First off we are going to start off the post with a little bit of “good guy Bungie”. There is a patch coming up that changes the way pinnacle drops work. Currently Pinnacle rewards give you a single point of light, making it exceedingly hard to change the calculation and increase your light past 950. In truth I never quite expected to be needing pinnacles to move me forward but I find myself in the same position everyone else is. After Thursday there is a change coming in that bumps this up to a guaranteed two light levels per pinnacle reward.
Now this week is the Iron Banner and with it comes a bunch of bounties that all reward pinnacle gear. There has been a bunch of talk on the internet about saving up your bounties to turn in AFTER Thursday’s patch, but just in case someone missed this when you log into the game you get the big damned notice across your screen that you see in the first screenshot. I greatly appreciate them going above and beyond to make sure no one was unaware that a patch was coming and that they should not spend any of those precious precious pinnacle loot drops until then.
I’ve now reached the end of the seasonal journey track and still have 34 days left to go until the end of the season. Like I said yesterday I was honestly not sure if I would make it, but I did with plenty of time to spare. Now I am continuing to gain ranks but to the best of my knowledge there is nothing gained from them. It appears that post 100 you gain a Nostalgic Engram every 500,000 experience points, and since each rank is 100,000 xp that is every 5 levels. I feel like that is a perfectly reasonable reward for time spent grinding thanks to all of the xp boosts that come with the seasonal ranks. Now doing this without the pass… probably is a massive pain in the butt.
The interesting thing about the process is that as you move upwards you start getting these perks that say you have a chance of getting one of the weapons from the seasonal journey in various activities. I’ve run a bunch of activities after getting these “scavenger” perks but never actually saw one of the weapons drop. Then last night I managed to get a second Machine Gun and a second Auto Rifle within two matches of hitting Rank 100. I am wondering if the chance of getting these goes up exponentially after hitting 100, or if Iron Banner is somehow juiced to give higher drop rates?
Whatever the case I have shiny new versions of the two weapons. I am not at all certain if they are better than the original rolls that I got, but both have Range Finder which may or may not be useful. I was not a huge fan of either when I first got my hands on them, but I figure I will give them some more testing to determine if they are useful. I might break out the original rolls just to see how they feel as well. The original HMG had Hip Fire and Pulse Monitor, so I definitely think the new version with Quick Draw and Range Finder was an upgrade. The Auto Rifle however I am not sure about with the original having Outlaw/Dynamic Sway Reduction and the new version with Range Finder and Mulligan. Given the spray and pray nature of an Auto Rifle… Mulligan might be a pretty solid perk.
The real win for the night however is that I managed to finish the “Get Guardian Kills with Void, Hand Cannons or Void Hand Cannons” step of the Thorn quest. Slowly bit by bit I whittled away at this for what felt like ages, but thanks to the Iron Banner giving extra credit it seems… I managed to go from just under 50% to finished in a single night. I still need to run the mission for both this and the Lumina so I can get both weapons. Side note I also finished 3 of the 4 bounties available for the Iron Banner. The one that increases thanks to super kills is always the one that lags behind.
Tonight however I am planning on running around in WoW Retail and doing the 15th anniversary quests lest I forget to do them before they disappear. So I logged in this morning to park at the Caverns of Time where they I believe all start. I got the letter in the mail and have the quest step to talk to Chromie, so I will get all that taken care of tonight.
While I am starting to dip my toes back into World of Warcraft, I am still spending an excessive amount of time in Destiny 2. I am a huge fan of the new Altars of Sorrow event and it has rapidly become my downtime activity. Between activities? Lets hop down to the moon and see if there is a group up and doing the Altars. Of note Escalation Protocol also used to be my group activity of choice back when it was actually happening on the regular. There is just something about the zero commitment drop in nature that I really love.
I mean part of me wishes there was a sure fire way of getting a successful group of players together to do it, apart from queueing in groups. One thing I noticed is that when I queue solo, I get matched with groups way more often than when Thalen and I were trying to drop in and do some Altars as a pair. In most of those occasions it seemed like it was just the two of us attempting to do content clearly designed for a full fire team. Regardless it is a good way to get a handful of weapon drops. They are on a daily rotation and Reddit user Letuch created a spreadsheet to track the rotation and what some of the rolls you might be interesting in are.
