Destiny

The Villainy

November 2, 2015 by Belghast

Extra-Life : Support Liore!

We started out this year with every intention of doing Extra-Life as AggroChat. However somewhere in the middle of all of this good intention… life happened. At this point we have done nothing to prepare for Extra-Life and done absolutely no fundraising. This means… that AggroChat is not in fact doing Extra-Life this year but will be taking a rain check in the hopes of rebooting this initiative next year. In the meantime… I highly suggest you support the person I am supporting for Extra-Life. We have joked for awhile that AggroChat and Cat Context are similar enough that we should start having special “AggroCats” episodes where we jumble the cast together. I feel like the podcast would end up feeling pretty similar. Liore and Cat Context were so much inspiration when we decided to start AggroChat… so backing Liore in her Extra-Life is kinda like backing us! In truth if not for Cat Context there would likely not be an AggroChat because that podcast taught me that it is perfectly okay to do a podcast with natural conversation instead of show notes and such!

It is my hope that even though I am not doing Extra-Life I can pop by on Liore’s stream and hang out a bit while she does her thing. We even talked about potentially playing something that is all multiplayery that we can hang out and chat while doing. I love the concept of this event, because it proves that gamers can in fact put their hearts in the right place and do amazing things for the world. It is not in fact all about teabagging… and I was honestly shocked that was still a thing when I encountered it recently in Destiny. Like people did that in the Quake 3 engine days… and I figured surely by now people had gotten over that “phase”. I got off track… anyways I highly suggest you pop by the donation page and throw a few bucks towards the cause. I will be tuning in for as much of Liore’s stream as I can, so it should be a good time!

Favorite Weapons

Yesterday I decided to do a new sort of video for me, where I go into it with a specific topic… you know like most youtube videos in existence. Generally speaking YouTube is just this place where I dump backup copies of whatever I have streamed, and not something I really do intentionally. This time around I wanted to talk a bit about the weapons I am currently using in Destiny and what I like about each of them. So during the course of the video I go through my current arsenal:

Zhalo Supercell – Auto-Rifle
Hakke Zarinaea-D – Auto-Rifle
Suros DIS-43 – Scout Rifle
Suros Hawksaw – Pulse Rifle
Invective – Shotgun

I cannot fully put into words how excited I am that Xur had a Zhalo Supercell on Friday. Other than No Time to Explain exotic… this was the weapon I wanted most. This gun is so much fun, and more importantly it does a bunch of interesting things. Namely it seems to be able to reach around shielded mobs when it procs. So if you are fighting a Hive Knight or Cabal Phalanx… the procced lightning damage will still damage them even if they have the shield up. This means this is my go to weapon for most strikes because it will simply decimate so many mobs… and can drop the shield of annoying mobs like Knights, Captains and Harpies that have those Arc Shields. I am really hoping that everyone who wants one of these got it this past weekend, because even though it is only 280 I was able to pour enough stuff into it to make it reasonable for most things. Largely right now what I am lacking is weapon parts… and decent high level weapons to feed into my legendary weapons of choice. I wish I knew the secret to getting decent drops… because I am equipping every last ounce of light I can before I start decoding, and still habitually ending up with 260-280 items that are utterly useless to me.

New Weapon

Traditionally my Hunter has used the hand-me-downs from my Titan as far as weapons go. Then if I ended up really liking a weapon… I would end up stealing it from the hunter and giving it to my Titan instead. I think the above weapon is the first time I am not going to do that. On my Titan I already have a really capable Pulse Rifle in the form of a Hawksaw, that nicely rounds out my weapon arsenal. If you want to hear more about it, I go into it in detail in my video above. The other day I managed to rank up with Future War Cult that my Hunter reps… and the package handed me one of their weapons called the Villainy. I didn’t think much about it and ultimately it took me awhile to get around to testing it out. Yesterday during our Star Wars pen and paper session I spent a good deal of time running around in Destiny on my hunter and chewing through the backlog of bounties. During most of that time I used this weapon, and I have to say… I am liking it.

