titan Archives - Page 4 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Spindle Envy

November 3, 2015 by Belghast

Game of the Month

This month for AggroChat Game Club we decided to do something a little different. This was the brain child of Tam, who wished we had the time to really dig in and explore a much larger game. If you’ve noticed we tend to pick relatively short games for the Game Club because it gives us a shot in hell of beating it before the end of the month and we record the show. We also tend to pick relatively cheap games, making it easier for all of us to pick the title up… which a lot of times limits us to Indie titles. Instead this month we are digging wholeheartedly into post apocalyptic Boston… in Fallout 4. Since we are hitting that time of the year when people start to have conflicts, and we have decided to make Fallout span two months. So the plan is to have it be both the game of the month for November and December, with a bit of a preview show at the end of November to talk about our progress so far. Then around Christmas a tell all show talking about our feelings about the game and more importantly our experiences. This is the sort of game where everyone who sits down in front of it will have slightly different experiences, and at least to some extent I plan on trying to keep a running journal of what all I find in the wastes.

Fallout and I go far back, and I can honestly say I have been a huge fan of the series since its launch. I remember going to the local Wal-mart to buy a copy for the PC shortly after it launched, and pretty much losing all sense of time playing it. I wish I could say that I went as far back as Wasteland, but alas I did not. I remember the game, I remember people talking about it… but when it existed I simply did not have a computer. Fallout is one of those games that changed the way I felt about PC gaming in general. In the years prior to it, I was pretty much heavily a Super Nintendo gamer… thinking that Final Fantasy and the JRPG thing was the superior gaming experience. Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment… changed all of that and I started moving heavily away from the consoles and focusing almost entirely on PC RPGs and eventually allowing myself to get sucked into the MMO world. So it is with zero hyperbole that say that Fallout shaped the way I feel about gaming, so when a new one releases… I end up almost vibrating with excitement. I realize in the coming months I am pretty much going to be dead to the world apart from poking my head into the occasional game here or there. For at least the first several weeks my blog is pretty much going to be entirely devoted to my travels in post apocalyptic Massachusetts. I am hoping that you will join me in this adventure, and we will sort out how best to convey your experiences so we can talk about them on the podcast as well.

Lost to Light

Yesterday the mission in Destiny called “Lost to Light” was the daily heroic, and as a result that meant Black Spindle the exotic sniper rifle was once again available. I had plotted and schemed all day long about this being the night we would actually go do this. I was so phenomenally wrong…. but we at least made an attempt. I grabbed Carthuun and Squirrel Pope and we made a valiant attempt. Earlier in the day Squirrel had actually managed to get through the quest with a group, and while we didn’t succeed we didn’t do that horrible in the grand scheme of things. Basically I think we are still slightly too low light, but that seems to be the general problem… because I have no clue how to get over 300 reliably other than run the raid. Everything was going pretty smoothly, we destroyed the Ogre which started the sequence where we run through the hive fortress and branch off to go up onto the Ketch instead. Once on the Ketch we did fairly well for the most part, other than the room with all the snipers. It took us a lot longer in that room than it probably should have, which made everything feel that much more stressful. We were sitting roughly at the 5 minute mark when we set foot into the final room to fight the taken version of Taniks. From there… things just went bad… we died a lot… we failed to knock out one of the blights in the far back of the room… and we simply were not doing enough damage to the boss fast enough.

From there we decided to lick our wounds and head into Nightfall, because according to Squirrel it would be far easier than what we just went through. I am not disappointed mind you in our progress… it at least gives us a goal to work towards. Nightfall had a few frustrating moments but we took it nice and slow after the rushed experience of trying to clear to and defeat Taniks in ten minutes. When we finally downed Alak-Hul I got lucky enough for him to drop his unique helmet, which I am now rocking after some fiddling with it. I really love collecting these unique items, like the arms with the chain fist from the bond brothers strike. For the Nightfall itself I was awarded a 4th Horseman, which sadly I already had… so it pretty much immediately became an exotic shard which is never a bad thing. I’ve talked about this before but as far as shotguns go… I just cannot think of a situation where I would want 4th Horseman over Invective. From there we attempted to run a few heroics… which we got through the first one without issue… then during the second one Carth disconnected. He has been having some internet issues lately… and I forgot to set the group to “locked” so the game filled for us… and we ended up finishing the restorative mind with a stranger. All in all… which we had some frustrations it was still a really fun night, and I am hoping to be able to get in again tonight and do some more fun stuff.

