Destiny – Page 47

400 Light Solo

January 4, 2017 by Belghast

This mornings post is something I have been kicking around in my head for awhile. If you have read any of my blog over the last few years, you will already know that I am nigh obsessed with Destiny. I am not exactly sure what it is about this game that draws me to it so much, but I am smitten. One of the big problems however is that it can be more than a little obtuse for new players. There are so many things that you COULD be doing… that it is sometimes hard to identify what it is that you SHOULD be doing. One of the key goals in the game is the improving of your light level, which is for all intents and purposes exactly the same thing as the modern MMO concept of item level. Higher light level means you simply perform better, in having slightly better stats on your gear… as well as doing more damage. Your light level also dictates how well you will perform against the various levels of content in the game from Patrols, to Strikes, to Raids each with their own suggested light levels.

Now throughout Taken King I raided with then Axioma Clan and now Tequila Mockingbird, but with the release of Rise of Iron I simply haven’t been able to align my schedule to be available for raiding… given that for a lot of it I have been raiding in two other games. That did not however change my desire to keep improving and bumping my gear towards the currently light cap of 400. Over the break I managed to push my Titan main to 400 light, and my Warlock and Hunter are lagging slightly behind at 399 and 398 respectively. I managed to do this entirely through doing solo content with a few hours per sitting of time invested, and honestly… I did it mostly wrong. The problem with Destiny information is that most of it that you will find are either in insanely long and difficult to parse Reddit posts, or in a plethora of YouTube videos that you have to listen to a few times to really grok what they are saying. What doesn’t really help is that most of the “get to 400” information is targeted at folks who ground it up as soon as the game came out and are now trying to explain how it was that they got there. I have the benefit of having just reached 400 light on my Playstation Main… and am now slogging my way back there on my alternate Xbox One account.

New To Destiny

One of the problems with Destiny is that it is really bad at on-boarding new players. At this point there are likely two different categories of players that might be looking at this guide. Firstly they purchased the game at launch, played it… got frustrated and are now contemplating coming back. Second is that they never got into it… and want to get started but find all of the options for purchasing the game confusing. Regardless you are likely honestly wanting the Destiny Collection, which is a set that includes all content released to this point and will upgrade existing accounts to bring them current. Please note that you absolutely want to be current because honestly Destiny does not function nicely if you are not up to the latest version of the game. Largely speaking you are simply limited in what you can do… and this guide of sorts is going to focus on players you are caught up to the Rise of Iron release of the game. The other confusing thing is that long term Destiny players like myself tend to refer to things as years. So for the sake of clarification…

Year One

Destiny Original Release
Dark Below Expansion
House of Wolves Expansion

Year Two

The Taken King Release

Year Three

The Rise of Iron Release

Now your first instinct is going to be that you need to play through all of the original content, then all of the Dark Below content, then all of the House of Wolves content, then the Taken King content, and finally end up with Rise of Iron. On this I am torn because I absolutely think it is worth playing through all of the content available, especially the two expansions from year one because they are going to give you bits of information that will help to fill in gaps in your knowledge as you do various strikes. However started at Year One and leveling your way slowly to Year Three is probably the least efficient way that you can be playing this game. From the standpoint of getting to 400 light… literally everything that happens in Year One is going to be of no long term use to you other than taking up space in your vault as a collectible.

The Infusion System

For the most part Year One was full of a lot of mistakes on how to make content that ages gracefully, and with Year Two they introduced the infusion system allowing you to essentially grow your weapons and armor with you by infusing items into them. Thankfully if you are coming into the game now, you also missed a completely frustrating grind that was the infusion calculation system because during most of Year Two this was an extremely lossy system. For example if you took a 300 light item and infused a 308 light item into it… you were likely going to end up with a 304 light item as a result. With an update in 2015 they shifted this so that infusion was a one for one increase… meaning if you took that same 300 light item and infused a 300 light item into it… you wound up with a 308 light item. However this only applies to items that dropped from Year 2 or Year 3 content… meaning everything from Year 1 will functionally be locked at the gear levels from that era.