Yesterday was shotgun day, and I have yet to get a roll I am super happy with. For now this is my current best option which is Quickdraw and Rampage. I also have a variant with Swashbuckler and Auto Loading Holster which might be interesting. The truth is this isn’t exactly my jam as far as weapons go because it is a strange archetype of slug based shotguns that fire a single high powered round rather than a spray of shrapnel. If you are dead on with this you can drop targets really fast and it is basically a legendary Chaperone.
I’ve talked about it before, but for now this has become my new kinetic shotgun of choice. It comes with 8 in the magazine, One Two Punch and Threat Detector and the reload speed is nonsense on it. This is the closest I have found to a shotgun that replaces my beloved Ikelos. Sadly for a lot of players this is going to be much easier to get given that no one seems to be running Escalation Protocol. I wish they would turn that into a playlist similar to the Vex Invasion so that people can still have access to the items. Occasionally Thalen and I drop down onto Mars to see if it is going on because I still lack two of the three available weapons, and he has none of them.
The other weapon that I have firmly in the not sure about it camp is the Apostate. I am not much of a sniper user at all, so I am not sure what represents a good roll here. Snapshot Sights and Range Finder seem like a viable combo given that this feels like the type of sniper you would want to try and quick scope with. That particular build seems to aid that process. Post in the comments if you have an idea what a better option might be for me to chase. In truth I am doing the event because I am enjoying it and the weapons are more or less just a bonus.
I posted about the curated roll for the Rocket Launcher that I got a few days ago, and in truth… I am probably never going to find a better roll on a rocket launcher than one I already have in my inventory. Bad Omens is the Gambit rocket launcher and at some point in my travels I picked up one that has both Cluster Bomb and Tracking, making it as close to a Destiny 2 Gjallarhorn as I think I am ever going to find. This is effectively what I use to nuke Invaders in gambit, because it is super easy to target in and destroy them.
On to other things… I am nearing the end of this seasonal journey. When it started and when the Mastery tree was introduced I was not entirely certain I would play enough to hit rank 100. However as of last night I am about halfway to 97 and will easily hit 100 this weekend when I play some Iron Banner. I gotta say there are a lot of issues with this sort of Fortnite style progression path, but it does give me some constantly focus and a drive to keep playing in order to get those final items. For me… it maybe adds the overarching sense of purpose that Destiny 2 was lacking once I reached the item cap. I’ve been sitting at 950 for weeks and knowing there are more things to unlock has kept me engaged.
BlizzCon was this weekend, and I admit that I stayed home on Friday to watch what was about to happen. I was not sure if it would be a weekend full of protests, or a weekend where Blizzard finally quelled the rising storm. The truth is… it seemingly was a little of column A and a little of column B. They opened the show with a statement by Blizzard President J. Allen Brack or JAB as people have taken to calling him. During the comment he said a lot of words that sounded pretty close to apologizing without actually ever apologizing. It was effectively the corporate version of reflexively saying you are sorry when you don’t quite know what you just did.
A real apology includes three components. First admitting that you realize what you did and being able to explain it. Second giving a heartfelt apology that relays an understanding of the harm that was caused. Third an explanation of how you are going to make the changes necessary to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The statement did none of the above, however it is likely the closest we are ever going to get on this situation. I give them credit for making an attempt however and for now I am going to lower my pitchfork, because quite frankly I am tired of having to be upset at Blizzard. I stand by my statement that in the Video Game and Entertainment industry, no one has clean hands and the only way to do so is to simply stop doing business with China in any form.
We are addicted to Chinese products, be it the cheap phone charger that you picked up to have a spare, the clothing that we wear, or literally every inch of your mobile phone. Blizzard is attempting to walk the line between our Western sensibilities and the Great Firewall that will lock them out completely from competing in the single largest market on the planet. There is a long list that Mashable compiled of companies that have bowed to the whims of China, and Blizzard is right up there with all of them. What I did see that I found interesting however were a bunch of subtle moments during the stream. There were times that the cameras focused in on “Free Hong Kong” t-shirts or the extremely long time that one focused on a shirt that read “Fire Bobby Kotick”. What I saw was a company trying to walk a very delicate path and coming off super awkward and frustrating in the process.
