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.
I’m on vacation for the next days so as a result I am getting around significantly later than normal. I’ve been mostly playing Destiny 2 as my primary game and as a result I am spending pretty much every night working on various objectives. Tomorrow I want to do a post where I run down all of the various activities available to the players, because there is what feels like to be an obsessive amount of things to be doing at any given time. Also as a result of this… I really don’t feel like I have the play time to actually keep multiple characters up and running. In theory I planned on doing Iron Banner with the Hunter but I just keep finding things to do on my Titan instead.
If you were like me… you loved the Stranger’s Rifle and the later No Time to Explain version. In part it was for the rewind perk and full auto… but it was also just a really cool looking weapon. The Adhortative is effectively a time aged version of this same weapon class sharing the same base model with both of those weapons and the Osiris themed Machina Dei. It also can roll with what is reportedly the best combination of stats available aka Feeding Frenzy and Multi-Kill clip. I managed to pick one of these up yesterday without really chasing after it, so I will put it through the paces and see what I think of it. I still with it at least had the Full Auto perk that Strangers/NTTE did.
Also in my travels yesterday I managed to get through the first part of the Thorn quest which apparently adds you a base model of the weapon before the next set of quests start tweaking it. I was never a huge fan of the Thorn but since it exists as an Exotic quest in Destiny 2 I sorta want to finish it. The next step is unfortunate because it clogs up my bounty inventory with three really long bounties the first involves grinding 35 Black Armory Forges, Blind Well Events or phases of Escalation Protocol. The next one requires getting 100 multi-kill streaks with any weapon and the last requires getting 50,000 points in a single Nightfall. I am hoping The Ordeal works for that last step.
As far as light gains go I am not taking any sort of a structured approach to this. I can technically hit 941 but keeping enough upgrade components has been a challenge to stay outfitted in the set that I want to be outfitted in. Right now I have latched onto a specific set of the Iron Banner armor because I like the look of it using this particular shader. My weapon load out tends to be Breakneck the gambit pinnacle auto rifle, The Hero’s Burden SMB with Kill Clip and Zen Moment, and for now at least A Fine Memorial with Threat Detector and Tap the Trigger…. but at some point soon I plan on making on a concerted effort to get a better roll on that weapon. Later today I plan on running a bunch of activities for screenshots for my big post tomorrow talking about all of the content available in game right now.
Yesterday was the beginning of the very first Iron Banner of the Shadowkeep expansion and more specifically the Season of the Undying. Now I have a weird relationship with Iron Banner as a whole, because I have never really been much of a Crucible Rat… but I generally look forward to participating in the Banner each time it rolls around. It might be something about Lord Saladin that I like in particular or the concept of the Iron Lords… or it could just be that there are a lot of interesting weapons associated with it that you can earn. Whatever the case it is an event that I tend to look forward to and last night was no exception as I was anxious to get home and started.
This time around Iron Banner was a Control map, which probably adds to my enjoyment as that is generally my favorite game type. Ultimately you complete matches of Iron Banner and collect tokens that you then turn in for packages and ultimately gear drops. There are bounties you can complete this time around that reward Pinnacle gear and they all seem to be themed off of the original Iron Lords. This also means that it seems like there is a limited quantity of them that you might be able to complete. Before you can get started turning anything in however you have to complete a quest chain called Scour the Rust. The First step requires you to:
Capture 10 Iron Banner Zones
Kill 30 Enemy Guardians
Get 3 Kills With Your Super
Your reward for the first step is the Claws of the Wolf and a piece of Iron Banner armor… I believe I got the arms first. I am not sure if this weapon is a curated roll, or if I just got lucky and wound up with one that was super easy to complete the next step with. My roll in particular included Full Auto, Snapshot Sights and Appended Mag. When you complete one step you get the next part which involves the following:
Complete 6 Iron Banner Matches
Capture 20 Iron Banner Zones
Kill 25 Guardians With a Pulse Rifle
Once again you get a new weapon to play with and a new piece of armor, this time the Fusion Rifle the Wizened Rebuke. I believe the armor piece was the legs. I got a perfectly cromulent roll, but then again I have no clue what a good roll on a fusion actually looks like given that I don’t run one often. I should note that the quest chain objectives appear to be cumulative during the course of this particular Iron Banner period. Quickly you wind up in a situation where all you need to finish the next step is to get the weapon kills. Everyone seemed to be on this step of the quest which ended up with some interesting gameplay. To move the chain forward you need the following:
Defeat 100 Guardians
Capture 30 Iron Banner Zones
Defeat 20 Guardians with Fusion Rifles
Your reward for this step is another Iron Banner weapon and another piece of armor… I believe it was the Helm this time around. I should note that I am not 100% certain on the order I got any of the pieces of armor, I just know that each time I got a weapon I got one. Again I have no clue if this is a curated roll but I got a pretty solid Hero’s Burden including Kill Clip, Zen Moment and Appended Mag. I was able to melt face in the Crucible completing yet another series of objectives based on the weapon you just got. To move the chain forward again you need the following:
Eliminate 15 Guardians With Your Super
Eliminate 15 Guardians With Your SMG
Capture 40 Iron Banner Zones
Now is where things get really weird. First off I got a reasonable roll on the Grenade Launcher including Rampage, Snapshot Sights, and Thermoplastic Grenades. The challenge of course in any Crucible match is getting Heavy Ammo. I noticed at first that for some reason I was showing 2 launcher kills without having picked up any purple bricks. When I did get launcher kills… it didn’t seem to move the quest chain forward. This lead me to do some googling and find out that apparently this step in the quest chain is bugged…. and that SMG kills will progress the Grenade Launcher step. In theory… this makes the quest way easier and you should probably go ahead and push through to this point just in case Bungie patches it. You are going to need the following:
Capture 50 Iron Banner Zones
Complete 15 Iron Banner Matches
Kill 10 Guardians With Grenade Launchers (if still bugged SMG instead)
After completing this step you get your final piece of armor which for me was the chestpiece. However the REAL prize of hitting this step is being able to turn in all of the medallions that you collected along the way. If you got the various bounties associated with the Iron Banner you should in theory also have several of those to turn in as well. It was a fun grind and I am hoping to get back in tonight and run a bunch more matches. Ultimately for my trouble I got a full suit of the brand new Iron Banner gear and four really good weapons. This makes me want to run through this on my Hunter as well.
