For the last few days I have been on the cusp of coming down with something I think, but the problem is my schedule does not really allow me to take a day off right now to recuperate. If I were to take off right now, deadlines would suffer… so as a result I have been taking some over the counter stuff to try and limp along until I can collapse. Last night however I probably should not have taken that NyQuil, because this morning… I am groggy as hell. Last night however was the beginning of the 5th season of Destiny 2 and it seems like they are mixing things up a bit. For the last few seasons in Diablo 3 there has been an overarching theme to a new season… and it seems like maybe Bungie is borrowing this concept. The latest “This Week At Bungie” blog post goes into more detail about this, but there is a fairly packed roadmap content wise that we can look forward to.
As far as last night… I focused on starting the Pinnacle Weapon quests that I actually feel like I have a shot at getting before the end of the season.
Pinnacle Weapons are more or less a unique weapon that you can grind for during the season. There is one tied to Vanguard Strikes, another tied to the Gambit event, and another tied to how far progressed you make it rank wise in the Crucible. Given that I love Autorifles because I am a noob… I decided to spend a good deal of last night working on trying to get the Gambit based weapon called Breakneck. I think in part I just like the old world feel of the weapons that The Drifter offers. As you can see you need to play a minimum of 40 matches of Gambit, and also do a bunch of other things in the process. Now my hope is that by the time I have played my 40… I will have long since completed the other objectives. My goal is to play a handful of rounds of Gambit and run a few Strikes every night to begin whittling away at this objective over time. The truth is that will probably hold for a bit and then I will spend a weekend grinding nothing but that activity so I can get the weapon.
With a new season, comes a new set of cash shop engrams… and throughout the night last night I unlocked four of these… one of which happening to give me this sweet Ghostrider themed sparrow. I also pulled an exotic ship that is themed after Warmind/SIVA but it isn’t anywhere near as cool looking. This however immediately became my new main sparrow as I ride around on flaming nonsense. All it is missing is a bunch of skulls. I really like the Scorn as a faction, and I love how all of their tech seems even more improvised than even that of the Fallen. All in all it was a good night and a largely quiet one as I slowly whittled away at collecting powerful and prime engrams. I have finally reached the point where I am pretty regularly getting 600 light items… so my hope is in the next few days to be able to hit that item cap before Black Armory bumps it up by 50 again. It really is a great time to be playing Destiny 2.
If you prefer to consume this information from a Bungie Vidoc… they also have you taken care of as a nice one released yesterday attempting to differentiate between the content players will be getting for free and the content locked behind the Annual Pass.
Last night I did not join in FFXIV Eureka shenanigans, largely because I was not feeling terribly sociable. This is was and will probably continue to be a trying week, as is often the case when we come back from a significant break. In my case I was out five days, and while I spent a good chunk of the first day at the hospital… it was still enough time to get thoroughly out of the habit of going to work on a regular basis. Instead I spent my night roaming around in Destiny 2 and doing puttering sort of activities, in part because I had knocked down the vast majority of the major stuff over the weekend. The thing I did not realize however is that yesterday was also the final day of the season, and I am a little bummed out that this was apparently the first season that Greysky Armada will not have maxed out guild rank… and will not be earning the banner pole. I myself have done next to nothing to contribute to this, so in the grand scheme of things I am okay with this… just a little sad.
Instead of doing things on my Titan main, I opted to instead piddle around on my Hunter who has not really been dusted off since the launch of Curse of Osiris. It is really weird to have the start of three different content blocks… Curse of Osiris, Warmind, and Forsaken all on the director map. I play this game incorrectly… and what I mean by that is my preference is to level to the new numerical cap before starting any of the story driven content. My thought process is something like this… if I grind the levels on something like strikes or heroic public events… I can use the story as a light leveling experience, meaning anything I happen to get along the way is actually useful gear instead of something that I immediately relegate to the shard bin. This may or may not be worthwhile but it is the pattern that I find myself falling into over and over again.
Traditionally I have focused on doing nothing but Titan public events, since by the time you down one of them there is often times another one just about to spawn on the other half of that relatively small map. With the advent of planetary bounties, I have started focusing on those instead and knocking out a full round of the planets that I have access to. Each time you turn in one of the bounties it appears to be a significant jump in experience and as a result I am sitting at level 37 out of 50… and wondering if the Black Armory is going to bump up both Light Level cap and Level Cap. Grinding in Destiny is my jam, and I find it extremely peaceful to roam around and knock out patrols and public events.
