exotic sword

Sword Logic

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Conversions Away

Sword Logic

Last night I had every intent of logging into The Division and playing it all night long.  If nothing else I knew I needed to pop in long enough to convert all of my materials to orange or blue quality.  This Tuesday there is a pretty horrible nerf coming down the pipe in crafting.  In the case of high end crafting it is more than doubling the amount of materials needed to craft something through the form of an extremely lossy conversion of materials.  Right now it takes 5 greens to make 1 blue, and 5 blues to make 1 orange crafting material.  Which has always felt like a pretty fair method.  However after the patch it will take 10 green mats to make a single blue, and 15 blues to make a single orange.  To make matters worse they are also nerfing the amount of materials you get off of deconstruction which right now usually yields two materials…  but after the patch it will more consistently yield a single material.  Essentially all of the love I have for Destiny and the quality of life improvements…  I am feeling the opposite for Division and what seems to be some very unfair changes for the casual player.  As a result I highly suggest you get into the game and convert everything you have up to the highest tier of material you can make.

Unfortunately there is no batch conversion option so you will be holding space bar and hitting escape a bunch to burn through your materials.  It took me about twenty minutes to convert everything up because I really did have a lot of materials.  I need to focus on farming some more weapon nodes this weekend so that I can hopefully convert up at least enough to get 10 for one weapon.  Right now high end craftables take 8 orange mats, and after the patch they are going to require 10.  I didn’t notice any mentioned nerfs to the world nodes, so I am wondering if these changes are designed to get players to prioritize going after them instead of simply killing a bunch of stuff to deconstruct.  In any case I know today/tonight I plan on farming as many nodes as I can get my hands on with the hopes of converting it all upwards into shiny orange materials.  In the process of screwing around yesterday I did manage to complete a mission and hit 23 so at some point I really need to make the final push to 30 so I can join in all the fun end game “reindeer games”.

Unintended Exotics

Sword Logic

As unexcited as I am about The Division patch…. I am insanely so about the Destiny patch.  Yesterday I was super pumped to see what the next Playstation exclusives would look like, namely I really really want that new exotic sniper because it has an almost Tex Mechanica vibe.  I also think the new Jovian Guard armor set is probably the coolest Titan armor to date, so I will absolutely be farming up a set of it, which should go a lot more smoothly given that I can infuse things much easier.  On the infusion department there is some conflicting information up on the Bungie site, but it makes it sound like we will no longer get engrams to decode to less light than our converted light total.  Meaning that if you are 309 light when you decode you should get items of level 309 or higher.  What is confusing is this seems like a massive change, but one that I really welcome.  I am sick of getting 260 blues and 270 purples from engrams.  I’ve been holding onto a vault full of interesting weapons, that just need to be infused to use…  so I am amped that this might mean that process becomes super simple.  At some point before Tuesday I really need to sort through my vault and deconstruct all of the lower level items that I was holding onto as stepping stones for leveling higher stuff from 280 and beyond.

I didn’t intend to play Destiny last night, but at some point during the evening I flipped over to the clan messaging app and saw that my friend Jex was trying to get ahold of me.  Now I have needed to finish up the Exotic sword quest for some time, but I wasn’t really pushing the issue.  It turns out that Jex and Squirrel were looking for something to do last night, and thought that it would be the perfect time to work on that quest for me.  The sunless cell is probably my least favorite strike because I don’t like the whole “not being able to see” aspect, and the exploding thralls coming out in close proximity.  That said the worst part about it last night was the anxiety of not wanting to screw up the pattern.  You have to bleed down the main boss to where you can finish him off in a hit or two… and then drop the warden of your elemental type and then within 30 seconds finish off the boss to complete the quest.  The problem being that the flame sword warden is apparently the most annoying because he could almost one shot all of us.. and we were well above the suggested 300 light.  We managed to do it in a single attempt, but with a lot of resurrections in the process.  Afterwards we popped over to the dreadnaught and did some Court of Oryx, with the goal of finishing some antiquated runes so we would each have a stack to go through with the patch on Tuesday.  I know personally I have six, but it sounded like Squirrel had a full stack of them.  The hope is that we can farm up one or more of those 335 artifacts to boost our light level before the raid that same night.  In any case I am super grateful for the group, and my shiny new exotic 310 sword.