You ever hang a picture, and you screw up when you put the nail in the wall, and you got the wire a little off kilter… so that if you hang it on the wall it is always just slightly off? That's this Blizzcon. There is a lot of good stuff, it is just slightly off what I hoped
So I left a big thread about my feelings in regards to BlizzCon 2019. Something felt off the entire weekend and I think I realized what it was on Sunday. Because of the events leading up to the show I found myself in a state where I wasn’t quite willing to surrender myself to what I have called the “BlizzCon” spirit. In past years I let the hype flow over me and allowed myself to fall into the loving embrace of the big blue community. This year… I saw the imperfections and the seams. I saw the people straining under the yoke of not quite knowing how any comment was going to be received. I mean there was good reason for this because of the “Don’t You Have Phones” comment from last year and the controversy surrounding Blizzard this year. It was a show filled with anxiety and folks who looked tangibly like their jobs were on the line. However I could wallow in this awkwardness all morning long but lets get into some of the things that were announced.
Diablo IV
The big one for me of course is Diablo IV, aka the announcement I had been waiting years for. Now that I have it… I am not entirely certain what I think of it. It feels like they are leaning heavily into what is traditionally the Path of Exile space in an attempt to win back some of those former fans. It is going to be a juggling act to try and entice the “Diablo II” stalwarts while not losing any of the newer “Diablo III” fans. When we were still doing the Game Club, we picked Diablo II at one point and none of us actually managed to make it through the campaign. It was a sloppy mess from a bygone era and in part thanks to that I have realized just how amazing Diablo III was and still is.
If they can however somehow thread that needle of adding the complexity and depth that was Diablo II without giving up the fast paced gameplay of Diablo III it will be a phenomenal game. I’ve been in a position of “I will wait for it to release” for awhile thanks to a lot of half baked alpha programs… but I really would love to be in this testing program. I would love to help shape this game on the forums with comments and feedback, because I have a feeling if they manage to pull it off this is going to be my main Blizzard game going forward. I would love to transplant our Friday night seasonal starts over to a fresh new game. I have hope but I also have concerns… because again you have to split down the middle of two vastly different demographics. The leaning heavily on the darkness aspect makes me deeply concerned that they are going to make too big of a play for the Path of Exile crowd and leave me out in the cold.
Diablo Immortal
Not surprisingly they shadow dropped this Friday night. To the best of my recollection there was no mention of Diablo Immortal at any point during the Diablo streams. I get why given the extremely negative reaction last year, but I do still think this is going to be an interesting game. I will likely either play it from a Mobile Emulator on my gaming PC or from my Samsung S4 tablet. This feels like the true successor to the Diablo III lineage and I still hope that maybe just maybe it gets some sort of a PC release. This would also potentially be an excellent new Switch game.
World of Warcraft Shadowlands
Several months ago there was a leak floating around the internet that seemed a little far fetched at the time… but turned out to be exactly what the set up for the new expansion has been. Sylvannas was in fact trying to lead both the Horde and Alliance down a path to destruction, in order to create more souls to be trapped and used for some army in the Shadowlands by her master. We don’t quite know who that master is at the moment, but you as the player are going to venture forth into the lands of the dead as some sort of a planeswalker that can freely move between worlds. There you will join with one of four covenents that will shape your experience based on which you choose.
I like that they are leaning into class fantasy again, like they did in Legion. I also like that they are setting up to maybe bring a story that doesn’t rely entirely on the big dumb red versus blue storyline. Unfortunately it doesn’t go far enough for me. I want them to abolish the Horde and the Alliance and create a new tapestry of personal faction choices that ultimately dictate where you can go in the world. I want the faction wall to fall. No better time to make it happen than in an expansion where we are quite literally leaving Azeroth and going to the lands of the dead. The world is fractured enough as it is without adding a painfully artificial choice into the mix.
