Just as a heads up this post is going to contain some spoilers, so if you have not finished the main story then I would suggest you go no further. Last night I kept I head down and pushed through the rest of the main expansion story in Destiny. From a lore standpoint it presents some really interesting food for thought and makes me think we are headed down a specific path. Namely that we will be swayed by the Darkness as they spent the next several seasons trying to explain to us how we should come over to their way of thinking. There had been rumors about Destiny 3 potentially including Darkness powers, and I think it would be interesting if we as guardians figured out a way to harness both forces for good.
I’ve always assumed that the Darkness in the Destiny universe was somewhat of a hive mind. Which makes me wonder if maybe just maybe this isolated ship that crashed on the moon may somehow be broken off from that collective consciousness. I’ve been wondering if it like the Darkness that was present in the Black Garden have been fractured from the whole and are working by their own means. This could in theory give us access to the powers of Darkness without being consumed by it. As far as the pyramid ship itself… it had a very sithy vibe to it. There are some follow up quests that I picked up after finishing the last mission that may add additional story beats.
The only problem that I see however is that without a firm knowledge of Destiny lore, I am guessing the story attached to Shadowkeep is going to read as completely incomprehensible to everyone else. Eris does not exactly do a good job of explaining things as you go, in part because she herself is an unreliable narrator with a very specific point of view. Similarly I wonder if maybe this specific tangent of the Darkness has been trapped in the Black Garden, and ultimately that it wants us to free it. I didn’t get a vibe from the final quest that it was trying to kill us, but instead trying to test us and our resolve to see if we were worthy of its ultimate prize.
In the Shadowkeep trailer, Ikora Rey talks fairly opaquely about the relationship between the Vex and the Black Garden. Namely I focus on the bit of what she is saying that says that the Vex will do anything to protect it. It was through Quria, Blade Transform that the Vex learned of the Sword Logic and that by worshiping the Worms they could draw power. I think the ultimate end of that line of logic was that the power of the Worms came from the Darkness and that through worshiping the Darkness they could draw even more power. Did the Vex then go find a pyramid ship and capture whatever organism that the Darkness represents at its core, and install it then in the Black Garden on Mars as a sort of machine to power the Vex as a whole?
I get the distinct impression that the Darkness represented within the Hive ship crashed on the moon doesn’t want to harm us, but instead wants to use our abilities to some end. I think that end is ultimately to send us into the Black Garden to free whatever vestige of itself is trapped there. Maybe you learn more details after the raid, but since I have yet to do that it is all speculation. I just have a feeling that our contact and the artifact that we collected, is leading us down a path that will eventually end in the ability to channel both the light and the darkness.
I feel like I am in a weird place right now with World of Warcraft Classic. Last week I allowed myself to take a break from the game for the launch of Destiny 2 Shadowkeep. Now that I have hit the light soft cap I have been trying to re-engage with Classic and it for whatever reason just hasn’t been taking. What has been happening is that I log in… run around a bit… and then log right back out and go over to Destiny 2 to play it some more. As a result I am in the woeful position of being out of the level range with most of the crew that I had been running with previously. I am sitting at a little over 44 and now folks are starting to ding 50.
I think I am more or less just lacking to find traction in a set of quests that are enjoyable to do. Right now Tanaris is a little over my level range, and what is left in Stranglethorn feels tedious and boring. Last night towards the end of the evening I moved over to Feralas and managed to make it through a few quest chains, so maybe just maybe this is going to be my home for a bit. I figure if I can somehow eek out 45 and 46 I can return to Tanaris and start to make some proper traction there. The benefit of Feralas is that there is plenty of meat to keep cooking up food… of which I go through a silly amount of because that is how I ultimately heal to lower downtime.
I am very much in the doldrums of the leveling curve and post 40 everything slowed down massively, which I think is part of the problem. It feels vastly different than the run and gun pace of Destiny 2 that I allowed myself to get used to. As a result my brain sorta rejects Classic each time I try and spend more than a few minutes playing it. What makes it worse is there is a tangible feeling that day by day people are getting ahead of me to the point where it will be super difficult to actually catch up. I could in theory run a bunch of dungeons, but the dungeons in my level range are not super exciting because there isn’t much more than XP waiting for me in them.