In the grand scheme of things I am seemingly way better at the crucible than I give myself credit for. It could be that we still have an influx of brand new players thanks to the PC launch, but in my best match for the night I wound up with a 3.5 Efficiency score, which I realize is not exactly the same as a KDR but I will take it regardless. The boost in valor gained took me up to Mythic II for the season which also had its own share of crucible rewards associated with it.
Another thing that you should absolutely not sleep on is the fact that Iron Banner seems to be worth a nonsense amount of XP for your seasonal grind. I entered the night part of the way through 33 and closed the night sitting at 40. So that is a little over seven levels from what felt like casually playing Iron Banner and knocking out quest steps. It probably was a lot more matches than I realized… in fact looking back at Destiny Tracker it was apparently 17 total matches throughout the course of the night. Ultimately if you enjoy Crucible at all I suggest you at least participate to get some levels. If you don’t like Crucible… the rewards are good enough for you to maybe stomach it regardless.
Closing thoughts… the armor looks really sweet. Additionally it seems to be a good source of some light levels as I managed to get 8 during the course of the evening. I am a big fan!
Morning folks. I am still playing an excessive amount of Destiny 2, but I am not sure if I have any new thoughts to add to it. Right now I want to be talking about how I wish Blizzard would pull their heads out and do the right thing so we could be friends again, however I get the distinct feeling you are sick to hell of talking about it. I know this because anytime I mention or forward it, I slowly bleed a few more followers in the process. I care less about that than it sounds, because really… I have no clue why the majority of you follow me at all at this point. You are either in it for me and my nonsense or you are probably one foot out the door already.
Instead of writing something on my own I am going to share a few things with you. I have a fondness for YouTube think pieces. A lot of the conversation that happens back and forth between myself and the AggroChat crew is discussion of the pieces that make up gaming. Sometimes we record an episode that goes down these avenues, but more often than not that discussion just dissipates into the ether because it was for our own benefit and not necessarily something we wanted to share with the world. That is not to say that there are not an awful lot of great think pieces out there so this morning I am going to drop a few that I find cogent.
First off let me state that I have some issues with the presentation of this video. It bugs me to no end that he keeps saying the phrase “the lady that I live with”, but what he is saying is nonetheless interesting and a conversation that I have had a few times with Tam especially. Gaming has a vocabulary that we are just arguably better at speaking and comprehending now than we were at the dawning age of MMORPGs for example. There are extreme hurdles for someone to get up to that level of fluency and the games we play really don’t do any favors in that department. I dislike tutorialization as much as the next person, but this is still a worthy watch as it talks about the struggles of someone with minimal exposure to these “rules”.
Folding Ideas is a great think piece channel, and one of the better ones is once again relevant with all of the discussion of Fornite over the last few days. The video presents the treatise that modern games set out to create just a tiny bit of discomfort and shame so that we will spend more money in order to remove that. That they set us up for a world where we are constantly dissatisfied with the state of affairs and the only way out is to spend more money. I think this is key to understanding the “seasonal mastery track” thing that is infecting games, and why skins matter.
Since I am playing an awful lot of Destiny, I have also been getting quite a lot of Destiny videos suggested to me. This one is worth a watch because honestly it feels a lot like how I feel at times about the game. I am super positive about what the future for this franchise might hold in their presently untethered from Activision state. Shadowkeep in its “smaller size” is actually quite possibly the best expansion that Bungie has come out with yet. I feel like I have so many options at any given time and they are all equally rewarding with different sets of items that I could be chasing. The game feels better than it has since the end of Destiny 1, and personally hope they abandon the notion of ever creating a Destiny 3 and just keep making this version of the game better.
That is all I have to share this morning. If you have some really good think pieces, feel free to share them in the comments below.
