A Little Closer

Best Laid Plans

A Little Closer

I had these grand plans for last night, and as is always the case when I seem to plan something… that is precisely what won’t actually happen.  The original goal was to pop into Destiny “for a bit” and get CoE finished on my Titan for the week, so that I could end up doing it later in the week on both the Warlock and Hunter.  I’ve managed to get the light levels up on both enough to be able to start getting decent loot.  The other goal was to chill out downstairs and play some more Diablo 3 since I am one piece of gear away from being able to rock the Invoker set over the Akkhan set, which I think is going to improve my quality of life greatly.  That said I am starting to maybe get the hang of playing Akkhan but still missing several items that make the build really viable.  I am however loving the flail that gives me an army of phalanxes to run around with me.  I think maybe that is ultimately going to be the best option for running with the Akkhan set since they seem to shred everything in my path.  I did get to play a little Overwatch last night however when my friend Tamrielo got home, and was pleasantly surprised that he too enjoys the game.  I am not sure if he is really a convert but it at least gets why the game feels better than Team Fortress 2, which was something I had trouble putting into words.  I managed to get in a few matches before my wife got home, and we ended up walking to go get dinner.

A Little Closer

When we got back I started in with the Destiny bounties, and ultimately ran a Prison of Elders to get my weekly loot box for completing that activity.  Last week I experienced a glitch, where after running a CoE I could not seem to be able to get the loot box, so I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.  From this point onwards it was me trying to get Jex and Squirrel together in the same group at the same time, which is not something that happened until about 8:30.  This weeks Challenge of Elders is a little tougher than past examples because the bonus damage and bonus scoring have no real synergy.  For example in past weeks you had bonus damage from primary weapons, and bonus scoring from headshots…  so those two worked nicely with you simply focusing on primary weapon headshots.  This time around the bonus damage was melee based, but the bonus scoring was super kills.  Meaning we spent a good deal of time wandering around waiting for our super bars to tick up so that we could get bonus scoring.  We managed to get the 30,000 score step pretty easily in our first attempt, but did not score high enough to be able to get the 90,000 within two matches.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

A Little Closer

It was round about this time that the monkey wrench was thrown into the works, as Squirrel had signed up for the Crota’s End retro raid.  So Jex and I ended up getting pulled along after our first Challenge of Elders match into that.  Other than simply not being what I had planned to spend my night doing, I was totally down with this because I had never seen that raid.  For the most part I think I did okay and didn’t screw anything up horribly.  One of the group was hunting for the Crux of Crota that is used in the long quest chain that ultimately winds up rewarding you the Necrochasm Auto Rifle.  As a result we saved off a number of check points, which meant jumping off the back wall into the abyss so many times.  However this also meant that instead of just doing the raid on my Titan I was able to swap to multiple characters and get lots of stuff.  The only negative here is that apparently you get rewarded the two shaders and emblem ever single time you kill Crota if they were not already in your inventory.  What I did find odd is that every single time the Word of Crota hand cannon dropped, but with slightly different perks.  The only potential gotcha here was that I had to break out a rocket launcher with tracking and/or the horseshoes and hand grenades perk.  Thankfully I had a truth, that I ultimately leveled up… even though I never actually use rocket launchers.

A Little Closer

In other news I am now down to the point where I need a helm, primary, class item, and artifact at 335 to max out.  So the end result allows me to sit fairly comfortably at 334, which should help quite a bit when getting drops.  As far as Challenge of Elders loot, I wound up getting arms and another copy of the Her Fury sniper rifle with crappier stats than the one I have been using.  Speaking of sniper rifles this seems to be my week to get them, because I also managed to pull a LDR 5001 from a Vanguard package.  This seems to be the sniper that a lot of the youtubers are actively hunting god rolls for, but I don’t even know for certain what a god roll would look like.  The one I got has Partial Refund, High Caliber Rounds, and Firefly which is decent… but I would have rather had triple tap somewhere in there because that comes in so damned handy for boss fights.  It is probably a great option for like heroic strikes or non-boss PVE content, but not having triple tap really places it below my existing 1000 Yard Stare or Her Fury.  The main reason why I was interested at all is just because it is really damned cool looking.  Also you can see from the above ship shot that I managed to get a ship from Variks, which for whatever reason I thought was a Trial of Osiris ship when I had seen people using it.  Was ultimately a really great night, just one that didn’t got as planned.  That however is perfectly okay because sometimes the end result is much better.