On the Destiny side of things I have stalled out a bit as well. I am starting to get pretty much exclusively 410s off powerful engrams, which is fine so long as they drop for a new slot. However when the same slot keeps dropping over and over there isn’t much gained by it. I probably need to spend a bit of time in the world grinding blues and legendary drops between powerfuls to try and keep pushing it upwards. I still have yet to beat the campaign… which I really should do soon.
I could also start an alt which would help with the light pushing a bit. For the time being however I am just enjoying the moment to moment game play so much. I am curious what changes the reset is going to bring today. Right now the activities seem to be dropping a fixed set of weapons, and I am wondering if that is going to rotate today.
This morning is mostly just going to be a long string of pictures and commentary about those pictures. I spent the vast majority of the weekend playing Destiny 2 and the Shadowkeep expansion content. If you could custom build an expansion to my interests you would end up with this one, largely because it has a lot of overworld activities going on and things to grind for. We are going to start this off however by showing off my favorite ship. Weirdly I have a massive collection of Exotic ships and sparrows, but it is a Legendary ship that I have somehow latched onto called the Pitfall Souter E5D. I really like the design on this one better than the exotic version of this drop ship, and it feels very Titan-y to me.
I hit the soft cap over the weekend and have since pushed up to 905 without the artifact, or 910 with the bonus. This is setting up a situation where we have the whole Year 1 thing with legendary items giving you more light than they actually do which feels real weird. I would have greatly preferred that they just took this new adjusted light number as your actual light number. That said I am still pretty regularly getting prime engrams that are slowly pushing that number up.
As far as the seasonal track goes, I am sitting at level 17 with about halfway through 18. This has been interesting, but I wish when you got gear off the track that it counted as a powerful engram rather than just being miscellaneous debris. The whole acquiring new items through the track is a bit lackluster when it is just the same set of gear that you got at step one. As a result you see that there are a lot of steps where I have chosen not to collect the reward. Same goes for all of the glimmer as I am not having any issue getting glimmer, and there might be a point in the future where I wish I had a large stack of it.
On the Artifact itself I have mostly been unlocking Autorifle/Submachinegun and Hand Cannon perks, and trying to make sure I have a reasonable coverage of Anti-Barrier and Anti-Overload rounds available. These come into play during the Vex Invasion activity that you can queue for. Various mobs you encounter have either a Barrier or an Overload that causes them to keep from being damaged until you drop that shield, and as a result the easiest way is to hit them with a weapon that has the equivalent “anti” effect. Right now I have Anti-Barrier on my Auto-Rifle and Anti-Overload on my Submachinegun. This tends to be my favorite combo right now and has largely replaced Auto and Shotgun for me.
Lets just stop to appreciate how damned cool the Vex Invasions look when they are happening on the moon. Full on Terminator vibes going on and lots and lots of vex to violently dismantle. Generally speaking they seem to happen a few minutes after a public event finishes. As such I have had the best luck going to an area, completing the public event… and then waiting around for a few and before long the vex will start dropping in. The only negative of these events is that they are really really hard to solo and you don’t get a chest to drop until you have taken down three of these little incursions in a row. If you are too slow the boss will “escape” and you won’t make it to round three.
I was never a huge fan of the Monte Carlo in Destiny 1, in either version. However the Destiny 2 version is freaking amazing and I managed to get this in one of the first activities I participated in after hitting 900 light. So far a lot of people seem to be reporting getting it pretty early in the cycle, and the Vex Invasions are supposedly a good way of farming Exotics if you end up doing a bunch of them in a row. The queued event drops a chest after each wave of the encounter that has Vex themed goodies, and supposedly these also have a reasonable chance of dropping exotics.
