May 2016 – Page 8

A Little Closer

May 4, 2016 by Belghast

Best Laid Plans

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.

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

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.

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.

Survival Solved

May 3, 2016 by Belghast

Violated

Right now I am having a little bit getting started this morning. I went to the cleaners yesterday, and after I got home I forgot to carry in the clothing. As a result this morning I hurriedly got dressed enough to be seen outside, and went out to the truck to get the laundry. When I got out there the door was slightly open, and apparently I either failed to lock the car last night… or failed to completely shut the door. As a result someone got inside and rifled through the glove box and the center console, I can only assume looking for drugs. They passed up a bunch of change, and didn’t touch my work id badge, or any of the few packs of magic the gathering cards that were deep down in the console. I don’t really keep anything of value in the vehicle, so I am certainly they were sorely disappointed. Unfortunately the whole event has left me feeling a little vulnerable, because we live in this super quiet neighborhood… but every so often something like this happens. We have a ton of teenagers and I am certain it was probably one of them. I just lack the gene apparently to fully understand why something like this happens, and I am kicking myself for not having a more proper inventory of the stuff I keep in my car to be able to tell if anything is actually missing. There is this sense of dread inside me that something was taken that I will miss… I just don’t know it yet.

It seems like another one of those blog award things is cycling through our community, because last night I was tagged by my friend Sandrian. I was originally going to go ahead and answer the questionnaire this morning, but since it is all about positivity and blogging and all of that sort of stuff… I am maybe not in the right mindset to do it. I will have to do it before too much longer however, or I will forget about it… much the way I forgot about the last one and then didn’t actually do it until I was tagged a second time. These things are cute, and mean well but they also often feel like the chain letters of the blogosphere. They are always interesting ways to get to know the people who are filling them out, but by the same token I always feel horrible for trying to obligate someone else to keep the chain letter moving forward. While there are no dire predictions for not completing the task, in the same way as chain letters normally have… I still feel nonetheless obligated to complete the task. In any case… it will be answered in a morning I feel a little less violated.

The Slow Spot

As far as gaming and happier subjects go, I spent a good chunk of last night playing the tail end of Iron Banner. I am not sure if they ratcheted the drops down as the week went on, but the last few days after hitting rank five on all of my characters I really didn’t see much in the way of drops. I was hoping to get more 335 items to use as infusion fodder, but even though I played a dozen or so matches last night, the only thing I ever seemed to get was a bunch of blues, some strange coins and a single class item. I mean I did get a bunch of drops early on, so maybe there is a cap on the amount of dropped gear you can get from it or something. Either that or maybe I just had a lot of bad luck. In any case, right now my lowest item is 330 with the bulk of my gear being between 333 and 335. I only have boots, gloves and heavy maxed out at 335, so my hope is that with Challenge of Elders this week I will get another piece of armor to fix some of that. The lowest piece is the 330 helm, so getting a 335 helm would go a long way to bringing up my total light level. I am just pumped that I managed to get a set of gear that allows me to max out both intellect and discipline. This weeks Challenge of Elders is going to be strange, in that Melee does bonus damage… but you score extra points through super kills.

I had every intent of logging in last night to Overwatch and spending the entire team playing that. However when I actually went downstairs, I wound up riding along with Kylana for some more levels and gear. The shitty thing about the item set this time for crusaders is that it feels like I need some super specific items to make it viable. I am sitting at four pieces of Invoker, so truth be told I might jump ship to that set if I find the last two pieces. I did however solve my survivability issues it feels, because after doing some fiddling I was able to survive incoming damage a whole lot better. I had fiddled with some stuff one night as an experiment and apparently never flipped back off the rune that made it so I could not dodge, but blocked more often. That alone was apparently the thing that was completely destroying me when running any content. Once that got turned off, I was amazed at just how well things went. I managed to solo a level 30 greater rift, but my damage dealing capabilities are still too low for me to really be able to do that comfortably. I do however need to spend a bit of time doing greaters so that I can get the rest of the gems I will need, and then also spend some time pouring levels into them. I think a lot of my lack of drive to play Overwatch is knowing that I am already “bought in”, and also knowing that there will be yet another reset before the game actually launches. I do however want to get in and play some with Tam, so I will need to check in tonight to see what folks are doing. It is my hope that I can get home with enough time to run Challenge of Elders in Destiny and then pop in for either Diablo 3 or Overwatch shenanigans.

Accepting Help

May 2, 2016 by Grace

Last week was quite the rollercoaster around here, with a few very excessive ups and downs. The downs are personal so I’m not going to get into details, but they had me sad and anxious and stressed for a lot of the week. The ups were 100% due to the awesomeness of my friends in ways I cannot completely explain on this humble blog.

I had a long discussion with my spouse at one point during the week about giving and accepting gifts. We have so many cultural hang ups about accepting gifts in part because there are so many situations where “gifts” come with an expectation of some sort of reciprocity. It can be disarming to receive a gift, freely given just to make you happy or to help out when you needed it. This weekend I was getting carried a bit in D3, and I can sort of justify accepting that help because I know that once I get my character built up I’ll turn around and carry other friends later on. But in the middle of the silliness of being dragged through TX rifts I got a whisper from another friend inviting me to a WoW friendship moose run. In that case there’s no way I could repay that kindness. I’ve stopped raiding in WoW, all my characters are barely in Tanaan gear. I actually had to spend a WoW token to join the moose party because I had been distracted enough that my subscription had lapsed. I took my completely undergeared kitty druid into that raid and I ate the floor like a champion and walked away with a moose and it was amazing. There’s no way for me to repay the folks that made that possible other than to thank them profusely, and maybe try to pay it forward in some way when I am able.

