destiny 2

Destiny 2 Sodium

November 29, 2017 by Belghast

To say the Destiny community is a little salty right now is a bit of an understatement, so as a result I am using a screenshot of the emote for today’s post. We are in this weird situation where anyone claiming to enjoy themselves right now is being angrily labelled a Bungie shill. The truth is my play time has decreased greatly over the last few weeks but this isn’t necessarily because I am not enjoying myself still playing the game, but instead because I have reached a point where I feel comfortable not grinding all the time towards my goal. I am a very loot centric player when it comes to MMOs or loot driven games, and now that I have reached the top of the hill… a lot of my drive to keep grinding disappears. Sure there are things out there that I want to do and want to obtain… but I have been grinding Destiny 2 since September 6th when it launched on the PS4. I leveled a set of characters on console and then hit the PC launch with the same gusto with it happened on October 24th grinding up a brand new set of characters there. Next Tuesday the latest batch of content will release and I am preparing myself to start the grind all over again as I attempt to top the hill and get to the next loot and level cap. In truth I am likely just backing off a bit to give myself some breathing room right before the next rush starts.

That said there are a lot of players who have eased up on the play time and this taken with the wave of frustration circulating add up to a fairly disgruntled player base that Bungie is going to have to appease. The core issue for me at least is that Destiny 2 has seemed to be a sequel to Destiny 1 at launch… not Destiny 1 in the state at which it arrived during year three after the significant improvements that came with Taken King and Rise of Iron. My working theory has always been that they started work on Destiny 2 at some point during the release cycle of Destiny 1 and never really took into account everything that happened to massively shift the game during Year 2 and Year 3. As a result when Destiny 2 launched it felt like it was feature limited and missing a lot of the quality of life improvements that we had come to expect. Additionally some poor decisions like shaders being consumables kept piling the frustrations and we made our way through the content. So I am going to talk about a few points this morning that either bother me or bother a lot of players.

Forced Throttling

One of the biggest personal frustrations for me is the lack of ways that I can see improvement in my character. Like I said above I am very loot centric and my core drive in this game as with most loot driven games… is to improve my gear score. There has always been a final slog to the goal in Destiny but in this incarnation it came way the hell too soon. Light gain felt really good up until about 265/270 and then the bottom completely dropped out leaving you with a handful of “Powerful Gear” milestones to do each week. I am absolutely certain that this is a mechanic that they put in place to make it so casual players could hang with the players willing to grind endlessly for gear. The problem is for those of us who would be playing the game nonstop… it gives us no real reason to keep doing so. It takes me about an hour per character to grind out the three easy powerful gear milestones each week (crucible call to arms, planetary flashpoint, and clan xp). So after those three hours of gameplay… there is really nothing else left for me to do that is going to move the needle forward. Even now sitting at 305 light… I would still be grinding and spending my time catching up all of my favorite weapons to the level cap. The problem is that everything drops 5 levels below your current light level, feeling like a slap in the face each time you see another useless bauble that will never be of use to help you climb the ladder.

Skill Based Match Making

This is a topic of great contention among the PVP haves and have nots. In Destiny 1 there used to be an algorithm that attempted to match you up with players in your same skill range, and it favored this pairing over connection quality. With Destiny 2 they reversed this decision and seem to be basing pairings entirely on connection quality and as a result I see a lot of people with Oklahoma and Texas themed names from my digital neighborhood… but also wind up getting thrown into some pretty horrible match ups. The number of times I have gotten thrown into a match with a full team of ringers that then proceeds to shred my team of randoms… honestly represents the majority of my times playing crucible. It feels horrible to keep being ground up and spit out by a bunch of folks that are queuing together. While tweaking the calculations for team making they really need to favor throwing randoms with other randoms and teams with other teams, because the current state of the only thing mattering is your connection really sucks. The only positive is that I have had to get better much faster by being thrown against a wall over and over. I am still not what you would call good, but I am passable and can usually do my Call to Arms in 4 to 5 matches and that is really all that matters to me.

Static Rolls

In Destiny 1 weapons had a randomized set of stats and perks that could come from a list of possible perks on that weapon. This lead to the process of grinding an activity on the hopes of getting a “god roll” weapon to drop, with whatever the community had deemed was the ideal set of stats for that weapon. A prime example of this was my “God Roll” Haakon’s Hatchet from Year 2 Iron Banner that came with Perfect Balance, Counterbalance and Range Finder giving it an insane stability of 80 and an aim assist of 79 making it a laser beam that just melted opponents. Similarly I had another one sitting in my vault that I never got around to dismantling that only had a stability of 58… which makes the weapon perform drastically differently. There are huge swaths of the Destiny community that are salty about the absence of random weapon rolls, and in truth this is one of the areas where I am extremely happy with Destiny 2. I love knowing that when I finally get Jiangshi AR4 to drop from gunsmith… that it will be the best possible roll of that weapon without having to try for it multiple times. I love knowing that if I suggest Better Devils to a friend, that I don’t have to specific that you need it with this perk or that perk or it is completely useless. I have a vault full of sub par Imago Loop hand cannons in Destiny 1 because I never actually got the perfect roll, and the same goes for Eyasluna another weapon I chased hard to always came up empty. I think primarily the salt is coming from the fact that static weapon rolls removes one more thing that people did in Destiny 1 and was not replaced with a similar grind to serve as a time sink.

