Destiny

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.

Last night I spent the entire night playing Destiny 2, and I am now starting to feel a little guilty about not logging into World of Warcraft Classic at all. So much so that right now my plan is to play tonight and see just how far behind I am in the curve. There were a few players pulling ahead of me and I feel like I am probably going to be several levels behind the pack. Unfortunately… I have been having a blast in Destiny 2 and just have wanted to spend my entire evening playing that. It would be easier were I sitting at the level cap in WoW to alternate back and forth between the games.

Yesterday I posted a picture of these ominous Hive themed Yeti coolers on the moon with Symbols on the front. When I encountered them they appeared to be locked, and when Deej made some post yesterday about our moon findings… I replied with a picture of the chest as a joke. However I got some very serious replies, including what exactly we are supposed to do with them. I apologize for the crappy quality picture but I am trying to illustrate something badly. You notice there are symbols on the front in a specific order I personally refer to them as E A and 0 because the first looks like an E without the back and the last looks like when you draw a zero with a slash through it to differentiate between it and an O. This is going to require some squinting maybe, but if you look in the upper left corner of the image you will see the E symbol and if you look in the middle of the right hand side you see the A symbol. How spread out they are is the reason why you got a rather crappy image to illustrate this point. Behind where my camera is currently is a column with the 0 symbol. Essentially to open the chest you shoot the symbols in the order shown on the box. If you are doing it right the symbol will begin to glow with that ominous shadowy hive energy. When you have shot them all you end up with a normal chest that you can open and usually a piece of gear.

Another thing that I spent my evening doing is punching things. Like I normally punch a lot of things already, but what I mean is that I used finishers to punch them into oblivion. I had not quite figured out the finisher system the night before last, but I have it on lock now. Essentially when an enemy gets low you will see a glowing orb over their head and they will start to shimmer a little bit. This is the indication that they are primed and ready for your finisher, much in the same way as it works in the 2016 Doom game. My finisher was set to the G key but I rebound it to 7 which is the key that I use on my mouse as my combo point dump in MMORPGs. The interesting side benefit of using a finisher is that apparently it counts as the damage type of whatever sub class you have equipped, but also doesn’t consume a melee charge. This meant that when I landed on Titan and got a Destination Bounty of kill 30 things with Void damage… and I had no Void weapons on me… I was able to punch things to death for fun and profit. Normally speaking I would have just logged into Destiny Item Manager on my second monitor and swapped over a void weapon. However while that appears to be fixed now, for awhile that was not updated to work against the new user interface. I would imagine that it will also count for those “Void Class Abilities” bounty objectives as well, since your damage is being dealt by the class, but I am not 100% certain on that.

The highlight of the night however is that I found out that you can in fact get back into the Cosmodrome without deleting a character. When you log into the game a bunch of stuff happens, especially if you had the Solstice of Heroes armor waiting on you. Banshee gives you several objectives so I completely missed that you also gave me an exotic quest called “Pain and Gain”. This involves going into the Cosmodrome and in the area is a Fallen Walker that you can defeat over and over. Doing so drops one of the items that you pick up from the New Light experience.

So you can essentially farm the walker until you have gotten all of the items that you would have gotten had you deleted your character. The first time I took down the walker the chest that spawned gave me the Arcadia-Class Jumpship from Destiny 1. The second time I got the item I was hunting for… the Khvostov 7G-02 or the weapon you start the game with. This is still among the best feeling guns in the game and I am really hoping we get the exotic quest at some point during this expansion cycle to go get the version of it from Destiny 1 that had swappable perks. I loved that weapon so much. The other item I could have gotten was the white “Generalist Shell” but honestly I didn’t care enough about it to stick around and kill the walker a third time. Supposedly it is capable of showing up on the Heroic Mission playlist as well.

If you keep going with the mission you end up discovering a completely new area of the Cosmodrome which involves a really nonsense jumping quest. Thankfully I was forged in the fires of the Dreadnaught and managed to do the entire sequence on the first try. In the grand scheme of things none of the jumps are terribly difficult. The hardest bit is trying to figure out where you should jump to next especially in the last set of jumps before arriving at the treasure room. You are rewarded a copy of the Risk Runner exotic which I had and if you keep moving you end up fighting a boss that awards you its catalyst which I did not have. Risk Runner has become one of my favorite weapons in Destiny 2 and more or less takes the place of a shotgun as one of my secondary weapons of choice.

All in all I am having a blast in Shadowkeep, and I feel like I have really not even scratched the surface. I need to do a strike which I have not done to progress the storyline. Instead I wound up doing a Nightfall… which thanks to the new mode allows you to matchmake and queue for them. There are things I miss… like all of the different ways to get powerful gear. I feel like this is going to turn into a rant at a later point when I am sitting at 900 light and have no real way to get higher. However for the moment I am having a blast. I really want to get the 100 levels of the seasonal pass thingy as well, so we will see how the grinding goes. Tonight however… I plan on likely being back in WoW Classic to try and catch up with what has been going on over there.

