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The strange thing about this week is that we just finished one Kings Fall raid on Monday night, only to start a brand new one fresh last night. It gave a certain Deja Vu feeling to the whole doing Oryx fight, especially given that it was so damned hard fought on Monday night. However I will talk about that a little later. First I want to talk about what seems to be me going completely off my rocker. If we had talked months ago I would have told you I was a Diehard Carebear, and that if pressed I could probably shoot rainbows out of my belly in a pretty mean Carebear Stare. Over the last few months however something has happened and I have come to realize that I actually do enjoy doing PVP in limited situations. Those limited situations appear to largely be “Destiny” and “The Crucible”. I am not exactly sure what makes this game different… it could be that there are relevant items that I can be earning that help me in PVE content, or it could be that it simply feels like there is no negative to doing it. Whatever the case doing the Crucible is one of those activities that I mix in when I want to do something… but don’t want to do bounties or be bothered with grouping up for a strike. The other interesting thing is… that I don’t really mind that I am ultimately bad at the content.

Now I have heard stories of much toxicity from the Xbox Live community, and folks leaving crucible matches only to have nastygrams waiting for them from other players complaining about their performance and questioning their parentage. So far the PSN community has been pretty chill about such things, and nobody actually uses the voice chat for public groups either. The end result is that I can just zone out and play some Crucible without fear of retribution, and this zero pressure setting has made me actually enjoy it quite a bit. So much so that while I know this is far from the first Iron Banner… it is the first one that I actually care about and will be trying to rank up to level five during. Largely I am looking at it as a way of maybe getting some infusion fodder, and maybe just maybe a decent legendary hand cannon or machine gun out of the process. As of last night I am closing in on Rank 2, and have managed to complete several of the pieces of the bounties that I never expected to…. like getting highest score among all the players in a match. I’ve been warned that I should hold onto my brown weekly bounties until later in the week to turn in, because I guess they become worth more points as the weekend goes on. I am however trying to complete the three dailies each night, and in theory when I get home from work tonight I should be able to knock those out and put in a bit more work towards the weeklies.

Melting Ogres

Like I mentioned at the top of the post, it was a little strange stepping back foot inside Kings Fall given that we just finished Oryx the previous night. Before the start of a new raid I end up with quite a bit of anxiety that is not fully alleviated until we get past both the ships and the piston wall jumping puzzles. I am just bad at both of them, and end up falling so damned often that I feel like a moron. I had a significant better run last Tuesday, and was back to my fumbling prime last night. That said in both cases I was not the last person through either puzzle, so I guess I don’t feel too awfully bad about my performance. For months I have listened to folks in the Destiny community complain about the RNG in the Kings Fall raid and how it never seems to actually give them any upgrades. I feel like I have crested the new and shiny portion of the raid and am entering the valley of slow and prodding forward movement. Which is to be expected given that at least armor wise I have every available drop… but still have a bunch of weapons I have yet to see. The odd thing there is that I have gotten two of the pulse rifles, and two of the auto rifles… but the rest of the primary weapon types I have not seen yet. Given that last night was only my fourth trip to the raid… I feel like I have plenty of time.

Of the drops that I did manage to get… the only piece of armor that I might use is the chest piece and even then only because it has intellect on it. The fist and auto rifle will absolutely be used as infusion fodder to push something else up. The Suros Regime will replace the 280 one that I picked up off Xur some time ago, and the 310 Thunderlord will replace my previous 290 dropped version. One of the things that I am coming to realize quickly is that apparently my first two times into the raid were flukes. Granted all of the encounters still for the most part melt before us… but those first two Oryx kills seemed effortless. They just worked flawlessly without much issue and while they still took a couple of attempts… they only took a couple of attempts. Monday and last night both seemed like a battle of wills as we kept plugging away at the fight, only to be waylay’d by this quirky bit or that. I am not sure if I would truly elevate the problems we were having to the glitch tier, but definitely things felt like a battle and not like a loot pinata. We managed to get Oryx on what we had deemed was the “last try” because several of us needed to go to bed, and even then we failed at doing the challenge mode variant… finally deciding to go ahead and finish up “as is” just to get the kill in. Supposedly I can walk in and do challenge mode at some point during the week and still get the bonus chest. In any case… content lag or not… I am loving this game more than pretty much anything else right now and looking forward to the big April patch.

