over and over again. This has been a major point of frustration for a lot of players, myself included… in that we keep getting the same exotic items over and over when there are still a bunch on the list that we have never seen. I hit a streak of six prospectors in a row awhile back, and anything to blunt that would be much appreciated. They also announced the return of Three of Coins in a modified form of just providing a 4 hour buff that gives you an increased chance at exotic drop rates. I had a love/hate relationship with Three of Coins, and to some extent I like Xur serving more of a purpose each week than just presenting you with exotics you have already seen him sell numerous times. Lastly while on the Xur front they announced that he would begin selling an additional item called a Fated Engram which decodes into an exotic item that you have not already unlocked on that character. The above image shows that this costs 97 shards… which is a hefty price but by the time you need this you are probably going to be swimming in them.

Another thing that I was extremely excited to see is that Banshee-44 will start just straight up selling a limited number of mods each week for a combination of Mod Components and Legendary Shards. Now at first this doesn’t seem a amazing because it is not like we are swimming in Mod Components, however they are attempting to create a bridge for that too. The biggest problem I have with the mod system is that in theory I need to hold onto every single blue mod in the hope that I get three of them to turn in for the purple variant. As a result I regularly have no room left for mods because the 50 slot inventory is just inadequate. Now they are going to make it so with blue mods you can break them down for gunsmith materials but they will also have a chance of dropping a mod component at the same time. While saving them up for a guaranteed mod is nice… I will absolutely start breaking down every blue i get because I just don’t have the room. They did state that eventually he will sell Kinetic Damage mods which in truth are the only ones we really have a hard time chasing. Side notes… apparently Master Rahool will start straight up selling Legendary Engrams to help those chasing Masterwork weapons, and Benedict will redeem raid tokens before you get your first clear. Additionally faction merchants will only now beckon you… if you have enough tokens to turn in for a faction package. So no more every icon in the tower blinking at once.

Functionally everything I have talked about is coming in either the December 5th update or December 12th. I am going to attempt to list out the various things appearing in each, but I am certain to miss stuff so again I highly suggest you read the blog post and listen to the podcast for yourself.

December 5th

Armor Ornaments
Gunsmith Selling Mods
Blue Mods Occasionally Dropping Mod Components
Master Rahool sells Legendary Engrams
Benedict allows immediate raid token turn-in
Reputation Token Economy changes – way more tokens per activity but slightly higher turn in amounts
Cayde’s Treasure Map Minimum Payout
… and of course the Curse of Osiris storyline and related stuff

December 12th

Masterwork Weapons
Selection of Faction Armor/Weapons Purchasable for Legendary Shards
Xur Changes – Fated Engram + Three of Coins
Zavala/Shaxx sell Gift consumables that give interesting bonuses
No More Empty World Chests
Vendors leave you alone until ready to turn a package in

All of this sounds great to be honest. The problem is we rarely get one of these posts like this. All the player base really wants is to know what is coming down the pipe and roughly when they can expect it. This is true for Bungie and Destiny but also equally true for World of Warcraft or any persistent game that receives a constant slow trickle of content. Sure dates may not be final and they can shift and slip… but it is still nice to know what exactly we are waiting on. I can only hope that this is the beginning of them giving us more information in greater detail… but in truth I feel like this is triage to stave off the angry pitchfork mob. As players we get deeply invested in these games, and to hear them talk about it as a Hobby is a step in the right direction. I would love to see one of these posts each time there is a content drop brewing just to let us know what folks are thinking and how they plan on addressing the concerns of the community. Deej and Cosmo both do excellent jobs of giving us information… when they are allowed to. Most of the frustrations with online games in general come from a feeling of not knowing what is going on in this thing that we are spending so much of our time doing. If we got a monthly post that outlined the timeline of what they were thinking about doing during that month… I feel like we would be in a much better state and more willing to give the benefit of the doubt. However this is a double edged sword and they talk about it a bit in the podcast. They have been so gun shy to say anything because they don’t want an idea they had to turn into a promise when they maybe don’t even know if it is possible yet. In the end… its a tricky situation but I think the combination blog post and podcast were the right decision to make at this time. I’m pretty excited about a bunch of the quality of life changes, and ready to tear into the new content next Tuesday. My sodium levels have lowered greatly.