If you look at the two weapons… Hawksaw and Villainy they stack up pretty closely… but I have to say in almost every possible way the Villainy is just better. It has significantly more impact, more range, more stability… similarly reload. The more I look at it verses the Armory profiles for each weapon… I am guessing I simply just got a really ideal roll on my Villainy. This is one of the things I like about this game that would end up driving others absolutely insane. I like that two different weapons from the same family can vary so much, because it makes you feel like this weapon or that weapon are more “yours” because they may not be exactly the same as anyone else’s version of it. My specific Villainy has Partial Refund, Perfect Balance, and Third Eye… and it is an absolute amazing weapon to use. Part of me is hoping to get another one just to see how different they might feel. All I know for certain is that for the time being… this weapon is the go to for my hunter. I also posted a picture of my hunter above just because he looks kinda bad ass right now. I am hoping to get more pieces of the Neuroghast set… because seriously… that name is fitting for me, and it looks pretty amazing.

Week in Gaming 11/1/2015

November 1, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye Summer

This is the week where we finally started to see some colder temperatures. Its funny that this has been the case for the last few years… that October for the most part has still be warm and sunny and if we still had our pool open… we probably could have swam in it all month long. We still have yet to see a freeze but this past week it was regularly in the 40s, when the week before it pretty much never dropped much down past the 70s other than the early morning. As a result this means our hibernation instincts are starting to kick into overdrive. We recorded the AggroChat podcast Friday night, which left us with all of Saturday to do whatever we wanted. The end result… is that we pretty much just stayed inside apart from a mad dash out of the house around 4 pm to run a few errands. I am perfectly fine with a weekend like this… my wife however has some inborn instinct that tells her that we if did nothing over a weekend… that the weekend is somehow a failure. Me… I see those as the most wonderful weekends ever.

I had all of these plans to play some themed games for Halloween… but those plans pretty much died yesterday. Instead I ended up working on my Warlock and getting it to 21 from about level 8. I have to say the Warlock is growing on me over time… and I really really like Nova Bomb as a super goes. It is this awesome mix of the way the Havoc Fist super and Shadowshot super feel, where I can deliver death from above… but at a target instead of jumping down in the middle of everything. Having played all three classes… I have to say they have done an excellent job of giving them all something really neat and special about them that makes it rewarding to play. The hardest thing for me so far however has been adjusting to the Warlock jump. It just works so different than all of the others… and while I am starting to get the hang of it… I still have zero desire to do any of the platforming encounters with it. We will see when I get to the dreadnaught if I can figure out how to do the various chasm jumps with it. Hunter is simple… double jump, and Titan is similarly simple… you just have to sort out when you want to hover over your target before you land. Warlock… is just fiddly and annoying and I never can seem to do the sort of jump I need when I need it.

The secret of my success honestly was getting high enough level to where I could break out my Stranger’s Rifle and I plan on riding that puppy up as long as I can. That weapon is just so damned amazing… and I am ultimately going to have to sort out the process for getting the modern version of it. Sadly I don’t have much faction with Future War Cult, which is ultimately required to get the No Time to Explain exotic. As it stands right now my hunter is running up Future War Cult faction, but since I don’t play him nearly as much as I do my Titan it is lagging behind. I did manage to get my hunter up to 285 light, and I can now consistently him 297 light on my Titan. Getting 300 and beyond items just seems to be the problem, and I still decode so many 260ish items that are just trash. While I don’t mind so much if they are weapons… since I am consistently struggling to keep enough weapon parts on all three of my characters… but armor… I have more than enough to share. I want to take a moment to talk about how much I love the Bungie.net website for swapping stuff between my characters, and the fact that you can do it in the middle of a game play session. This is a really amazing feature.. and I have heard there are chrome plugins that streamline this process considerably.

For the last several weeks I have been on this mission to grind as many strikes as possible to get Exotic Engrams… and there was a method behind my madness. There was one weapon in this game that I wanted more than anything else… and that was.. the Zhalo Supercell. From the moment I saw it in a video, I loved the look of it as some sort of futuristic AK-47/Bolt Action Hybrid thing. What I loved more about it was the functionality of being able to chain lightning to all of the mobs around your target. The only problem being… I never seem to get weapon engrams. I get Helms and Gloves… and the occasional Chestpiece… but have pure hell getting any sort of weapon to drop. So you can imagine my excitement this Friday when Xur had none other than the Xhalo Supercell available. The only negative of course is that all Xur weapons start at 280 instead of the 290 that they are usually dropping for me as. I have managed to pour enough stuff into it to get it to 287 which will have to do for the time being. I love this gun, and more importantly I love the way it rips through mobs that always frustrated me. I’ve noticed when the lightning procs… it can hit Phalanx and Knights even if their shields are up which makes this gun freaking amazing. When I wrap up my post this morning I think I am going to stream/record for a bit and talk about some of my favorite weapons currently.

