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Minuet 42

July 25, 2017 by Belghast

A few days ago I said I had more or less “beat” the Destiny 2 beta in part because there is so little to actually do in it. That said for whatever reason I keep returning and playing. Since writing my initial post I have done the strike several times and spend a bit more time in the Crucible. Some of my initial comments about not really liking the 4 vs 4 format and the small map sizes, is in part me likely just getting adjusted to changes and not really having a weapon load-out that I would have preferred. Traditionally my crucible build has been an Auto Rifle in the primary slot… usually my extreme stability Haakon’s Hatchet or if I am feeling squirrely… my Genesis Chain. From there I generally have either a Shotgun in the secondary slot Invective or Party Crasher +1 or I go for one of my Fusion Rifles… traditionally Saladin’s Vigil. The heavy slot varies greatly because in truth… I am not really expecting to get heavy ammo in Crucible matches so I am not super concerned. If I have an exotic slot available I go with Gjallarhorn and if not probably my Silvered Dread machine gun. The problem with the Destiny 2 weapon loadouts is that on my preferred class… the Titan there was nothing that I could really replicate this feel with so I in part had to feel out what worked for me in the new scheme.

What finally ended up feeling good and seeming usable is to run a Submachine Gun in my primary slot, namely The Showrunner seen above. However in truth I was using this weapon much in the same way as I would have used a secondary in Destiny 1 only swapping to it at certain times. For my main weapon I relied heavily on the Minuet Hand Cannon sitting in my energy weapon slot, because it had some significant stopping power and actually allowed me to win non-teamshot firefight engagements. Where the sub machinegun was handy is any time that someone ran up on me, I could hang out just outside of melee range and grind them down with a rapid fire hail of bullets. In theory I think this is more or less what folks who loved the sidearm used to do… but I never could make sidearms work for me in this fashion. As far as the heavy/power weapon slot… once again I didn’t care too terribly much about this given that I was similarly not expecting to ever get ammunition for it… so instead just relied on the grenade launcher in case I ever did. I am by no means “good” at the new Crucible, but I managed to find a setup and style that worked for me and I managed to keep climbing higher in my efficiency number as the night went on.

The thing that I find the most impressive about the Destiny 2 demo experience… is the fact that it is so damned short yet I kept returning day after day to keep experiencing it in any way that I could. In part it has made me want to actually dig in and try and finish some of the book achievements that are sitting there unfinished, and bask in the glory of the Destiny 1 experience before it is gone. All in all I am anxiously awaiting the release of this game and even more so the upcoming PC beta that we are getting at some point in August. I have a lot of concerns relating to the PC version, namely how it is going to feel and how well it plays in my various systems. I am really hoping that I can figure out a set of tweaks to get it to play with passable performance on my i7 Geforce 960m laptop. I am not expecting the world and would be completely fine with running 720p on it… pending that the performance is at a minimum 30 fps. One moment of sadness last night however is that the left thumb stick on beloved Hori FPS Plus controller started tearing. I am seemingly particularly hard on left thumb sticks, and as Squirrel pointed out last night… since it is not our aiming stick we are way less gentle with it. I ordered a set of cheapo aftermarket thumb stick caps, hoping that maybe just maybe it will fit. I tried one of the Kontrol Freaks PS4 caps that I had laying around and it kept popping off because the slightly smaller than normal size. All in all though I am going to be really sad to see Destiny 2 beta ending tonight, but will be looking forward to actually getting to play the game at launch.

Aggrochat #166 – Crunchyroll and Chill

May 21, 2019July 23, 2017 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo

This week we have a bit of an odd show, namely because there is far less gaming talk than other stuff talk. We start off with me botching the intro… then roll straight into a discussion that got dropped from last weeks show due to the already two hour runtime. Kodra, Ashgar and Tam have been watching a whole lot of anime namely with the new season of content showing up on Crunchyroll. As a result they run down some of the more memorable shows. From there we talk a bit about the Destiny 2 beta and the season 11 open in Diablo 3… or that time everyone played necros. We wrap things up with some talk about the Final Fantasy XIV escape room experience.

Topics Discussed

Anime Roundup
- Your Name
- Restaurant to Another World
- Kinka Bancho Otome
- Knights and Magic
- My Hero Academia
- Gamers
- Ikemen Sengoku
- In Another World With My Smartphone
- New Game!!
Destiny 2 Beta
Bone Spikes For Days
FFXIV Escape Room

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Destiny 2 Beta Impressions

July 19, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday around noon was the official launch of Destiny 2 Beta on the PS4. I personally got my hands on it around 6 pm after doing various things that needed to be done and taking my wife out to eat. To call this a Beta however feels like a little bit of a misnomer because in truth we are getting out hands on essentially the same demo that was available to press at e3. With that comes a greatly limited subset of options that you can take part in. Functionally right now there are three things available to players: The first story mission, the Inverted Spire strike, and one play mode of the crucible. I didn’t get a ton of screenshots because I was actively playing, but I did decide to stream and ultimately record me in game from the moment I started up Destiny 2 to the moment I logged out feeling like I had “beat” the demo. If you are really curious you can check out my Mixer VOD that runs for a little over an hour. I opted to go for a silent stream because I was largely just recording this for my own benefit.

