mmofps – Page 25 – AggroChat

Combo Breaker

May 20, 2016 by Belghast

Ending the Streak

The other day I talked about how the three plus year streak has been looming over my head like this impassable object. After long thought I’ve decided that the sooner I break it the better, and as a result I will not be making posts this weekend. I mean that is in part a lie since I will be posting over on AggroChat Sunday morning in the form of our weekly episode. However tomorrow morning I am going to chill out, and eat my breakfast in peace with zero thought of what the hell I am going to post that morning. That is at least the theory… I have a feeling that in practice it is going to be a lot harder to NOT post than it is to post. The end goal is basically to reach a point where I am posting a new post every workday morning, so I can continue the routine of drink coffee and write about stuff. That means weekends and holidays I get to myself, or more than likely it just means I start gaming a little earlier on those days. My hope is that some time off is actually going to present topics that I want to talk about, rather than trying to wrack my brain for a new post.

I have to tell you I am a little nervous about this “new experiment” following up the previous “grand experiment”. It makes solid sense to just post week days since those are the days that folks generally read on. However at this point I am just used to the comfortable routine. So in theory the next time you will hear from me is Monday morning. As far as my weekend plans… I think I have a pretty chill one ahead of me. Tonight may or may not be a thoroughly awkward family dinner, largely because I have not decided if I am actually going or not. We just had one of these a few weeks back, but there is a family member in town that folks have not seen in some cases years… so folks are pulling together an impromptu dinner. Past that I am hoping the report of non-stop rain is exaggerated and I get to spend a little time out on the back porch. I have bubbles that need blowing. Last weekend I went to a birthday/adoption party and they had bubbles for the kids… and it made me remember just how damned much I love blowing bubbles. So I bought myself a small bottle of the soapy mess for hanging out on the back porch. Viva adulthood and the ability to buy your own damned toys!

Light Level Cap

It has been a little over a month since I last set foot in the Kings Fall raid, or at least it seems like it. There was a bit of a change around that ended up with Squirrel trying to start an earlier raid team beginning at 8 pm which is more sane and rational for those of us who get up at 5 in the morning for work. However that never really took off in the fashion that we had hoped, and it also lead for the official “rookie” raid night to get moved to Wednesdays. As a result of this switcheroo I simply didn’t raid for several weeks, and this week was my first time signing up again largely on the promise of a “guaranteed” 335 artifact from the War Priest Challenge Mode. Unfortunately that Guarantee like oh so many things in Destiny, was not really set in stone and I wound up getting yet another damned 334 item. I did however have a lot of fun running the raid, and after some time away from it all of the jumping puzzles that stress me out so much didn’t seem quite so bad. I even managed to run the orb on sisters without screwing up too badly.

Last night Squirrel, Jex and I had what has become somewhat of a tradition… a night of Challenge of Elders and whatever the hell else any of us happened to need. So on paper this should have been one of the easiest weeks, with precision shot bonus experience. However in many cases we struggled to survive and I think it was largely the inclusion of “fresh troops” into the mix. I died so damned many times last night, and we were just shy of being able to get to the 90,000 bonus in two rounds. I would have felt bad about my performance were it not for the fact that both Jex and Squirrel died quite a bit as well. The frustrating thing about CoE is it has become one of those “unskippable” activities each week because it is one of the few reliable means of getting 335 loot. I say that… however almost every single item I got this week was a damned 334, which is completely maddening. There seems to be some bug that hits where instead of giving you upgrades it starts giving you side grades. That said I did manage to get a Titan Mark as end of match loot, and then after CoE we went to the Dreadnaught for some Court of Oryx. After summing three Tier 3 events… the final one dropped my 335 Artifact taking me to the current light level cap. This is extremely exciting for me, because this represents the first time in my history playing this game that I have EVER been capped on light. Special thanks to Squirrel, Jex, Wet and the entire Axioma Clan for helping me get here.

