This weekend was a weird mix of leveling characters and slowly incrementing that light level up there. Saturday I spent most of my time working on the Warlock and I managed to get the light level up to 282, then I turned around Sunday and caught my titan main up and can now hit 283 if I swap a bunch of gear around. I potentially should have taken a new screenshot this morning, but largely I took this one to show off the gear that I finally stabilized with, or at least enough to feel like I could use some shaders to blend everything together. I’ve been using the Doom Fang Pauldrons as my exotic armor piece because of the benefits it gives to Sentinel. The shield throw is rather potent and giving me an ability to do more than one per super is something I can seriously get behind. The rest is a blend of Wild Wood armor and Kerak Type 2, which gives me the sort of heavily armored but also a bit piecemeal look that I was going for that the Doom Fang Pauldrons already had. Another thing that I spent a significant amount of time was sitting on Io and testing weapons out trying to determine what I want to keep and what I absolutely hate to use and can shard. As far as the “why Io” part it just happened to be where I was when I decided to start down this rabbit hole. The end result is that my vault is greatly less cluttered, and that I have settled on a number of what I consider my favorite weapons. I thought this morning I would talk about some of them.
Scathelock is the weapon that I keep going back to and for all intents and purposes can be called my primary gun. I loved this weapon in the beta and one of my happiest moments was when I got my first copy from Devrim Kay, and quite honestly from that point on its been in pretty heavy rotation. It is really hard to compare weapons from Destiny 2 to Destiny 1 but as far as feel goes this is somewhere in the range of my beloved God Roll Haakon’s Hatchet and Zhalo Supercell. It is extremely fast and relatively accurate… and if you land precision shots you can melt four or five oncoming minion type mobs without reloading. The only negative is that there is sometimes this weird pull to one side… which can sometimes make it a bit hard to track mobs that are moving. However I have learned to adjust and completely love this weapon, especially with the cool copper and black shader setup that I am rocking right now.
The other weapon that has become my default energy slot item is the MIDA Mini Tool. You get this weapon as part of the new quest chain that ultimately leads to the MIDA Multi Tool, and I absolutely love the look of it. My default crucible loadout tends to be auto rifle and submachinegun, and for the most part I tend to treat subs as the new shotgun. They offer you a way to completely melt a target at close range in a very short period of time. As far as for PVE purposes, this also melts enemy shields and tends to be a bit more accurate than the average submachinegun is. You are going to use this in close to medium range engagements however, because there is no way you are accurately hitting something across the room from you. This thing is awesome for melting Vex Minotaurs and Cabal Centurions specifically.
Yesterday I heard this weapon referred to as the new Gjallarhorn, and while in some ways I agree with that… I am afraid no weapon in Destiny 2 is ever going to be nearly as powerful as the Gjallarhorn was. Merciless however comes really close and if you absolutely need to destroy a boss target, then this thing is going to be your go to. It has a really tight cluster of shots as far as Fusion rifles go and this means that more than like a single shot is going to take down any non-boss yellow bar. When it comes to bosses however that’s where the perks of this weapon really shine. I talked about this a little Friday when I did my Xur post, but Conserve Momentum is the exotic perk and it causes non-lethal hits to speed up the weapons charge rate. This is EXTREMELY noticeable and after a few hits the weapon starts to feel more like a pulse rifle than a fusion rifle. It is going to be extremely useful for fights where you have a limited burn window to take down as much ammo off the boss as possible, and if you use hunter dodge or titan shield reload you can keep up the damage without breaking the effect. I’ve managed to get a couple of these so far from Exotics and I have a feeling as we go deeper into the game this is going to be that weapon everyone wished they had gotten when Xur sold it.
I am really not much of a fan of scout rifles in general. They are great for using as a psuedo sniper rifle, but I would just much rather have a harder hitting hand cannon or a more buzzsaw like auto rifle to whittle down mobs. The Manannan sorta plants itself in a territory that I actually really enjoy using. Once again it is super hard to compare a weapon stat for stat to Destiny 1, but this feels like a much harder hitting Year 2 Hung Jury SR4. Explosive payload makes this weapon help quite a bit on add duty which is where I feel scouts tend to fall down a bit next to the weapons I am used to using. It’s weird, that during Destiny 1 I was not really a big fan of most of the Omolon weapons… and WAS a huge fake of Hakke. This time around it is pretty much the exact opposite… where I am finding myself sharding very few Omolon weapons and sharding almost every single Hakke item I get my hands on.
Speaking of Hakke weapons… here is one that has absolutely earned its slot in my inventory. Hawthorne’s Field-Forged Shotgun… is a mouthful but so far it is hands down the best shotgun I have come across. The primary reason being that just like Destiny 1… Full Auto is where it is at and this thing is super useful for pouring a bunch of hits into a boss in quick succession. It has shockingly decent range and a decent magazine size for a shotgun. I’ve sharded a bunch of shotguns because they never really gave me much reason to use them… and I was completely spoiled by Destiny 1 weapons like the Invective or Party Crasher +1. This shotgun however absolutely sits nicely on the same level as those weapons, and if you get it… you might think twice before tossing it aside as you are probably not going to find a better shotty.
I’m going to close things out with something that I happened to find while cleaning out my vault, that I apparently hurriedly tossed in there without really trying it out. This is another one of the few Hakke weapons that I have kept and I did so largely because this hand cannon has damned near maxed out impact at 92 out of 100. The only weapon I have with that same stat is the exotic Sturm… that I just picked up and have yet to really use much. Basically think of this weapon as a Legendary Sturm much the same way as Eyasluna from Destiny 1 was a Legendary version of Hawkmoon. If I had to choose between using Sturm and using Merciless… then I am absolutely going to be equipping Pribina-D and having that exotic in the heavy slot. More than anything though this weapon proves that you should in theory at least give some test time to every single legendary weapon that comes across your path. You are going to find some gems that at first glance you thought nothing about.
