This morning is mostly just going to be a long string of pictures and commentary about those pictures. I spent the vast majority of the weekend playing Destiny 2 and the Shadowkeep expansion content. If you could custom build an expansion to my interests you would end up with this one, largely because it has a lot of overworld activities going on and things to grind for. We are going to start this off however by showing off my favorite ship. Weirdly I have a massive collection of Exotic ships and sparrows, but it is a Legendary ship that I have somehow latched onto called the Pitfall Souter E5D. I really like the design on this one better than the exotic version of this drop ship, and it feels very Titan-y to me.
I hit the soft cap over the weekend and have since pushed up to 905 without the artifact, or 910 with the bonus. This is setting up a situation where we have the whole Year 1 thing with legendary items giving you more light than they actually do which feels real weird. I would have greatly preferred that they just took this new adjusted light number as your actual light number. That said I am still pretty regularly getting prime engrams that are slowly pushing that number up.
As far as the seasonal track goes, I am sitting at level 17 with about halfway through 18. This has been interesting, but I wish when you got gear off the track that it counted as a powerful engram rather than just being miscellaneous debris. The whole acquiring new items through the track is a bit lackluster when it is just the same set of gear that you got at step one. As a result you see that there are a lot of steps where I have chosen not to collect the reward. Same goes for all of the glimmer as I am not having any issue getting glimmer, and there might be a point in the future where I wish I had a large stack of it.
On the Artifact itself I have mostly been unlocking Autorifle/Submachinegun and Hand Cannon perks, and trying to make sure I have a reasonable coverage of Anti-Barrier and Anti-Overload rounds available. These come into play during the Vex Invasion activity that you can queue for. Various mobs you encounter have either a Barrier or an Overload that causes them to keep from being damaged until you drop that shield, and as a result the easiest way is to hit them with a weapon that has the equivalent “anti” effect. Right now I have Anti-Barrier on my Auto-Rifle and Anti-Overload on my Submachinegun. This tends to be my favorite combo right now and has largely replaced Auto and Shotgun for me.
Lets just stop to appreciate how damned cool the Vex Invasions look when they are happening on the moon. Full on Terminator vibes going on and lots and lots of vex to violently dismantle. Generally speaking they seem to happen a few minutes after a public event finishes. As such I have had the best luck going to an area, completing the public event… and then waiting around for a few and before long the vex will start dropping in. The only negative of these events is that they are really really hard to solo and you don’t get a chest to drop until you have taken down three of these little incursions in a row. If you are too slow the boss will “escape” and you won’t make it to round three.
I was never a huge fan of the Monte Carlo in Destiny 1, in either version. However the Destiny 2 version is freaking amazing and I managed to get this in one of the first activities I participated in after hitting 900 light. So far a lot of people seem to be reporting getting it pretty early in the cycle, and the Vex Invasions are supposedly a good way of farming Exotics if you end up doing a bunch of them in a row. The queued event drops a chest after each wave of the encounter that has Vex themed goodies, and supposedly these also have a reasonable chance of dropping exotics.
There are a bunch of weapons that can drop while doing assorted activities on the moon, and when they do a quest will start allowing you to “cleanse” the item. This generally involves doing a specific thing a number of times, getting kills with that weapon type, and then finding some MacGuffin deep in the bowels of some area of the moon. You then return these to the Lecturn next to Eris Morn and you collect a weapon. You can spend some currency to get new rolls of these weapons at pretty much any time, and can skip the MacGuffin step since you have already collected it. By far my favorite of these so far is the Arc Logic Auto Rifle, which happened to roll with Rampage, Subsistence and Extended Mag making it fairly potent. This has become my Anti-Barrier weapon of choice.
Probably my favorite of the Vex themed weapons so far is the Imperative Scout Rifle that rolled with subsistence, multi-kill clip. I am sure there are better rolls of this weapon available but this one is serviceable for situations when I need to hit things at range. I hope that we are going to get some access to secondary skins for these weapons because the leaf covered thing is kinda cool for a few minutes, but eventually wears then when you realize that you can’t do much to apply shaders to them. The leaves themselves will always stay the same shade. Right now these serve the role of really easy to get weapons as they seemingly drop like candy from the queued Vex Invasion activity.
I really should spend some time tonight pushing through the storyline, as I have yet to get to the end of it. This is the problem with opening up the world and letting me do things without completing the story… I ultimately don’t put any emphasis on actually finishing. With Forsaken I was pushing ahead in the story because I wanted to unlock access to the Dreaming City. As far as I know finishing the story doesn’t really unlock anything new that I don’t already have access to. I should do this thing however just to get it done.
I had intentions of playing World of Warcraft all night, and while technically I was around for awhile crafting some stuff for folks who had sent me mats, I found myself fighting falling asleep at the keyboard. So once again I retreated back into Destiny because the pace of gameplay was what my brain apparently needed to keep me awake. It has been a really long rough week and I am super ready for the two days of respite that come with the weekend. Nothing in particular but more a correlation of a bunch of things all at once making me stay a little too long under the covers each morning after the alarm starts blaring. As such I am not sure if I have anything profound to talk about this morning, because I feel like profundity is lost from my brain.