There are a bunch of weapons that can drop while doing assorted activities on the moon, and when they do a quest will start allowing you to “cleanse” the item. This generally involves doing a specific thing a number of times, getting kills with that weapon type, and then finding some MacGuffin deep in the bowels of some area of the moon. You then return these to the Lecturn next to Eris Morn and you collect a weapon. You can spend some currency to get new rolls of these weapons at pretty much any time, and can skip the MacGuffin step since you have already collected it. By far my favorite of these so far is the Arc Logic Auto Rifle, which happened to roll with Rampage, Subsistence and Extended Mag making it fairly potent. This has become my Anti-Barrier weapon of choice.
Probably my favorite of the Vex themed weapons so far is the Imperative Scout Rifle that rolled with subsistence, multi-kill clip. I am sure there are better rolls of this weapon available but this one is serviceable for situations when I need to hit things at range. I hope that we are going to get some access to secondary skins for these weapons because the leaf covered thing is kinda cool for a few minutes, but eventually wears then when you realize that you can’t do much to apply shaders to them. The leaves themselves will always stay the same shade. Right now these serve the role of really easy to get weapons as they seemingly drop like candy from the queued Vex Invasion activity.
I really should spend some time tonight pushing through the storyline, as I have yet to get to the end of it. This is the problem with opening up the world and letting me do things without completing the story… I ultimately don’t put any emphasis on actually finishing. With Forsaken I was pushing ahead in the story because I wanted to unlock access to the Dreaming City. As far as I know finishing the story doesn’t really unlock anything new that I don’t already have access to. I should do this thing however just to get it done.
I had intentions of playing World of Warcraft all night, and while technically I was around for awhile crafting some stuff for folks who had sent me mats, I found myself fighting falling asleep at the keyboard. So once again I retreated back into Destiny because the pace of gameplay was what my brain apparently needed to keep me awake. It has been a really long rough week and I am super ready for the two days of respite that come with the weekend. Nothing in particular but more a correlation of a bunch of things all at once making me stay a little too long under the covers each morning after the alarm starts blaring. As such I am not sure if I have anything profound to talk about this morning, because I feel like profundity is lost from my brain.
I did however find a really cool area of the moon last night that is so far off the beaten path that you don’t see yourself on the map at all when you are here. I am not entirely certain if I arrived here sooner than I should have, and quite frankly I am not sure if I could get back here if I wanted to. I just started wandering until the fenestrated walls of the Scarlet Keep broke free and opened back up onto the smooth dunes of the lunar surface. What makes this area extra interesting is that it keeps going far further than you would think, and as you move outwards the mobs start to thin out to a point where you are wondering if you just wandered into something that was left unfinished.
There have been some general complaints about the size of the expansion content. I’ve more or less stopped completing objectives in favor of trying to hit the soft cap before I get any further. That however is wisdom talking and not necessarily some need for being stronger. I know there will be rewards that come from the quest steps, as I seem to be unlocking a full set of Eris themed armor through the process of completing steps. I figure I should probably be sitting at 900 before I make much more forward momentum in order to eek out as much light gain as I can in the process. Additionally there is a good reason to just keep grinding because I keep getting Seasonal objectives and Artifact progress.
As far as the overarching size of the new areas, I would say they are probably a bit bigger than the plaguelands were. Prior to the launch of Shadowkeep, Bungie had set expectations for this to be more in line of a Rise of Iron sized expansion and not a Taken King or a Forsaken and I am cool with that. After seeing what they did to revitalize the moon, I am super amped about the prospects of maybe just maybe them doing the same thing to the Dust Palace area of Mars or even more so the swamps of Venus. I would love to revisit a modern realization of Venus because it was always one of my favorite destinations for the sheer scope and imagery of the Ishtar Collective.
One of the more interesting things that has happened since the release of Destiny on Steam is that I am encountering a lot of weird names. Notice that someone has spelled out what appears to be “Fleshious” in some foreign character font, and quite honestly I don’t know enough to even guess which one. If I had to guess this is a parody of the destiny streamer named Blessious. The thing with Steam is they are real liberal on what you can put as your name and with it that is pulling over into game… emojiis and all. Ultimately prepare to enter the wild west when it come to naming conventions. Personally… I am just going to stick with Belghast and call it good. Steam however allows you to change your name pretty freely in order to accommodate clan tagging and such, and as a result you are going to see some crazy stuff.
