First off we are going to start off the post with a little bit of “good guy Bungie”. There is a patch coming up that changes the way pinnacle drops work. Currently Pinnacle rewards give you a single point of light, making it exceedingly hard to change the calculation and increase your light past 950. In truth I never quite expected to be needing pinnacles to move me forward but I find myself in the same position everyone else is. After Thursday there is a change coming in that bumps this up to a guaranteed two light levels per pinnacle reward.
Now this week is the Iron Banner and with it comes a bunch of bounties that all reward pinnacle gear. There has been a bunch of talk on the internet about saving up your bounties to turn in AFTER Thursday’s patch, but just in case someone missed this when you log into the game you get the big damned notice across your screen that you see in the first screenshot. I greatly appreciate them going above and beyond to make sure no one was unaware that a patch was coming and that they should not spend any of those precious precious pinnacle loot drops until then.
I’ve now reached the end of the seasonal journey track and still have 34 days left to go until the end of the season. Like I said yesterday I was honestly not sure if I would make it, but I did with plenty of time to spare. Now I am continuing to gain ranks but to the best of my knowledge there is nothing gained from them. It appears that post 100 you gain a Nostalgic Engram every 500,000 experience points, and since each rank is 100,000 xp that is every 5 levels. I feel like that is a perfectly reasonable reward for time spent grinding thanks to all of the xp boosts that come with the seasonal ranks. Now doing this without the pass… probably is a massive pain in the butt.
The interesting thing about the process is that as you move upwards you start getting these perks that say you have a chance of getting one of the weapons from the seasonal journey in various activities. I’ve run a bunch of activities after getting these “scavenger” perks but never actually saw one of the weapons drop. Then last night I managed to get a second Machine Gun and a second Auto Rifle within two matches of hitting Rank 100. I am wondering if the chance of getting these goes up exponentially after hitting 100, or if Iron Banner is somehow juiced to give higher drop rates?
Whatever the case I have shiny new versions of the two weapons. I am not at all certain if they are better than the original rolls that I got, but both have Range Finder which may or may not be useful. I was not a huge fan of either when I first got my hands on them, but I figure I will give them some more testing to determine if they are useful. I might break out the original rolls just to see how they feel as well. The original HMG had Hip Fire and Pulse Monitor, so I definitely think the new version with Quick Draw and Range Finder was an upgrade. The Auto Rifle however I am not sure about with the original having Outlaw/Dynamic Sway Reduction and the new version with Range Finder and Mulligan. Given the spray and pray nature of an Auto Rifle… Mulligan might be a pretty solid perk.
The real win for the night however is that I managed to finish the “Get Guardian Kills with Void, Hand Cannons or Void Hand Cannons” step of the Thorn quest. Slowly bit by bit I whittled away at this for what felt like ages, but thanks to the Iron Banner giving extra credit it seems… I managed to go from just under 50% to finished in a single night. I still need to run the mission for both this and the Lumina so I can get both weapons. Side note I also finished 3 of the 4 bounties available for the Iron Banner. The one that increases thanks to super kills is always the one that lags behind.
Tonight however I am planning on running around in WoW Retail and doing the 15th anniversary quests lest I forget to do them before they disappear. So I logged in this morning to park at the Caverns of Time where they I believe all start. I got the letter in the mail and have the quest step to talk to Chromie, so I will get all that taken care of tonight.
While I am starting to dip my toes back into World of Warcraft, I am still spending an excessive amount of time in Destiny 2. I am a huge fan of the new Altars of Sorrow event and it has rapidly become my downtime activity. Between activities? Lets hop down to the moon and see if there is a group up and doing the Altars. Of note Escalation Protocol also used to be my group activity of choice back when it was actually happening on the regular. There is just something about the zero commitment drop in nature that I really love.
I mean part of me wishes there was a sure fire way of getting a successful group of players together to do it, apart from queueing in groups. One thing I noticed is that when I queue solo, I get matched with groups way more often than when Thalen and I were trying to drop in and do some Altars as a pair. In most of those occasions it seemed like it was just the two of us attempting to do content clearly designed for a full fire team. Regardless it is a good way to get a handful of weapon drops. They are on a daily rotation and Reddit user Letuch created a spreadsheet to track the rotation and what some of the rolls you might be interesting in are.
