For several weeks this thing has been building behind Ikora Rey and I find it super interesting. I have started noticing other changes. Like at the Ramen shop there are traditionally a few people eating there, but last night they were gone. I am not sure if this is on some sort of a cycle and I just always happened to be walking by when they were sitting there or if this is something changing as a result of the building happening. I noticed some other NPCs that I swore were in one specific place moved somewhere else. It is subtle but sorta cool to see, and I am assuming that the gate we are building is somehow going to be used in conjunction with the conclusion of the Season of the Undying.
Next reset brings us back the Festival of the Lost and it seems like they are bringing back something that started with last years. There is a really cool mode called the Haunted Forest, which is essentially the infinite forest but dark… and the goal is to see how many loops you can finish in 15 minutes. Your rewards are increased by the number of loops your group can complete in that time. Last year they introduced the Horror Show auto rifle that dropped fully masterworked and at Maximum Light, and it seems like they are bringing this concept back. The Braytech Werewolf gun shown in the thumbnail seems to be a version of the Winter Wolf weapon Anna Bray rewards.
I wound up playing a good deal of Gambit Prime last night, as I am trying to get my Infamy up high enough to do a reset and knock out the machine gun pinnacle weapon that I have had in my quest log for awhile. I also find Gambit weirdly relaxing and was ultimately working on both a Werner bounty and trying to unlock the Gambit Powerful award for the week. I’m up to Heroic III which means I need to get through Fabled 1-III, Mythic 1-III and Legend in order to get that reset. Gambit takes way longer than Crucible so the grind feels so much slower than it did last week.
I am now at level 70 on the seasonal journey, and I have a feeling that I won’t have much trouble hitting 100 by the end of the season. This is the only part of this process that I really don’t like is that it feels like I need to be playing Destiny 2 as my primary game in order to get full benefit. I want the items that are available along the path and as such I am playing pretty constantly to make sure I can get them all. I will say that with all of the XP bonuses the levels come way faster as you go, but it also sorta makes you always doing something to help it out. Like if I am running around in the world and I see one of those “Kill A Bunch of Stuff” patrols, I am always going to pick it up because it is super easy to complete and worth a bunch of XP. Similarly I am always trying to make sure I have a bunch of bounties available.
I noticed that Savathun’s Song is this weeks Nightfall, so I think my next grind is going to be running the strike trying to get Duty Bound. I love the look of this weapon because it looks like quite possibly the most Warhammer 40k gun available in the game. I have no clue if it is even good but I want to own a copy, and as a result I am hoping to run the strike a bunch in the Ordeal playlist in an attempt to get it to drop. I’ve had pretty good luck so far getting the strike specific drops, but having said that I will run this thirty times with no luck. The above screenshot is just one I found online to show off the weapon and it appears that they have applied the Leviathan shader to it.
Speaking of Leviathan… I would really like to get through that place. I have access to ways of running it and just getting carried through it. However I would far rather build a super casual raid team and work our way through it. We got pretty close to callus but I think it was the dexterity check of running the orb around the ring that ultimately killed us. We have a handful of people now playing but if you are among my mutuals out there… and are interested in this nonsense hit me up. The goal would be to find a week night and run for a few hours until we down Leviathan and the six other raids and lairs that exist in the game right now. I think for me Thursday nights are probably the best option, but I am open to negotiation.
Sometimes your evening doesn’t go exactly as planned. Last night was absolutely one of those. I had every intent to hunker down and grind out Crucible until I made a significant dent in the Thorn quest line. That did not happen… in fact I didn’t even make three games before I was looking for something else to do. Ultimately I think there are a bunch of issues. Firstly I am not that great of a PVP player and it shows when I am trying to get kills that push me outside of my comfort zone. I am not normally a Hand Cannon player, and even then I am not normally one who uses the Omolon style energy hand cannons. Most of the ones that I have that are void fall into that category.
Squirrel suggested that I use the Thin Line hand cannon, but I am guessing at some point I tried it and didn’t like it because I only had one version of it sitting in my vault. Triple Tap and Outlaw is not exactly optimal for what I would be doing with it, but I gave it a shot. Overall it felt okay in actually lining up targets and dealing damage but the low stability and low handling score made the entire experience feel sluggish. I also gave a shot to the Ikelos Hand Cannon that you get through the quest line and again it was in that faster firing archetype which meant you needed to land way more hits to actually pop off a Guardian.