 

 

Sword Logic

by

Conversions Away

Sword Logic

Last night I had every intent of logging into The Division and playing it all night long.  If nothing else I knew I needed to pop in long enough to convert all of my materials to orange or blue quality.  This Tuesday there is a pretty horrible nerf coming down the pipe in crafting.  In the case of high end crafting it is more than doubling the amount of materials needed to craft something through the form of an extremely lossy conversion of materials.  Right now it takes 5 greens to make 1 blue, and 5 blues to make 1 orange crafting material.  Which has always felt like a pretty fair method.  However after the patch it will take 10 green mats to make a single blue, and 15 blues to make a single orange.  To make matters worse they are also nerfing the amount of materials you get off of deconstruction which right now usually yields two materials…  but after the patch it will more consistently yield a single material.  Essentially all of the love I have for Destiny and the quality of life improvements…  I am feeling the opposite for Division and what seems to be some very unfair changes for the casual player.  As a result I highly suggest you get into the game and convert everything you have up to the highest tier of material you can make.

Unfortunately there is no batch conversion option so you will be holding space bar and hitting escape a bunch to burn through your materials.  It took me about twenty minutes to convert everything up because I really did have a lot of materials.  I need to focus on farming some more weapon nodes this weekend so that I can hopefully convert up at least enough to get 10 for one weapon.  Right now high end craftables take 8 orange mats, and after the patch they are going to require 10.  I didn’t notice any mentioned nerfs to the world nodes, so I am wondering if these changes are designed to get players to prioritize going after them instead of simply killing a bunch of stuff to deconstruct.  In any case I know today/tonight I plan on farming as many nodes as I can get my hands on with the hopes of converting it all upwards into shiny orange materials.  In the process of screwing around yesterday I did manage to complete a mission and hit 23 so at some point I really need to make the final push to 30 so I can join in all the fun end game “reindeer games”.

Unintended Exotics

Sword Logic

As unexcited as I am about The Division patch…. I am insanely so about the Destiny patch.  Yesterday I was super pumped to see what the next Playstation exclusives would look like, namely I really really want that new exotic sniper because it has an almost Tex Mechanica vibe.  I also think the new Jovian Guard armor set is probably the coolest Titan armor to date, so I will absolutely be farming up a set of it, which should go a lot more smoothly given that I can infuse things much easier.  On the infusion department there is some conflicting information up on the Bungie site, but it makes it sound like we will no longer get engrams to decode to less light than our converted light total.  Meaning that if you are 309 light when you decode you should get items of level 309 or higher.  What is confusing is this seems like a massive change, but one that I really welcome.  I am sick of getting 260 blues and 270 purples from engrams.  I’ve been holding onto a vault full of interesting weapons, that just need to be infused to use…  so I am amped that this might mean that process becomes super simple.  At some point before Tuesday I really need to sort through my vault and deconstruct all of the lower level items that I was holding onto as stepping stones for leveling higher stuff from 280 and beyond.

I didn’t intend to play Destiny last night, but at some point during the evening I flipped over to the clan messaging app and saw that my friend Jex was trying to get ahold of me.  Now I have needed to finish up the Exotic sword quest for some time, but I wasn’t really pushing the issue.  It turns out that Jex and Squirrel were looking for something to do last night, and thought that it would be the perfect time to work on that quest for me.  The sunless cell is probably my least favorite strike because I don’t like the whole “not being able to see” aspect, and the exploding thralls coming out in close proximity.  That said the worst part about it last night was the anxiety of not wanting to screw up the pattern.  You have to bleed down the main boss to where you can finish him off in a hit or two… and then drop the warden of your elemental type and then within 30 seconds finish off the boss to complete the quest.  The problem being that the flame sword warden is apparently the most annoying because he could almost one shot all of us.. and we were well above the suggested 300 light.  We managed to do it in a single attempt, but with a lot of resurrections in the process.  Afterwards we popped over to the dreadnaught and did some Court of Oryx, with the goal of finishing some antiquated runes so we would each have a stack to go through with the patch on Tuesday.  I know personally I have six, but it sounded like Squirrel had a full stack of them.  The hope is that we can farm up one or more of those 335 artifacts to boost our light level before the raid that same night.  In any case I am super grateful for the group, and my shiny new exotic 310 sword.

 

 

Death and Taxes

by

A Very Bad Day

Tuesday night I slept fairly horribly, and spent most of it tossing and turning and unable to regulate my body temperature between too hot and too cold.  So yesterday I went into the day on a low point, with being extremely groggy and fumbling through activities.  Unfortunately this also seems to be the sort of day when something horribly goes wrong.  About 10 am yesterday morning we had a freak incident occur where a publish went wrong in the content management we use at work, that caused the entire xml cache to jettison itself and our main public facing website started throwing a “no nodes” error instead of serving content.  I proceeded to spend the next five hours trying to fix the problem by republishing every single piece of content on the site…  which is roughly 20,000 nodes worth.  We got the bulk restored really quickly, and then spent the next three hours fighting with a handful of tricky node trees, that seemed to be super picky about the order in which things were published.  By the time I exited work… all I really wanted was a drink…  or four.