Boosting to the Rescue

The other main problem with playing through content as it was designed is that your light levels are going to increase extremely slowly. Destiny is confusing in that it has physical levels… and light levels. When you finish the base game you will be sitting at around physical level 14… and completing both Dark Below and House of Wolves should be able to take you to level 20 without much issue. Taken King content opens at level 20… and takes you to physical level 40. However upon exiting the content you are going to be sitting somewhere around 180-200 light. The Rise of Iron content expects you to be at a minimum of 280 light level, which was the Year 2 floor for being completely outfitted in beginner Legendary gear. If we imagine that you are at 200 light, it is going to take an awful lot of grinding older content to get to 280 and again… that is largely going to be wasted time since the goal has moved on you and are looking at 400 light as the new target.

Buying either Rise of Iron or the Collection both give you a boost that you can use to take your character to level 40… and also outfit them in a full set of 280 blue gear, instantly giving you access to start the newest content. If you want to see the older content, I honestly at this point suggest going ahead and boosting and then just playing through it for the sake of seeing the story… knowing that the only thing of use that you are going to get out of it is some engrams. For the sake of speed and getting you on the path to 400 light fastest… I also suggest playing through the Rise of Iron story as soon as you reasonably can. I did it last night on my 280ish geared Xbox One character and had no real problem making it through the missions. That said… I play a lot of Destiny and there are a few places where the missions can be a little brutal like during the final fight of the opening Rise of Iron mission. However completing the Rise of Iron is going to outfit your character in a full set of 320 blue gear, putting you on a much better ground for starting the push to 400 light.

Level Plateaus

Another concept that you are going to need to learn is that the game rations how much light you can get from certain content. As a result I am going to give you some advice that is going to seem counter intuitive at first. Don’t decode Blue, Purple or god forbid Orange engrams while you are leveling. The temptation is going to be great to rush over to the Cryptarch and see what new and shiny loot you get… but that effort is going to be wasted for the most part until you are at least ready to begin the light push in proper. You are going to ultimately thank yourself later once you reach certain light plateaus that you have a much needed boost waiting for you in the bank. I am going to lay out the various light plateaus and then talk you through them.

Blue (Rare) Engrams – These Max out at 365 light
Purple (Lengendary) Engrams – These Max out at 385 light
Faction Package Loot – These Max out at 390 light
Orange (Exotic) Engrams – These Max out at 400 light with some caveats
“End Game Activities” – Max out at 400 light

The general theory being that you hold all of your engrams until you are at least to the 320 light level that you exit Rise of Iron with. From there you decrypt your blues and do so in a slow and methodical faction. Light level is an average, and your engrams will decode to the same light or slightly higher than whatever your current light level happens to be. So that means as you decode them you want to be doing so as evenly as possible. So you might decode a helm… equip it, and then decode a chest piece… equip it… then a weapon… equip it. Essentially you are trying to stair step up your light as much as you can before decoding the next engram. When you hit 365 light in every slot… you start working on your purples and do the same stair stepping manor until you have everything sitting at 385. Then… you really do not touch your exotics until you have hit 390 loot off of faction packages. Finally and this one gets awkward quickly… you decode exotics until you reach around 399. There seems to be a bug in place where once you get past 399 you stop reliably getting upgrades from Exotics. Sure you can get 400s… but during my most recent slot I would say 80% or so of the exotics I decrypted sat at 399 light instead of going on up to 400 making it heartbreaking. I saved the remaining exotics for after I actually hit 400 to use as infusion fodder.

Bridging the Gaps

Quite simply put… there is no way you are going to have enough engrams to get you all of the way through the light leveling process. This is where all of the other activities come into play. I personally did a ton of bounties to help start getting me faction packages along the way. In the above image you see three types of bounties, the first row being the new Strike Bounties that will give you reputation with the Vanguard and your chosen faction that you should have joined by now… Dead Orbit/Future War Cult/New Monarchy. The middle row are the traditional Vanguard Packages that can be completed anywhere in the game and these give Vanguard and Faction reputation same as the strike bounties. The last row are the Crucible bounties that give you reputation with Lord Shax, but pay special attention to these because some of them require you to be a member of a fire team…. and while technically every group is a fire team… they mean one that you formed yourself. Here is an attempt at a list of the things that you can do to get past various light plateaus.

365 Light Barrier

Blue (Rare) Engrams
Siva Crisis Strike List

Side note during this grind… Siva Crisis Strike list also has the ability to drop Skeleton Keys used to open the Hoard Chests at the end of the strike. Once again hold these in reserve because you are going to need the light boost to hit 400 and each chest you open will reward you one Legendary and one Rare item up to 400 light. So start stockpiling keys now as you go through this process.