Ultimately I gave up on the whole void thing and just wound up using The Last Word a bunch last night which seemed to be fairly successful in finishing off Guardians. The only challenge there is that this is really a close range engagement sort of weapon and I kept getting maps with extremely long sight lines. The meta feels stacked against Hand Cannons right now but I will eventually push through it. What I think this is going to mean is that my load out is going to be Last Word in my kinetic slot and maybe the Suros Iron Banner Void SMB in my secondary or a pulse rifle depending on the map. That way I am either getting Hand Cannon kills or Void kills… because apparently getting both at the same time feels awful. Ultimately I got 10% progress for the three games I played which I guess is okayish.
What I did instead was decide to hop over and play some Gambit and take advantage of the infamy bonus. Without really meaning to however I apparently completed the Chaperone quest line and now have a shotgun that I am likely never going to use! I did not exactly love this weapon in Destiny 1 and I doubt I am going to love it in Destiny 2. I guess you could run double shotguns easily since this fits neatly in your primary slot. That seems like misery however, but I am happy to have accidentally knocked out another exotic weapon quest.
At some point along the way I picked up a sweet ornament for the weapon… but it only serves to make me miss my invective. I realize why we are never going to get the ammunition regeneration weapons… but it doesn’t mean I don’t miss them an awful lot.
Sometimes I get stuck on things and I am not entirely sure why. For example I could have done a bunch of useful things last night prior to the reset… but instead I spent my time in Iron Banner trying to get wins on the Hunter. It either was not my night, I just suck at playing the hunter, or I kept running into some premade groups… or a combination of all three. I did manage to get two more wins before finally giving up on that achievement for the evening. I am not sure WHY completing the Iron Banner page suddenly became important to me last night but it seemingly did. I did manage to get 75 packages for the entirety of the event and a lot of gear that I will mull over and decide what to keep and what to shard.
At some point I swapped back to the Titan and worked my way through the material gathering phases of the Thorn quest. I finished the first step by doing a third nightfall and a single bounty on Io. That left me with the other two steps and I opted to take the PVP route for those… the first requiring me to get kills on Titans and I managed that in a single round of Iron Banner because I happened to be on a stacked team full of Titans. The next step was to get Hunter kills and for some reason it was just Titan and Warlock night, and I kept getting teams with only a single Hunter on them. As such I think it took me a total of 4 Iron Banner matches to rack up enough kills to move things forward to the most painful step.
In this step as I understand it there is a hidden 500 point system that is instead represented as a percentage bar. You earn the absolute most points from a Void Hand Cannon streak while in either Competitive or Iron Banner. So there are sorta multiple components to the math behind this but essentially you can move the bar forward with either Void Weapon kills or Hand Cannon Kills. Ideally the weapon everyone keeps pointing towards is the Kindled Orchid… of which I don’t exactly have a stellar roll and it has been wasting away in my vault. I could in theory try and get a better roll, but they really need to rework the way the whole forge system operates. It seems way the hell too difficult to get a Ballistics Log each week.
Thankfully however the new Vex Incursion event has a fairly reasonable option as well. As it stands the best version of the Optative that I currently have is one with Accurized Rounds, Outlaw and Zen Moment. The version that I would be chasing if I so decide to do this nonsense would be one with Rapid Hit and Kill Clip since that appears to be the best combo in my eyes available on the weapon. I do have one with Rapid Hit and Mulligan that might be an option as well. Regardless of what I use… this is going to be a really long grind to go from the 12% I am sitting at as of last night to 100%. I guess I am going to be doing a lot of crucible with Last Word in my kinetic slot, Optative in my energy slot, Hammerhead in my heavy slot and while playing a Sentinel Titan in an attempt to max out the possible point gain.