Yesterday was shotgun day, and I have yet to get a roll I am super happy with. For now this is my current best option which is Quickdraw and Rampage. I also have a variant with Swashbuckler and Auto Loading Holster which might be interesting. The truth is this isn’t exactly my jam as far as weapons go because it is a strange archetype of slug based shotguns that fire a single high powered round rather than a spray of shrapnel. If you are dead on with this you can drop targets really fast and it is basically a legendary Chaperone.
I’ve talked about it before, but for now this has become my new kinetic shotgun of choice. It comes with 8 in the magazine, One Two Punch and Threat Detector and the reload speed is nonsense on it. This is the closest I have found to a shotgun that replaces my beloved Ikelos. Sadly for a lot of players this is going to be much easier to get given that no one seems to be running Escalation Protocol. I wish they would turn that into a playlist similar to the Vex Invasion so that people can still have access to the items. Occasionally Thalen and I drop down onto Mars to see if it is going on because I still lack two of the three available weapons, and he has none of them.
The other weapon that I have firmly in the not sure about it camp is the Apostate. I am not much of a sniper user at all, so I am not sure what represents a good roll here. Snapshot Sights and Range Finder seem like a viable combo given that this feels like the type of sniper you would want to try and quick scope with. That particular build seems to aid that process. Post in the comments if you have an idea what a better option might be for me to chase. In truth I am doing the event because I am enjoying it and the weapons are more or less just a bonus.
I posted about the curated roll for the Rocket Launcher that I got a few days ago, and in truth… I am probably never going to find a better roll on a rocket launcher than one I already have in my inventory. Bad Omens is the Gambit rocket launcher and at some point in my travels I picked up one that has both Cluster Bomb and Tracking, making it as close to a Destiny 2 Gjallarhorn as I think I am ever going to find. This is effectively what I use to nuke Invaders in gambit, because it is super easy to target in and destroy them.
On to other things… I am nearing the end of this seasonal journey. When it started and when the Mastery tree was introduced I was not entirely certain I would play enough to hit rank 100. However as of last night I am about halfway to 97 and will easily hit 100 this weekend when I play some Iron Banner. I gotta say there are a lot of issues with this sort of Fortnite style progression path, but it does give me some constantly focus and a drive to keep playing in order to get those final items. For me… it maybe adds the overarching sense of purpose that Destiny 2 was lacking once I reached the item cap. I’ve been sitting at 950 for weeks and knowing there are more things to unlock has kept me engaged.
Last night I spent some time participating in the newest Escalation Protocol event happening in the Sorrow’s Harbor area of the moon. In theory as soon as you port to the area you will be matched up with a group of players also participating in the event. Now last night we had a full group and it went pretty smoothly. This morning I tried a round with less than a full group and we still managed to complete all of the rounds to earn the final chest. In theory this should be a much easier thing to get started than Escalation Protocol. It tells me they maybe took some lessons away from how that event worked and figured out a way to juice the results a bit by allowing us to drop down directly in an area where we are going to see events happening.
At any given point there will be a platform or platforms activated so you can participate simply by hanging out in the near vicinity. The goal is to take out a number of majors that will be spawning and heading towards your platform. Similar to Escalation protocol there is a phase where you have to mix things up a bit where a number of Hive Wizards spawn with shields. In order to break these shields you will need to take out the Hive Knights that spawn in at the same time and use their swords to disrupt the shield similar to the Warsat event in the Archers Line area of the Moon. Each time you successfully defeat all of the Majors within the time limit the Altar event moves to the next Tier, and after Tier V a boss will spawn at the gate to the Shadowkeep.
