It was a thoroughly frustrating weekend, so instead of a post in the games of the decade series, you are instead getting a general Destiny post. I took off work Friday and thought I was being awesome, running around and taking care of a bunch of things like renewing my drivers license. Then Friday night I got a text that would ultimately dominate the entire weekend. I have a warning set on my account to text me any time a transaction over $300 is placed against my bank account. At 6:13 pm I got a text saying that a “check” for $797.51 was written against my account. I knew I did not have any bills queued up for that amount, so it lead me to go sifting through my bank account where there were three other unauthorized transactions.
This lead to a back and forth with the bank call center Friday night, and by the end of the evening them realizing that it wasn’t just some sort of a printing error and that someone had faked out checks against my account under what appeared to be the actual name of the person commuting the fraud. Saturday this meant we had to go to a branch location that had lobby hours and close out our original account and open a new one… which then meant I spent the rest of the day trying to make sure everything that I had set to bank draft for utilities and such was pointed at the new account. We also had to file a police report, which I don’t actually expect to go very far… even though we were more or less able to find the guy with a series of google searches. It appears the guy used his real name, real date of birth and potentially real drivers license number when writing the checks and there is a felon that matches both name and birth date in the OKC metro where two of the checks were written.
Between flurries of dealing with the stress I played an awful lot of fairly incognito Destiny, and apparently am really bad at paying attention to messages that are coming in while I am playing. Poor Squirrel tried to reach me on practically every platform to see if I wanted to run a Nightfall. Thalen similarly tried to ping me multiple times over the weekend, and I was seemingly unaware of any of it until much later. My mind was likely going through the permutations of “which account did I forget to move over” while mindlessly grinding away in Destiny. I did however in my travels manage to pull the Exotic sparrow from the Arms Dealer nightfall which was kinda cool.
The hero of the weekend is Martyr’s Retribution… or Marty as I have heard the community referring to it. This is a brand new type of grenade launcher that fires a Titan thermite grenade out along the ground that follows the grenade being ejected. As a result of this behavior you use this basically like you are throwing an extra grenade to help soften up any enemies in front of you. This can be used to devastating effect in the crucible where I racked up several medals in the very short time I spent doing that this weekend. The most important trait for me personally is Auto Loading Holster, which allows me to play in a way where I fire this off, then immediately swap to my primary and then after getting some kills swap back to fire off another round that has been reloaded for me.
Another good get for the weekend is a significantly better roll of the Breachlight sidearm… which coincidentally pairs very nicely with Marty. I love this sidearm and having one with outlaw and multi-kill clip works well. I did really like Vorpal blade as far as new weapon perks go, but this one is overall better suited for my play style. I would have rather had something else in the second column than Drop Mag, but I guess this is the way of Destiny. There is always a more perfect roll out there somewhere waiting to be found.
The other take away I have from the weekend, is that I have started to see a bunch of weapons that I have not seen at all since Year 1. The Old Fashioned for example is one of those, and while this is not an amazing roll with hip fire and pulse monitor… it was interesting to see it show up regardless. This maybe means that we finally have the full compliment of weapons available from banshee again, as for some time it seems like I kept getting the same ones over and over. I am hoping to see a weapon that has eluded me completely on the PC… the Jiangshi AR4 Omolon Auto Rifle. It seems as though according to the Wiki you may be able to get Uriel’s Gift in random roll variant which would be similarly awesome.
I hope the new week brings me some stress relief… but I know it probably won’t considering I have to do a ton of stuff to close out the year since as of next Monday I will be off for two weeks.