This game is going to catch so much flak for being “Destiny 1.5” and I can see that. In every meaningful way this is Destiny. The characters perform as smoothly as the original, and the gunplay feels just as good. Those who played a significant amount of time with the first game… might have a little bit of an adjustment period because there are subtle differences everywhere. This is not simply a “HD Remaster” of the original game… but you can feel that it is in fact a brand new game that has tried extremely hard to capture everything that was great about the first one. The titan jump feels slightly different, and everything from the pulse rifle to the hand canon are recognizable… but feel different enough to know at a base level that you are playing something different. The first story mission is excellent and does an amazing job of providing you a feel for the game and its play… as well as giving you a rich narrative ride through parts of the tower you have never seen before. It takes everything that was learned through the Taken King and Rise of Iron and distills it down into the purest form. You are killing Cabal but you are doing it with a constant purpose of trying to save those you can… with enough nostalgic elements to make it feel like your home is falling apart… not just some random structure being blown to pieces. The mission also does a great job of weaving in single player and multi player elements… with the central section being a sort of defend the tower mode as you and lots of other players fight back against the Cabal along side Zavala. That is another huge part of this experience… you are interacting with characters that you already know like Zavala, Cayde-6 and Ikora Rey. They have personality and treat you in a manner befitting someone who has been leading all of these strike missions for all of these years. Hell you even get some interesting interactions with Lord Shax and Amanda Holliday.

The Strike is similarly awesome, and I can see myself running it over and over as part of the strike list. There were a few annoying jumping puzzle style elements… namely that giant grinder that we have seen multiple times in trailers and such. You find yourself trying to navigate through an area while avoiding the spinning wheels of doom. There is a similar mechanic in the first story mission where you have to avoid certain death while destroying objectives, and made me question my choice of the control jump instead of the height jump. The only weirdness about all of this is… it felt like grenade and super both charged super slow. Maybe I am just used to running around with my Armamentarium and rocking two grenade charges… but it always felt like when I needed a grenade the most it was still on cooldown. The super when available however was glorious. Last night I focused on the Sentinel Titan… and I got to run around bashing things with my shield. I never figured out how to throw it… but doing the equivalent of the old striker titan shoulder charge with a void shield was amazingly fun. While sunbreaker is supposedly back for Destiny 2… I can absolutely see me maining Sentinel. The thing that surprised me the most is the fact that I didn’t really seem to use the portable shield capability that often. It was useful for setting up essentially a gun nest, but for the most part I just ducked in and out of cover like I always did.

The only negative of the night was the crucible. I am just not a fan of the changes they made. For starters they have reduced the number of people in standard crucible matches from 6 vs 6 to 4 vs 4. As a result they have created a series of much smaller maps with much tighter choke points. What this does is make it feel much more frenetic in a style of game-play that I equate with Call of Duty. Crucible always felt like a thinking mans game… where it was as much about how you moved and when you chose to fire or not fire… rather than just charging forward into the fray every few seconds. It could be my experiences were deeply colored by the fact that in both occasions I ended up on a team of randoms fighting against a team of people sharing the same clan tag. Functionally all I know is that the changes did not feel as good as the original crucible does, and as a very casual player of the crucible it is not really something I look forward to participating in. Which leads us to the other problem of the night… I am more or less a Patrol player. If you believe Destiny Tracker I spend something like 70% of my time playing Patrol missions where I wander around aimlessly and kill things in the open world. As such with this demo “my Destiny” was not open for business yet and after doing the story mission, the strike, and a few round of crucible I considered myself largely done for the night. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy myself… it just felt like a very shallow experience without the open world content and without character progression. I am sure I will boot it up a few more times… but this did nothing to really satiate my desire for the actual game.

Embracing the Fel

July 18, 2016 by Belghast

Confronting the Legon

This week on “the twitters” I said something to the effect of Legion might be the first World of Warcraft expansion that I never managed to get into either Alpha or Beta. Then almost like queue on July 15th I found an email in my inbox notifying that my account had been flagged for Beta access. As a result I installed it on both my Desktop upstairs and my Laptop downstairs, and spent a good deal of the weekend poking about around the fringes of the new expansion. The truth is I was not all that excited about Legion prior to this weekend, namely because I am stuck in another down cycle with this game. There are plenty of things I could be doing, but just nothing I felt terribly compelled to do other than log in a few times a week to collect “free gold” from the garrison chore masters. Even more maddening in a way is the fact that I desperately need the transmog system changes yesterday. I think a huge part of why I stopped playing so frequently is because one of the activities that I absolutely love is farming old content for interesting bits. The challenge there is that I have my entire bank, void storage and all but a half dozen slots in my inventory taken up with appearance gear. So I just really have no more place to store anything and with transmog changes so damned close… there is no way I am going to get rid of anything that might be cool looking. So as a result I think I just largely stopped playing, thinking that eventually Legion would arrive and I would be able to have a massive spring cleaning… or in this case late summer. Well that time has arrived almost and tomorrow the patch lands that is going to see me spending my entire evening sifting through shit trying to figure out what I can pitch and what I should actually keep.