Later today something really cool is about to happen. Firstly the new expansion for Destiny 2 is launching and Shadowkeep will be playable on all platforms around 10 am CST. There is a complicated release matrix that is available , but alas for me I will be at work and won’t get to play until this evening. The other cool thing that is happening is that Destiny is launching its Free to Play experience. So this morning I am going to do a bit of an informational post for new players and players who maybe have not followed any of the happenings of the last few months.

What is New Light?

New Light represents a re-imagining of the new player experience for Destiny 2. Instead of throwing you in the middle of the Red War Campaign, it sort of eases the player in a bit slower with doing various activities associated with the destinations and guiding the players through that experience. Additionally and most importantly it is completely free for anyone to download regardless of platform, and includes a shocking amount of content. You are essentially getting all of the Destiny 2 “Year One” content, aka the base game (Red War), Curse of Osiris expansion, and Warmind expansion. This also gives you access to all of the core activities like Strikes, Crucible, The Leviathan Raid and various reoccurring events like the Iron Banner. You also apparently get access to some of the year two content like the Black Armory Forges, Gambit/Gambit Prime and The Menagerie which is sorta like the LFR version of Destiny 2 raid content. In addition to all of this… you can be viable to hop in and play with you friends in content on day one minute one. They have changed the way the world scales and you could hop in and do a strike moments after you first create your character. You can get New Light on the following platforms:

• Steam
• Playstation 4
• Xbox One

Destiny Moved to Steam?

Yes as part of the divorce from Activision, Bungie is no longer going to be available through the Battle.net client. For me this was largely a positive since the vast majority of the games that I own and or play are through the Steam launcher. For some people however this might be a negative as I found out from one of my friends yesterday. Of the various platforms that Destiny could have moved to, I feel like Steam was probably the best option. There would be way more gnashing of teeth had it moved to the Epic Games Store for example, or insisted that we install yet another game store client on our machines.

At the time of writing this all of the Bungie systems are offline for maintenance. However if you played on Battle.net and are wanting to continue playing that character you will still be able to move after the systems come back online later today. You need to go to Bungie.net/PCMove to initiate the process. However as the above advisement states it will not be an instant process and there may be some lag time before your character shows up on steam. Ultimately the process requires you to log into your Battle.net account and then into your Steam account and it creates a mapping and starts the character move process. If you did this prior to the systems going offline, then your Steam character should be sitting there waiting on you when you install either the New Light client or Shadowkeep.

What is Cross Save?

Again the systems are offline, but when they come back online later today you will be able to configure Cross Save. Essentially if you have played Destiny 2 on any platform in the past, you can keep your characters and move them forward with you if you choose to swap platforms. For example I had characters on both the PC and the PS4 and once everything was linked up, I was able to choose which set of characters would be my “Cross Save” and available on all platforms. Since then I picked up Forsaken when it was on sale on the Xbox One and have been able to play the same characters on all three platforms seamlessly. To make it work all you need to do is go to the Bungie.net/CrossSave page and associate the accounts for each platform with your Bungie.net account. It will then ask you to select which account you are going to promote to your cross save. Now these other accounts won’t actually “go away” but will instead be suppressed as the characters from your chosen platform loads. You could in theory go back and reverse the decision at any point and play different characters on each of the separate platforms. My hope is at some point in the future they give us full cross play as I have friends that choose to play on each of the platforms, but my chosen platform is the PC. I could however load up any of the clients but I am limited to only that group of friends on a given client.

How do I Convert Heroic Events?

One of the most common activities in Destiny 2 is that of the public event. Some activity will spawn in on your destination and you can get good experience and some gear by completing it. However you get significantly better experience and loot if you manage to convert it to the heroic version. At times the process of converting it is directly in competition with actually completing the event, and as a “KinderGuardian” you can frustrate players by not knowing how to transform the event. As such I feel like one of the more important steps is learning what you need to do to convert each activity. I wrote up a post some time ago, but since then a bunch of new event types have been released. Thankfully Mesa Sean released a video today walking through the process of converting every single event.

I Feel Like I Am Missing Some Lore

There is a lot of story to Destiny, and sadly most of it is not told through the natural flow of in game narratives. It is instead told through things you interact with in the world, side quests, items that drop and add notes to your grimoire, and some of the higher end content like raids. Additionally there is a wealth of knowledge that never transitioned over from Destiny 1, and as a result you can feel like you are at a massive debt of knowledge as you enter this world. Destiny 2 is not really a narrative experience. It is a game about excellent gunplay and fun activities that you can complete with your friends. That however does not mean there is not a mountain of interesting lore behind the game. As such I once again am pimping this excellent video from Byf, that outlines everything we currently know about the lore of Destiny. It is a four hour long video that outlines the origins of the various factions and Guardian doesn’t even factor into it until around the 2 hour mark. If you want to understand what came before… then watching the first 2 hours and 56 minutes is well worth your time as that takes you up through the beginning of Destiny 2.