titan – Page 3 – AggroChat

Crusaders and Guardians

May 1, 2016 by Belghast

Season Six

While I greatly enjoy the concept of the Developer Appreciation Week… I am always somewhat happen when it is over. During the week I feel like I have to be making posts along that them, so when things happen that I want to talk about… I end up pushing them down until the week is ultimately over. Now as I sit here for the first unfettered post in awhile… I am finding it super hard getting started. The biggest happening of this weekend is that Friday evening at 7pm my time the newest Diablo 3 season began. For season six I opted to roll a Female Crusader, because I had so much fun playing as one last season. I have this general goal of getting a male and female of each class eventually, but that also means that someday I will have to finish playing that mage and attempt to play a witch doctor. The only problem I am running into is that it feels like what made the crusader so amazing last go round… was the fact that the Invoker set was just phenomenal. Now that I have my six piece Akkhan set, it doesn’t feel anywhere near as powerful as I did last season. In fact while the set dungeon was a breeze for me last go around, this one is only causing chain wipes. Granted I am not nearly as geared as I was at this point last year, in part because I am not getting drug by Carthuun.

When the season started we ended up with six people on the guild discord, and as a result we split into two three player teams. Ultimately ending up with me and Grace playing together, with Solaria and Kodra joining up for short periods of time. Towards the end of the evening Kylana was with us as well as the other three player team ultimately disolved with Ashgar got pulled away for work, and Callalil went to bed. I myself only lasted through level 60, because that was ultimately the point at which I was starting to fall asleep at the keyboard. So I went to bed around 11pm and the rest of the group pushed onward. Yesterday morning Grace and I ended up playing together, and she helped me get the rest of the way to 70, and unlock my gear set. She was sitting over 100 paragon levels, which means that more than likely Carth is sitting around 300ish. At some point I will join in his Torment X shenanigans because I really need some gear. All in all it was a great start of the new season, and at some point I will sort out my spec and with gear should be able to solo more stuff. Right now the challenge is finding thorns on gear, and I have ended up burning through all of my materials trying to enchant away useless stats and turn them into thorns.

Banana Split

Another awesome happening this weekend is that yesterday while waiting on folks to show up for the AggroChat game of the month show, I managed to push my Hunter to rank 5. This is the first month that I managed to get to characters to rank 5, and I’ve since started working on getting the warlock there as well. My hope is that after I finish knocking out this blog post I will head upstairs and work on that. Iron Banner has been really damned good to me, letting me amass a lot of gear and weapons that will ultimately either get used as is or serve as infusion fodder. In theory I should probably be doing matches on my Titan with the hopes of getting more 335 items, but it feels good actually working on my other characters. After playing the hunter I can absolutely see why they do so damned well in the crucible. Throwing knives are amazing, and I had so much fun yesterday finishing off people with them. I still feel like golden gun however is the least exciting of the supers, but I am getting used to using it to optimal efficiency. There was one point where I managed to get three kills in a row with it and earned the way of the gun trophy.

Over the course of the week I have picked up so much gear, with the latest acquisition being a 335 Tormod’s Bellows. The only challenge here is that I am not sure if I will keep it or infuse it into one of my heavy weapons. I could really use a 335 sword… just saying. The funny thing is… I got the 335 drop on my absolute lowest level character while working on the Warlock yesterday. So I am wondering if maybe the buff in faction that you get for pushing up additional characters does something as well to the chances of getting max light drops as well? In any case another Iron Banner has come and almost gone, and I have loved every minute of it. I finally sorted out why I like PVP in Destiny and never have in other games. There is something about getting real loot at the end of matches, as opposed to a currency in lieu of loot that can maybe someday add up to be enough to get something interesting. I love random chance, and I love being rewarded with interesting stuff. More so than that… I love getting not quite perfect items… and then trying to figure out how to use them to my advantage.