This process has been bolstered by the fact that apparently the gun I ground for during the Halloween event, may not have a minimum level cap to equip or at least it is equipable at my lowest level which is 30. I was swapping gear around through DIM… and if you don’t know about Destiny Item Manager you should totally stop what you are doing and check it out. Without really realizing what I was doing I swapped my 600 item level Horror Story over to my Hunter… and it equipped without issue. This means that immediately I started getting gear that is way higher than I probably should at the equivalent level. Sure some of it isn’t necessarily usable due to level restrictions… but some of it is and as such this weapon that is an arguably worse version of the Origin Story… serves as a light level booster. Similarly I tried it out on my 289 Light Level Warlock… and once again I could equip it just fine.
With the opening of a brand new season…. I will likely be putting the Huntress to bed once again, however the sheer fact that I am interested in playing my alts tells you a lot about the improvement to the current state of Destiny 2. When the PS4 version released I ground up all three of my classes to 305 light, and used them as a sort of spring board each week to help me level up my weapons… which in turn then drug up the level of my armor. With the PC release… I only had the oomph to get the three characters leveled… but never spent time gearing them other than the Titan. I lost steam… and Curse of Osiris did not really help that, and at which point I seemingly became a player that only really played my main. Now I am back in the mood to fiddle with the other classes and see what sorts of trouble I can get up to with them as well. Essentially the desire to play is greater once more than the total package of content available to me on any one character… which is saying an awful lot given that there are so many opportunities for Powerful/Prime engrams.
Like I have said before… Destiny 2 is in its best state ever, and one that I feel probably rivals the state of Destiny 1 during Year 3 (and honestly the current state since it has largely been frozen in time). If you have access to the game I highly suggest checking it out again. If you have any questions or need help, feel free to holler at me through one of the many channels folks have to holler at me through.
Tonight we are down a few people but pick up with a topic that sorta got skipped from the previous week which is Deltarune the new Toby Fox Game. From there Kodra talks about his experiences with The Messenger and then the game Getting Over It. At which point we discuss how much Kodra apparently loves meat grinder games. Bel talks about the purchase of Obsidian and inExile and how it is probably good for the longevity of those studios. From there we discuss the conflict between investors and game players…. Fighting for the soul of a game beginning with the news that Destiny 2 is “Under Performing” and sorta going off in different directions from there. Bel talks about his experiences trying a bunch of new Mobile games and encounters the weird trend of mobile games that literally play themselves. Finally we move into a discussion about how much Ashgar would like us all to try Cross Code.
I was off Friday and as a result did something that I had been putting off for far too long. For quite some time now I have had a new case that I needed to shift my main gaming machine into… so that I had enough room to slot the 1080 ti graphics card I picked up for cheap. The problem is it has been a sequence of two things… firstly not wanting to have my machine down on the weekends when I spent most of my time using it and doing things like recording AggroChat. Secondly I have been dealing with some nasty bouts of anxiety and the little voice in my head kept telling me that I would screw something up and be without a gaming machine while I tried to fix it. As a result I have used the powers of avoidance to keep kicking that can down the road until finally last Friday I took care of it. It took me about three hours to gut everything from my previous case and install everything fresh in the new case… with time in between to clean the components before seating them again.
Admittedly I was watching Netflix so was probably greatly slowed down by that as well, but regardless by noon-ish I was up and running and wondering why the hell I waited so long. As is tradition when I get new hardware… I launch what feels like every game I have just to see what it looks like on the highest resolutions. I now have officially entered the realm of 4k gaming… and it is glorious. Sadly these scaled screenshots won’t really do it any justice… but seeing it in motion is gorgeous. The other interesting thing I found out this weekend is that my beloved Parsec client, takes a 4K signal from my machine upstairs… scales it dynamically down to 1080p and delivers it to the laptop without losing a lot of the fine detail. The end result looks like I am running 1080p super sampled to 4k and still providing a much nicer experience than just playing the games at 1080p all without noticeable issues.
