All Hail Patch Day

Light be Praised

All Hail Patch Day

Today is the most magical of all days…  patch day in Destiny.  There have been times in the past when something so cool was being released that I have been giddy about the patch, and today is definitely one of those days.  If you have not been following Destiny since the original launch, I have to say you have been missing something.  This is one of those games that a lot of people wrote off completely after being frustrated with the original release.  To be truthful even among the AggroChat folks… even though I talk about Destiny constantly… there are a handful of people that were burned so bad on this game that they never want to play it again.  This is however a huge unfortunate thing since Taken King was for Destiny what the 2.0 patch was for Diablo 3.  It was that period of time where so many things were just “made better”, because in many ways it was the start of Bungie realizing that a somewhat adversarial loot policy was a bad idea.  That said there was still quite a bit of grind in Taken King, but it was the sort of grind that never made me feel like it was utterly hopeless.  I could go out, get a bunch of engrams… and maybe just maybe one of them would be worth using to help infuse up all of the 280 weapons that I had sitting in my vault.  The infusion system was so much better than hoping for a drop… and then not being able to use it because it didn’t have enough light on it like happened so often in Year One.

All Hail Patch Day

That said the infusion system was still a pain in the ass.  I had my vault lined with 285 items that I could use as stepping stones to get those 280 arms day and vendor drops up to decent levels of light to make them usable in most activities.  Last night I cleared every last bit of that out of my vault, because with today’s patch infusion will be 1 to 1.  Meaning that if I get a 280 weapon, I can drop a 310 item into it and it becomes 310… no fiddling or calculations required.  With today’s patch the light level is also being increased… to 335, with pretty much all of the “end game” activities from Iron Banner to Court of Oryx to the existing raid being able to drop high light level items.  There is a part of the patch preview on the Bungie site that is a bit ambiguous talking about engrams now decoding to a minimum of whatever your equipped light level is.  If that is the case I will sing the praises of this game from the rooftops because I have a vault full of weapons I would LOVE to use… but they are simply too low of light level to be viable.  While I didn’t start saving nearly as far back as my friend Squirrel did (simply for lack of bank space) I did start saving pretty much every engram I have gotten in the last few days.  The hope is that tonight when I log in I can start decoding them and hopefully get some really nice upgrades to my overall light levels.

Hope of Stability

All Hail Patch Day

As is often the case on various game subreddits, some user has created a really excellent list of all of the content that players might need to know about coming back to the game.  While I fully expect there to be a deluge of returning players, this really is the ideal time to reinstall the game and start once more.  This patch packed some pretty massive quality of life issues, and if the grind bothered you before… that should be significantly lessened now.  As far as how I spent my last night before the patch…  we were attempting to play clean up on the stranded Kings Fall raid from Tuesday.  I’m part of the group formerly known as the Rookie Raid, that has now been renamed to the Squirrel Squad.  Though based on the folks that sign up instantly…  I was going to suggest Jexy Squirrelghast for the unofficial name.  While I still very much feel like a rookie, I guess I have picked up more information than I realize.  Granted I still suck horribly at the jumping puzzles and more than likely always will.  I died so many times to the wall last night it wasn’t even funny.  That said I wasn’t the last person to get to the chest, nor the last person to get up through the rock pillar vertical puzzle either.  As far as the stranded raid…  well we spent most of our time attempting to get the Warpriest challenge mode, and as a result we simply ran out of time to move on beyond it.  We wound up simply killing the Warpriest in non-challenge mode, which I felt was at least in part my fault… given that it was my first time doing platforms.

Last night we more or less cruised along nicely thought Golgoroth, and Sisters… only to run into some logistical first timer issues on Oryx.  The fight has a lot of things to take in and we straight up got robbed of at least one kill when half of the orbs didn’t detonate even when players were standing on them.  The raid ended in frustration, because we simply ran out of time and available resources to keep pushing.  I greatly appreciate all the non-rookies that stuck in and pushed forward trying to get Nidrew his first kill, and it is my hope that tonight the servers will be stable enough for us to give a good push at trying to get that kill this evening.  Part of the becoming “Squirrel Squad” is that we moved the start time back to 8pm CST giving us an extra hour worth of attempts on stuff to hopefully get the clear.  That 9pm start just guaranteed that by the time we hit Oryx we were all a little loopy and out of it.  The only gotcha tonight is that given my history of big landmark patches in the various MMORPGs I have played…  I totally do not expect the servers to actually be playable tonight.  I will be totally fine with just doing small activities roaming around this evening, and maybe taking in some Court of Oryx.  However I am still holding out hope that we might be able to do the 320 version of the Kings Fall raid tonight, and get folks some new and shiny upgrades.

 

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