Purple Hand Cannon

April 22, 2016 by Belghast

Challenge of Connection

There are some nights where things don’t go quite as planned but ultimately work out okay in the end. Last night was one of those nights. The original plan was to do some Challenge of Elders with Squirrel and Sagacyte. I got home at my normal time, but I couldn’t really commit to doing much of anything until after we ran some errands. So the plan was once my wife got home, we would go run errands, and then grab dinner on the way home. After munching some food it would be challenge time. Unfortunately my wife got home significantly later than I had expected, and then our errands themselves took significantly longer than expected… and when we went to grab food there was a longer line than expected. The end result meant I didn’t actually get upstairs on the PS4 until a little after 8 pm. By that time Squirrel was having all manner of connection problems. While sitting in voice chat together we were getting only every third word he was saying, making it damned near impossible to understand what he was trying to say. We gave it the good college try and made an attempt at doing the Challenge of Elders without him on voice chat.

However a few minutes into the match he disconnected which lead Saga and I to end up having to try and solo Sylok the first boss. We attempted to duo the Cabal boss but had absolutely zero luck there, and ultimately went to orbit. It was around this time that in the clan channel that Broken and Havel were asking for a third for their own CoE shenanigans. I felt like a dick leaving Saga, but he assured me that I should grab the open spot. Last week the bonus was primary ammo headshots, which was super easy and lead to allowing folks well below the suggested 320 light to be able to complete it without much issue. This week however the bonus was grenade kills, making it significantly harder. I went in as Sunbreaker because the Simmering Flames perk meant that so long as I had a super ready my grenade recharge was greatly increased. To that I ended up swapping all of my gear so that I was sitting around 360 discipline. On top of that I wound up getting a 324 Armamentarium moments before the first attempt at the Challenge, meaning that I also had double grenade charges going in. Both Broken and Havel did similar steps to allow them to get super grenade action, and as a result we managed to get 108k score over the course of two matches. So while it sucked that I didn’t get to run with Squirrel and Saga… it is pretty awesome that I managed to finish on my titan regardless. During the course of the weekend my new goal is to make sure that both Squirrel and Saga get through as well.

Spoils of War

The result for me is that I walked away with an interesting Hand Cannon that I am not quite sure if I will actually use. I spent the rest of the night doing bounties with it to see if it was something I actually enjoyed using. For ages I swore by the Hand Cannon, but then I got used to Auto and Pulse Rifles… and quite simply never use them. The state they were in after the serious round of nerfs held me back from really enjoying the experience. During year one I used the hell out of the Last Word, and then for the first part of year two I largely rocked the Hawkmoon… enjoying both weapons greatly. As far as Her Revenge goes… I like how it feels and it has an interesting sequence of perks so for now I plan on leveling it up and seeing how I enjoy it in its final form. As for my armor piece, I ended up getting a 328 chest piece… which was below my current 329 so instead of keeping it I wound up shipping it off to my hunter. As I talked about yesterday, there has always been a pecking order when it comes to gear… which generally falls in line with Titan > Hunter > Warlock. My hunter is closer to being viable for things like Challenge of Elders so my goal is to buff him up enough to be useful when it comes to the current “end game” content.

That said I did also manage to throw a few handmedowns onto the Warlock, bringing the light level up by a few points. If I can keep stair stepping them up with no more than a 10 light level difference between them I think life will be pretty grand. I think the mission for tonight is to try and run some content on either the warlock or hunter with the hopes of bringing their light level up a bit. The biggest thing I need right now are legendary artifacts for both. The best route to that is of course the Court of Oryx, but neither of them has an antiquated rune to make that possible. I do have a few skyburner keys and wormsinger runes… so in theory I could burn through those hoping for some drops. The other awesome thing from last night is that I managed to get another Sublime Engram which takes my set piece count up to three… with 2 chests, 1 helm, and now 1 Titan Mark of the new Jovian Guard set. I really love the look of that thing, and while I am not sure it would win out over my Iron Banner set… it is still something that I would proudly rock. Speaking of Iron Banner, Bungie has apparently announced the next bits of gear that will be available and I am super pumped. I should finally be able to get legs to complete the Iron Banner look, and it also seems like I will be able to get a Titan Mark in the process. Other than that this round is offering the Auto Rifle and Rocket Launcher, both things that I am super interested in. Right now the goal is to push both the Titan and Hunter through, so I will be trying to do daily bounties on both of them.

