September 2017 – Page 5

Warlock and Worm Gods

September 14, 2017 by Belghast

I don’t have a whole heck of a lot to talk about this morning. I had a relatively chill night playing Destiny 2 without a whole lot of focus on any more serious adventures. The first part of the evening I finished a milestone that involves doing a bunch of challenges. Most of these I got yesterday morning while doing a little crucible, but I wound up finishing up in the EDZ knocking a few out there. After that I picked back up with the main story quest on my warlock and leveled my way through the end of the EDZ, all of Titan and Nessus and have the starting quest for Io. The only problem there is that I have been way less meandery this time and am sitting just shy of level 10. In order to accept the IO quest you need to be 11… so I am going to spend some time wandering Nessus and taking down stuff there I think. Titan as a whole is not really a great event running zone, given that things are so broken up due to the various platforms that everything happens to be on. Nessus and EDZ seem like they are for the long run going to be the best spots to get pick up events, but even then… now that Nessus is the flashpoint it seems to be way less active than the EDZ was last week. That said there are still a ton of people running events in the EDZ, which might ultimately be the best place to settle into.

The other thing that I wanted to talk a bit about this morning is something I had seen in a video before. There is a mission on Titan where you end up essentially going down into an underwater base. There is this one place where you drop down to a platform below… and if you are following the flow of the mission you are focused on the objective that is behind me in this screenshot. However if you turn around and look behind you… you see this translucent bank of windows and can see something swimming by in shadow that is massive… and has tentacles. Now if you have not read the Books of Sorrow this probably will mean nothing to you. If you want to know the lore of the Hive, then I highly suggest either watching the video series by Byf or the one I actually watched ages ago from Myelin games. If you prefer to read it yourself, then the full text can be found here as well as I believe all of the Grimore cards from Destiny 1. I like the video options because I am a sucker for dramatized radio play style text readings… which is probably why I am a fan of podcasting and public radio in general. Now we are going to enter some spoiler territory so if you do care to experience the Books of Sorrow yourself come back later. In the books you find out that the Hive long ago crashed landed on a Water Giant world that they refer to as “The Fundament”, and they ultimately sought the help of the worm gods that lived deep under the water and were creatures of darkness. I think it doesn’t really make sense that Titan would be “The Fundament” because otherwise we by all accounts should have had to deal with the Hive in full force long before they actually found us. Instead I am wondering if what we are seeing underwater swimming up against the arcology is a similar Worm God. Others have talked about this maybe being an Ahamkara, but everything indicates that they were dragon like… not Leviathan like. I would say that maybe all of this is for nothing and this is just native life… but few things that Bungie does are for no actual reason. I have seen time and time again how they have planted the seeds of something that is yet to come… in the background of something we have already seen. During several of these missions the Ghost says that these Hive are different than the ones we had encountered before, which makes me wonder if a certain character that keeps getting mentioned… has sought out more Worm Gods to make a pact for more power. Again if you have not dove pretty deep into the lore of Destiny not a damn word I have said today will make much sense.

Death Knight Mount Get

September 13, 2017 by Grace

I finished the DK mount quest (that’s class mount number 11 for me, for those keeping score at home). Once again I really enjoyed it. As much as I don’t like melee characters, the story quests have made leveling DK a ton of fun for me. I especially liked how the mount quest seemed like a logical progression from the Broken Shore follower quest for this class.

One thing I am sad / mad about is that they took out the “Unholy Determination” feat of strength before I got the chance to earn it. Yes, I know they retroactively took it away from everybody, but still. I decided to murder every single living thing in the ruby dragonshrine anyway. It felt perfectly in character for my DK. From a mechanics standpoint I can see why they took it out, since it is a non-repeatable quest. Otherwise I’m not really sure why people were complaining about the morality of it. Death Knights aren’t exactly full of rainbows and love, and if you’ve made it this far in the DK campaign you’ve already done a ton of other questionable things.

Anyway I raised the giant red dragon from the dead and now I have a fancy mount and a matching pet. I thought I was finished with DK stuff but I didn’t realize I have to do the broken shore quests for the other specs to unlock the other two pets. I have concordance with all the weapons, but it won’t let me buy them yet so I’m assuming that’s the holdup. I’ll wrap that up this week and then only warrior will be left.

Not all of the class mount quests have been winners, but this one was definitely one of my favorites. The class flavor was spot on, the quests were fun and not annoying, and the mount looks cool!

