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Third Week Summary

September 26, 2017 by Belghast

Today is reset day in Destiny 2 and brings a close to the third week of gameplay. At this point my maximum power on the Titan is 291 and I am really hoping to get some good luck in week four with the luminous engrams. At this point that is realistically the only way I move the needle forward other than the occasional extremely lucky exotic engram or loot from nightfalls. This week in particular seems like it is going to be interesting for the Nightfall because there is no way to extend the timer. The really interesting thing happening in the tower however is the faction rally, where the three faction leaders return and ask you to pledge your loyalty. The rally itself involves collecting faction tokens for your respective faction in the hopes that at the end of the rally your side has gotten the most. Most of my clan has chosen to go Dead Orbit… and in truth I think they are likely going to win because at least in Destiny 1 you saw a lot more of those faction emblems than literally anything else. I personally have been a huge fan of the Future War Cult starting with the No Time to Explain quest line, and in Destiny 2 it is the only faction that has weapons I am extremely interested in. As a result I went FWC on my Titan main, New Monarchy on the Warlock and Dead Orbit on the Hunter. Of the weapons available however… the only one I have any interest in is the FWC Pulse Rifle with the new version of firefly.

The real important happenings of the week is that I leveled my Hunter to 20 and wrapped up the main story last night. Then after doing that I managed to unlock flashpoints and knock that out as well as the clan xp luminous engram. That means for the week as a whole I finished up a grand total of eight luminous engrams, pushing my total power up slightly across the board. I am amused at just how fast you can pull up a second or third character. Functionally what I have done is latched onto a single item from Xur and then all of my higher level weapons from my main. This has allowed me to get to the 260 or so power level point extremely quickly, and then keep pushing it up by carefully infusion gear. Similarly this time around I had legendary mods to rely on which is something I didn’t quite have when I was doing this for the warlock. Granted I don’t have them for every slot, which is why for example I still have some blue boots on the hunter above. However I feel like I am in a really good place to be going into the faction rally. Before sitting down to write this post I knocked out a single heroic event on Io and got 8 faction tokens, so I am wondering if we are just going to be flooded with new loot from the faction vendors. I am perfectly okay with this is that is the case, and I plan on doing a bunch of heroic events tonight to get some of those sweet sweet future war cult weapons. I am specifically after the omolon auto rifle, because it looks like it might be the same class as my beloved Uriel’s Gift.

Destiny Roegadame

September 25, 2017 by Belghast

I had this post that I was contemplating making this morning, but I’ve decided that maybe today is not the right day. I woke up with a headache that sort of feels like my brain case is trying to split in two… so it maybe isn’t the best time to be getting into subjects that require a delicate touch. So instead this morning you are going to get to see some of what I did this weekend over in Destiny 2. Firstly you get a shot of my current Warlock outfit… I am in the one in gold and black with the crazy horns. Now it was announced last week that they nerfed the luminous engrams for multiple characters of the same class. I am beginning to think that maybe they also nerfed said rewards for ANY characters. I spent a good deal of time on the Warlock completing the few “easy” engrams… namely the Weekly Flashpoint (Titan), Clan Experience Reward and Call to Arms Milestone. The last two line up neatly because you get a predictable 500 xp per crucible match, which helps to chew away at that 5000 xp needed to get the Clan reward. I held all of the engrams until I had completed all three and then equipped my strongest power gear and turned them in one at a time so I could in theory adjust as needed. Now when I do this on my Titan I usually see a significant jump in power… and when I turned in on the Warlock they all for the most part dropped at the same light level as me or maybe one higher. Ultimately I am not sure if doing multiple luminous engrams per week is really worth it… but if I can get my Hunter through the main story in time I might try at least one of hers to see if I get the same results.