I did however find a really cool area of the moon last night that is so far off the beaten path that you don’t see yourself on the map at all when you are here. I am not entirely certain if I arrived here sooner than I should have, and quite frankly I am not sure if I could get back here if I wanted to. I just started wandering until the fenestrated walls of the Scarlet Keep broke free and opened back up onto the smooth dunes of the lunar surface. What makes this area extra interesting is that it keeps going far further than you would think, and as you move outwards the mobs start to thin out to a point where you are wondering if you just wandered into something that was left unfinished.
There have been some general complaints about the size of the expansion content. I’ve more or less stopped completing objectives in favor of trying to hit the soft cap before I get any further. That however is wisdom talking and not necessarily some need for being stronger. I know there will be rewards that come from the quest steps, as I seem to be unlocking a full set of Eris themed armor through the process of completing steps. I figure I should probably be sitting at 900 before I make much more forward momentum in order to eek out as much light gain as I can in the process. Additionally there is a good reason to just keep grinding because I keep getting Seasonal objectives and Artifact progress.
As far as the overarching size of the new areas, I would say they are probably a bit bigger than the plaguelands were. Prior to the launch of Shadowkeep, Bungie had set expectations for this to be more in line of a Rise of Iron sized expansion and not a Taken King or a Forsaken and I am cool with that. After seeing what they did to revitalize the moon, I am super amped about the prospects of maybe just maybe them doing the same thing to the Dust Palace area of Mars or even more so the swamps of Venus. I would love to revisit a modern realization of Venus because it was always one of my favorite destinations for the sheer scope and imagery of the Ishtar Collective.
One of the more interesting things that has happened since the release of Destiny on Steam is that I am encountering a lot of weird names. Notice that someone has spelled out what appears to be “Fleshious” in some foreign character font, and quite honestly I don’t know enough to even guess which one. If I had to guess this is a parody of the destiny streamer named Blessious. The thing with Steam is they are real liberal on what you can put as your name and with it that is pulling over into game… emojiis and all. Ultimately prepare to enter the wild west when it come to naming conventions. Personally… I am just going to stick with Belghast and call it good. Steam however allows you to change your name pretty freely in order to accommodate clan tagging and such, and as a result you are going to see some crazy stuff.
Last night I spent the entire night playing Destiny 2, and I am now starting to feel a little guilty about not logging into World of Warcraft Classic at all. So much so that right now my plan is to play tonight and see just how far behind I am in the curve. There were a few players pulling ahead of me and I feel like I am probably going to be several levels behind the pack. Unfortunately… I have been having a blast in Destiny 2 and just have wanted to spend my entire evening playing that. It would be easier were I sitting at the level cap in WoW to alternate back and forth between the games.
The Chest Mini Game
Yesterday I posted a picture of these ominous Hive themed Yeti coolers on the moon with Symbols on the front. When I encountered them they appeared to be locked, and when Deej made some post yesterday about our moon findings… I replied with a picture of the chest as a joke. However I got some very serious replies, including what exactly we are supposed to do with them. I apologize for the crappy quality picture but I am trying to illustrate something badly. You notice there are symbols on the front in a specific order I personally refer to them as E A and 0 because the first looks like an E without the back and the last looks like when you draw a zero with a slash through it to differentiate between it and an O.
This is going to require some squinting maybe, but if you look in the upper left corner of the image you will see the E symbol and if you look in the middle of the right hand side you see the A symbol. How spread out they are is the reason why you got a rather crappy image to illustrate this point. Behind where my camera is currently is a column with the 0 symbol. Essentially to open the chest you shoot the symbols in the order shown on the box. If you are doing it right the symbol will begin to glow with that ominous shadowy hive energy. When you have shot them all you end up with a normal chest that you can open and usually a piece of gear.
Another thing that I spent my evening doing is punching things. Like I normally punch a lot of things already, but what I mean is that I used finishers to punch them into oblivion. I had not quite figured out the finisher system the night before last, but I have it on lock now. Essentially when an enemy gets low you will see a glowing orb over their head and they will start to shimmer a little bit. This is the indication that they are primed and ready for your finisher, much in the same way as it works in the 2016 Doom game. My finisher was set to the G key but I rebound it to 7 which is the key that I use on my mouse as my combo point dump in MMORPGs.
The interesting side benefit of using a finisher is that apparently it counts as the damage type of whatever sub class you have equipped, but also doesn’t consume a melee charge. This meant that when I landed on Titan and got a Destination Bounty of kill 30 things with Void damage… and I had no Void weapons on me… I was able to punch things to death for fun and profit. Normally speaking I would have just logged into Destiny Item Manager on my second monitor and swapped over a void weapon. However while that appears to be fixed now, for awhile that was not updated to work against the new user interface. I would imagine that it will also count for those “Void Class Abilities” bounty objectives as well, since your damage is being dealt by the class, but I am not 100% certain on that.