Timed Nightfalls

While I have done them several times… I just do not like the new Nightfall system with its weird timed mechanic. The truth is there are a lot of people who just want back the way Nightfalls used to feel as being a harder version of the normal strike. This is compounded by the fact that there are no heroic strikes to serve as a bit of a middle ground. Personally I am just not a fan of anything on a timer because it stresses me the fuck out. In elementary school I slipped two groups in mathematics thanks to these stupid quizzes called mad minutes… where you had to get a bunch of problems done in a minute. I do not perform well when on a timer and as a result I either rushed through and made a lot of errors or had zero errors but took my time. When you put me on a timer and I know I am on a timer… I am going to perform like shit. This is in part why I rarely willfully did mythic+ dungeons in World of Warcraft because they stressed me out more than they were worth. I will do a Nightfall, but they are mostly like swallowing a pill… and now that I have hit 305 light… I have no real desire to keep doing them.

Strikes are Meaningless

In Destiny 1 I used to spend hours grinding the heroic strike playlist because it was a possible source of gear upgrades but also a way that I could get special unique strike specific drops. Later on they put in the strike scoring system and it ramped the reasons to keep running the strikes as they were a great source of faction and also rewarded loot from completing the bounties. The current state of Destiny strikes is that they are largely fun but also completely pointless after you get to 265 light. There is nothing that you can get from them apart from Vanguard tokens that make them worth repeated running. Similarly with Nightfall strikes, they are only worth doing once per week per character, and again this adds to the feeling that there is “nothing to do” that players are having. Its not that there are not things to do… its that there is a general sense of feeling like there is nothing “worth” doing. I miss hoard chests at the end of strikes that had the possibility of dropping really interesting things. There are still weapons in Destiny 1 that came from these chests that I never managed to get, and if I went back to the game it is the sort of thing I would work on trying for when nothing else was going on. Basically the game as a whole feels like it is lacking stretch goals that players can accomplish reasonably while doing solo play.

Still a Great Game

As you might be able to tell from this post… I have my own issues with Destiny 2, but all of this said it is still a game that I enjoy each time I log into it. I’ve been on a recent binge of leveling my Orc Warrior in World of Warcraft and very similarly that is a game that I have lots of problems with… but still enjoy. Mostly I think for me it is a sense of disappointment because after playing through Destiny 1 I have seen them do certain things better. Similarly I know that Destiny 1 Year 1 was an awful place and to see where they went over the three years of that game, have taught me that they can in fact improve and pivot while the game is still running. Today Bungie was supposed to do the final live stream reveal for the Curse of Osiris expansion, and they have cancelled it largely to go back to the drawing board a bit. It seems like they are instead planning on giving us more information about the future of the game and some of the ways they plan on changing it. My only fear is that they might over correct and do away with some of the things that I think are working well. Static rolls are great as far as I am concerned, and I would hate to see them go. The problem is which players should Bungie listen to and which ones should they not? All I know is that I feel like I lack goals that are in the distance that I can keep shooting for that also support solo play time when I just can’t handle being around other players. I’m curious to see where the game goes from here.

Seasonal Swan Song

November 28, 2017 by Belghast

I talked a bit about progress in Destiny 2 in yesterdays post but I didn’t really want to get too deep into it figuring I would talk more at length today. Last week I managed to knock out a bunch of accomplishments, not the least of which was hitting 305 light finally on the Titan. Granted I realize this is all going to be in vain starting next week as the level cap itself is raising and I assume as well that means the light level with it. Last week was Iron Banner, the second for console players but the very first for those of us choosing to primary the PC version. Now on the PS4 I managed to complete a full set of Iron Banner armor on my Titan and my goal was of course to do the same for the PC. I consider myself extremely lucky because I managed to get the full set after turning in thirteen packages. There are folks I know who have been grinding away at this all week long and are still missing pieces of armor. In addition to this I managed to pick up all of the weapons but three… sidearm, fusion rifle and submachinegun. Of those the only one that I would have actually used is the Fusion Rifle, but even there I have several options that I like already including Merciless if I am willing to give up my exotic slot and Main Ingredient if I am not. The most important weapons for me were getting the Pulse Rifle, Auto Rifle and Hand Cannon all of which will see use. The scout rifle might, but I need to spend some more time playing with it.