Another huge positive from this week is that one of the Armsday orders was the above Suros DIS-43 Scout Rifle. One of the rolls available had full auto… which makes this gun freaking amazing. It has good impact, solid range and really great stability which makes it pretty much the perfect scout rifle for me. This has now completely replaced Hung Jury in my current weapon load out. My Hung Jury essentially has maxed range which is nice… because I can use it much in the same way as I would a sniper rifle, but the Suros DIS-43 is just a much better all around weapon. I noticed it was available for Armsday orders again this week, and I put in for another one… so hoping that I can end up getting a third one for my Warlock. I have two of these now and they are just excellent. Hoping that everyone managed to get in on the full auto version from this past week because man… I am really enjoying it. My only problem with Suros weapons… is that I really don’t like the Red and White paint job. So this is another case that I would love to be able to repaint my weapons… like if I could put a Dead Orbit paint scheme on this thing… it would be perfect.

Secrets of Grindea

Another title that I played this week was Secrets of Grindea to get prepared for the Friday night podcast. I of course talked about this at length on the podcast, but this is a game where I went through a few different phases with it. At first… it didn’t really grab me. This was my pick for the month, and I largely picked it because some of the game footage I saw reminded me of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Secret of Mana. The early gameplay however… is kinda boring, and the first “boss battle” on the bridge felt a little uninspired. That was quickly followed up by the Giga Slime boss… which was absolutely brutal to do as a melee character. So I have to admit that knocked a lot of wind out of my sails as far as this game went. I did however manage to pick it back up this week and saw the game that I had not quite gotten to yet.

All I can say is… boy was I wrong to doubt this game. The quests are cute, and a parody of traditional RPG tropes…. without being cruel or slapstick about it. It is kinda a sly nod and wink to the fans of this genre… saying “we know” rather than trying to rub your face in it. We talked about this on the podcast, but this is essentially the game I had wished Citizens of Earth was. It is well written, has some interesting and often times hilarious characters, and presents a world for the grown up fans of the original Zelda games… not necessarily the same audience those games were targetting. The boss fights are really challenging, but each of them have a trick or a pattern that once you figure it out it becomes doable. That said I do think this game might have significantly more challenging encounters than Zelda did, because the above Hydra was essentially the point where the game broke me. After talking with my friends on the podcast… there was essentially a pattern that I was missing that hopefully means I can get in and wreck it now. There was not a single boss that did not take me multiple attempts… other that the first bridge encounter mind you. The game does a great job of check-pointing your progress so you start pretty close to where you died allowing you to get right back into the action and try again. Even though this is early access… I highly suggest checking it out… though admittedly you might just wait for the final version.

Devilian

The other game that I spent some time playing is Devilian, that was having another beta test weekend. I still have issues with the game, at least in the style of the character classes… and their gender locked nature. That said I do actually enjoy playing it, and I think it is a cool take on a normally Diablo clone environment. It feels like something different, and I find it significantly more challenging already than anything I saw in Diablo. Diablo gameplay felt “cheap” at times… where bosses would just straight oneshot you if you were unlucky or lacked the armor/skills to deflect the blows. This game requires you to react a lot more quickly to things happening and dodge out of the way of incoming damage. I’ve already encountered a boss that I just cannot currently beat, and I am hoping to come back to it once I have picked up a few more levels. I have this feeling that the boss is designed for multiple players to take him down… because he is right there out in the open rather than hidden behind a bunch of mobs.

The game is really damned pretty, and I will give it marks too for running extremely smoothly. I am still getting used to its somewhat quirky control scheme, but it makes sense. If I were in the permanent test group I would probably be playing this more regularly but with only having weekends to play it… it somewhat disincentives my time spent. My ultimate hope is that Trion has more control over this one than they do over ArchAge and that maybe just maybe they can get some of the changes in that will make the game more enjoyable. Like for example the game is desperately in need of some inventory management tools… like sort and compact. It feels so odd to be playing a game without those things at this point. I doubt the whole Gender locked classes thing will ever be solved, because that will mean a TON of art and animation work to get there. In truth, as I look at the other classes… it is highly unlikely that I would play any of them other than the berserker in the first place. I am just not much for ranged classes… and I have zero desire to play a character with a habitually open shirt. In truth I wish there was some sort of a “tanky” character like the Crusader in Diablo 3. That would probably ultimately be the class for me.