Here’s the thing: happiness isn’t a zero sum game. Gifts don’t have to be transactional. Doing silly things for your friends can feel pretty great, so being on the receiving end of help shouldn’t feel weird. Life can be pretty crappy sometimes, so embrace happiness when it is offered and do your best to spread it around when you can. And to all the friends who made my week better last week, thank you.

Flowers and Rank 5s

May 2, 2016 by Belghast

Backyard Whim

One of the interesting developments that has happened this summer is that we are spending a good deal more time outside than we have ever before. I mean we have lived in our house for seventeen years now… and we’ve never really taken advantage of our backyard. My wife and I tried to sort out why this was, and I think in truth it was that the back of our house looked bad. Before moving in during the inspections they found a lot of termite damage on the wooden siding, and the bulk of this was located on the back of the house. The repair job looked adequate at first, but as it aged… the back wall ended up looking like a patchwork quilt that even with a fresh coat of paint just looked “wrong”. So in many ways I think it just put us off from being outside and having to look at it. With the recent renovations and new siding, we also had a door installed off of the bedroom. Years ago we created a quick and dirty patio with pavers, and now it feels like everything has finally come together. Sunday morning for example by the time I had woken up and gotten out of bed, my wife was already on the patio off the bedroom reading. There have been many times during the weekends that we end up eating lunch on the back patio as well.

Now I am not exactly certain where it came from… but recently we have talked about trying to put flowers sprinkled around the backyard. Granted we have always had a brown thumb, but this resurgence of backyarding… has made us want to at least try it. This reached a boiling point Saturday when while running errands we found a couple of planters that we really liked at Sam’s Club, and you can see one of them in the foreground of the above image. Given that Sams always has a rotating stock we went ahead and picked them up, thinking that if we waited they probably wouldn’t have two of the color we wanted later. Now I had zero intention of doing anything with them this weekend… I mean because I had Iron Banner and Diablo Season 6 to play. However before I knew it Sunday we were making a trip to go get rock and potting soil, and plants. We are massively cheating in that the start of each of the pots is a hanging plant, but so far so good. Now we just have to make sure they keep watered, but the hope is that since we are spending so much time out in the backyard anyway… that it won’t be that big of a deal. For those that are curious I created a nifty panoramic shot of the entire back yard.

Rank 5 For All

Even though we spent a chunk of the afternoon working on flowers and such, I still managed to make it upstairs on the PS4 by around 4pm. This allowed me some dedicated time to play the Warlock, and push forward towards Iron Banner rank 5. I closed with the weekend with my Titan and 333 light, Hunter at 324 and Warlock also at 324 which is significant movement. I have a feeling that those last two points of light on the Titan are going to end up being pure hell. However on a similar photo from the 22nd… I was sitting at 324 on the Titan, and 314 and 304 on the Hunter and Warlock respectively. So I have to say… I am pretty damned pumped about the rapid progress. The Iron Banner as a whole was very good to me, especially in the equippable gear and infusion material categories. I managed to get all of the available gear for this week, minus a pair of legs for the Warlock. There are numerous copies of the Auto Rifle, Rocket Launcher, and even managed to pick up a sidearm and sniper rifle from Rank 5 packages. It has been interesting playing all three classes this weekend, and I have to say that in truth… I think maybe the Warlock and Hunter are just inherently better at crucible than my Titan. It feels like they have a lot more tricks up their sleeve, whereas the Titan is just pure brute force. Warlock Blink seems to be the best escape method for getting out of an engagement, and Hunter throwing knives seems to be the best finishing move ever.

As far as the sniper rifle goes that I managed to pick up, I am not exactly a huge fan. It has Eye of the Storm, Speed Reload and Spray and Play which in theory would make it an insanely fast sniper rifle, but given its low impact… I question how useful it really is. For crucible at least you would have to land so many shots to make the kill, and it is hard enough to nail a single shot let along multiple at range. I will probably end up holding onto it just because it looks really cool, but I have a feeling that sooner or later this will get infused into something else to bring up its light levels. As far as new snipers go, I am still a much bigger fan of the 333 Her Fury that I managed to pick up from my Challenge of Elders this week. High impact, paired with Triple Tap and Armor Piercing rounds makes it something enjoyable to use. Tonight I have plans to hang out upstairs at least for a bit and try my luck at getting more of that tasty Iron Banner loot. It would be amazing if before the end of the weekend I manage to get more of the 335 items to help push up other gear. As far as the rest of my Destiny schedule for this week it feels a little up in the air. I did not set foot into Kings Fall last week, and I would really love to remedy that this week. The thing that sucks is that I am now in a position where the only benefit I will see is from a hard mode run, given that all three of my characters are now over the 320 light level that normal drops.