Light Improving

April 20, 2016 by Belghast

Catching Up

One of my favorite things about the April patch is that I finally feel like I am catching up to all of the folks who have been playing since the dawn of time. More important than that… I feel like I have a clear path to be able to reach 335. There are things within my control that I can do solo that will allow me to slowly but certainly make progress. Namely one of the big ones right now is faction packages. Many of the factions have the code that make sure an item that comes from that package is better than your current light level. So this means I am constantly getting upgrades that I can either use as is, or infuse into my existing item from doing Vanguard and the three Tower faction missions. This also means that those daily bounties are more important than they have ever been, and the same goes with the crucible bounties whenever I am feeling my Wheaties and decide to do some serious pvp. More importantly than any of this… I feel in control of my own “Destiny”… pun intended.

Much of my early frustration with this game is it felt like there were missing rungs on the ladder that I had to have someone show me where I should be climbing. Now I feel like there are objectives that I completely understand that I can be knocking out regularly to better myself. At this point as the above image shows I have managed to take my Titan to 321, Hunter to 310 and as of last night Warlock to 302. The Warlock and Hunter will likely always be second stringers for me, but I do want to spend more time pushing them up. Namely I would really like to unlock all of the stuff on all three sub classes but that simply requires a lot of play. As for now I am still very much enjoying the process of infusing up old weapons and dusting them off to enjoy them once more. I have a lot of really great weapons, that were just lacking light level to be used on a regular basis. At some point however I am going to have to reconcile a bunch of the stuff and figure out which versions of which weapons I intend to keep permanently. For example I have six different Havoc Pidgeons sitting in the bank and five different 1000 Yard Stares… as well as a large assortment of Zarinaea-D. I don’t really need ALL of them… just keep the best rolls and swap weapons as needed via the web site or mobile apps.

Pipe Dream

Every so often I come up with an idea that while I lack the technical know how to actually build it… I know it is functionally possible. Within the server services world.. there is a marvel of modern science referred to collectively as the IP KVM or remote keyboard/video/mouse switch. While remote desktop is a thing that works great most of the time… there are times when you need to literally lay hands on a box because something has hung on boot up. This is where the IP KVM steps into play, because it emulates sitting physically at the keyboard from quite literally anywhere on the network that can reach it. The other awesome thing about them is that generally speaking they are almost as good as sitting on the box with many of them getting to the point where you can hardly tell the difference. What I want is for some budding entrepreneur or kickstarter campaign to come up with this technology… but for consoles. Sure PS4 Remote Play is cool, but I also want to be able to play remotely from my PS3… or even say older analog systems. The idea would be a rack mounted type system so in theory you could dump all of your consoles in the equivalent of a server room. Instead of harddrive arrays you could build special four unit high rack cases that allowed you to plug in a whole slew of console games and have them selectable remotely.

The other idea would be that each console had custom hookups and the hardware KVM device would allow you to configure emulation of the devices. So you could remake your Nintendo controller to be fully functional from something like a PC connected Xbox 360 controller. Now there are oddities like the Wii/Wii U that would be difficult to emulate but in theory most controllers work just fine for other controllers. For years I’ve loved this idea of having all of the games I want to play “on tap” and thanks to both the Twisted and official PS4 Remote Play app I am using the hell out of this functionality. It is cool as hell to be able to sit downstairs on the sofa with my laptop and have full access to all of my PS4 games, and be able to play them with minimal latency. I just wish this same concept worked with everything. It feels like this is the sort of thing that would be doable, just no one has tried to make it work. Even if you started with only consoles that supported USB controls and HDMI output… that would give you a decent base unit that could then maybe be expanded with retro modules that daisy chained onto the base unit. So here you go… I give this idea freely to the world… just someone make it happen because I want to throw money at you.