Blood Deathknight

A huge part of the reason why I wanted into Beta was to fiddle with the class changes. Yes I realize that at any point in the last several weeks I could have installed the PTR client, but without having access to more than just those changes it didn’t really feel worthy of the 28 gig install. Throughout late Wrath of the Lich King up until Warlords of Draenor I was a huge fan of the Blood tanking spec. Then in Warlords alpha a whole bunch of that changed, because the feel of the class changed. Sure the rotation was similar, but the inclusion of Blood Boil as part of the standard rotation made the class start feeling too casterly for my tastes. It is funny how class fantasy can really effect the way you feel about a set of changes, and at least in this case it was a bridge to far. On the other hand the Warrior changes for Warlords were amazing, and I loved being able to indulge in a different player fantasy… which was dpsing with a sword and shield thanks to the Gladiator spec. While I mourn the loss of that option, I completely get why they had to make the change for balance reasons, because quite frankly Gladiator was just too much of a one off special snowflake. It was my hope that Blood on the other hand would be appealing again, and for the most part I think I like the changes. That said something is still off with the class and I am struggling to put my finger on it. Deathknights in general have undergone some pretty shattering changes, and while the feel of the class is right… there are a bunch of empty spots in the rotation where you are waiting on either runic power or rune regeneration. That is not to say that there is absolutely the chance that I might be playing it wrong. However in my experience so far there seem to be some pretty significant lulls in the action, and at the same time the class feels like it has lost a whole lot of survival. On my fresh 100 test character I struggled to get through the quest that ultimately earns you the artifact weapon, because I kept dying with no real way of keeping myself alive.

Demon Hunters

After a bit of a false step by accidentally choosing a talent that turned my resource builder into an auto attack key… I’ve decided that I really love Havoc Demon Hunters. Much like Deathknight was the Belle of the Ball in Wrath of the Lich King… it feels like Demon Hunters are the class that has the most new toys to show off. For starters… any class with a double jump is something that I am going to pay attention to. Better than that they have a built in wing glide, which is similar to using the goblin glider… but just as an intrinsic ability. Then there is the movement… this class has the ability to dart around the battle field like crazy… and those same abilities have allowed me to explore maps in ways that you really could not in previous expansions without copious amounts of wall hacking. The only negative so far is that I hear by creating a level 100, I somehow am missing a huge batch of abilities that you pick up from quest chains in the starting mission. The only negative of the class… is that you have to be an elf. I kinda hate elves, and will likely always hate elves… however ironically I have always loved Illidan and the concept of the Demon Hunter. I am seriously contemplating making Demon Hunter my new main for the expansion, even though I realize that will make me yet another member of the Legion of players doing that… pun only partially intended. The gameplay however feels fun and fresh and like this strange amalgam of Combat Rogue and Fury Warrior. Ultimately I need to spend some time with the tanky variety of the class to see if I like that as well, because if so you might be looking at a newly minted Demon Hunter.

Warrior

The class that I spent the least amount of time playing this weekend was Warrior, but everything I saw made me feel like tanking as a warrior was going to be just as stable and reliable as it always was. Unlike Blood Deathknight, I had zero issue completing the quest chain to get my artifact weapon, the only problem being… that the protection warrior artifact is boring as hell. I have a vault full of amazing one hander and shield combinations… and for the most part all of them are cooler than the artifact weapon. It seriously looks like leveling trash, and I am hoping that some of the mutations later will at least give me something I am not embarrassed to be using. With the absence of Gladiator though, it is going to be hard for me to really consider being a Warrior main this time around. I have to say however that some of the changes in animation for Fury looked amazing, so at some point over the next few days I want to give that a proper whirl… once again pun only partially intended.

Tanking

Generally speaking I tend to gravitate towards tanking, and if you plunk me down in a brand new game that is almost certainly what I will roll. That said I think Final Fantasy XIV has spoiled me when it comes to tanking. Their version is just head and shoulders more enjoyable than pretty much any other form I have played since then. As a result I think I might be hanging up my tanking hat when it comes to World of Warcraft at least. I tried to tank for some of my friends late in Warlords, and I just didn’t like the way it felt in the least. Now I am sure I will still play things that have a tank spec… and be able to swap in for specific encounters or for copious dungeon runs, but more than anything I just don’t think I want to be a raid tank anymore in this game. So knowing that, I am trying to find the class I enjoy dpsing the most or hell I might even try out some healing. Mostly I have a feeling that I will never again be completely stable and reliable as a player when it comes to World of Warcraft, so I am trying to make sure I pick classes that are useful when I feel like attending something, and not a burden when I don’t. For all I know I might really love Demon Hunter tanking, and that ends up changing my mind… but I am prepping myself to no longer be a go to tank at least when it comes to this game.