That brings me to the fact that I started my hunter this weekend, and wound up deleting my Destiny 1 character and re-rolling as a Female Awoken. Some interesting things to note… that even though I deleted my character I got specific story hits as though I was a legacy character. I am guessing those flags are set at an account level and not a character by character level, so I still got referenced based on my past deeds even though I ultimately deleted my previous hunter. My Titan being Exo is really the important part of the equation, and the fact that my other two characters were Exos… was largely due to the fact that there are no beards in Destiny. Since Hunter is such a nimble and graceful class, I always thought in the back of my head that I probably should have rolled a female character… and in part I am just correcting that original error. As far as rolling Awoken… this is the closest I can get in Destiny to having a Roegadame… which is always the correct choice if you have it.

This is ultimately a test run for how I am likely going to level when the PC release happens. I quested my way through the European Dead Zone to unlock Titan, and did the first quest there which unlocks the planet as a whole. From there I ran public events until I reached 20, which for the first 10 levels took a single event per ding… and afterwards took roughly 2 per. So if I functionally get to titan around level 5 that means within 25 public events I should be sitting at the level cap. The reasoning behind this is that you get an awful lot of random gear drops while doing the story content. Now the specific rewards like Exotics have power limits and will not float up as your level increases… but all of these random drops absolutely will. There is a significant part of the leveling process that is going to involve grinding something until you hit 260 light… the cap that you can get to with blue items. From there you will need a stockpile of faction rewards to get to 265… and in this case I had a fat stack of Titan tokens to turn in when I got there artificially by equipping the chest I had purchase from Xur and all of my Titan’s weapons. I started the Hunter around 11 am yesterday afternoon and wound up dinging 20 around 5 pm… with time between to do laundry and cook and random tasks like that. Now I just need to finish out the main story, which in theory I should be able to do tonight.

When I logged my character in earlier to take a few screenshots I noticed that my Clan has defeated the Raid. When this happens everyone in the clan gets a specific engram that is a level 10-15 version of one of the raid weapons. I just so happened to have a base 290 pulse rifle sitting in my bank that I sacrificed for science… and infused to bring the weapon up to usable levels. All in all I like this pulse rifle quite a bit, and while it is going to take some getting used to the action and the sounds it seems to be really solid. The important thing however is that I am super proud of my clan for defeating the angry penis head… which if you have seen Emperor Calus… it is a fairly apt description that I sadly cannot claim as my own. I am not sure which team specifically got the kill, but awesome work because I know it took a lot of people over the course of two weeks to really nail this all down and get the fight across the finish line. Now the rest of us casuals have some shiny baubles as a result. I think tonight I will be working on the Hunter main story so that I can at least test the flashpoint engram to see what sort of levels I get it to decode at.

290 Power and More Weapons

September 21, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I pushed through and hit another Milestone in Destiny 2, and that is hitting the 290 light barrier. While our clan lead seemed to hit this practically over night… it has been a long slog for most of us. I’ve talked about this before but the gearing process slows down greatly at 265 and then each additionally point of power seems to be a struggle to obtain. This is going to be the phase of the game that loses most people because if you have never dealt with how rough Destiny 1 was to get light… then this is going to seem like a chore. For the most part I am enjoying the process because I like watching the numbers go up. For frame of reference however… the game was released on September 5th and sixteen days later I have logged roughly 57 hours of play according to Destiny Tracker. Now for additional point of reference I spent just shy of 500 hours playing Destiny 1 on the PS4 and just shy of 50 hours on the Xbox One. Basically all I am trying to say here is that 290 power level is a significant investment of time, but in theory you could probably also get there just by focusing on the few powerful gear rewarding objectives that you can do each week. My process has involved a lot of doing random stuff hoping to get exotic engrams that then push me up every so slightly.

