The Last Word

This weekend I spent most of my time in Destiny 2, and as a result I started working furiously on trying to knock out a bunch of objectives that had been clogging my inventory. During the podcast on Saturday night I spent the entirety hanging out with Thalen and working on some objectives he had surrounding the completion of escalation protocol on Mars. It is funny how much more reasonable that seems to be when you are grouped up with at least one more person. We managed to get it through I believe wave 5 before ultimately having to retreat and start over. I miss the days when you could drop down on planet as a solo and get all of the way to seven.
The highlight of the weekend however is that I finally got through the Last Word exotic weapon quest. This one features a few sections that are a colossal pain in the ass. The biggest of these is the pure Crucible section, that involves moving a gauge to 100. A guardian kill gives you 2 points and a death takes 1 point away. I apparently had a good weekend as far as crucible goes and found myself only a few kills away from completing this objective and thankfully managed to push through. The next step involved farming a bunch of things up… and then getting 25 “revenge” medals from the Crucible, which weirdly went way faster than I would have expected. Finally I had one painful mission to get through and a duel with a hive that I failed out like 20 times before finally getting through and claiming my weapon.
Another thing I spent time on this weekend was working through the Rat King’s Crew quest. I never really prioritized this one because it isn’t a weapon I would likely ever use. I really do not enjoy sidearms in Destiny. However it has clogged my quest log for ages and I spent part of yesterday getting Thalen caught up. Sadly I needed to run out and get some errands taken care of so we only got one of the two crucible matches in. I think after that we just need to run a Nightfall… of which I am really hoping that the modern Ordeal style ones will work.
I also managed to get the last piece of exotic armor for Titans this weekend, because apparently Xur’s overly expensive engram finally includes the Season of Opulence gear. I had read somewhere that this was the case so I went ahead and gambled a stack of Legendary Shards on it. There is apparently a super powerful build based around these legs that I might try at some point. Mostly I just wanted to check another space off on my list of exotics. I need to start working on the same for Hunter and Warlock as I am way behind on both of those.
All told I am up to 927 light and my Hunter is up to 919 without the best weapons swapped over. At some point I will push up the Warlock as well so I can have all three active and at reasonable light levels. Most of my running around with Thalen on Saturday night was with the Hunter, and I only swapped back to the Titan to get exotic quest steps done. In my downtime I am working on slowly knocking out other Triumphs that I never got when I transferred from PS4 to PC initially. There are a bunch of lost sectors that I have never quiet collected for example, or region chests opened. For the time being it seems like Destiny 2 is my main game, so I am settling in and finding stuff to keep me happy.

Loud Lullaby

In part because of my self imposed exile from Blizzard products, over the last several nights I have played an awful lot of Destiny 2. The weird thing about it is that I am not really grinding my ass off to get that light higher. In fact this week I am not sure if I have actually earned any powerful engrams. Instead I find myself piddling around and working on various quests. One of my favorite of these are the weapon quests that start dropping on the moon that lead to purifying a weapon of a sort. I am not sure how many of these there are but I have picked up a fair number of them. However the moment I get a new one it suddenly becomes my key priority.
Last night for example I unlocked this super angry climbing pick. It really is a brutal looking weapon, but I am not sure if I could actually qualify this as a “sword”. Unfortunately I don’t really know what makes a good sword versus a bad sword, but this one seems to be one that you want to use the light attack on as you get a bonus when you do so… and you also get some ammo refunded to the weapon. This means I need to vary my play style because I generally go for the slow big hits rather than the blade flurry.
Another weapon unlocked last night is Every Waking Moment, which is a Submachinegun which I am coming to love more and more. This time it has dynamic sway reduction which really helps with the kick on a sub. Subsistence helps to reload the weapon on kill and then ricochet rounds extend the range a tiny bit and increase stability. The total package leads to a very predictable experience and this is quickly becoming my weapon of choice for anything serious, paired with either the Monte Carlo or my good ole Standby the Breakneck with Barrier Rounds equipped. Monte Carlo would never leave my hand were it not for the fact that I can’t equip barrier rounds.
If I need to swap things up a bit I got a new scout option. The previous roll that I liked has Subsistence and Multi-Kill Clip. This one has good ole Triple Tap and Explosive Payload making it theoretically way more useful for me when I end up using a scout rifle. The only time I run one is when I know I will need to sit back and plink things from a distance, at which point triple tap helps quite a bit. I am still not the biggest fan of the look of the Vex themed weapons that come from invasions and incursions but they are solidly rolled most of the time. Weirdly I seem to get more scout rifles than any of the other weapons.
Another weapon that I like an awful lot that I got recently is the Loud Lullaby which is the Eris Morn Hand Cannon. The roll I got is pretty solid with Opening Shot and Outlaw as well as Flared Magwell. I am playing around with this quite a bit, and it has become my go to when I get a hand cannon bounty. Previously I had been using a Duke and this is absolutely replaced that. There is also the side benefit that it looks really freaking cool.
As far as seasonal progress goes I am still way off from the end, but I have heard as you near the end it starts to pick up thanks to all of the XP Bonus perks that you pick up along the way. I love that the seasonal bits carry over between characters, and at some point I will start working on my Hunter who I managed to get to the 900s by pulling stuff out of the collection and seasonal rewards. Any time there is a piece of gear gained you get a copy of that item on every single character which is really nice. Mostly this is just a show and tell post, but this is what I have been up to over the last few nights.