Rising Light

Unintended Kings Fall

Rising Light

The original plan for last night was to chill on the sofa and play some Ratchet and Clank over the PC Remote Play application.  However as the day went on yesterday I noticed that there was a new raid scheduled for last night that my good friend Sagacyte would be attending.  Since the Tuesday night Rookie Raid… now called the Squirrel Squad didn’t make due to the patch and too much newness for folks to be exploring, I thought it might be a good idea to pop in and at least get some boss kills for the week so I had a shot at loot.  Things went pretty well overall, but I think I blew all of my jumping skill early on.  I managed to make it through the ship puzzle without falling and even make it over onto the ledge that leads up to the chest.  However by the time I got to the wall puzzle, I was apparently out of juice because I fell so many times trying to get over to the exotic chest.  There was one jump where I kept bouncing off the damned wall.  The jumping is the only thing that I dread each week when I run Kings Fall, and while I seem to be improving… there are times where it feels like I can simply do no right and either land too hard, or can’t quite get over the gap.  In any case I eventually gave up and headed to the end of the puzzle and managed to do that without much issue.  It was just the ledges leading up to that chest that I seemed to be having problems with.

Rising Light Rising Light Rising Light Rising Light Rising Light

As far as the raid itself things went really smoothly other than that time that I got torn during sisters… and had no clue what platform I was supposed to start from.  Now I know however that you apparently look up and find the orb and then start counterclockwise to it.  While we wiped on that round we managed to pick it up and wreck them on the next.  Probably the best moment however was one-shotting Oryx doing it the challenge mode, especially considering how much issue we had with him in the previous few weeks.  I failed to get back from the exploding balls in time, but we still managed to get the kill.  The best best part however was getting a bunch of loot that were upgrades, and finally getting a Red Death.  Smite of Merain has been my go to weapon for awhile now, and I ended up picking up a 318 version of exactly the same roll.  Getting Red Death however was the icing on the cake since that was one of those exotics that I had been hoping to see.  All in all the run went really well, and while Squirrel keeps trying to tell me that I am no longer a Rookie, I still very much feel like one.  I know the fights, but I still feel like there is a certain amount of skill that I am lacking.  The fight I feel the most comfortable on is Oryx oddly enough, because I really like the bubble titan duty there.  Above is a gallery of all of the nifty things I picked up throughout the evening of playing.

Rapid Increases

Rising Light

The thing that has felt insane for me is how I floundered at sub 300 light level for the better part of a year, and over the last two months I have shot up to as of last night 318.  I guess it is like any game, that if you have access to raiding your gear levels increase rapidly.  Early in the evening I spent some time with Broken and Squirrel running the Challenge of Elders, which was one of the new pieces that went in with the patch.  The idea is that once a week you grab a scorecard from Variks, and then there are two challenges that need to be completed.  The first is to finish the three round Challenge of Elders while earning at least 30,000 total team score.  We failed barely to get this on our first go, but on the second and third attempts we blew the score completely out of the water.  The second challenge is to get a weekly total accumulated score of 90,000 which we easily hit within three outings in the area.  Each match rewarded some decent infusion fodder, and at the end we managed to score a guaranteed weapon for the single match objective, and a guaranteed armor piece for the cumulative challenge.  Unfortunately the roll on the helm and machine gun that I got were kinda crap, but they did serve nicely as infusion fodder taking my Iron Companion helm and my Bretomart’s Stand to 318.  I have to say the Challenge of Elders was really damned fun, and I look forward to doing this one at least once a week.

Quite honestly all of the Prison of Elders content has been great, and it is the sort of thing that I am not really going to turn down if anyone is looking to run it.  Squirrel mentioned that he plans on running Prison of Elders quite literally all day Sunday and that doesn’t seem like a horrible idea.  I am wanting to see how doable the level 41 version of the event is to complete with total strangers.  I am assuming that you can queue for a group like you can for a strike, and after experiencing it… it seems like it would be doable with strangers.  As far as for farming gear this seems like a decent way to go since every match I ended up walking away with at least one if not two legendary engrams with a chance of one of the special legendaries to drop.  Honestly the thing I am enjoying the most about this patch is it feels like I have lots of different ways that I can be increasing my light level.  I’ve run a handful of crucible matches and each time I managed to get something at the end.  The getting nothing problem seems to have either been fixed or greatly reduced, because now the consolation prize seems to be coins or a few motes… and the best option is some infusion fodder.  Either way I am down with it, and will probably try and use crucible to farm a few more motes before Xur disappears this week.  I need to replenish my stock of three of coins.