Overwatch 2
I like the world, setting and characters of Overwatch, but I gotta admit that the game itself is not really my Jam. I never really wanted a Team Fortress 3, but that is seemingly what we got. I would have loved to have seen what they could have done with this setting as an MMORPG, and while I realize there are good reasons Project Titan never got off the ground… I can still pine for what might have been. Overwatch 2 is bringing in the PVE game to the original Overwatch PVP focused game and I am going to largely take a wait and see approach on this. It isn’t a Destiny style game and instead seems to be something more akin to what Marvel Avengers appears to be shaping up to be. If they can give me an experience that feels similar to a Destiny Strike, I might be interested.
Hearthstone
Hearthstone announced another set. If this game is your jam then I assume you are excited, but it is probably hard to garner much excitement given the rapid release cadence of this game. I admit this was my signal to go use the bathroom during the opening ceremony. It isn’t so much that I dislike Hearthstone, it is more of a case that it was a methadone to my Magic the Gathering addiction. I played it for awhile because it gave me the best digital card game fix I had available to me. Then Magic the Gathering Arena released and I have never logged into Hearthstone after that point. If I could somehow gift my cards to someone I probably would. I hate to see them going to waste on an account that doesn’t care about them anymore.
All in all there was a lot of good stuff, but like I said before. Something felt off about all of it. I am going to just assume it was thanks to my mental state going into the event and not because they didn’t actually show off a bunch of interesting things. Like the topic states… for now I am lowering my pitchfork and moving on with my life. Being angry about something exhausts me when all I really want to do is try and find some way of bringing enjoyment into my often frustrating and maddening real life. I play games as an escape to the rigors of reality and when that relief valve is jammed shut… I find myself way less reasonable. Warcraft is back on the menu it seems, but even then I found it super hard to get back into Classic or Retail and will probably still mostly be playing Destiny 2.
Last night I spent some time participating in the newest Escalation Protocol event happening in the Sorrow’s Harbor area of the moon. In theory as soon as you port to the area you will be matched up with a group of players also participating in the event. Now last night we had a full group and it went pretty smoothly. This morning I tried a round with less than a full group and we still managed to complete all of the rounds to earn the final chest. In theory this should be a much easier thing to get started than Escalation Protocol. It tells me they maybe took some lessons away from how that event worked and figured out a way to juice the results a bit by allowing us to drop down directly in an area where we are going to see events happening.
At any given point there will be a platform or platforms activated so you can participate simply by hanging out in the near vicinity. The goal is to take out a number of majors that will be spawning and heading towards your platform. Similar to Escalation protocol there is a phase where you have to mix things up a bit where a number of Hive Wizards spawn with shields. In order to break these shields you will need to take out the Hive Knights that spawn in at the same time and use their swords to disrupt the shield similar to the Warsat event in the Archers Line area of the Moon. Each time you successfully defeat all of the Majors within the time limit the Altar event moves to the next Tier, and after Tier V a boss will spawn at the gate to the Shadowkeep.
Similar to Escalation protocol you are chasing a number of weapon drops that apparently change on a daily basis. Yesterday the Rocket Launcher was dropping, and today there will in theory be a completely different drop. Unlike Escalation Protocol these weapons seem to drop each time you get through the final boss. I got a couple of different rolls and managed to pull what I think is the curated Masterwork roll as well. All in all this looks to be a pretty solid rocket launcher thanks to the Cluster Bombs. It doesn’t beat my Bad Omens with both Cluster Bomb and Tracking Module… but it still is a pretty solid option for the Crucible.
I also ran a few rounds of Nightmare Hunts which got me the shotgun essence and it seemingly turned into a pretty solid roll. As much as I like punching things… the One-Two Punch perk seems to be pretty useful. The Magazine holds 8 rounds which is also super nice, placing it as probably my new favorite kinetic slot shotgun. Having threat detector on a shotgun also is super nice for the added reload speed, making this the sort of shotgun that you can bounce around a mob and fire after loading a single round over and over until it is dead. I am still pleasantly surprised at just how damned good the game feels right now, and how much there is to keep doing even though I have been capped in light for weeks.
Warden of Freshtovia (@belghast) November 1, 2019