The other thing going on is the fact that this week is effectively the last chance to do anything in Season 1. Now I am not entirely certain what this means from a player perspective other than the fact that we know a bunch of new stuff is going to happen. All of the Eververse items are changing out apparently, so that only makes the fact that they have apparently been throttling our xp gain towards bright engrams all the more shitty. In truth I have gotten the few items that I care about… namely the Ramen bowl emote and Bandwagon ship. On top of that I managed to pull three of the exotic ships total and two of the exotic sparrows. All in all I feel like I made out pretty well for season 1, but what I am really curious about is whether or not all of package loot is changing as well. There are a number of weapons that I have not managed to get that I really walk… namely the Curtain Call rocket launcher, Jiangshi AR4 auto rifle and Halfdan-D auto rifle. I would not mind getting a Morrigan-D rocket launcher either considering I believe it is the only one with tracking still intact. Finally I really want to complete the hunter set from Io on the off chance that maybe those are changing out as well. Granted I don’t know any of this, but I know in Destiny 1 they started re-rolling the weapons so that is a possibility here as well I would guess.

Lastly the other big change for us personally… is that our clan will be resetting from rank 6 to rank 1 next week and we will need to begin the leveling process anew. Supposedly we will be adding a brand new clan banner standard to the mix because we maxed things out in Season 1. Additionally the perks for each of the clan ranks will be changing out to a new set more relevant to the content we will be doing, that is at least in theory Vex based. The only thing that concerns me is that we do not have nearly as many people actively playing right now as we did at the launch of the clan, and as a result the grind is going to go more slowly. The calculations I had done before said that we needed about 20-25 characters reaching maximum contribution each week to keep us hitting the progression cap each week, and I think in theory we will still have at least that. I know I will continue to keep contributing my 5000 clan XP on three different characters per week and if things get dire I have a set of characters on the PS4 on a secondary account that could add experience as well. This whole season thing is new concept to me and I am somewhat excited to see just how different the game is from a loot perspective. That also means that this week I need to do some significant vault purging to get ready for the introduction of new items. I am hoping that we get some more space… because we need it across the board from vault to shader storage. If they really want money from me… I would throw money at the screen for more storage space.

Punitive Shades and Iron Banner

November 21, 2017 by Belghast

The 13th anniversary event is going on right now in World of Warcraft and I have been largely disconnected from me. For whatever reason I am focused on leveling my Orc Warrior above pretty much all else. This is often the case when I return to WoW after being gone for a bit, I have to ease my way back into playing my bigger characters. This year each character gets a package that contains 200 timewalking tokens and the quest vendor also sells a bunch of items. One is the Corgi from past events and another are these crazy sunglasses that my Orc Warrior is modelling above. These seemed like a fun item until last night I happened to catch wind of something through twitter.

Correct, the Bronze-Tinted Sunglasses are only transmoggable during each year's WoW Anniversary event. https://t.co/wNQhhXuIEa

— WarcraftDevs (@WarcraftDevs) November 20, 2017

Why would you create an item that is only transmoggable during the yearly anniversary event? I mean I guess in theory they did give every character 200 tokens so they can fall back on the reasoning that we aren’t out any of our time to get the apparently disposable item. The transmog system in general has never quite set right with me because it seems overly complicated rather than simply just letting you swap any graphic with any other graphic. However the fact that there are timed transmogs only makes me more grumpy with it. I just hate the whole concept of time limited items in general because I realize these are supposed to make me want to collect them all before the time runs out. Instead what they do is make me just not want to even try and save myself the general disappointment by not participating. In the case of the shades, I put them on the Warrior for fun but I am not deeply connected with them. However it does seem oddly punitive to the players who have designed entire transmog outfits around them. This is just part of the Blizzard school of design where we can’t have anything that is universally good. Every nice thing seems to be required to have a negative that comes with it, and that ethos will always be an axe I have to grind with this game.

My means of taking screenshots in Destiny 2 seems to have crapped out this morning. It’s probably nothing a reboot won’t fix but I don’t exactly have time to do that when I am trying to churn out a blog post on the off chance that there might be queued updates to run. Instead you are going to get the Iron Banner screenshot from the PS4 that I took when the event was last available. Tonight I will begin the process of trying to get a set of gear on my Titan once more, because I really love the Iron Banner gear this time around. I have the full set on my PS4 Titan and I love it so much for many reasons… not the least of which is it has a decent stat package. Additionally I am all about trying to get back a few of the weapons that I really enjoyed using… namely the Pulse Rifle and Auto Rifle. There are daily milestones and my goal is to attempt to complete them on each of my characters. I am still frustrated that the Iron Banner is not a means of gaining power level the way it used to be in Destiny 1, but it is still a good source of cool gear and I am just going to focus on that aspect.