385 Light Barrier

Purple (Legendary) Engrams
Archon’s Forge event in Plaguelands Patrol Zone
Heroic Siva Crisis Strike List
Normal Mode Wrath of the Machine Raid

While this is a guide largely targeted at soloing your way to 400 light… I did include the raid content in the list because it also bridges the gap if that is something you have the opportunity to run easily.

390 Light Barrier

Package Loot
- Vanguard – Tower
- Crucible – Tower
- Faction (Dead Orbit/Future War Cult/New Monarchy) – Tower
- Gunsmith – Tower
- Eris Morn – Tower
- Variks – Reef
- Petra Venj – Reef

Now of note… while you are getting to this point you are going to start getting package loot already. There is no real way to hold multiple packages in reserve, and you need to be watching your faction ranks manually because as far as I know when you gain a new rank… and have not collected the previous faction package it is lost. Now I have not experienced this personally, but it is the wisdom of the community that this is apparently a thing that can happen. This is especially important when you are grinding out a bunch of Crucible matches or Strikes in a row… because the faction goes quickly if you are not watching it.

400 Light Barrier

Orange (Exotic) Engrams
Archon’s Forge – Ghost and Artifact slots only
Crucible Matches
Strike Hoard Chests – Requires 1 Skeleton Key each
Iron Banner – Monthly Crucible Event
Nightfall Strike – Once Weekly Per Character
Trials of Osiris – Serious Team vs Team Event
Hard Mode Wrath of the Machine Raid

So something important of note… Rise of Iron came out in September and I am just now hitting the level 400 light cap. I am slow as hell and I did not do things in the most opportune fashion. I broke every single rule that I lined out in this guide, because I was not super focused on getting there as quickly as possible. However expect that each step in this ladder is probably going to take twice as long as the last step, with the last 10 points taking easily the longest if you don’t have access to something like the raid… or a team that can carry you to the tower each week in Trials of Osiris. Your absolute best bet is going to be something like the Iron Banner which has a really good drop rate for gear. The gotcha there however is that each month the Lady Efrideet (pictured above) only brings a few items to the tournament.

This past Iron Banner for example she brought Class Items, Helms, Fusion Rifles and Scout Rifles, so when you add to it the chance of an Artifact or Ghost Shell dropping which is always the case with Iron Banner that gives you six possible items you can get at the end of matches, out of the total 10 slots that you eventually need to raise your light. There are also four bounties that you can complete each time the event runs, and two reward gear drops, and the other two reward weapon drops… that can drop something that in the current months assortment of items. The absolute best case scenario is that you save these until the end of the week because they will reward you based on your current equipped light levels… and hopefully by the end of the tournament you will have bumped up your light a bit. There is also a catch up mechanic that makes gaining faction with the Iron Banner faster on your alts, so in theory I try and run multiple characters through at a time to get more than one set of these packages. However you are going to have to stomach the crucible, so if you are a strictly non-pvp player this might be a step too far for you.

The Missing Pieces

Ultimately whatever path you choose, there is likely going to be a point where you cannot get the drop you need to take you from 399 to 400. For me that item slot was my Heavy Weapon, and nothing I did seemed to be willing to drop one. I finally got it from decoding a Legendary engram, which of note… there is always a slight chance that Rares upgrade into Legendary and Legendary into Exotics. Hell yesterday I even managed to pull a 400 Mida Multitool off of a Rare Primary Engram… so that is also a thing, but just don’t bank on that actually happening. Where the Hoard Chests at the end of strikes come in handy is that each one of them has a chance of dropping a specific set of loot, with a loot table of generally only a couple of items per chest available. The below image is from an excellent reddit post where they took the time to format all of the information in which item drops from which Hoard chest in table form.

If you are interested in which specific drops come from which specific chest… then I suggest you check out this visual guide both of these I am simply referencing for the sake of space and my sanity rather than recreating in blog form. I have recently been chaining strikes in the effort to get an Imago Loop with a decent roll for example. Regardless you should be able to target specific strikes in spending those keys that I hope at this point you have stockpiled and get yourself the rest of the way to 400 in no time.

But What About Xur?