A Little Closer

May 4, 2016 by Belghast

Best Laid Plans

I had these grand plans for last night, and as is always the case when I seem to plan something… that is precisely what won’t actually happen. The original goal was to pop into Destiny “for a bit” and get CoE finished on my Titan for the week, so that I could end up doing it later in the week on both the Warlock and Hunter. I’ve managed to get the light levels up on both enough to be able to start getting decent loot. The other goal was to chill out downstairs and play some more Diablo 3 since I am one piece of gear away from being able to rock the Invoker set over the Akkhan set, which I think is going to improve my quality of life greatly. That said I am starting to maybe get the hang of playing Akkhan but still missing several items that make the build really viable. I am however loving the flail that gives me an army of phalanxes to run around with me. I think maybe that is ultimately going to be the best option for running with the Akkhan set since they seem to shred everything in my path. I did get to play a little Overwatch last night however when my friend Tamrielo got home, and was pleasantly surprised that he too enjoys the game. I am not sure if he is really a convert but it at least gets why the game feels better than Team Fortress 2, which was something I had trouble putting into words. I managed to get in a few matches before my wife got home, and we ended up walking to go get dinner.

When we got back I started in with the Destiny bounties, and ultimately ran a Prison of Elders to get my weekly loot box for completing that activity. Last week I experienced a glitch, where after running a CoE I could not seem to be able to get the loot box, so I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. From this point onwards it was me trying to get Jex and Squirrel together in the same group at the same time, which is not something that happened until about 8:30. This weeks Challenge of Elders is a little tougher than past examples because the bonus damage and bonus scoring have no real synergy. For example in past weeks you had bonus damage from primary weapons, and bonus scoring from headshots… so those two worked nicely with you simply focusing on primary weapon headshots. This time around the bonus damage was melee based, but the bonus scoring was super kills. Meaning we spent a good deal of time wandering around waiting for our super bars to tick up so that we could get bonus scoring. We managed to get the 30,000 score step pretty easily in our first attempt, but did not score high enough to be able to get the 90,000 within two matches.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

It was round about this time that the monkey wrench was thrown into the works, as Squirrel had signed up for the Crota’s End retro raid. So Jex and I ended up getting pulled along after our first Challenge of Elders match into that. Other than simply not being what I had planned to spend my night doing, I was totally down with this because I had never seen that raid. For the most part I think I did okay and didn’t screw anything up horribly. One of the group was hunting for the Crux of Crota that is used in the long quest chain that ultimately winds up rewarding you the Necrochasm Auto Rifle. As a result we saved off a number of check points, which meant jumping off the back wall into the abyss so many times. However this also meant that instead of just doing the raid on my Titan I was able to swap to multiple characters and get lots of stuff. The only negative here is that apparently you get rewarded the two shaders and emblem ever single time you kill Crota if they were not already in your inventory. What I did find odd is that every single time the Word of Crota hand cannon dropped, but with slightly different perks. The only potential gotcha here was that I had to break out a rocket launcher with tracking and/or the horseshoes and hand grenades perk. Thankfully I had a truth, that I ultimately leveled up… even though I never actually use rocket launchers.

In other news I am now down to the point where I need a helm, primary, class item, and artifact at 335 to max out. So the end result allows me to sit fairly comfortably at 334, which should help quite a bit when getting drops. As far as Challenge of Elders loot, I wound up getting arms and another copy of the Her Fury sniper rifle with crappier stats than the one I have been using. Speaking of sniper rifles this seems to be my week to get them, because I also managed to pull a LDR 5001 from a Vanguard package. This seems to be the sniper that a lot of the youtubers are actively hunting god rolls for, but I don’t even know for certain what a god roll would look like. The one I got has Partial Refund, High Caliber Rounds, and Firefly which is decent… but I would have rather had triple tap somewhere in there because that comes in so damned handy for boss fights. It is probably a great option for like heroic strikes or non-boss PVE content, but not having triple tap really places it below my existing 1000 Yard Stare or Her Fury. The main reason why I was interested at all is just because it is really damned cool looking. Also you can see from the above ship shot that I managed to get a ship from Variks, which for whatever reason I thought was a Trial of Osiris ship when I had seen people using it. Was ultimately a really great night, just one that didn’t got as planned. That however is perfectly okay because sometimes the end result is much better.