Chasing the Darkness

Just as a heads up this post is going to contain some spoilers, so if you have not finished the main story then I would suggest you go no further. Last night I kept I head down and pushed through the rest of the main expansion story in Destiny. From a lore standpoint it presents some really interesting food for thought and makes me think we are headed down a specific path. Namely that we will be swayed by the Darkness as they spent the next several seasons trying to explain to us how we should come over to their way of thinking. There had been rumors about Destiny 3 potentially including Darkness powers, and I think it would be interesting if we as guardians figured out a way to harness both forces for good. I’ve always assumed that the Darkness in the Destiny universe was somewhat of a hive mind. Which makes me wonder if maybe just maybe this isolated ship that crashed on the moon may somehow be broken off from that collective consciousness. I’ve been wondering if it like the Darkness that was present in the Black Garden have been fractured from the whole and are working by their own means. This could in theory give us access to the powers of Darkness without being consumed by it. As far as the pyramid ship itself… it had a very sithy vibe to it. There are some follow up quests that I picked up after finishing the last mission that may add additional story beats. The only problem that I see however is that without a firm knowledge of Destiny lore, I am guessing the story attached to Shadowkeep is going to read as completely incomprehensible to everyone else. Eris does not exactly do a good job of explaining things as you go, in part because she herself is an unreliable narrator with a very specific point of view. Similarly I wonder if maybe this specific tangent of the Darkness has been trapped in the Black Garden, and ultimately that it wants us to free it. I didn’t get a vibe from the final quest that it was trying to kill us, but instead trying to test us and our resolve to see if we were worthy of its ultimate prize.
In the Shadowkeep trailer, Ikora Rey talks fairly opaquely about the relationship between the Vex and the Black Garden. Namely I focus on the bit of what she is saying that says that the Vex will do anything to protect it. It was through Quria, Blade Transform that the Vex learned of the Sword Logic and that by worshiping the Worms they could draw power. I think the ultimate end of that line of logic was that the power of the Worms came from the Darkness and that through worshiping the Darkness they could draw even more power. Did the Vex then go find a pyramid ship and capture whatever organism that the Darkness represents at its core, and install it then in the Black Garden on Mars as a sort of machine to power the Vex as a whole?
I get the distinct impression that the Darkness represented within the Hive ship crashed on the moon doesn’t want to harm us, but instead wants to use our abilities to some end. I think that end is ultimately to send us into the Black Garden to free whatever vestige of itself is trapped there. Maybe you learn more details after the raid, but since I have yet to do that it is all speculation. I just have a feeling that our contact and the artifact that we collected, is leading us down a path that will eventually end in the ability to channel both the light and the darkness.

Classic Doldrums

I feel like I am in a weird place right now with World of Warcraft Classic. Last week I allowed myself to take a break from the game for the launch of Destiny 2 Shadowkeep. Now that I have hit the light soft cap I have been trying to re-engage with Classic and it for whatever reason just hasn’t been taking. What has been happening is that I log in… run around a bit… and then log right back out and go over to Destiny 2 to play it some more. As a result I am in the woeful position of being out of the level range with most of the crew that I had been running with previously. I am sitting at a little over 44 and now folks are starting to ding 50. I think I am more or less just lacking to find traction in a set of quests that are enjoyable to do. Right now Tanaris is a little over my level range, and what is left in Stranglethorn feels tedious and boring. Last night towards the end of the evening I moved over to Feralas and managed to make it through a few quest chains, so maybe just maybe this is going to be my home for a bit. I figure if I can somehow eek out 45 and 46 I can return to Tanaris and start to make some proper traction there. The benefit of Feralas is that there is plenty of meat to keep cooking up food… of which I go through a silly amount of because that is how I ultimately heal to lower downtime. I am very much in the doldrums of the leveling curve and post 40 everything slowed down massively, which I think is part of the problem. It feels vastly different than the run and gun pace of Destiny 2 that I allowed myself to get used to. As a result my brain sorta rejects Classic each time I try and spend more than a few minutes playing it. What makes it worse is there is a tangible feeling that day by day people are getting ahead of me to the point where it will be super difficult to actually catch up. I could in theory run a bunch of dungeons, but the dungeons in my level range are not super exciting because there isn’t much more than XP waiting for me in them.
On the Destiny side of things I have stalled out a bit as well. I am starting to get pretty much exclusively 410s off powerful engrams, which is fine so long as they drop for a new slot. However when the same slot keeps dropping over and over there isn’t much gained by it. I probably need to spend a bit of time in the world grinding blues and legendary drops between powerfuls to try and keep pushing it upwards. I still have yet to beat the campaign… which I really should do soon. I could also start an alt which would help with the light pushing a bit. For the time being however I am just enjoying the moment to moment game play so much. I am curious what changes the reset is going to bring today. Right now the activities seem to be dropping a fixed set of weapons, and I am wondering if that is going to rotate today.