When I got home however we decided to get the monkey off our backs of our taxes.  We itemize, and we also have them prepared…  not that I think we can’t do our own taxes but I will happily throw money at someone for the piece of mind that come an audit we can point the finger at someone else’s legal team to sort it out for us.  There is a level of stress that taxes invoke in me that is far higher than just about anything…  so doing them on the day I was already having a shitty day was maybe not a great idea.  Then again it wasn’t like the day could get much worse.  The problem being that as we were flailing about the house trying to gather the last two or three bits of information before going…  my wife and I were fussing with each other in a way that never really happens when money isn’t on the line.  All of the stress and anxiety, is generally for naught as we get our taxes done… and generally get back a decent refund.  The bigger stress last night was that I felt bad for missing the WoW raid… but thankfully it sounded like they had enough people to pull together without me.  I hear they even managed to down Iskar which is a brand new boss for our group.

Today however seems like it is starting off much the same way as yesterday.  I got to bed at a decent hour and it felt like I was getting good sleep… that is until about 2 am when I woke up thinking the alarm had gone off.  For whatever reason it seems like we fell asleep with the television on, and that noise made me think the alarm was going off.  In the middle of my trying to get ready, I noticed the smell of smoke.  Like enough to make me start freaking out about if the house was on fire.  So I started roaming the house to see if the smell that permeated got worse anywhere to indicate where it was coming from.  I woke my wife when I decided to leave the house and go wandering outside to see if it was something from a nearby house.  The smell was far worse outside, but once again it seemed to be diffuse without any real direction that it was coming from.  I finally hopped in the car and drove the neighborhood, and when the smell was the same up the hill from us…  I finally reached a point of solace that it was very much “not our house” and was able to attempt going back to sleep.  This morning on the news we found out that apparently there is a massive grass fire burning north of us, but still about a thirty minute drive… so that has to be one hell of a fire to generate that thick of smoke as far away as we were.

Hilt Punch

Death and Taxes

Ultimately I ended up getting settled in after taxes and getting some food in me, roughly an hour after the start of the raid.  I could have of course logged into World of Warcraft, and gotten pulled into the raid as a late comer.  After the day I had however I was not exactly fit to be around other human beings, so instead I opted to chill out upstairs with the PS4 and some Destiny.  One of the missions that has been eluding me for awhile has been the continuation of the quest that upgrades my legendary quality sword to exotic.  There is a step early on where you need to get 50 “yellow bar” kills with the sword in PVE and 25 kills of players in the crucible.  While I occasionally poke my head into the Crucible… I am not exactly a regular PVP player.  That said last night I felt as combative as I was ever going to be… and my clan had suggested doing it on a week when Mayhem Clash was one of the highlighted modes.  Supposedly “heavy ammo drops like candy” or so someone said and in truth… sure it is more common than other modes but not exactly easy either.  There were so many times I picked up heavy ammo and instantly got gibbed by another player coming up right behind me before I could even get my sword out.  So instead more often than not I simply punched players with the empty hilt of my sword, which counts as a sword kill nonetheless.  Ironically in a lot of cases… the hilt without any ammo… still one shot players.

Death and Taxes

Spending an hour or two doing Clash had a few awesome side effects.  Firstly I gained a fat stack of glimmer, more than enough to purchase the ship above from Petra in the Reef since I had recently reached rank 3 there.  It also meant that after bashing my face against it for a bit… I managed to get all 25 of my kills…  strangely enough the last six were gained in a single match, and single ammo pickup.  I just got lucky and managed to time my jumps just right as to slash folks as they came at me in the air.  This allowed me to knock out the next step pretty quickly, which was a special boss on the Dreadnaught.  I remember when I read up on the quest folks talking about how challenging that encounter was and that how they really needed to use sword block effectively.  In truth I would start out each foray by blocking an attack and then landing a succession of quick hits… but then would jump away and wait for my shields to recharge before repeating.  Doing that it took roughly three engagements before I had that boss down.  Now I am on a step that seems considerably more time consuming than any yet… where I need to collect special materials from the moon that supposedly occasionally drop from helium filament canisters and chests.  At the same time I need to use my solar abilities, which is pretty easy given that I am rocking the Armamentarium for double the grenades and some item that allows me to pretty much do nonstop solar punches.  Supposedly this means I need to kill 500 mobs with solar abilities and farm at minimum 100 helium fragment containers to get the drops.  My goal is to finish that part so that the next Armsday I can pick up the final piece which is the Sunless Cell strike… and convince Squirrel and Jex to help me get through that.  It feels good to get the crucible step out of the way… but I also know that next up is working on First Curse.  That said I actually really enjoyed playing the Crucible and managed to get a couple of legendary engrams out of the process and a handful of exotics including a 310 Twilight Garrison.