Similar to Escalation protocol you are chasing a number of weapon drops that apparently change on a daily basis. Yesterday the Rocket Launcher was dropping, and today there will in theory be a completely different drop. Unlike Escalation Protocol these weapons seem to drop each time you get through the final boss. I got a couple of different rolls and managed to pull what I think is the curated Masterwork roll as well. All in all this looks to be a pretty solid rocket launcher thanks to the Cluster Bombs. It doesn’t beat my Bad Omens with both Cluster Bomb and Tracking Module… but it still is a pretty solid option for the Crucible.
I also ran a few rounds of Nightmare Hunts which got me the shotgun essence and it seemingly turned into a pretty solid roll. As much as I like punching things… the One-Two Punch perk seems to be pretty useful. The Magazine holds 8 rounds which is also super nice, placing it as probably my new favorite kinetic slot shotgun. Having threat detector on a shotgun also is super nice for the added reload speed, making this the sort of shotgun that you can bounce around a mob and fire after loading a single round over and over until it is dead. I am still pleasantly surprised at just how damned good the game feels right now, and how much there is to keep doing even though I have been capped in light for weeks.
Halloween Events in general are my favorite in games, in spite of never actually getting the Headless Horseman mount in World of Warcraft. In Destiny we have always had the Festival of the Lost which arrives and decorates the tower in a spoopy theme. The festival has become a bunch of things over the years but traditionally it has focused on two objectives… wearing paper masks of various critters from Destiny lore and swapping candy. Starting last year Bungie introduced the Haunted Forest and with it a weapon to chase that would spawn in with maximum power level and fully masterworked.
This year that chase weapon is the Braytech Werewolf and I managed to finish mine last night. This is a reskinned version of the Braytech Winterwolf and comes with a curated roll of Armor-Piercing Rounds, Zen Moment, Multi-Kill Clip and a mastery stat of Range. All in all it is a pretty solid Auto Rifle and I spent a little bit last night running around with it. The only negative is that it has a goofy recoil direction of 74 making it impossible to easily correct for its deviation unless you push it well past 100. There is an excellent video that explains the recoil direction stat that I would check out. The short of it is that recoil direction is a wave that decreases in amplitude as you approach 100. Even intervals of 10 are going to skew up and to the right, Odd intervals of 10 are going to skew up and to the left and intervals of 5 or pushing the number all the way to 100 will produce recoil that is more or less straight up. So having 74 makes it CLOSE to vertical but just slightly to the left.
Getting this mask is locked behind the Master of Disguise triumph that asks you to get all 5 of the masks from Eva Levante during the 2019 Festival of the Lost. These masks are all gained through spending Chocolate Strange Coins. The most expensive and the creepiest of these masks has to be The Drifter pictured above. The humanoid masks always end up feeling the weirdest, but then again Michael Myers in the Halloween series is supposedly wearing a low budget William Shatner mask so I guess that is part of it as well. In order to get all of the masks you are going to get a total of 150 Chocolate Strange Coins. The prices are as follows:
Once you have earned this Triumph you have to actually go into your triumphs screen and click on it in order for the game to register it successfully. Eva Levante will then allow you to purchase your own Braytech Werewolf for 1000 candy. After getting your first Werewolf you can pick up random rolls from that point forward for 250 Candy, 5000 Glimmer and 5 Legendary Shards.
There is a sixth free mask available but it is tied behind the Days of the Dead triumph that asks you to complete seven other triumphs during the season. Doing so will get you the paper mache visage of Eris Morn. These achievements range from collecting candy and chocolate strange coins to completing the candy trading quest that I talked about yesterday. There is a secret triumph that I am betting is requiring you to hit at least the 9th branch of the Haunted Forest. Last year there was a similar Triumph associated with the 7th branch.
With a number of the achievements and bounties each day associated with the Haunted Forest, you are going to be spending a lot of time in there. I ran around over the last two nights with my friends Thalen and x1101 and without really pushing it we were pretty easily capable of getting seven branches each time. Were we to focus a little more and get x1101 a little more light, we could probably start doing nine clears. The thing about the Haunted Forest is that thanks to your masks that you have equipped… Heavy Ammo drops like candy. I plan on infusing up a Thunderlord and trying to see how far I can make it without using any other weapons. I have a feeling that will greatly speed up our clear times.
