crota’s end – AggroChat

Season of Providence

December 30, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the end of the previous season in Destiny Rising, or more correctly I think Season 2 Act 2? They do this weird thing where they split the same season up into multiple acts, with each being effectively like a new seasonal start. This one is centered around an alternate universe version of Kabr, aka the one that died in the Vault of Glass from Destiny 1. It introduces a few new game modes, and a new raid which appears to be a rework of the Destiny versions of Crota’s End. I have no clue if this will be closer to the original Destiny 1 version or the Destiny 2 reworked versions that have appeared over the years. I do know that gated behind the raid is access to a new Exotic Scout rifle which comes from Destiny 2 called Symmetry. While this weapon was not necessarily associated with Crota I do believe it was put into the game with the Shadowkeep expansion as a chase bonus for buying the fancier versions if I am remembering correctly.

Kabr the Resolute is the new alternate reality version of Kabr that we are getting access to, and I have to say… not really my thing. You can play him in Trial mode, and his kit just doesnt seem like it works that well. Effectively he has a primary scout rifle and a secondary linear fusion… when when combined with a character that mostly creates a bunch of shields feels odd. More so they shifted the burst ability to being one that has to be channeled, similar to how the shield works in Vault of Glass. I mean its a cool call back to that raid mechanic, but honestly… mostly just feels weird and removes any mobility that the character had. Standing still is never a good option regardless of how many shields you are generating. As a result I doubt I will be spending any premium pulls that that I have saved up on this banner.

We were told that we would be getting a free copy of Kabr, and that is true… within a specific frame of reference. Right now Kabr the Resolute exists on his own banner with his own new currency… which instead of pink and blue boats…. is apparently a bright red boat. During the course of this introductory event, doing dailies will get you a currency that will eventually unlock 6 sets of 10 pulls each… and since the pity for this banner is at 60 pulls, that means you are in fact guaranteed to pull Kabr during the event if you hop in and do all the things every day. Additionally you have access to the other four stars on this banner like Ikora, Attal, and Rossi… and in truth I could actually use more talent points for both Attal and Rossi. I will be doing the thing and jumping through the hoops to get my free copy… but I will be slightly annoyed that they didn’t just hand me a copy and let me move on with my life.

There is a brand new game mode that went in with this update called Bullwark Ops. Essentially it is tower defense for Destiny Rising. There is a building phase that lets you place down turrets and other things to help control the waves of mobs spawning, and then those encounters follow a fixed path through the map. Between you and the turrets, your goal is to make sure they die before crossing a finish line. So far it feels like Blight in Path of Exile, where you are the strongest turret, but that might change as I get into higher difficulties. I played a round of it this morning on Maru and it was pretty easy, but then again… Maru is my most built out character with a fully upgraded exotic single shot grenade launcher. I will be interesting to see how this plays with different characters.

There is also a limited mode version called Armed Enclave that I have yet to play, but there are a bunch of limited upgrade currencies gated behind it that I need to finish out some of my characters. Since we shifted into an Arc and Solar meta with this season, that means I need to spend a bit more effort building out Arc and Solar characters. Right now I have Estela, Jaren, and Helhest in a pretty good state with Ning Fei not too far behind. I am certain Jaren will be in the limited list of characters that we can play for Grandmaster content, but I thought Estela, Ning Fei, and Helhest would be as well. However that is not the case… of my built out characters the only two that I will have access to are Jaren and for some reason Jolder. Rossi and Attal are both pretty much in the same spot and would need copious upgrades to get them into the 64k range required for the activities. I will be honest that I don’t really like either of those champions enough to spend resources on them. It might be a REALLY rough week for Grandmasters. I am hoping we can maybe do the Gauntlet.

There is new story that involves us seemingly traveling to the Destiny 1 universe specifically. It was so cool to hear the original version of the Destiny theme song playing during this point. Essentially we meet up with our friend Xur who explains that there are many worlds and while Crota is building power in our world… we are not ready for him. So the storyline seemingly involves us discovering and very likely eventually raiding SIVA technology to make us stronger and more likely to take on Crota in his full force. Thing is… for anyone who knows the lore of the Iron Lords from Destiny 1… you will know that it was trying to capture SIVA that brought the downfall and ultimate death of most of them. Are we doomed to repeat history and see most of our Iron Lords dead and trapped in the chamber with SIVA while our Wolf character and Saladin escape… just like it happened in the Destiny 1 universe? I am very interested to see how this all plays out.