 

Steampunk Primalist

Primal Goodness

It was honestly a sheer miracle that I made it through yesterday.  As the day went on, it felt like my estimate of three hours of sleep was a bit too high.  Luckily around 3 pm I managed to catch a second wind which made the whole “driving home” thing significantly safer for everyone on the road.  My general goal was to stay awake long enough to be able to head to bed naturally around 9 pm thinking that maybe just maybe it would fix the problems and give me a good nights sleep.  For the most part it seems to have worked and while I am a bit groggier than normal this morning, I am feeling significantly “better”.  In my stupor yesterday however I managed to have an insane bit of luck.  I happened to be watching my twitter feed at just the right moment, when Rift tweeted that they were just about to give out some Wilds Packs.  They posted a photo with I believe six different codes on it, and I picked the smallest one… and started typing.  Apparently my fingers were fast enough because much to my shock I saw a note in my transaction history that said the Wilds Pack was added to my account.  Also much to my shock… I thought this was the basic pack that just included the new primalist class only, but instead it was apparently the $100 pack that includes a ton of other goodies as well including an insane dinosaur mount.

Steampunk Primalist

I think maybe that I violated the intentions of the class when it came to outfitting him.  I rolled a dwarf, thinking that a dwarf with a big hammer/axe/thing would be kind amazing.  Then when it came to actually setting up the wardrobe and picking a mount to use…  things happened.  Now I have my goggle wearing, leather clad, aetherbiker Dwarven Primalist.  I played a little bit but very quickly realized that maybe when I am half awake is not the best possible time to play anything that requires a significant amount of reading.  I did play enough to decide upon the Berserker prebuilt class for the time being.  I considered going Titan which was the tanky build listed, but for the time being I think I am just going to be a pewpew hammer swinging dps.  The starter primalist weapon looks kinda amazing, and honestly one of the big things that I look forward about playing him is that I will actually collect all of the low level gear appearances as I get stuff to drop for me.  That was the negative about going into a major change like the wardrobe system with a high level character…  that ultimately I was well past the gearing phase and all that I would end up physically seeing was new gear.  Playing a low level character again will see me coming across all of that gear that I had and sold, or at least that is the hopes.  However this is a journey for another day, one when I am not struggling to exist.

Questing Guardian

Steampunk Primalist

One of the negatives about playing Destiny as primarily an MMO player is that there are certain traits that carry over into the MMOFPS title.  Namely that you actually find yourself caring about having quests hanging around in your quest log.  Since the whole reading and making sense of things part of my brain was largely malfunctioning, I thought I would instead venture into Destiny and work one some of the things that have been looming over my head.  Namely the “High-Value Targets” quest.  On paper it sounds simple enough, that you need to defeat several of these High-Value targets… 3 in the Cosmodrome, 3 on the Moon, 3 on Venus, 3 on Mars, and 3 on the Dreadnaught.  The problem being that in order to qualify as a high-value target, it has to be one of those special patrol missions that ask you to go kill a given mob somewhere in the patrol zone that is marked with a red star.  To make matters more interesting… I learned that these only come from special patrol beacons that are also marked with a star.  Theses seem to be largely rare and absolute luck of the draw if you will see them.  So as a result I managed to complete the Cosmodrome and Dreadnaught quickly…  but struggled with having not found a single high value target patrol on Venus or Mars.

Steampunk Primalist

So last night I spent pretty much the entire night wandering around various planets looking for star beacons, and when I did not find them… running as many patrols as I could in the hopes of making them spawn.  At about 9:30 last night, moments before we were heading to bed…  I managed to complete the quest.  Additionally I also managed to complete Taken Assault: Mars which gave me enough Queen’s Wrath faction to finally start opening up bounties on the Reef.  This also opened up The Wolves of Mars quest chain for Variks which involves doing a bunch of shit involving the Fallen.  From what I have heard this will reward a Boolean Gemini at the end of it… which in truth will probably be a Year One variant…  but if it works like Last Word did, it also opened up the Year Two blueprint for me.  So in theory I can save up my marks and purchase the 280 version as well.  In any case I had a lot of fun last night faffing about working through the various quests and bounties.  There is something relaxing and mindless about wandering around and taking things out with an assortment of really fun to use weapons.  The other big progress I made is I collected enough data using a shotgun, so I am now on the step where I need to disassemble a bunch of blue or better ones.  I had a handful stowed away just for this occasion but it was nowhere near enough.  As a result I will be farming engrams in the hopes of getting more, and in theory I need to just start running strikes.  I did however manage to make it to 287 light when wearing my “best” gear, which is slow but palpable progress.