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Backyard and Banana
Last night was a pretty chill night and was spent either gaming or hanging out on the patio off our bedroom. Here is a photo from my chair as I waited to top off the pool and played Monster Hunter Generations. There was a nice breeze and it was making the wind chimes do all sorts of happy sounds. My wife was hanging beside me doing school work… because unfortunately it is both hobby and job rolled all in one. I love our backyard even though I don’t spend anywhere near as much time as she does out in it. Last night however was a perfect storm of overcast and cool which is about my sweet spot for outdoors. My eyes are super sensitive to light and there are times where while I am sitting in the shade… the world itself is just too bright for my tastes. The flowerbabies of course are doing okay still, and I need to wrap up this post soon so I can go out and give them all a drink.
As far as Monster Hunter Generations… I am largely playing it over 4 Ultimate because of the impending release of Generations Ultimate for the Switch. Monster Hunter is way too complicated a game for me to really enjoy playing it on a tiny screen with a thinkpad trackpoint nub serving as my second thumbstick. That said I do know that whatever effort I make is going to transfer over to the Switch so it feels like it is allowing me to have a bit of a headstart as it were. There are still three months until the release of Generations Ultimate and that gives me some time to casually work on leveling my Palicos and progressing through the quests to a point where I might not be completely on ground one at launch on August 28th. I am super looking forward to having a newish to me Monster Hunter experience to sink my teeth into… that I will be able to play on my 43 inch monitor upstairs.
The tail end of the evening I settled into playing some Iron Banner in Destiny 2 as I had not honestly played much of that since Curse of Osiris. I am nowhere near as good at Crucible as I once was because I am simply out of practice, but then again I never was terribly good in the first place. I did manage to turn in a couple of packages, one of which getting me the Auto Rifle that looks like Scathelocke. I am super pumped about it because firstly I love Auto Rifles and secondly… I had really wanted to try that weapon out and was afraid that I lost my chance when the season changed. There is another auto rifle available as faction rewards so I am wondering if I want to try grinding out 30 packages… and I pretty much figure the answer is no. I do however want the super high rate of fire weapon because it has auto loading holster and high impact rounds and seems like a much better version of Perseverance/Valakadyn… which are both weapons that I hated on the console but have come to enjoy with a mouse and keyboard.
I have significant problems with Destiny 2… but damn does that mechanical loop still feel fun.
Seasonal Swan Song
I talked a bit about progress in Destiny 2 in yesterdays post but I didn’t really want to get too deep into it figuring I would talk more at length today. Last week I managed to knock out a bunch of accomplishments, not the least of which was hitting 305 light finally on the Titan. Granted I realize this is all going to be in vain starting next week as the level cap itself is raising and I assume as well that means the light level with it. Last week was Iron Banner, the second for console players but the very first for those of us choosing to primary the PC version. Now on the PS4 I managed to complete a full set of Iron Banner armor on my Titan and my goal was of course to do the same for the PC. I consider myself extremely lucky because I managed to get the full set after turning in thirteen packages. There are folks I know who have been grinding away at this all week long and are still missing pieces of armor. In addition to this I managed to pick up all of the weapons but three… sidearm, fusion rifle and submachinegun. Of those the only one that I would have actually used is the Fusion Rifle, but even there I have several options that I like already including Merciless if I am willing to give up my exotic slot and Main Ingredient if I am not. The most important weapons for me were getting the Pulse Rifle, Auto Rifle and Hand Cannon all of which will see use. The scout rifle might, but I need to spend some more time playing with it.
The other thing going on is the fact that this week is effectively the last chance to do anything in Season 1. Now I am not entirely certain what this means from a player perspective other than the fact that we know a bunch of new stuff is going to happen. All of the Eververse items are changing out apparently, so that only makes the fact that they have apparently been throttling our xp gain towards bright engrams all the more shitty. In truth I have gotten the few items that I care about… namely the Ramen bowl emote and Bandwagon ship. On top of that I managed to pull three of the exotic ships total and two of the exotic sparrows. All in all I feel like I made out pretty well for season 1, but what I am really curious about is whether or not all of package loot is changing as well. There are a number of weapons that I have not managed to get that I really walk… namely the Curtain Call rocket launcher, Jiangshi AR4 auto rifle and Halfdan-D auto rifle. I would not mind getting a Morrigan-D rocket launcher either considering I believe it is the only one with tracking still intact. Finally I really want to complete the hunter set from Io on the off chance that maybe those are changing out as well. Granted I don’t know any of this, but I know in Destiny 1 they started re-rolling the weapons so that is a possibility here as well I would guess.