Week in Gaming 11/1/2015

November 1, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye Summer

This is the week where we finally started to see some colder temperatures. Its funny that this has been the case for the last few years… that October for the most part has still be warm and sunny and if we still had our pool open… we probably could have swam in it all month long. We still have yet to see a freeze but this past week it was regularly in the 40s, when the week before it pretty much never dropped much down past the 70s other than the early morning. As a result this means our hibernation instincts are starting to kick into overdrive. We recorded the AggroChat podcast Friday night, which left us with all of Saturday to do whatever we wanted. The end result… is that we pretty much just stayed inside apart from a mad dash out of the house around 4 pm to run a few errands. I am perfectly fine with a weekend like this… my wife however has some inborn instinct that tells her that we if did nothing over a weekend… that the weekend is somehow a failure. Me… I see those as the most wonderful weekends ever.

Destiny

I had all of these plans to play some themed games for Halloween… but those plans pretty much died yesterday. Instead I ended up working on my Warlock and getting it to 21 from about level 8. I have to say the Warlock is growing on me over time… and I really really like Nova Bomb as a super goes. It is this awesome mix of the way the Havoc Fist super and Shadowshot super feel, where I can deliver death from above… but at a target instead of jumping down in the middle of everything. Having played all three classes… I have to say they have done an excellent job of giving them all something really neat and special about them that makes it rewarding to play. The hardest thing for me so far however has been adjusting to the Warlock jump. It just works so different than all of the others… and while I am starting to get the hang of it… I still have zero desire to do any of the platforming encounters with it. We will see when I get to the dreadnaught if I can figure out how to do the various chasm jumps with it. Hunter is simple… double jump, and Titan is similarly simple… you just have to sort out when you want to hover over your target before you land. Warlock… is just fiddly and annoying and I never can seem to do the sort of jump I need when I need it.

The secret of my success honestly was getting high enough level to where I could break out my Stranger’s Rifle and I plan on riding that puppy up as long as I can. That weapon is just so damned amazing… and I am ultimately going to have to sort out the process for getting the modern version of it. Sadly I don’t have much faction with Future War Cult, which is ultimately required to get the No Time to Explain exotic. As it stands right now my hunter is running up Future War Cult faction, but since I don’t play him nearly as much as I do my Titan it is lagging behind. I did manage to get my hunter up to 285 light, and I can now consistently him 297 light on my Titan. Getting 300 and beyond items just seems to be the problem, and I still decode so many 260ish items that are just trash. While I don’t mind so much if they are weapons… since I am consistently struggling to keep enough weapon parts on all three of my characters… but armor… I have more than enough to share. I want to take a moment to talk about how much I love the Bungie.net website for swapping stuff between my characters, and the fact that you can do it in the middle of a game play session. This is a really amazing feature.. and I have heard there are chrome plugins that streamline this process considerably.

For the last several weeks I have been on this mission to grind as many strikes as possible to get Exotic Engrams… and there was a method behind my madness. There was one weapon in this game that I wanted more than anything else… and that was.. the Zhalo Supercell. From the moment I saw it in a video, I loved the look of it as some sort of futuristic AK-47/Bolt Action Hybrid thing. What I loved more about it was the functionality of being able to chain lightning to all of the mobs around your target. The only problem being… I never seem to get weapon engrams. I get Helms and Gloves… and the occasional Chestpiece… but have pure hell getting any sort of weapon to drop. So you can imagine my excitement this Friday when Xur had none other than the Xhalo Supercell available. The only negative of course is that all Xur weapons start at 280 instead of the 290 that they are usually dropping for me as. I have managed to pour enough stuff into it to get it to 287 which will have to do for the time being. I love this gun, and more importantly I love the way it rips through mobs that always frustrated me. I’ve noticed when the lightning procs… it can hit Phalanx and Knights even if their shields are up which makes this gun freaking amazing. When I wrap up my post this morning I think I am going to stream/record for a bit and talk about some of my favorite weapons currently.