A Little Luck

September 13, 2017 by Belghast

Last night the loot gods were very good to me. Weekly reset is a time where the impossible seems possible… or at the very lease you have a new round of milestones that can reward “powerful gear” otherwise known as Luminous Engrams. For the unindoctrinated… these are a weird cross between purple and gold and contain gear that is always a significant upgrade over whatever you happen to be wearing. This always probably needs to have its own caveat given that when you hit the current hard level cap of 350… this will in theory constantly keep rewarding you maximum power items. These right now seem to be the primary method of moving the needle forward… and I guess that makes sense given that the normal mode of the raid is 260 to 280 power. This makes sense due to the general difficulty increase as you progress through raid bosses and the hope that you will be slotting in items you get on the first few bosses to keep ratcheting your power level as you traverse the content. This is the point where I am going to apologize because I will inevitably for a long time keep calling it Light instead of Power… and while I am trying my best to catch these several of them are going to slip through the cracks. Functionally now that we are all arriving at 265 we are settling in for the long game of slowly incrementing our levels each week through doing events. The folks that are pushing 300 right now did some sheer madness… namely I know it was super popular in the reddit circles to roll 3 of exactly the same class so you could swap gear and get three times the weekly engrams… greatly increasing your chances of moving things forward.

What I did not expect was for Cayde-6 to pay out this week the way that he did. For the also unindoctrinated… once you hit level 20 and complete your main story quest each of the traditional NPCs does a specific thing. Ikora Rey for example lets you replay three missions a week and then in turn rewards engrams based on the faction tokens you get from doing this. Zavala is once again all about the strikes and the nightfall, and Cayde-6 unsurprisingly is all about sending you on a quest to gather up loot he has stashed. He sells 5 maps per week for 5000 glimmer each and they are always going to be in whatever zone happens to be the Flashpoint area. This week for example it was Nessus and when you purchase them a series of Spade icons appear on your map with no real indication of how to actually get there. Other than a few rare cases these icons are “breaking the border” of the map… meaning you need to figure out if they are in a cave system or if you need to climb up somewhere and jump out in what is officially unmarked space of the map. Occasionally there are gimme chests like the one this week that is literally in the middle of a structure that is impossible to miss… but I won’t go into any spoilers about any of them. Last week I got one exotic engram, one legendary… and a bunch of random junk that Cayde-6 will buy back from you… like a Spinfoil Hat. This week was insanely good loot wise because not only did I wind up getting four legendary engrams and one exotic, I also got a 271 weapon. So that means in theory you could possible get power level increasing upgrades from him going forward.

Since I was functionally gifted almost the right number of items for a specific quest… I decided to make last night all about trying to catch up on the various exotic weapon quests. When you finish the main storyline there are a number of blue crown icon quests that start showing up on the various planets. From what I understand each of these ultimately leads to an exotic. I had already been working my way through the one that rewards first the MIDA Mini Tool submachinegun and eventually the MIDA Multi Tool scout rifle made famous in Destiny 1. The quest where I needed all of the engrams however I am still working my way through by doing silly things on Nessus. However one of the first steps in the chain involves going to Master Rahool in the tower and decrypting 5 legendary engrams and 1 exotic engram. The quest itself pays out one legendary engram, so I knew that this was one of those times where it would be easy to move forward in the quest chain since I had everything sitting there and ready to go. The only quest that I have not started is the one for the Rat King, but I will be doing this soon given that I am hearing this is a decent week to try and get through it as one of the steps requires you to make insanely good time in the Nightfall. I feel like I am still making progress, but a lot of that progress is slow and incremental. We’ve entered the cold winter phase of Destiny, when every few points of light requires a large amount of effort. I’m completely fine in this territory because I have been there before, but I am wondering if we end up losing a few people in the post 265 slog.

Destiny 2 Heroic Event Triggers

September 12, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday Pete asked if I could do a post about the various heroic event triggers, and this morning I am going to attempt to do just that. Last night I was able to get a few reasonable screenshots of the objectives for several of the events. Others I have simply looked up and will attempt to explain because I don’t have good imagery for them. At this point though I now feel relatively comfortable in my knowledge of how to launch any of the events into heroic mode. I am posting a picture of my own character at the start of this post largely because I am happy that for once I have most of a matched set of gear.

Glimmer Extraction – Fallen Event

This is more than likely the very first event you ever complete in Destiny 2 because it spawns right out in front of the church. Essentially a Ketch will drop off a Glimmer Harvesting team and you have to take out the extraction teams. Each team will consist of 3 mobs followed by a mini boss type mob. Then the ketch will drop another ship in a new location. There will be three different locations that the Fallen attempt to harvest and if you take down all of them you defeat the event. In the Heroic mode however things change. In the above screenshot you can see a little engine looking thing with a stream of glimmer going into it. There will be one of these at each location the Fallen attempt to harvest, and to trigger heroic you need to destroy them before you have defeated a given waves miniboss. From there the goal changes to guarding a pile of glimmer until your folks can transmat it out. Someone has to be standing on the pile at all times to make sure the bar is progressing.