Lastly the other big change for us personally… is that our clan will be resetting from rank 6 to rank 1 next week and we will need to begin the leveling process anew. Supposedly we will be adding a brand new clan banner standard to the mix because we maxed things out in Season 1. Additionally the perks for each of the clan ranks will be changing out to a new set more relevant to the content we will be doing, that is at least in theory Vex based. The only thing that concerns me is that we do not have nearly as many people actively playing right now as we did at the launch of the clan, and as a result the grind is going to go more slowly. The calculations I had done before said that we needed about 20-25 characters reaching maximum contribution each week to keep us hitting the progression cap each week, and I think in theory we will still have at least that. I know I will continue to keep contributing my 5000 clan XP on three different characters per week and if things get dire I have a set of characters on the PS4 on a secondary account that could add experience as well. This whole season thing is new concept to me and I am somewhat excited to see just how different the game is from a loot perspective. That also means that this week I need to do some significant vault purging to get ready for the introduction of new items. I am hoping that we get some more space… because we need it across the board from vault to shader storage. If they really want money from me… I would throw money at the screen for more storage space.
Punitive Shades and Iron Banner
The 13th anniversary event is going on right now in World of Warcraft and I have been largely disconnected from me. For whatever reason I am focused on leveling my Orc Warrior above pretty much all else. This is often the case when I return to WoW after being gone for a bit, I have to ease my way back into playing my bigger characters. This year each character gets a package that contains 200 timewalking tokens and the quest vendor also sells a bunch of items. One is the Corgi from past events and another are these crazy sunglasses that my Orc Warrior is modelling above. These seemed like a fun item until last night I happened to catch wind of something through twitter.
Correct, the Bronze-Tinted Sunglasses are only transmoggable during each year's WoW Anniversary event. https://t.co/wNQhhXuIEa
— WarcraftDevs (@WarcraftDevs) November 20, 2017
Why would you create an item that is only transmoggable during the yearly anniversary event? I mean I guess in theory they did give every character 200 tokens so they can fall back on the reasoning that we aren’t out any of our time to get the apparently disposable item. The transmog system in general has never quite set right with me because it seems overly complicated rather than simply just letting you swap any graphic with any other graphic. However the fact that there are timed transmogs only makes me more grumpy with it. I just hate the whole concept of time limited items in general because I realize these are supposed to make me want to collect them all before the time runs out. Instead what they do is make me just not want to even try and save myself the general disappointment by not participating. In the case of the shades, I put them on the Warrior for fun but I am not deeply connected with them. However it does seem oddly punitive to the players who have designed entire transmog outfits around them. This is just part of the Blizzard school of design where we can’t have anything that is universally good. Every nice thing seems to be required to have a negative that comes with it, and that ethos will always be an axe I have to grind with this game.
My means of taking screenshots in Destiny 2 seems to have crapped out this morning. It’s probably nothing a reboot won’t fix but I don’t exactly have time to do that when I am trying to churn out a blog post on the off chance that there might be queued updates to run. Instead you are going to get the Iron Banner screenshot from the PS4 that I took when the event was last available. Tonight I will begin the process of trying to get a set of gear on my Titan once more, because I really love the Iron Banner gear this time around. I have the full set on my PS4 Titan and I love it so much for many reasons… not the least of which is it has a decent stat package. Additionally I am all about trying to get back a few of the weapons that I really enjoyed using… namely the Pulse Rifle and Auto Rifle. There are daily milestones and my goal is to attempt to complete them on each of my characters. I am still frustrated that the Iron Banner is not a means of gaining power level the way it used to be in Destiny 1, but it is still a good source of cool gear and I am just going to focus on that aspect.