Another huge positive from this week is that one of the Armsday orders was the above Suros DIS-43 Scout Rifle. One of the rolls available had full auto… which makes this gun freaking amazing. It has good impact, solid range and really great stability which makes it pretty much the perfect scout rifle for me. This has now completely replaced Hung Jury in my current weapon load out. My Hung Jury essentially has maxed range which is nice… because I can use it much in the same way as I would a sniper rifle, but the Suros DIS-43 is just a much better all around weapon. I noticed it was available for Armsday orders again this week, and I put in for another one… so hoping that I can end up getting a third one for my Warlock. I have two of these now and they are just excellent. Hoping that everyone managed to get in on the full auto version from this past week because man… I am really enjoying it. My only problem with Suros weapons… is that I really don’t like the Red and White paint job. So this is another case that I would love to be able to repaint my weapons… like if I could put a Dead Orbit paint scheme on this thing… it would be perfect.

Secrets of Grindea

Another title that I played this week was Secrets of Grindea to get prepared for the Friday night podcast. I of course talked about this at length on the podcast, but this is a game where I went through a few different phases with it. At first… it didn’t really grab me. This was my pick for the month, and I largely picked it because some of the game footage I saw reminded me of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Secret of Mana. The early gameplay however… is kinda boring, and the first “boss battle” on the bridge felt a little uninspired. That was quickly followed up by the Giga Slime boss… which was absolutely brutal to do as a melee character. So I have to admit that knocked a lot of wind out of my sails as far as this game went. I did however manage to pick it back up this week and saw the game that I had not quite gotten to yet.

All I can say is… boy was I wrong to doubt this game. The quests are cute, and a parody of traditional RPG tropes…. without being cruel or slapstick about it. It is kinda a sly nod and wink to the fans of this genre… saying “we know” rather than trying to rub your face in it. We talked about this on the podcast, but this is essentially the game I had wished Citizens of Earth was. It is well written, has some interesting and often times hilarious characters, and presents a world for the grown up fans of the original Zelda games… not necessarily the same audience those games were targetting. The boss fights are really challenging, but each of them have a trick or a pattern that once you figure it out it becomes doable. That said I do think this game might have significantly more challenging encounters than Zelda did, because the above Hydra was essentially the point where the game broke me. After talking with my friends on the podcast… there was essentially a pattern that I was missing that hopefully means I can get in and wreck it now. There was not a single boss that did not take me multiple attempts… other that the first bridge encounter mind you. The game does a great job of check-pointing your progress so you start pretty close to where you died allowing you to get right back into the action and try again. Even though this is early access… I highly suggest checking it out… though admittedly you might just wait for the final version.

Devilian

The other game that I spent some time playing is Devilian, that was having another beta test weekend. I still have issues with the game, at least in the style of the character classes… and their gender locked nature. That said I do actually enjoy playing it, and I think it is a cool take on a normally Diablo clone environment. It feels like something different, and I find it significantly more challenging already than anything I saw in Diablo. Diablo gameplay felt “cheap” at times… where bosses would just straight oneshot you if you were unlucky or lacked the armor/skills to deflect the blows. This game requires you to react a lot more quickly to things happening and dodge out of the way of incoming damage. I’ve already encountered a boss that I just cannot currently beat, and I am hoping to come back to it once I have picked up a few more levels. I have this feeling that the boss is designed for multiple players to take him down… because he is right there out in the open rather than hidden behind a bunch of mobs.

The game is really damned pretty, and I will give it marks too for running extremely smoothly. I am still getting used to its somewhat quirky control scheme, but it makes sense. If I were in the permanent test group I would probably be playing this more regularly but with only having weekends to play it… it somewhat disincentives my time spent. My ultimate hope is that Trion has more control over this one than they do over ArchAge and that maybe just maybe they can get some of the changes in that will make the game more enjoyable. Like for example the game is desperately in need of some inventory management tools… like sort and compact. It feels so odd to be playing a game without those things at this point. I doubt the whole Gender locked classes thing will ever be solved, because that will mean a TON of art and animation work to get there. In truth, as I look at the other classes… it is highly unlikely that I would play any of them other than the berserker in the first place. I am just not much for ranged classes… and I have zero desire to play a character with a habitually open shirt. In truth I wish there was some sort of a “tanky” character like the Crusader in Diablo 3. That would probably ultimately be the class for me.