This weekend was an extended weekend for me, having taken two days off to match up with my wife who is on fall break. As a result I had more than my average amount of play time and the timing happened to line up perfectly with the first Iron Banner for the Season of the Undying in Destiny 2. This time around there was a quest chain that I wrote about the other day that walks the player through collecting four weapons and a full suit of the Iron Banner armor. After this however it became my first mission to make sure I had completed that on all three characters. The above collage shows them all in the gear set that I picked up with some shaders applied to make them look cooler.
The most curious part of the weekend is that I somehow capped my Valor twice and reset it… and am now grinding it up a third time presently sitting at the Brave II rank. Partially this is due to the fact that the weekend included a bonus to all valor gained, and partially due to the fact that I played an excessive amount of crucible via the Iron Banner. I am guessing that the bonus valor also somehow equated to bonus XP because I skyrocketed from around 33 at the start of Iron Banner to 60 as of last night. I also managed to hit the less permeable cap of 960… aka 950 gear and 10 bonus light coming from the artifact. From this point on I believe the gains are in single point increments.
I was completely all over the place this weekend when it came to the activities that I dipped my toes into. While podcasting I opted to grind the Menagerie a bit and attempt to get a good roll of the Austringer, something that I had apparently completely failed at doing during the Season of Opulence. I am not even sure what a God Roll looks like, but my friend Teyeger01 suggested either Rampage/Rapid Hit or Rapid Hit/Kill Clip… the later sounds most excellent. I pulled an Outlaw/Rampage which seems like a perfectly reasonable option for the time being and one well worth using. For the time being I am completely out of Desire runes and will probably wait for Thalen to unlock the chalice before grinding some out again seeing as he was not benefiting from my runefinder buff.
Speaking of which, I spent a good chunk of the weekend running around with Thalen and doing whatever he had on his list of activities. I now fully understand why Squirrel always wanted me to drive the activity we were doing, because after a point it doesn’t really matter what it is we are actually doing. It is the act of running around and getting to play big brother guardian that is really fun. I wish I could have somehow carried people to the Iron Banner armor, but the way those objectives were set up to do not exactly lend themselves to being helped out by another guardian. So many of the checkmarks are depended upon getting weapon kills of a specific type, which means you need to be the one that actually finishes the Guardian off. If they were assists… maybe just maybe I could have helped folks like Pix through the Iron Banana because apparently I am better than I realized?
Speaking of killing Guardians… I finished off my Malfeasance… which is a Hand Cannon that I am probably never going to use. Right now I am heavily favoring swapping back and forth between Austringer and Ace of Spades when I want to play with that weapon type. The problem with Malfeasance is its special perk procs an explosion after the fifth hit on a target. Very few targets can handle five hits… even Guardians tend to drop somewhere in the 3 to 4 hit range. This means the only time you are ever going to get use of the perk is on some tanky Majors and Boss type encounters… which are situations you are probably going to use a heavy or a special on. So basically this weapon feels like it needs some tweaking… if it was 3 hits and then an explosion this gun would be amazing. Regardless it is another Exotic quest checked off on my list, and another quest out of my log.
At the start of this week I would have said without a doubt that this was the best feeling Iron Banner I had experienced to date. Then things shifted… and I eventually found out that Bungie made tweaks to the way the matchmaking was working. Originally as a solo queue player I was almost always getting matched with other solo queue players, which felt amazing. The problem is the vocal minority of the “sweaty” pvpers complained that they were sitting in orbit with a full team for hours and not getting matches. Bungie made some tweaks to the system and suddenly on Saturday I started getting matched up with 4 or 5 players from the same clan against my rag tag group of solo queues. Basically I am glad that I got most of my progress towards the armor sets done before that point, because on my Hunter it took way longer than it did on any of the others.
It makes me realize how much better the Crucible would be for me personally… if there was a freelancer play list. I am almost always going to queue as a solo player, because that tend to be how I play crucible most of the time. On the first few days before they applied this tweak… Iron Banner felt amazing. On the days after the patch was applied… I got one of two games… competitive or shut outs that I got “mercied”. Even when you lose in a close game… it somehow feels better because you had a chance. The weirdest realization for me personally… is that even in the scenarios where I was getting completely tromped… I was doing reasonably well. I think of myself as a very shitty PVPer… but maybe just maybe I have improved over time. I did enjoy myself and I find doing the Crucible bounties a little less tedious than it used to be.