The most hilarious thing about this is… it seems like they were not able to secure the voice actor for Radegast to deliver new lines for this event. As a result they did quite possibly the dumbest and most ridiculous thing they could have done. Instead of voice lines…. Radegast delivers a bunch of Tim Allen from Home Improvement style grunts. Before I started this Ace had warned me about it… but I was in no way prepared for just how silly this ended up being. I was almost crying from laughing so hard by the time the cutscenes finished. I mean I guess this is a choice that could be made. I remember when the last GW2 expansion dropped during the actors strike, and we got silent dialog… and I am thinking maybe that was the better call. Anyways. Looking forward to another season and a bunch of new events to learn. The post Season of Providence appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

No Time To Explain

May 25, 2017 by Belghast

Once upon a time in Destiny year one, there was a weapon called The Strangers Rifle. It was funky looking, had a unique feel and sound to it… and you got it whenever you finished the primary storyline of Destiny… then spent forever collecting stuff to level it up completely. It was also gained from someone that we really know little to nothing about… other than the fact that she doesn’t have time to explain why she doesn’t have time to explain. However this weapon got left behind in the past largely because The Taken King introduced the ability to upgrade weapons through infusion. However they did introduce a hidden quest that involved a bunch of madness that I mentioned at least briefly back in April of 2016 in a post. Apparently they have changed it up a little bit… but once upon a time you had to wait for the Paradox mission to appear as the daily heroic. Then during the course of the mission you had to collect three ghost fragments and return the Future War Cult Ghost to Lakshmi-2 in the tower. From there you had to pledge the Future War Cult and gain 1000 reputation to unlock the next part, which involved killing Taken Minotaur until a Simulation Core dropped. Then we reach the part I was stalled on for over a year for various reasons… killing Atheon in the Vault of Glass on any difficulty.

Last night the awesome folks in Tequila Mockingbird… but more importantly Squirrel and Jex helped pull together a raid for the purpose of getting me my Atheon kill. We did it on old school difficulty, largely for the purpose of trying to steamroll through it and then move on to getting in a Crota kill. After the raiding I lucked out during the next part, which is to find a chest that spawns in a weird version of the Twilight Gap crucible map. Thankfully I knew my way around the map and I decided to head over to B first… and sure enough sitting right beside what would normally be the capture point was a chest containing the piece I needed. From there I went on to do the Blood of the Garden quest, which did not exactly work how I was expecting it. Firstly I did not realize I was not in the final area of the map… and I knew there was an anger mechanic that was supposed to spawn the Taken Ultra that I needed to kill to get the final component. However I didn’t remember how high I needed to get my anger and I wound up slaughtering wave after wave of Minotaur until I somehow managed to get the anger to over 200%… and when nothing still spawned I noticed the arrow on my mini map pointing to the next area. Sure enough the big Minotaur was up and way easier to take down than attempting to survive that constant deluge of a dozen regular Minotaur at a time. Finally I went back to the tower and claimed my No Time to Explain exotic pulse rifle… to which I had to sacrifice both an exotic that I was no longer using… and a 400 primary to bring it up to modern standards.

That was the part of the evening that went amazingly well… the other part of the evening was struggling to do Crota. First off I had only actually been into the raid once before… and back during the “we overpower this so much, what are mechanics even” phase. As a result we struggled more than a bit, because we were doing it on heroic where resurrections are not a thing that happens. Additionally we lost a member of our fire team a little bit into the raid, and wound up replacing him with an unknown quantity. Said new person was moody as hell while we were actually failing to mechanic, and then when we called it a night made sure we knew how mad he was. Before he left chat he said something along the lines of that he bailed on his normal raid to come get an easy Crota kill, and now he screwed up and missed the raid invite. No one promised him an easy kill, and even though we were failing a lot… we were laughing and having fun while doing it. That is ultimately the important part, and sure I didn’t manage to finish my Necrochasm quest… but I had a lot of fun learning bits and pieces of the modern version of the Crota raid. In truth I think if I went back in again I be more prepared for what I needed to get through on the other side. All told however I managed to pick up a couple of cool weapons in the process including a spiffy new Oversoul Edict… so I think in the grand scheme of things the night was a complete win far as I am concerned. Once again huge thanks to Tequila Mockingbird for hanging out and making stuff happen, and Squirrel for prodding them into doing so.

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.