Monday night after finishing a significant number of contracts and stronghold runs I opted to spend a little time on my Chonky Boi in Hard Mode normal contracts to start building out enough gear to make something functional. I’ve been spending a little time now that I have the Ranger in a good spot, working on the other javelins and Colossus seems to be the one I struggle the most with. What I expect is for it to be this unstoppable juggernaut… and what happens in practice is that I am constantly having to run away from the fight and find red chicklets on the ground to heal myself back up. In my hard mode travels however I came across one of the last “drops in any mode” Masterworks that I did not currently have… the Fist of Stral which is based on Cloudburst one of the two Autocannons that don’t require much in the way of spin up.
Also in my travels I picked up my second Legendary in the form of Glorious Result a Heavy Pistol. This is not exactly my jam but I spent a little time checking it out and playing with it. It is somewhat unique in that it fires two shot bursts and it feels a bit like using the Crimson Hand Cannon from Destiny 2. That was not really my moment of joy and neither is this weapon, however I do dig the fact that it reminds me of Ghostbusters with its “Scarbusters” paint job. This is largely going in the vault as more of a collectible than something I am actually going to use, which is a little disappointing for how few and far between Legendary drops are.
After running a bunch of regular contracts on Monday night I managed to cobble together something resembling a decent build and last night I opted to do my Legendary contracts as Colossus to start piecing together a reasonable assortment of components. I also had time to run one Stronghold as Colossus which was manageable but still as a whole the suit feels unwieldy, especially considered to the much more nimble Ranger that I am used to. Right now I am running the Fire Wall ability as primer and Siege Cannon as my detonator, and it seems to work for most things… and thankfully I managed to pick up a Masterwork Rubidium Furnace so I can continue with that build. That is the worst part about easing your way into Grandmaster 1 is having to abandon what was a build that felt good… and deal with whatever luck of the draw got you.
Overall for the night I got several components including my third Legendary drop… which I was sorta kicking myself a little bit that it happened while playing my alternate frame. The biggest thing I am noticing is that as I get better gear I seem to be getting more pips of armor… which means I can survive significantly more damage before I have to run away and find skittles on the ground to recuperate that health. Not having and over-shield is still fundamentally weird and feels not amazing… but I think I am starting to hit that break even point in Grandmaster where it largely feels the same as Hard mode used to.
I’ve not really talked about it much on the blog but I have been using a really cool website called Anthem Archive to look up various gear options. What I would really love for them to do is implement some sort of a profile system that allows us to either run a tray resident app that uploads our loadouts, or for Anthem itself to have some sort of an API that they can access to pull the same information. I also wish it would allow you to link to a specific item… so that I could have included links to each one of those components so you could find out what exactly they do. The site as a whole isn’t quite there yet… but it is the best that we have and I am thankful to have ANYTHING at this point. I however have been spoiled greatly by the utility that Destiny Item Manager provides for Destiny/Destiny 2.