Xur Week Ten: 11/17/17

November 17, 2017 by Belghast

This week we have a phenomenal week for Xur at least as far as I am concerned. He brought a bundle full of goodies that I either had never gotten to drop or did not yet have on the PC. As a result this week is an extremely expensive week for me personally. As is always the case he can be located on the Flashpoint location and in this case that is Titan. You can find him in the rig section in a building devoid of enemy spawns. That said be careful because they will absolutely stand at the doorway and shoot you while you are hanging out and doing your business with your face tentacled friend. You might need to do a little pre-clear before you duck inside. Let’s get on with the goodness.

Hard Light as a gun has always been in the marginal category as far as usefulness goes. It was never a bad weapon but it also never really stood out in the pack. The year two Hard Light feels better across the board but still is far from the best Auto Rifle that you could be using in your energy slot. That said the it is still a really interesting weapon because of its ability to shoot around corners and the fact that it lacks damage fall off. That is however a deceptive thing to say given the way Hard Light works in that it fires a volley of projectiles that go bouncing around as they hit surfaces, meaning you can in theory “curve the bullet” and fire around corners. While the gun doesn’t have damage fall off there is absolutely accuracy falloff the further from your target you get because you increase the likelihood that it will encounter something else and cause the trajectory of the original round to shift. All of this is still in the fun and interesting but not amazing category until you bring into play another intrinsic ability of the weapon, and that is to shift the elemental damage type by swapping around your perks. This isn’t near as handy as the playstation exclusive sniper rifle that has a keybind allowing you to do it on the fly… but it does serve as an excellent prism/match game weapon that can shift to whatever element you happen to be lacking. If you do not already have this it is well worth the pick up and I know I personally am definitely going to be grabbing this for the PC since I’ve yet to get it to drop otherwise.

The Synthoceps are another fun and interesting item, but maybe not best in slot at anything. If you are a Titan you probably like punching things… and these gauntlets improve the way you punch things. The exotic perk Biotic Enhancements increases your melee range and improves melee damage when surrounded. That last bit can be a slight improvement if you only have a few targets around you to a massive improvement when you are fighting packs of things like thralls. If you combine this with something like the striker melee build… you can do a number of very interesting things and cause massive amounts of damage as a melee titan. Similarly this would benefit the sentinel spec path that causes you to regain health on melee kill, but not nearly as much given that spec cannot really chain melee abilities in the same fashion as Striker. This is an item that I had yet to get so I am definitely picking it up for the unlock, and more than likely going to try out a striker melee build around it.

Do you really still want to punch all the things even as a Warlock? Karnstein Armlets are a set of exotic gloves that are effectively all about punching things as a warlock. They have a built in version of the devour perk, though as I understand it significantly weaker that causes you to gain health recovery on melee attacks. Note that it says attacks and not kills so in theory just punching things are going to help slowly regenerate your health. While doing this punch happy life you are also slowly increasing the regeneration of your melee, grenade and class ability. I am absolutely certain there is a build out there that could make the most of this… and I feel like double dipping with devour is maybe a great option. Sometimes you look an an item and think to yourself… I can build something around this and that is definitely the case with these gauntlets. If nothing else I wanted to pick them up simply because I did not have the unlock in my collection.

The Lucky Raspberry is a returning item from Destiny 1 that more or less kept the same ability. Probability Matrix the exotic perk causes your arc bolt grenades to chain significantly further than in their default state. Additionally dealing damage with your arc grenade has a chance of recharging your grenade. This means that if you drop your arc grenades in a large pack of mobs, it is extremely likely you are going to get a proc and return your full grenade charge. This makes this item a beast for doing something like the Nightfall on the weeks where every kill counts towards gaining back time on the clock because you can wait until arc burn and become a mad bomber dropping grenades everywhere. The rest of the time however you are probably not going to see enough mobs tightly clumped to really make this worth using. Occasionally in the team shot environment of the crucible you can drop one and take out an entire team… but that is going to be the exception rather than the rule. Still a very interesting chest to pick up and at least add it to your collection.

Destiny 1

Xur had a similarly interesting day in Destiny 1 as he brought a couple of my favorite items. Firstly the Armamentarium is the chest piece that I want back for my Titan more than anything because it simply gives you a second grenade charge. Right now I am so enamored with striker titan largely because it is the only spec I can have this functionality back. Similarly once I found the Bones of Eao I never looked back because it started enabling me to quad jump as a Hunter, a piece of utility that beat out every other possible exotic that I might want in that slot. The Warlock helm is largely forgettable because it is their version of the Alpha Lupi chest that Hunters and Titans have… but Xur did bring the Universal Remote which is the very odd primary slot shotgun. Lots of stuff worth picking up if you don’t already have them… and I would say for Titan and Hunter these are absolute must haves. Enough so that I am legitimately considering grinding out the strange coins so I have them on my Xbox One account. Here is the full run down of what he is selling.