Weapons Exchange – Fallen

This event is pretty straight forward. In Destiny 1 we learned the ins and outs of fighting Fallen Walkers… hit the armor plating on their legs until one section falls of and then the carapace covering the control module slides open and you can pour damage into the unit. In this event there are 3 energy fields protecting a total of six scorch cannons. Each time you bust open the carapace on the Walker, a number of arc orbs will spawn at its feet. In order to trigger the heroic phase, you need to take those orbs and carry them to the receptacles that look like the object in the screenshot above. It will take two orbs per shield, and once you have dropped all three shields… a second walker gets dropped on your location. The goal is to have the first walker almost dead when you drop the shields so that you can grab a scorch cannon and finished both off extremely quickly.

Ether Resupply – Fallen

This event is another one that is pretty straight forward… kill the giant Servitor. During the event a number of smaller servitors will spawn in and start interacting with the bigger one. The first one has to be killed because he shields the Servitor from any damage. There is a second phase where three spawn in… and in theory you can leave these up if you are just taking down the Servitor normally. However if you kill them it starts the heroic phase… which causes the Servitor to take greatly reduced damage… talking 10-15 damage per shot in a vulnerable spot reduced damage. The goal here is to get the servitor down pretty close… then kill the three mini-servitors… then drop the big guy to close out the event.

Excavation – Cabal

This is one of the least straight forward of all of the events. The goal of the Excavation event is to stand hear the mining lander and progress the bar to 100%… all the while avoiding waves of progressively more difficult mobs and missiles that are coming in from the command ship hovering over the location. At various points in the fight a Thresher gunship will fly in and start attacking anyone defending the location. In order to trigger the heroic phase of the event you need to take down this gunship… and in my experience you have about two flyby phases to do it in before you have progressed the event to 100% and ended it naturally. Essentially everyone needs to focus fire this thing down whenever you see it. If you are successful a major cabal centurion boss will spawn in… and wreck him to earn your heroic chest.

Injection Rig – Cabal

I am not honestly sure what the non-heroic goal of this event is, because from the start it is telling you to drawn down the Infiltrator Valus… which is what happens if you trigger heroic mode. While this event is going on there will be a giant cabal shield that spawns over the drill, and every so often giant vents will open at up to four spots on the rig. If you are in the bubble you start burning, and the ultimately goal to trigger heroic mode is to destroy all four of these vents before you end up dying in the process. About the most that I have seen taken out in a single go are two vents at a time, so that means it will take a few passes to get them all down. It helps if you have a really good ranged power weapon like a fusion rifle or rocket launcher. If you are successfull Infiltrator Valus will spawn and you wreck him to get your chest of goodies.

Spire Integration – Vex

Much like the Fallen Walker event… this is a reboot of a classic event from Destiny 1. In the Spire Integration event your goal was to prevent wave after wave of Vex from integrating with the spire that you were guarding. One of those does in fact exist in this event, as does the objective of preventing anyone from integrating with a wiggle room counter of 10. However to progress the event to the Heroic mode you need to also help build shields around these additional spires. There will be 3 glowing rings scattered around the event… standing in one will begin to capture the point and raise a vex shield around you. Once you have captured all three of these the Heroic mode will trigger and you have to destroy progressively more nasty Vex until the timer runs out. Prepare to have Minotaurs and Cyclops to spawn in addition to all of the normal yellow bar Vex types. Stay alive and prevent 10 integrations to win your heroic loots.

Taken Blight – Taken

This is one of the ones that I don’t have an image for. Essentially the goal of this event is to destroy an number of taken blights that spawn in. In Destiny 2 the blights work slightly differently in that they are protected by a bubble and in order to actually damage the blight you have to step inside of it. During this event while standing in one of these bubbles you will get a brief buff called “Blight Receding”. There is another giant blight bubble that will spawn near the other blights… and this one is protected by a shield and if you attempt to hit it you get “invulnerable”. However while you have this Blight Receding buff you can deal damage to it. Functionally you need to alternate ducking inside the bubble to get the buff and going out and damaging the big blight until it is destroyed. If you are successful this will trigger the heroic mode and summon a Taken Major for you to destroy. If you defeat it then you get shiny loots.

Witches’ Ritual – Hive

This one only spawns on Titan and I believe only in one specific location near where you spawn in at the arcology. The goal is to prevent a pair of hive wizards from opening a portal… the only problem is the wizards are shielded and invulnerable. You will notice however there are two hive sigils on the ground, and standing in one causes the corresponding wizard to lose its shield. After you take down the wizards a bigger more powerful wizard will spawn in. In order to trigger the heroic version you need to then recapture the sigils and use it to destroy two crystals that were previously invulnerable to attack. If you do this successfully another Hive Major will spawn in the Darkblade Knight. Defeat it to get your tasty loots.