The Banner Falls

April 5, 2016 by Belghast

Plans Change

When I left work I had every intent to go home and play Iron Banner on the Titan all night long, in the hopes of getting some really awesome drops. That didn’t exactly happen, but I did end up playing Iron Banner up until the point when I decided to go to bed a little early. The change however was that I ended up playing on my Hunter. There is a clear pecking order between my Destiny characters. The Titan gets all the really good stuff… the Hunter gets the next tier of stuff… and the Warlock survives on scraps from the other two. Since I had already gotten the Titan to Rank 5, I was curious just how fast I could get the Hunter up there in levels. I had heard there was some sort of an alt bonus, that helped to push your second and third characters up faster, as well as now having access to both the rank 5 shader and emblem which also increase reputation gain. I made significant progress and after a half dozen matches I was sitting at Rank 3 staring down the barrel of Rank 4. Had I stayed up a little later I might have been able to hit Rank 5 all in one night. The big part was that I simply did not have the skill or the time to be able to complete the “brown” bounties on the Hunter since they take a lot of repeated effort. In theory next Iron Banner I might work on the daily bounties for both the Titan and the Hunter each day, and by the end of the week I should have enough progress to turn in those weekly bounties.

The huge positive however is that thanks to the gear that managed to drop while running matches, I can now hit 302 on the Hunter. In total I managed to pick up both a chest piece at 306 and a set of arms at 285… the later I will probably push up whenever the infusion changes happen. I really like the Iron Banner armor look, and I have a feeling that before long that is what my characters will be decked out in. However the upcoming taken look stuff, will probably be what I put on my Hunter since of the three looks that is the one I like the best. Honestly of the Taken gear the only one that I really don’t like is the Titan, and that is largely because of the dumb helmet. The horns on that helmet look like the radar array off of a cruise ship or something. This gets into a complaint I have with Destiny as a whole. It is MMOish but only sorta… and the thing I wish it offered was a true cosmetic system where you could actually customize your appearance without changing your gear. That is one of the things I like the most about The Division is the ability to change my look and have it largely be independent of what I happen to be wearing. Sure there your only options are various pieces of clothing, but in Destiny you could create some really unique armor sets. However I guess with the lossless infusion system, it will make customizing your appearance significantly easier.

Ponytail Titan

Tonight is yet another Rookie Raid and it has become that night of the week that I really look forward to. There is of course a certain amount of trepidation as well, namely when it comes to the damned jumping puzzles. As I have said before Destiny manages to trip my vertigo worse than any game since Mirrors Edge. However I push through it in order to be able to get the tasty drops. This go around what I am really hoping for is to be able to walk out of the raid with the machine gun. I realize that I just put a bunch of effort into pushing up my Bretomart’s Stand to make it raid viable… but I just keep hearing that the raid machine gun is pretty much better in every way. You get hooked on guns with the Cocoon perk, and knowing that whenever you swap weapons there will never be an awkward situation where you have to reload. This would definitely make dps time in the light bubble on Oryx more efficient since you could swap weapons and pour shots into him while waiting on the machine gun to load itself. Cosmetically I am going with a sort of White Knight meets Hive Knight look, and I dig it… even though I kinda wish I had the rest of the Iron Banner gear. When the infusion changes go in I will likely be swapping over to the Iron Camelot shoulders that I picked up from Saladin. I am hoping next go round he brings boots so I can finish out the appearance.

The only regret from this past week is that I didn’t actually connect with any of my friends to talk them into helping me finish my sword quest. It is not like I can actually use it in the raid, since on several of the fights I actually need to use an exotic primary. However it would just be nice to know that I am done with it. I also missed another opportunity for the Black Spindle, because I believe that was last Friday night. I was so focused on Iron Banner that I didn’t even notice until I got an email from another friend asking if I was around to make attempts on it. I have a bit of a mental block now about that mission, since I have failed so many times at it. The other side project that I would love to work on is finding someone to recruit, so that I can get those sweet sweet recruit a friend bonus items. I absolutely want a Tron Sparrow, but unfortunately I can’t just do the World of Warcraft thing and set up a second account. A lot of the achievement steps require you to be doing stuff together. I’ve wondered for awhile now what it would take to get my friend Vernie hooked on this game… because I think he would absolutely like it. The only problem is he is a die-hard keyboard and mouse guy… just like I was before the siren song of Destiny. The thing is… all the joy I used to have playing PC shooters when we would do LAN games after work… I am having with Destiny.