As far as things to talk about this morning I don’t have much. I thought instead I would share a few new weapon pickups that I am enjoying. Each week I do the crucible milestone so that I can get the luminous engram associated with it. During one of the many matches I had to play to get 100% completion to get my loot… I managed to get this gun to drop. As far as I know this is only available from the crucible itself or from turning in crucible tokens for faction with Lord Shaxx. This gun is amazing in PVE and I imagine similarly amazing in PVP given its propensity for one-shot killing almost anything but yellow bars, and even then a single shot will usually strip their shield. I was using it last night while running around on Io and straight up 2 shotting Vex Minotaurs… one to drop the shield and one precision shot to kill them. It did similar magic on Taken Centurions, except their shields seemed to take to shots to drop them. If you get this gun, I highly suggest you play with it a bit before sharding it because I think you are going to like it. I also love the name because its a play on two infamous guns from Destiny 1: The Devil You Know and The Devil You Don’t.

As the reward from completing the nightfall, I managed to pick up an Origin Story. I have no clue what weapon I chose at that step in the quest chain… but I know it was not this gun and whatever I did wound up as infusion fodder somewhere along the way. At this point in my life I was deeply connected to Scathelocke and could see no other weapon taking that primary gun crush position for me. However after hearing people talk about this gun, I decided to play with it a bit before using it as power level fuel. I am certainly glad that I did because my god this gun is amazing. It is a much slower rate of fire archetype as compared to the Scathelocke… so if that is the Haakon’s Hatchet then this is closer to the Suros Regime or Genesis Chain. This has quickly taken my primary slot and the only time I am not using it… is when I am rocking Better Devils.

A weapon that I have loved for awhile but was not using a lot at the time of the last post is Uriel’s Gift. I try really hard not to run double auto rifles because it limits the things that I can do, however there is a period of time when I did. Now that I have started using Better Devils a lot more this is filling in as my secondary slot. Similarly I am using this a lot in crucible because it just has an insane time to kill. Out of the gate the gun has really good stability in spite of what looks like on paper a relatively low stat… or at least it has a very predictable recoil pattern. This allows me to choose High Caliber Rounds to get the stagger effect against enemies. This has been the game where I suddenly greatly favor Omolon weapons. In Destiny 1 I always thought they looked cool, but never really liked the way they felt. This time around I am digging both. Functionally my two primary setups are Origin Story/Manannan or Better Devils/Uriel’s Gift and I swap back and forth between those as needed.

This has been the version of Destiny where pulse rifles are just not that good. I’ve tried a bunch of them and none of them really feel like they used to… or have the ability to shred enemies like they used to either. Of the pulses I have tried, I have largely standardized on using the Nergal because it feels the best and seems to perform the best out in the field. I’ve actually used it a bit in crucible and it works well enough… the problem is it is just outshined in every way by the Auto Rifle options I have now. I have this feeling that we are going to see an Auto Rifle stability nerf which will clear the way for the pulse to shine a bit more. Previously Pulse was the stable multi shot option… and Autorifle was all about learning how to ride a bucking bronco into battle. If you are looking for a pulse however I highly suggest you check this one out. I get it regularly from the gunsmith, and it seems to be on a pretty generic drop table.

Dark Math and Infusion

September 19, 2017 by Belghast

I finished the night last night at 287 power, putting me well within striking distance of at least 290 this week… and with some additional luck in getting some really good drops 300. For the moment I have standardized on the gear set that I am wearing and I have been eating everything that gives me slightly higher light levels to pour into it. This morning I thought I would talk a bit about the infusion game in Destiny 2 and my frustrations with it. The longer I play Destiny 2 the more I think of it as a continuation of the previous game to the point of largely feeling like a big smooth reboot. There is a lot of gnashing of teeth over this point but I have reached a sort of equilibrium in my attitude. I realize there are going to be some people that cannot get past this fact and I am guessing they really were not that big of a fan of the original game in the first place. There are certainly things that I am not the biggest fan of, but overall I am really enjoying my time spent wandering around… and weirdly looking forward to starting over with the PC launch and doing all of the things that I wish I had done this time around. For me at least the chronology of Destiny looks a little something like this.