The highlight of the night however is that I found out that you can in fact get back into the Cosmodrome without deleting a character. When you log into the game a bunch of stuff happens, especially if you had the Solstice of Heroes armor waiting on you. Banshee gives you several objectives so I completely missed that you also gave me an exotic quest called “Pain and Gain”. This involves going into the Cosmodrome and in the area is a Fallen Walker that you can defeat over and over. Doing so drops one of the items that you pick up from the New Light experience.
So you can essentially farm the walker until you have gotten all of the items that you would have gotten had you deleted your character. The first time I took down the walker the chest that spawned gave me the Arcadia-Class Jumpship from Destiny 1. The second time I got the item I was hunting for… the Khvostov 7G-02 or the weapon you start the game with. This is still among the best feeling guns in the game and I am really hoping we get the exotic quest at some point during this expansion cycle to go get the version of it from Destiny 1 that had swappable perks. I loved that weapon so much. The other item I could have gotten was the white “Generalist Shell” but honestly I didn’t care enough about it to stick around and kill the walker a third time. Supposedly it is capable of showing up on the Heroic Mission playlist as well.
If you keep going with the mission you end up discovering a completely new area of the Cosmodrome which involves a really nonsense jumping quest. Thankfully I was forged in the fires of the Dreadnaught and managed to do the entire sequence on the first try. In the grand scheme of things none of the jumps are terribly difficult. The hardest bit is trying to figure out where you should jump to next especially in the last set of jumps before arriving at the treasure room. You are rewarded a copy of the Risk Runner exotic which I had and if you keep moving you end up fighting a boss that awards you its catalyst which I did not have. Risk Runner has become one of my favorite weapons in Destiny 2 and more or less takes the place of a shotgun as one of my secondary weapons of choice.
All in all I am having a blast in Shadowkeep, and I feel like I have really not even scratched the surface. I need to do a strike which I have not done to progress the storyline. Instead I wound up doing a Nightfall… which thanks to the new mode allows you to matchmake and queue for them. There are things I miss… like all of the different ways to get powerful gear. I feel like this is going to turn into a rant at a later point when I am sitting at 900 light and have no real way to get higher. However for the moment I am having a blast. I really want to get the 100 levels of the seasonal pass thingy as well, so we will see how the grinding goes.
Tonight however… I plan on likely being back in WoW Classic to try and catch up with what has been going on over there.
First lets start off with the fact that I love this new character screen, where you see what sparrow and ghost shell you have equipped. Last night Shadowkeep launched as well as the New Light experience, and there were a lot of problems. That is not to say that the problems did not resolve themselves eventually. However we were stuck in the weirdest queue that would start at 16,000 jump up to 22,000… back down to 8,000… back up to 22,000 and then eventually at some point let me through.
I say at some point… because I had some real life stuff pull me away from the screen and about an hour later when I got back home I was sitting in game. All told according to Steam I played about 4 hours last night, which involved very little progress in the main story and a lot of faffing about on the moon. Because of the way that Steam tracks time in a game… I am guessing the entire time I was sitting in queue it was counting me as playing because I most definitely feel like I didn’t make 4 hours worth of progress.
The Moon is doing something that I not so secretly hope that we see a lot more of. It is revisiting an area from Destiny 1, expanding upon it and showing us what has happened since we last visited. If I am correct the above screenshot is roughly where we originally zone into the Moon in Destiny 1. I spent a lot of my time roaming around and revisiting destinations from the first game, because I spent an awful lot of time on the moon grinding random stuff, and knew it extremely well.
The only initial annoyance is that you start with effectively all of your gear at 750, and the moon is significantly higher level than that. I managed to get my light up to 770 and this area that I used to farm in Destiny 1 is still showing with all of the mobs having a Skull symbol, which I believe means they are higher light than I am. Everything hits really freaking hard right now so it is going to take some time to get my feet back under me. I am wondering about maybe grinding out some strikes to see if I can get my light level up a bit before doing much more of the sort of thing I really enjoy… wandering aimlessly.
One thing I am noticing on the lunar surface is that I am finding a bunch of chests that look like this that are currently unopenable. I am guessing that something at some point will give us access to these through some sort of a minigame like have existed in other areas. There were so many intricate farms on the Dreadnaught that I am really hoping that this is the sign of those existing here. I remember farming chest keys and then going through the process of tracking down how to find the chests. I’ve taken screenshots of two of these, and they have the same symbols on the front, which I assume will mean something at some point.
The only real frustration that I have is that there appears to be no way to play through that first mission of the New Light experience. It has me contemplating sacrificing my Warlock… which I have done nothing on since before Forsaken… in order to play it through the new starter experience. I am also completely confused about how content unlocks work in this new area of the game. I logged into my PS4 copy and I had access to all of the areas and was flagged for showing that I had access to the seasonal path. However it also prompted me upon logging in to buy Shadowkeep. So I am deeply confused as to if I do or do not have to buy it on multiple platforms. I don’t have much of an opinion yet other than the game as a whole is going to take some adjusting to.