Honestly I largely left Xur off the initial list… because honestly you never know from week to week if he is going to bring something useful. When you take that can combine it with the fact that for the last two weeks Xur has not brought Three of Coins… it feels like his purpose is a bit up in the air at the moment. Previously Three of Coins was a bizarre stacking buff system that made it so that you had an increasing chance of getting an exotic engram to drop any time you killed an ultra, or completed a crucible match. Traditionally this was the thing that I saved my Strange Coins for… and popped one anytime I was chain running Crucible or Strike content. It has problems but it is a nice way of increasing the chance especially new players have of seeing interesting loot. As far as the items he brings, in Year 3 they are all 350 light level and I absolutely abused this fact on my Xbox One account to get a short term boost in light and also provide me with a decent weapon to finish content on. Each week Xur brings one weapon, one warlock armor, one hunter armor and one titan armor. The combination of things you can get however are like I said at the start totally random… and some of the exotic rolls are notoriously bad like bringing items with straight intellect or discipline rolls making it hard to balance your gear around that. They can of course be re-rolled using Glass Needles that he also sells, and recently he has started selling Exotic Shards making upgrading those Exotics lining your bank significantly easier. Essentially I check one of the many youtubers Xur videos Friday morning, or hit WhereIsXur.com to see what he is selling an determine if I care about it for the weekend. Traditionally speaking Saturday night after we recorded our Podcast I would pop over and liquidate my stock of Strange Coins into Three of Coins. He arrives in the wee hours of Friday morning, and disappears in the wee hours of Sunday morning, so you have a limited chance to get items from him, but it is definitely something worth checking out. I just wouldn’t count on actually getting something you needed from him.

Bel’s Fake Game Awards

January 3, 2017 by Belghast

This break has been a bit of an odd one… namely because I have completely screwed up a few times and failed to blog. Even worse… I forgot I forgot to blog. It is as though I have been in a bit of a weird time warp where I lived a bit separate from the rest of the world for awhile. So instead of being connected like I usually am… everything has just sort of flown over the top of me without ever really sinking in. I have not been logging into MMOs hardly at all… and when I did it was for a specific focused purpose rather than just hanging out there. The break has been about falling into a number of game shaped holes… including Destiny, Minecraft, Bloodborne, and most recently Tyranny. However today represents the beginning of me trying to get into the swing of things. I technically have two full days left… well not full given that its 9 am when I am finally getting around to writing this morning. However it is time for me to do my sham of an attempt at an Awards Show… that I started last year, where the categories really don’t exist and no one actually wins.

Something Is Missing

Recently in the name of better health and that whole tradition of trying to start the New Year off right… my wife and I have been spending a lot more time walking. One of the things I greatly miss that was a huge part of my life during 2016… is Pokemon Go. One of the updates essentially screwed me over and locked me out at least semi-permanently from playing the game. The Google Safety check… seems to think my phone is rooted even though it is not. My only work around is to actually root my phone and install one of the many applications that will hide root from Pokemon Go… defeating the entire purpose of their safety check. However I am reaching a point where I really want to play the game… and I might just resort to this. Essentially this game was a good chunk of my year… or at least I was obsessive about it for two months. Pokemon Go did something that no game really has… made me care about mobile as a gaming platform and as a result it should get a significant shout out.

You Can’t Go Back

For the AggroChat Game Club, we tend to pick a game for both November and December… since once you take the holidays into account… you really have a single functional month. Last year the game that spanned the two was Fallout 4, and this year Grace chose Diablo 2 as her pick. At first I was all about this because I have some seriously rose colored lenses about this game and my memory of it. I remember trying to see who could get through all of Act V in a single lunch break, and so many farming runs to see if we could get the coveted set pieces. However on replay… I have changed drastically in my tastes since this game released, and while I was on the Diablo 3 doesn’t feel right bandwagon initially… I have evolved. Diablo 2 now feels like a grindy mess of a click fest with very little carrot and a hell of a lot of stick. So I am honestly wishing I had NOT replayed the game… and could leave it sitting happily in my memory untouched. My recent experiences… are proof of that adage that sometimes you can’t go back home.