Year One – Destiny Launch/Dark Below/House of Wolves
Year Two – The Taken King
Year Three – Rise of Iron
Year Four – Destiny 2 Launch

Now back to the original topic I wanted to discuss… Infusion. During Year One it was not really a thing even though there was a limited form of it available in the ability to “power up” weapons with ascendant shards… which was less a version of infusion and more a version of delayed gratification making you level your weapon further after getting it. Side note… they are doing something like this system with an exotic shotgun that you get from the raid but that is a discussion for another day. During Year Two they introduced the infusion system but made the calculations behind it extremely frustrating. The closer you got to the level cap the less light you were able to squeak out from each infusion. I remember keeping a vault full of random gear to step new items that I got up… without losing a bunch of potential light in the process. For those who didn’t live under the system… say you had a 300 light level exotic item.. and you wanted to infuse a 335 item into it… the resulting item would be 324. If the first item was a legendary item… you would end up with 328 making this weird penalty on using exotics. During the tail end of Year Two and all of Year Three this changed and you started to get the complete face value of every infusion, meaning in that same scenario… of a 300 exotic and a 335 infusion fodder… you would end up with a 335 exotic gaining full credit for the item you were pouring into it. The previous infusion system was pretty straight forward in that any primary could infuse into any other primary… with the same being true for armor pieces. Meaning I could throw my trash at my alts and help funnel their light level up.

Now we scan forward to Year Four and a bunch of things have changed that make the system as a whole way less beneficial to the players. Year Three was pretty much the pinnacle of the system as far as I was concerned, it felt good and didn’t cause needless strife to the players. In Destiny 2 however… they made a bunch of tweaks that seem like nonsense. Firstly they removed the element of simplicity, meaning it was no longer slot based infusions and instead depended upon the specific item type. This means if you need to bump up your auto rifle… you are going to need another auto rifle. Similarly it means that if you want to pour additional power into your hunter arms… you are going to need another pair of hunter arms. To further confuse things they added a system of mods into the game, and at face value these seem like awesome things. It lets you take one piece of gear and tailor it to your exact needs without having to wait for the ideal item roll to drop. Where this complicates things however is when it comes to legendary mods, because not only do they add perks to an item… they also had 5 power levels. This means that if you have a 200 item without a legendary mod and a 225 item with a legendary mod… feeding the 225 item into the 200 item will result in a new power level of 220 because the mod gets consumed in the process. The first time this happened to me I was confused as hell and extremely angry because it felt like they had taken a step back to the lossy days of item infusion.

Where things get even weirder is the fact that in the past there were hard item level caps that you could not breach. For example right now in Destiny 2… blues stop giving you upgrades initially a 260 and purples at 265. That however is a somewhat fungible barrier, because as your power level trickles up… so does the level at which items start dropping. I am not entirely certain why things drop at the level they start dropping… but for example last night the maximum power I could hit was 287 but the blues I kept seeing were 277. The lowest power item I have equipped is a 282 helm… so I do not think it is based on that given that there was a period of time where I kept getting items that I could infuse into my lower armor pieces to keep pulling my total up a bit. There is some manner of dark math happening behind the scenes and I think that is what is making this process feel less certain and because of that less “good” than the previous system. We reached peak infusion during year three and all of these tweaks just feel like they were screwing with a solved problem. I am hoping at some point we revert back to just having slot based infusion rather than item type based. The whole item levels and drops thing however I am not even sure how to straighten that out because it seems super wibbly wobbly. All of this said however… Bungie has tweaked things significant given time and I have a feeling that they will also tweak this product to roll back some of the weird parts. It is just a little frustrating at this point however to be entering what is legitimately year four of the game, and it feels like they forgot some of the lessons they learned during the first three years. I mean maybe this is the influence of Blizzard, since they seem to love fixing systems that were not broken by ripping up the pavement and installing brand new and improved pavement that requires a completely different car to drive on it. Whatever the case I am still loving the game and have been spending almost every non-work waking moment playing it… but there are just frustrations that build up as with any new experience. I thought I had gushed for awhile… and its probably time for me to start unpacking some of my baggage as well.