Media Consumption – 10/31/2015

October 31, 2015 by Belghast

Happy Halloween

This was another week where I mostly just watched things on YouTube. That said I did dig up a few gems that I feel are worth sharing. My weekend is going to be a bit odd because last night we recorded AggroChat so the members of our podcast that have social lives… can go out and do social things. I on the other hand plan on playing the new Funcom single player game “The Park” in honor of the holiday. I am not 100% sure if I am going to stream it or not, but I will likely record it. I have heard it is honestly not that long of a game, but it seems just about right for Halloween fun time. Other than that… I have this fear that because of the cold snap I am starting to also get a cold… I know it doesn’t work that way but still. So I am starting to preemptively medicate myself, because I really don’t want to be sick again… after having recently spent entirely too much time sick.

The Book of Sorrows

This is absolutely amazing… and you should stop what you are doing and spend the next hour and a half listening to this. I may or may not be a bit obsessed with Destiny and its oddly coherent… but insanely difficult to find Lore. This lore has traditionally been pieced together in a manner that can only be fully represented if you imagine a basement somewhere… with newspaper clippings, photos, scribbled writings… all connected together with red string with various bits and pieces circled and text scrawled on it that says “this means something”. Seriously to understand Destiny lore is to lose a significant part of your sanity. With the Taken King release…. they made things a bit easier in a way that peeling an orange with your bare hands… is easier than trying to do it with a pair of those weird mechanical lab arms that you see in science fiction labs. Throughout the new items there are some items called Calcified Fragments… and each one you collect unlocks another tidbit of a tome called the Book of Sorrows. This actual book… outlines the progression of the hive from being this tiny race that lived only ten years… to the immortal monster that it is today. This shit is really good… and at some point I will listen to it again. The channel I linked is pretty damned amazing… because it is voice acted in a manner you would expect an audio book to be done. Extremely worth your time… seriously listen to this now.

Star Wars Original Trilogy – Force Awakens Mash-up

Another thing I am also completely enamored with right now is Force Awakens and anything else that seems like Force Awakens. The measure of hype and love that I am feeling for Star Wars right now… is insane. The awesome thing about it is that right now I am rocking a R2-D2 beanie… and it is insane the amount of friends I make because of it. I had a long conversation about Star Wars Battlefront last night with the grocery store cashier because it all started with a “Man I love your beanie”. If you want to be crushed with feels…. watch this above video. The creator took scenes from the original trilogy, and cut it to fit the thematic elements of the Force Awakens trailer and that soundtrack. Seriously… I felt shivers when I watched this thing… and then was just overwhelmed with emotion upon its conclusion. I am probably overselling it… but you know I get super excited about things so… watch this too.

Detroit Trailer

A few years back there was this amazing tech demo running on the Playstation 3 hardware called Kara, about this android that feels more emotional than it should. We wondered for years what would become of it…. if anything would come of it. It was this great experience of trans-humanism and my friends and I all sort of hoped it would be more than just a tech demo someday. Turns out they are in fact working on a game surrounding that same universe, and they are setting it in Detroit. Not sure exactly what the appeal of Detroit is for non-American developers… but apparently it has some because there seem to be an awful lot of games set in this city. The game looks pretty awesome, and it is going to be interesting to see what ramifications come from being a “free range android” of sorts. Reminds me quite a bit of the show Humans, which deals with similar issues.

Destiny re-cut to Force Awakens

I said I was obsessed with Force Awakens right now… and also Destiny… and this video connects the two. Similar to the original Star Wars trilogy trailer, this takes the sound and voice over associated with the Force Awakens trailer and edits it to Destiny footage. I think it works pretty great, and I felt the same sort of warm fuzzies watching this as I did the other… I was honestly shocked at just how well it worked. The strange thing is… the guy that did this apparently almost exclusively re-cuts movie trailers to Destiny footage… but honestly most of them don’t work nearly as well as this one.

Walking Dead

I thought I would throw a footnote in here really quick… just to say I am not going to talk about this episode. Mostly because I don’t want anyone to accidentally have it spoiled. Some shit happens… some major shit… and Monday morning we tried to sort through all of it. We were seriously distraught because we were uncertain what the events of the show meant for the franchise as a whole. Then… one of us found some leaked information… which makes me even less likely to write about it. Right now… I am just not sure how I feel about it… what happened… what supposedly will happen. As a result I just am not going to talk about it other than what I have just said here. Since however I have gotten in the habit of running down each new episode, I thought I would at least leave a footnote.