But Maybe Sometimes You Can

Saying that however… there are apparently times when you can go home and enjoy yourself in the same ways you used to. There was a period of time when I was convinced that Warcraft would always only tangentially matter to me. That I mourned a time and a place and a specific group of people that were long going and could likely never been aligned and arranged in the same pattern again. I’ve devoted a lot of digital ink to this lament throughout the years… and then Legion comes along and proves me to be completely full of shit. I am not exactly sure what it is about this expansion but for the first time in seven years… I feel more hope for the game ahead of me… than nostalgia for the time that has long passed. I thought I was done raiding in World of Warcraft… and instead I am actively raiding three times a week… one night of progression, one night of farmed content, and an amazing karazhan team. I am super happy with the state of the guild, and the game… and how far we have come. I am amped about the prospects of starting Nighthold on time when it releases… and while I have not spent much of this break in game it still very much feels like home. While I still have issues with some of the disjointed feeling of the forced faction storyline at times in Legion… the bulk of the content is amazing and just seems to keep getting more interesting.

But Sometimes It Doesn’t Last

The other subtext of the year is how I have apparently fallen out of love with Final Fantasy XIV. We made an attempt to get the band back together and start raiding once more… and it worked amazingly for awhile. Honestly the Free Company is still an active and happy place… just with myself not really playing much of a role in it. I keep thinking that it will be fun to return… but I knew something was a miss when I started completely blowing off the holiday events that I used to love so much. Now I am significantly behind in gear and in story… and it is going to take a significant push to catch back up. This push however is just something that I have not been willing to do as of yet. I am excited about Stormblood… but nowhere near as much as I was prior to the launch of Heavensward. I guess the scale of Heavensward felt limited… with two dungeons per patch instead of three, and that alone wore on me. When you are grinding two dungeons in an expert tier… it gets super old really fast. They have since added in other content to occupy time like the deep dungeon… but it also feels extremely grindy in nature. I know at some point I will return and happily do so… but in the meantime I have simply not been forcing myself to log in and play a game I was not entirely into.

With Guns Blazing

The real winner of the year as far as my total time spent… I feel is probably Destiny. This game has gone from being something that never quite clicked…. to turning into a game that I obsessively play on an almost nightly basis. Over the break I spent a good chunk of my time playing “Not-Wipeout” and participating in the Sparrow Racing League. I managed to hit the currently light cap of 400, and instead of it diminishing my desire to play… it seems to have only spurred me on further trying to get infusion fodder to upgrade all of my favorite items. I cannot tell you how much being able to bring my favorite weapons from Year 2… into Year 3 has improved the game for me. Traditionally MMO items are just stat sticks with a look and a feel… and cosmetic systems make it so that you can look however you want therefor really negating any need to keep using older items. Destiny however… your items have a feel and a purpose and greatly effect the gameplay. I have guns that I love… that feel amazing to use… that I cannot actually quantify in words as to why. For example I love the Fabian Strategy… even though I technically have far superior legendary items that don’t eat my single exotic weapon slot. I just feel sorry for my friends who are casually interested in the game… because I go from zero to “let me show you my pokemans” in a frighteningly short amount of time.

Bad Christmas Was A Bust

This time last year… I was looking forward to the impending launch of The Division. I thought this game would end up being my new Destiny, and even better so because it allowed me to get the sort of gun play and looter shooter action I craved without having to resort to consoles. Unfortunately that was not the case and I never actually made it to the level cap. Going into Division I thought I would have a strong community to support me… but one by one my friends checked out quickly for a lot of reasons not directly connected to the game play. Largely they objected to the themes… and enough so that at least one of them immediately turned around and refunded the game through steam. I could have reached outside of my circle of friends and found new communities… but I was left with the awkward situation that my PS4 clan was of course playing on that platform and that I just didn’t really want to have to pester folks to play with me on the PC side. As a result I solo’d a hell of a lot… and reached a point where to progress at the speed I wanted to progress I needed some people with me. There was also the technical problem that I just don’t really like playing a third person over the shoulder shooter nearly as much as I enjoyed playing Destiny. Even more than that… the thing that was missing was the futurism of Destiny weapons. None of the guns felt any different than any other gun to me… so ALL SMGs felt the same, ALL LMGs essentially felt the same etc… they were more stat sticks than something that felt unique or individual. I still hold hope that at some point that I will be able to get back into the game and push the last bit to hit the level cap and start doing interesting content.