Slight Progress

October 26, 2015 by Belghast

Titan Improves

This weekend once again was mostly a Destiny weekend for me, as I worked on both my Titan and my Hunter trying to slowly inch up their gear. On the Titan I hit a bit of a milestone, and finally pushed forward to get my light level… aka item level to 295. The funny thing about this is it seems to be a significant number, because I have noticed that a lot of things simply feel easier now. I spent a good bit of the weekend running the level 36 strikes, but as per Cortical’s suggestion I tried a few 20 strikes. The strange thing about them is… in some ways they seemed more difficult. At the very least the level 20 strikes seem to throw more cheap mobs at you, and I guess if you have really good AOE damage you can shred through them. Ironically I died far more often in the 20s than I normally do in the 36s so I think I am going to return to doing the slightly “harder” ones. I would rather have harder bosses and easier trash I guess. It also seems like once I hit 295 I started getting slightly better drops. I still have yet to see a single item over level 300, so I am not sure at all how I am going to bridge that gap.

I guess Nightfall would be the next big jump forward for me, but I have to say I am slightly gunshy. Heroic was maddening at times, and I am guessing there are lots of mobs in Nightfall that will straight up one shot you. It feels like to do those really well you need to know the placement of the mobs and predict every sniper or big gunner type mob to take them out quickly before they whittle down the party. The other side effect that I am really not digging is the way that the community seems to love to glitch out content rather than complete it. Most of the times I have been on the Restorative Mind map… something happens and the other two players disappear on me… only to end up with me getting teleported to the final boss room moments later. So there has to be some sort of shortcut that I am just not understanding, or some glitch somewhere that lets them bypass the gates. I guess I get the reason why Destiny “Sherpas” are a thing.

Hunter Viable

The progress I am happiest with however this weekend is that of the hunter. It seems like it was only a week or so ago that I was 285 on the Titan, and I have now reached that point on the hunter as well. I am still largely focused on Nightstalker, but I did pick up the Bladedancer helmet this week. I also picked up a chest engram and pulled a Crest of Alpha Lupi which works pretty well. I am also really really loving my Zarinaea-D Auto Rifle, that I got the first week Armsday orders were available to me. I’ve had a couple of these now but the one my hunter uses seems to be the best so far. I am running a combination of Partial Refunds, Rodeo, and High Calibur rounds on it… and it is a beast at taking down mobs in general. I also really really like the LD Watchdog sights on it. I’ve heard the Suros legendary auto rifle is the one to get,but so far I have had little to no luck pulling that one. I did manage to get a Villainy pulse rifle from Future War Cult faction package, but I have yet to really put it through the paces.

At some point this week I guess I am going to work on my Warlock. At this point I am only level 8 on him, and I don’t have a cheaty item that will zoom me to 25 this time. The early game is really somewhat bland… and while I have weapons for 20ish in my vault… I don’t have much stocked away to make the low levels go smoother. The only negative about boosting the hunter is that I had made essentially no progress on my classes, and had to basically start leveling from 25 on… with nothing much to rely on other than the basic super and basic grenade. At least on my Warlock I have a fair number of the abilities ready to go, and that at least should make things good more smoothly. I have this overwhelming desire to have one of each at high levels, and since I went Solar sword on the Titan, and Void sword on the Hunter… I guess that means I am going to go Arc sword on the Warlock and throw sonic booms. Largely I just like the idea of eventually being able to swap swords between them based on the need. I wish there was such a thing as a Legendary kiosk like there is the Exotic one… because man… there are certain Legendary weapons I wish I could have on every character.

Week in Gaming 10/18/2015

October 18, 2015 by Belghast

One Track Mind

This week was quite literally… all about Destiny. We have a trio of myself, Damai, and Saldonas aka Carthuun that have been running around together quite a bit. Alternately I have been spending some time with Euron as well when we can manage to meet up, and both “actually” be on at the same time instead of afking for long periods of time and leaving our Playstation 4 on while connected to Destiny. Of note… if you do not exit out of Destiny before walking away, your PS4 will not fully go to sleep. I know I have frustrated many people on my friends list who tried to invite me to parties at all hours of the day… when I am not actually at my console. I have really been so into the PS4 this week that last night when we recorded the podcast, it was my first time on voice chat and really my PC since last Sunday. Anyways… on with the games!

Rift – Primal Urges

This week on a whim I decided to try and win one of the Wilds Packs being given away by Trion on their Twitter account. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time… and apparently choosing the right code to try. I opened the image that had six codes in it, and keyed it in quickly into my account and BAM… it gave me the Wilds Pack. I did not at first realize it but this was the big $100 pack of goodies, but the only negative so far is that it did not seem to give me ANY of the loyalty. Otherwise it would have pushed me from the Orange tier that I am currently on into the the Red. I put in a support ticket to ask, but my working theory is… that you get the loyalty for purchasing the pack, not for redeeming it. In any case I am more than happy to have a slew of free stuff including the new Primalist calling.

