Three Bananas

This weekend was an extended weekend for me, having taken two days off to match up with my wife who is on fall break. As a result I had more than my average amount of play time and the timing happened to line up perfectly with the first Iron Banner for the Season of the Undying in Destiny 2. This time around there was a quest chain that I wrote about the other day that walks the player through collecting four weapons and a full suit of the Iron Banner armor. After this however it became my first mission to make sure I had completed that on all three characters. The above collage shows them all in the gear set that I picked up with some shaders applied to make them look cooler.
The most curious part of the weekend is that I somehow capped my Valor twice and reset it… and am now grinding it up a third time presently sitting at the Brave II rank. Partially this is due to the fact that the weekend included a bonus to all valor gained, and partially due to the fact that I played an excessive amount of crucible via the Iron Banner. I am guessing that the bonus valor also somehow equated to bonus XP because I skyrocketed from around 33 at the start of Iron Banner to 60 as of last night. I also managed to hit the less permeable cap of 960… aka 950 gear and 10 bonus light coming from the artifact. From this point on I believe the gains are in single point increments.
I was completely all over the place this weekend when it came to the activities that I dipped my toes into. While podcasting I opted to grind the Menagerie a bit and attempt to get a good roll of the Austringer, something that I had apparently completely failed at doing during the Season of Opulence. I am not even sure what a God Roll looks like, but my friend Teyeger01 suggested either Rampage/Rapid Hit or Rapid Hit/Kill Clip… the later sounds most excellent. I pulled an Outlaw/Rampage which seems like a perfectly reasonable option for the time being and one well worth using. For the time being I am completely out of Desire runes and will probably wait for Thalen to unlock the chalice before grinding some out again seeing as he was not benefiting from my runefinder buff.
Speaking of which, I spent a good chunk of the weekend running around with Thalen and doing whatever he had on his list of activities. I now fully understand why Squirrel always wanted me to drive the activity we were doing, because after a point it doesn’t really matter what it is we are actually doing. It is the act of running around and getting to play big brother guardian that is really fun. I wish I could have somehow carried people to the Iron Banner armor, but the way those objectives were set up to do not exactly lend themselves to being helped out by another guardian. So many of the checkmarks are depended upon getting weapon kills of a specific type, which means you need to be the one that actually finishes the Guardian off. If they were assists… maybe just maybe I could have helped folks like Pix through the Iron Banana because apparently I am better than I realized?
Speaking of killing Guardians… I finished off my Malfeasance… which is a Hand Cannon that I am probably never going to use. Right now I am heavily favoring swapping back and forth between Austringer and Ace of Spades when I want to play with that weapon type. The problem with Malfeasance is its special perk procs an explosion after the fifth hit on a target. Very few targets can handle five hits… even Guardians tend to drop somewhere in the 3 to 4 hit range. This means the only time you are ever going to get use of the perk is on some tanky Majors and Boss type encounters… which are situations you are probably going to use a heavy or a special on. So basically this weapon feels like it needs some tweaking… if it was 3 hits and then an explosion this gun would be amazing. Regardless it is another Exotic quest checked off on my list, and another quest out of my log.
At the start of this week I would have said without a doubt that this was the best feeling Iron Banner I had experienced to date. Then things shifted… and I eventually found out that Bungie made tweaks to the way the matchmaking was working. Originally as a solo queue player I was almost always getting matched with other solo queue players, which felt amazing. The problem is the vocal minority of the “sweaty” pvpers complained that they were sitting in orbit with a full team for hours and not getting matches. Bungie made some tweaks to the system and suddenly on Saturday I started getting matched up with 4 or 5 players from the same clan against my rag tag group of solo queues. Basically I am glad that I got most of my progress towards the armor sets done before that point, because on my Hunter it took way longer than it did on any of the others.
It makes me realize how much better the Crucible would be for me personally… if there was a freelancer play list. I am almost always going to queue as a solo player, because that tend to be how I play crucible most of the time. On the first few days before they applied this tweak… Iron Banner felt amazing. On the days after the patch was applied… I got one of two games… competitive or shut outs that I got “mercied”. Even when you lose in a close game… it somehow feels better because you had a chance. The weirdest realization for me personally… is that even in the scenarios where I was getting completely tromped… I was doing reasonably well. I think of myself as a very shitty PVPer… but maybe just maybe I have improved over time. I did enjoy myself and I find doing the Crucible bounties a little less tedious than it used to be.