Awesome But Not My Deal

Sometimes there is a game that I am way more into the game world… and the lore than actually playing it. This is very much the case with Overwatch. I love the characters, and all of the storyline that is coming out surrounding the game… and while I enjoy playing the game in small bursts it just never seems to be the game I choose to play on any given night. As a result I am something ridiculous like level 6… and have only logged a few hours in total playing the game. I think much like with League of Legends… I would enjoy playing with a team of friends… but then you run into the issue of getting bored with bots… and not having the chops or desire to learn them to play against other pre-made teams. I also tend to be most happy when I am playing Torbjorn, but always end up playing Reinhardt or Mercy because I end up getting randomed into a team full of Hanzos and Genjis. I wish I had the burning desire to play this game because I love everything about its world and what it is doing with its narrative. In truth I find myself mourning the game it could have been… back when it was originally slated to be a new MMO. I would to play a Destiny like game… set in the Overwatch universe.

Christmas Basebuilding

December 26, 2016 by Belghast

My friend Grace calls today Super Xmas… or the day that you get to chill out and rest after the manic running around that happens around attempting to make everyone happy on Christmas and Christmas Eve. This absolutely used to be the case for me, but over the last few years Christmas has become a much more low key affair. I’ve talked a bit about the concept of an anchor household, but for me most of those are now gone. Instead we have to sort of make our own new traditions, and one of those recently has consisted of going out to dinner on Christmas Eve with my folks, and then coming back to our house and doing gifts together. For years there used to be a strict schedule of… my folks and mothers side of the family on Christmas Eve, and my Dads side of the Family early early Christmas morning… then my wife’s family for Christmas lunch and eventually another gathering Christmas evening. Over the years deaths in the family have taken the corner stone of each of those gatherings to where there really isn’t a whole lot going on during the holidays on either of our families.

There were of course a few options… one of which was the household that introduced me to the term “titty milk” a few years back and we opted out of that one. Instead for the most part we just chilled out at home and enjoyed the fact that it was freaking 70 degrees outside for Christmas. In the afternoon between thunderstorms we went out for a walk, which is something I need to start doing every day in an attempt to get myself prepared for all of the walking that is going to happen at Pax South. As far as gaming goes… I spent a lot of time not actually gaming yesterday but more in an extended state of transitioning between games… as I checked twitter and surfed the web. I did play a significant amount of the Sparrow Racing League, but largely playing remotely through the laptop. I am getting surprisingly good at dealing with the input lag that comes from playing PS4 via PC, so much so that it actually takes a bit to get adjusted to using the real console again. I am now in this place where I need two items to hit 400 light… Ghost and Heavy. I’ve since gotten two Exotic Heavy Engrams… but both of them decoded to 399 light instead of bumping on up to 400. This seems like a massive bug because every engram seems to decode at 399 rather than giving me what is usually a level bump. As far as the ghost goes… I tried some more forge only to have it bug out on me with the waves sitting at 100% for 10 mins and then eventually failing out without actually spawning the boss.

Another thing that happened yesterday is that I fell into a giant Minecraft shaped hole as we hung out and watched some shows on demand. It has been several years since I had legitimately played Minecraft and as a result I went back to pure vanilla for the moment at least while I get my bearings. Before long I was back into my standard operating procedure which is digging a big hole and then eventually erecting some large structures. I decided to have my main base out over the open water with a big tunnel leading from what is ultimately turning into my quarry. I used the seed “BelChillingChristmas2016” and wound up with a pretty cool spawn. My original cave opened into a giant chasm underground and I have been building the infrastructure needed to explore it more properly. I wound up digging down into the rock and laying a bunch of ladders as I went which ultimately allowed me to create a shaft straight down to the chasm floor. I have a hut of sorts down at ground level that lets me get down there in relative safety and at least see what monsters happen to be around.

I plan on building a dock of sorts under my base that should allow me to launch boats easily for exploring new areas, and I also plan on building another big land bridge/tunnel to the other nearby coast giving me access to new areas. Right now a lot of my time has been spent simply quarrying cobblestone and hollowing out the mountain side for that purpose. There is a bunch of gold in the chasm, but I don’t really have much need for it yet. I have not seen any of the more useful materials like Diamond or Red Stone so at some point I am probably going to have to do the whole dig down to bedrock thing and start some branch mining. At this very moment however I am trying to expand my base of operations and make more safe space for me to travel in. Minecraft is one of those games that triggers my base building instinct to the extreme, and I am ultimately falling back into the familiar patterns I do when I always play this game. In truth I should be playing Diablo 2 since we plan on recording the game of the month show this coming week… but for now I am indulging myself in a little bit of structured madness.