I have to say that mechanically it is really interesting. Instead of an energy or mana based mechanic, you have this push/pull mechanic that shifts your character between Fury and Cunning. Abilities that are scaled based on Fury push your bar closer to Cunning… and Cunning abilities push towards Fury. So you are constantly switching back and forth between the two stances and the gameplay feel reminds me quite a bit of the solar/lunar cycle of the old Boomkin. I say old Boomkin because I honestly have no clue if this push/pull thing is still in that class or not since I have not played one since Cataclysm. The calling itself is a leather wearing heavy weapon wielder, and so far I am digging it. As you can tell I shunned the tribal feel of the class and ended up making mine a steampunk dwarf. I’ve not really made it terribly far, but I have enjoyed the little bit I have played. I hope at some point soon I will devote a few days to getting really up close and personal with the calling.

Star Wars the Old Republic – Sith Happens

Last night during the podcast I returned to my Sith Inquisitor and am working on trying to finish it. I realize there is no way now that I will finish ALL of my classes before Tuesday, but I am at the end of Alderaan now and it seems like maybe if I can focus attention on it today I will be able to wrap this one up. I am still having a very love/hate relationship with the Sith Sorcerer. Namely I love that I can burn things down quickly with lightning, but hate how horrible of a healer I am if my companion ever seems to get into trouble. I switched from Khem Val to Treek and am enjoying that decision so far. Namely the big problem I run into is that my instinct is to burn harder as our health gets lower… and unlike my Scoundrel I cannot pull us out of quite the health deficit. So that means I really need to watch the companion health more closely and start healing sooner. As a result I end up dying quite a lot on this class, which just slows down the process. The storyline isn’t really “catching” me either… and I think largely the problem is I ended up choosing the finger-wiggler path instead of the melee path. Were I slashing things with my dual saber I would probably be enjoying this class significantly more. It does however give me a healing option Sith side… so I am just going to go with it for now and struggle through.

Destiny – Struggling for Exotics

I have reached the point in Destiny where those upgrades are no longer coming as quickly. I am now in the 290 light range and the engrams are being assholes to me. Right now the best source of gear seems to be doing Heroic Strikes, but our trio still struggles a bit with them. I realize that through running copious amounts of them that problem will solve itself. I also am frustrated by three of coins, which seem to be far less effective for me than others. It took me eight coins before I got my first exotic drop, and I am continuing to feed the beast and have not seen a second so far. I will say that the exotic that I did get was pretty sweet… Invective. I like shotguns, but my frustration has always been their relatively small ammo pool and clip size. Invective seems to take care of that for me, in that it regenerates ammunition at a fixed rate… which is actually pretty damned quick. I am finding it useful in strikes for when mobs get too close and personal.. and the fact that you can fire off the four rounds in full auto style… means you can absolutely shred a heroic minotaur for example. Then I shift back to my pulse rifle and by the time I need my shotgun again, the ammunition is back and ready to go. The only thing that could be better about it is if the chamber reloaded…. but that would probably be asking too much.

The funny thing is… I am in this place where I am really happy with my assortment of weapons. I just wish I had more high level blue fodder to feed to them to level them up. Right now I tend to mostly use… Hawksaw, Hung Jury, 1000 Yard Stare, Invective, and Sol Edge. I would love to have the exotic shards and fodder to power up my Hawkmoon… but I don’t have the steady income of exotics yet. I love that gun… but at 280 it is just too low right now to keep up with my other weapons. For the most part I am happy shifting back and forth between Hawksaw and Hung Jury… both of which are weapons that feel great and can precision shot pretty easily. The other big thing that happened this week is that I dug deep into the lore of Destiny, and if you ready yesterdays blog post you will see a bit write up about a series of videos. Last night I also ended up going on at length about this factor on AggroChat and probably bored the pants off of my co-hosts. What can I say… I am loving this universe and as I still continue to work my way through the missions I keep seeing more interesting parts of it. Destiny is one of those games that has grabbed hold of me and does not show signs of letting go. My hope is that I will be able to get it mostly out of my system by the time Fallout 4 launches…. because I want to spend some close and personal time with the wasteland.