Fun with Squirrels

October 28, 2015 by Belghast

Groupy Stuff

Last night I had an absolute blast in Destiny. During the day I mentioned that I really needed to do some Court of Oryx stuff on the Dreadnaught, since the Stolen Runes in their initial state do not stack… and I happened to have like four in my inventory. My friend SquirrelPope chimed in to mention that he could also do with some CoO goodness, but we didn’t necessarily make any firm plans. When I got home I started piddling around on my Warlock and shortly after dinner my good friend Carth showed up and we started up a PSN Party. Around about this time I decided to swap back to my Titan and I got a PSN friend invite from Squirrel and next thing I know it we are on the Dreadnaught doing summons. Over the course of the night we participated in probably a half dozen of the level 300 summons, and at least a dozen if not more of the 240 ones… then a good smattering of the low level ones mixed in as well. We were there long past the point where our bags were overflowing, and it managed to get me a level 300 artifact and Squirrel one as well for his hunter alt. We took a trip to decode our goodies on the Tower before regrouping.

From there we chain ran a bunch of strikes and I managed to get a couple of exotics as a result. The other night Carth managed to pull a Telesto fusion rifle, and I had commented that I really would not mind getting one since I didn’t have a great fusion rifle option. Sure enough in our travels last night one of my exotics was a special weapon and that was precisely what I pulled. The other item I got was extremely situational, No Back-up Plans arms which give you a force barrier anytime you kill someone with a shotgun. This screams like something perfect for defender titan in the crucible. Going to hold onto them because in theory they are a decent enough item, even though I skipped getting them when they were on Xur a few weeks back. It was one of those nights of incremental movement in my light and not necessarily anything big. The big two things were that I was able to push up Hawksaw from 293 to 296 and my Sol Edge from 296 to 298 making me extremely happy in both cases. With the focus on secondary weapons for my exotic slot, now that I have both Telesto and Invective I also robbed my Hunter and got my favorite version of the Zarinaea-D Auto Rifle to replace my Fabian Strategy that I am apparently going to shelve. I mostly liked the Fabian for the survival that it granted me… and I really notice it when I am not using it.

Armsday

It’s Wednesday, which means its Armsday… otherwise known as the… I can’t remember what I ordered so for the love of god get these packages out of my inventory day. Last week I put in orders for pretty much everything and you can see my actual picks above in the image gallery. This is the first time I have actually used an image gallery so… hopefully no strangeness happens with my blog layout as a result. Of these honestly… the only one I can really see myself using is the Judith-D hand canon and maybe one of the pulse rifles. The Auto Rifle is pretty much guaranteed to turn into legendary marks because it has next to no impact. As far as the shotgun goes… I have an invective and the ability to give all of my characters an invective… why would you use any other shot gun? In all seriousness I am probably going to eat my 4th Horseman and give an Invective to my Hunter, because having a shotgun that regenerates ammunition auto-magically is a pretty spectacular thing. The only thing that I really need to round out my special weapon options is the damned Black Spindle… and next time it comes up I am probably going to pester Squirrel and Carth to make several attempts at getting it. I want that damned thing so badly, and similarly I am hoping we see a return of the Firewall mission required to get the Sleeper Stimulant as well at the beginning of November.

The thing that excites me the most about this Armsday is not necessarily the weapons I got this week… but instead my hope for weapons next week. For ages I have been hearing about how amazing the Suros Ari-45 Auto Rifle is… and it has now appeared as one of the packages for next week. I’ve put in at least two of these orders, one on the Titan and one on the Hunter… and it would be pretty great if I managed to get my Warlock up to 38 this week and be able to put in another order on him. I have a feeling like the Zarinaea-D it is going to be one of those weapons that I would love to have multiple copies of. My only fear however is that maybe just maybe the hype surrounding this weapon is not going to live up to my expectations. I have very specific tastes in weapons, and it is as much about the “feel” for me as it is the actual stats. I like the Zarinaea-D because I love the “feel” of it… sure it is a laser beam of accuracy.. and packs a decent punch with good sights, but the sound is really what makes me love that weapon. I have been running around with a version of the Suros Ari-45 on my Warlock as I level him, and while it is cool and a fun weapon to use… it is no Zarinaea-D.