Curve Beating

December 22, 2016 by Belghast

I can in all honesty say I did not really expect to be placing this clipping of a screenshot on my blog. When we cleared Normal Emerald Nightmare… I was pleased as hell. When we turned around and cleared Normal Trial of Valor… I was ecstatic. When we started work on Heroic Emerald Nightmare… I figured that it would give us a challenge right up until the point that Nighthold Normal was released and that we would ultimately switch gears. I mean Nighthold is supposedly slotted for January 17th… which is only 26 days away depending on how you count today. We however started making some significant progress in Heroic Emerald Nightmare… and in truth I didn’t really dare to hope we would manage to get through it yet. We have several friends who are raiding mythics in a much more serious capacity than our guild raid. The awesome thing is… we are apparently the sort of raid that they still enjoy coming along on because of the interaction between all of the members. So in part I chocked our Heroic victories up to the number of “ringer” dps we ended up bringing in as a result. Last night we were extremely short on numbers and missing most of this overpowered dps that we had so often been bringing. I had resigned myself to hopefully repeating our previous progress, and just enjoying the process.

Now is the point where I tell you… that I can not possibly be prouder of my guild. Instead of struggling with the absence of some mythic ringers… we instead continued to perform at an admirable level as we not only defeated… but one shot several of the bosses we have never attempted. We had some early struggles as we essentially got back in the swing of the raid… for me not being able to make the last two Friday nights I felt more than a little rusty. However by the time we reached “Spiderbirb” we were trucking along nicely and managed the first new one shot of the evening. Similarly we seemingly rolled over Ilgynoth… or at least pulled out a victory doing the fight in a single burn phase. From there we worked on Cenarius and once again managed to pull out a victory in a single attempt, which lead us to only having Xavius to work on. This was sitting at 9 pm my time… and I thought to myself that we were in a good position to get a bunch of attempts in… giving us at least 30 minutes before the official end of the raid. I also thought that with it being the holidays… we might be able to extend a bit to get the kill if needed. It turns out we didn’t need all of that time on attempts, because we had a very close first shot and managed to pull out the victory on attempt two giving us still about fifteen minutes to spare before our official ending time. It was a really great night, and I am amped about our prospects going into Nighthold. We will for the first time this expansion be starting new content on exactly the week it comes out, which is a bit of a point of pride for me. I love feeling like we can be casual, but still extremely successful.

By the time the raid was over I realized that I had not actually spent any time with the Luna that evening. So I took her into my office to chill out and get some attention while I opted to play some Destiny. At this point I am 399 light… and have limited my list of needs down to replacing my 394 Ghost Shell, 399 boots, and 399 Heavy Weapon. I had a moment of extreme excitement at one point in the evening when I got an exotic heavy engram… which decoded at 399 instead of the 400 I have been getting from the SRL event. Before long I was joined by my friend Grace and we hung out doing some racing. She was working on one of the quest steps where you had to get ten races where you place in the top three… and I maybe just maybe played a little aggressively with the other drivers. There was at least one time when I happened to ram into the person who was closing in on her then third place slot. Who knew you could tank with a speeder bike? In truth I had seen a few clans doing this over my time racing… where they were essentially clearing the way for their friend to come in and snatch the first place position so I considered it completely fair game. That said she managed to pull out a few come from behind second place victories like the one I decided to screenshot here. The bonus of the entire night was that in both cases we improved our light levels… and simply hanging out and chatting made the whole racing thing go significantly faster.

I have honestly had some extremely good luck during the SRL with crucible weapon drops. Last night was apparently no different as I managed to pick up a really nice version of the NL Shadow 701X. Firstly it has triple tap which is a stat I love for boss encounters… or anything else I am pretty certain to land three precision shots in rapid succession. To crank up the stability is Hand-laid stock… which ultimately reduces the range but I can live with that at 47. Finally hidden hand helps with triple tap in making it slightly easier to get those precision shots… so all in all the weapon has some really nice synergy. The only negative is this is a scout rifle… and I don’t really tend to use a lot of scout rifles. This lives in the Mida Multi-Tool family, and actually has a higher rate of fire… which makes it feel extremely spammy. Now if I could have replaced Hidden Hand with Full Auto… this would have been just about my favorite scout rifle. In any case this is definitely something worth holding onto and other than my Hand of Judgement from Challenge of Elders… I didn’t really have that many legendary scout rifles that I enjoyed using. In any case that still gives me a good roll for Eyasluna, and god rolls for Hopscotch Pilgrim and potentially NL Shadow 701X coming from SRL so far.