Modem Death Cry

Better than Xur

Last night was a bit of a strange night in that I once again flipped between games like mad. I started off in doing my daily love rocket frustration grind… and once again I have nothing to show for it. Then I popped into Dragon Age Inquisition for a bit, but I am having a hard time remembering just what the hell I was doing when I last played. So I wandered around a bit aimlessly and almost accidentally completed a quest. Finally at the end of the session I realized that I apparently have one of those major quests waiting in the queue where I go off to seal some breach somewhere… and have apparently been just avoiding completing it each time I have played lately. Once again I logged out sufficiently avoiding it, but at some point over the weekend I really need to finish it so that hopefully I can get back on stable ground once more with this game. Throughout all of this my wife and I were trying to catch up on iZombie because at this point we are about five episodes behind. It was around this point when the hulu stream stopped and I started having some issues staying connected to the network. I get upstairs and once again my modem is insanely hot, and my internet connection that normally tests out around 200 Mbps is testing 5 Mbps. I unplugged everything and did the “throw it in the fridge for a few minutes to cool it down” trick once more.

When I finally got everything back up and running… I decided to just hang out upstairs and play some Destiny. So I set forth on a sequence of events that wound up keeping me awake until midnight. Destiny is still that game that I can just play happily without much forethought. Since I had not done so in awhile I opted to do a heroic, and I have to say… it was pretty miserable. For whatever reason I almost always get the restorative mind when it comes to heroics…. which is essentially the destiny equivalent of the Oculus. No one that I know of likes it… because for starters it is a huge mission and involves the damned “move the orb” mechanic to keep pushing forward. Additionally there is a segment with a bunch of Vex Cyclops that are just annoying to deal with. Finally you have this horrible segment at the end, where you have to keep running the ball while trying to avoid the beam of death from the restorative mind… and at the same time avoiding waves of goblins and hobgoblins that spawn in. This is pretty easy to deal with in normal, but in heroic the stupid beam of death is quite literally that. I made it though and ended up with a few purples…. that wound up being disenchant fodder. I continued running 36 strikes from that point on until I finally got an Exotic to drop… which is ironically Truth, the weapon Xur is selling this week… but in a much better 290 version.

Player Versus

I Want a Strike on This Map

It is round about here that my night starts to get a little strange. I don’t hate the crucible but it is one of those activities that I never actually participate in. Similarly I have never done Iron Banner or Trials of Osiris… and I completely missed doing any of the Crimson Doubles. Essentially I am a no show for the player versus player activities, and I have no clue why… but on a whim last night I decided to start doing Iron Banner. Firstly I absolutely expected to be horrible, since Iron Banner is in theory worse for new players than Crucible. In the Crucible all players are scaled down gear wise to a happy medium allowing all players of all levels and gearings to be viable and on somewhat even ground. Iron Banner on the other hand does not scale the players down… and my lackluster 298 ass is nothing compared to the 330 folks that are running around in the zone. The funny thing is however that I seemed to do mostly okay. Sure there were occasions where I just got wrecked from out of nowhere, but there were lots of other occasions where I gunned down my target and even so much managed to get a three streak of kills before finally getting wrecked in return.

Actually Won Some Matches

I think what makes this feel more enjoyable than a lot of the player versus player combat I have experiences is that it quite literally feels like there is no negative. You play a match, you shoot some people, and at the end of it there is a chance of loot. There are no repair bills, there are no lasting consequences… and even when you die you pretty much instantly respawn. This feels more like the old school Doom deathmatch gameplay that I originally cut my teeth on. Maybe I have shunned PVP all of this time without good reason. Sure I rarely broke 1.0 KDR but as the night went on I got significantly better. I even managed to pull a legendary from the place, and am pretty close to ranking up with the Iron Banner. I have to say I am shocked at just how much I enjoyed myself, and in truth I really need to do more crucible as a result. All of this kinda makes me look forward to the Dark Zone in The Division, because hopefully I can get a team together and we can roll around as a group exploring. Maybe I am not as carebear as I always thought I was.