AggroChat #255 – The Ish of E3

Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight I completely butcher the intro because my co-hosts decided to get clever with it.  Tonight we talk about a lot of stuff that is coming out ahead of E3… which in truth is the only time that matters given that the only people who care about the actual show are the ones attending in person.  We talk about the Google Stadia presser and Destiny 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 news that came out of it. We talk about the only thing from EA that matters… the progressively less vaporware Jedi Fallen Order. We talk the weird case of the Magic the Gathering Animated Series and then on to Pokemon Goodest Boy Edition.  Lastly a brief topic about how Ubisoft is dumb.

Topics Discussed:

  • Google Stadia
    • Netflix for Games
    • Xbox Cloud
  • Destiny 2
    • Season of Opulence
    • Free to Play and Cross Save
  • Baldur’s Gate 3
  • Jedi Fallen Order
  • Magic the Gathering
    • Netflix Animated Series
  • Pokemon Sword and Shield
    • Good Boy Edition
  • Ubisoft is Dumb

AggroChat #239 – Sticking the Ending

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat239

Tonight we have a bunch of not entirely related topics, but there is at least a minor theme of how you end something is extremely important.  Bel talks a bit about his experiences with the latest brand name beta in the form of Division 2. From there he also shares some frustrations with the way Assassin’s Creed Origins is ending which leads its way into a larger discussion about what makes a satisfying game ending.  We talk about what this means for passive media and how it might be different for interactive media. We then get into a discussion about progression systems and why fixed ones often times feel better than completely random ones. Finally we have some assorted digression about us looking forward to Anthem as a non-PVP mmo that somehow leads its way to FFXIV housing?

Topics Discussed:

  • Division 2
    • Military Fantasy Fallout but no Nukes
    • Worthy Successor to Original
  • Assassin’s Creed Origins
    • Great Game… But
    • Forced Character Swaps
    • End of Game Without “Your” Character
  • Satisfying Finales
    • Twist Endings
      • Mass Effect 3
    • Resolution Endings
      • Plot Twist Ending
      • Plot Twist at Beginning of Final Chapter
    • Fixed Length Shows
      • Anime
      • Babylon 5
      • Russian Doll
    • Revisiting Choices From Game in Ending
  • Fixed vs Random Progression Systems
    • Warframe Blueprint System
    • Destiny Random “Powerful Gear” Frustrations
    • Warframe Economy
  • Excitement over Non-PVP MMORPG
    • Anthem
    • Free PVP Gear from FFXIV Retainers
    • Lacking Money Sinks in FFXIV
    • House Reclamation

AggroChat #233 – Games of the Year 2018

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat233

This evening we do our traditional Games of the Year show, and apparently we are way less verbose than we used to be.  These shows used to get chopped into two roughly hour and a half long shows… but this year we managed to do it in pretty much two hours straight.  What makes this even more interesting is the fact that we churned through nineteen games in the process. Ultimately we each pick roughly five games that were important to us during the calendar year, and some overlap always occurs.  This year less overlap happened than is normal.

Games Discussed

  • CrossCode
  • Destiny 2 Forsaken
  • Dragon Quest XI
  • Fallout 76
  • Subnautica
  • Gloomhaven
  • Heroes of Hammerwatch
  • Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2
  • Diablo 3 on Switch
  • Magic the Gathering Arena
  • Night in the Woods
  • Super Smash Bros Ultimate
  • Hitman 2
  • Return of the Obra Dinn
  • Spiderman
  • Hollow Knight
  • Dragalia Lost
  • Monster Hunter World