Another thing that happened this weekend is that I managed to get together with Tam and Kodra and play the Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. aka… stress test. At some point they sent all of us a few friend codes, and I shared one with a good friend and former coworker that was considering getting into the game. That left me with two codes t hat I offered up to the AggroChat members. Luckily the test times on Saturday happened at a time we could all be online and… while I was enjoying the game solo, it really shines with friends. Just the interaction between three vastly different play styles made it so we were constantly finding different interesting things to get engaged with. I would find a chest and the other two would come over to see what was in it, or Kodra found a base that we could claim… that then lead to an event where we had to build up the defenses and fight off a wave of scorched trying to take it from us. The moment to moment gameplay and little doses of exploration was a glorious thing… and also it ran great at 4k without issues. I am really looking forward to being able to set up a private server for the AggroChat crew to roam around on.
I also spent a decent amount of my time in Destiny 2, and managed to get my light level up to 575 which seems reasonable. I’ve started getting 580 drops from Powerful/Prime Engrams, and I feel like soon the elevator to 600 will start to slow down a bit as has always been the case in Destiny. I am mostly logging in and piddling around and trying to accomplish something that will net me an engram or two but have not really been playing very seriously this week. It feels like there are just too many different things going on for me to really devote all of my resources towards any one of them. I have the desire to play… but the lack of focus to really push harder than I already am.
I still say failure shots in Monster Hunter World are among the most interesting. Right now the Kulve Taroth event is going on and I am trying to make sure I get in a few attempts each day so I can stock pile weapons. So far I have gotten a few really interesting things, but I am less shocked each time I get something cool than I was during the running over on PS4. At this point I have a few useful weapons for pretty much every slot, with the possible exception of Bow. For whatever reason Bows are extremely scarce, and I remember that being the case on Playstation 4 as well… similarly I always seem to get Heavy Bowguns instead of Light Bowguns. I do however have plenty of options to play around with, and I believe all of the items needed to make a full set of Kulve gear… minus the various Elder Dragon gems which I will have to farm later. My primary focus however is collecting the two sets of layered armor, which simply take repetition since the most tickets I have seen in a single run is 4.
Another thing I messed about with this weekend was the demo of World of Warcraft Classic. I started off playing a Tauren Warrior, which is legitimately the first character I ever created during the first stress test I got in back in 2004. However… Warriors about level 15 are miserable… and so is the Barrens… which were sort of this poorly thought out dumping ground of content. Instead I opted to also recreate Lodin my Dwarf hunter and spend time roaming around Westfall. I talk more at length about this on the podcast, but there are so many things that I remember… but only after seeing them in person. Like for example… I did not remember quest text scrolling as slow as it does. That said I now remember seeing out an addon to speed up quest text scrolling, and that was legitimately the first addon I ever installed. There are supposedly some tweaks you can make, but I am proud of blizzard in creating a way to legitimately play on a pseudo classic server with something resembling patch 1.12 on the client. I also applaud them for giving it to the players as part of their normal World of Warcraft subscription. I am likely going to play something up on a classic server, and I think it would be kinda cool to try some of the older content like Molten Core again.
Diablo was effectively the game of the weekend… for reasons other than what I am about to talk about. However I have been enjoying the hell out of playing Diablo 3 on the Switch, and wound up playing for quite a bit last night from bed. I’ve not spent a lot of time with a console version of Diablo in spite of having Reaper of Souls on the PS4, in part because if I have access to a console… I can just play the PC version of the game I have devoted so many hours to. However the switch is an interesting case because in theory I could drag it to work and play it over lunch, getting in some demon slaying on the go. All in all I have enjoying the experience of playing it with the switch, and while blizzon was going on I was largely playing this in docked mode while watching the streams.
As far as the other Diablo news… for the moment I am just going to link to our podcast from this weekend… because we spent the majority of the show talking about it. I have thoughts still that I will ultimately put into blog post form… in fact there were a few points during the weekend when I started drafting something in Google Docs, only to delete it all shortly after. For the moment I am disappointed in both Blizzard and the Diablo Community, but am generally okay with a Mobile Diablo existing because Dragalia Lost has proved to me that it might be something I would be interested in. It is going to take me a bit to work through my thoughts fully however because they are somewhat nuanced. For now however… this is already a massive post so closing things out.