Crusaders and Guardians

May 1, 2016 by Belghast

Season Six

While I greatly enjoy the concept of the Developer Appreciation Week… I am always somewhat happen when it is over. During the week I feel like I have to be making posts along that them, so when things happen that I want to talk about… I end up pushing them down until the week is ultimately over. Now as I sit here for the first unfettered post in awhile… I am finding it super hard getting started. The biggest happening of this weekend is that Friday evening at 7pm my time the newest Diablo 3 season began. For season six I opted to roll a Female Crusader, because I had so much fun playing as one last season. I have this general goal of getting a male and female of each class eventually, but that also means that someday I will have to finish playing that mage and attempt to play a witch doctor. The only problem I am running into is that it feels like what made the crusader so amazing last go round… was the fact that the Invoker set was just phenomenal. Now that I have my six piece Akkhan set, it doesn’t feel anywhere near as powerful as I did last season. In fact while the set dungeon was a breeze for me last go around, this one is only causing chain wipes. Granted I am not nearly as geared as I was at this point last year, in part because I am not getting drug by Carthuun.

When the season started we ended up with six people on the guild discord, and as a result we split into two three player teams. Ultimately ending up with me and Grace playing together, with Solaria and Kodra joining up for short periods of time. Towards the end of the evening Kylana was with us as well as the other three player team ultimately disolved with Ashgar got pulled away for work, and Callalil went to bed. I myself only lasted through level 60, because that was ultimately the point at which I was starting to fall asleep at the keyboard. So I went to bed around 11pm and the rest of the group pushed onward. Yesterday morning Grace and I ended up playing together, and she helped me get the rest of the way to 70, and unlock my gear set. She was sitting over 100 paragon levels, which means that more than likely Carth is sitting around 300ish. At some point I will join in his Torment X shenanigans because I really need some gear. All in all it was a great start of the new season, and at some point I will sort out my spec and with gear should be able to solo more stuff. Right now the challenge is finding thorns on gear, and I have ended up burning through all of my materials trying to enchant away useless stats and turn them into thorns.

Banana Split

Another awesome happening this weekend is that yesterday while waiting on folks to show up for the AggroChat game of the month show, I managed to push my Hunter to rank 5. This is the first month that I managed to get to characters to rank 5, and I’ve since started working on getting the warlock there as well. My hope is that after I finish knocking out this blog post I will head upstairs and work on that. Iron Banner has been really damned good to me, letting me amass a lot of gear and weapons that will ultimately either get used as is or serve as infusion fodder. In theory I should probably be doing matches on my Titan with the hopes of getting more 335 items, but it feels good actually working on my other characters. After playing the hunter I can absolutely see why they do so damned well in the crucible. Throwing knives are amazing, and I had so much fun yesterday finishing off people with them. I still feel like golden gun however is the least exciting of the supers, but I am getting used to using it to optimal efficiency. There was one point where I managed to get three kills in a row with it and earned the way of the gun trophy.

Over the course of the week I have picked up so much gear, with the latest acquisition being a 335 Tormod’s Bellows. The only challenge here is that I am not sure if I will keep it or infuse it into one of my heavy weapons. I could really use a 335 sword… just saying. The funny thing is… I got the 335 drop on my absolute lowest level character while working on the Warlock yesterday. So I am wondering if maybe the buff in faction that you get for pushing up additional characters does something as well to the chances of getting max light drops as well? In any case another Iron Banner has come and almost gone, and I have loved every minute of it. I finally sorted out why I like PVP in Destiny and never have in other games. There is something about getting real loot at the end of matches, as opposed to a currency in lieu of loot that can maybe someday add up to be enough to get something interesting. I love random chance, and I love being rewarded with interesting stuff. More so than that… I love getting not quite perfect items… and then trying to figure out how to use them to my advantage.

Lucky Banana

April 28, 2016 by Belghast

Strange Dream

This morning I am opting to make a more traditional blog post rather than an other DAW post because… well the DAW posts take a lot out of me. It takes a lot of effort to summon up this hardcore reminiscing, and after doing four of them, I need to take a day off. I am sure I will return tomorrow with another segment. Though it seems like not that many people are joining in, and it was a little disheartening the other day when a friend of mine called it a marketing gimmick. In truth we forgot about it this year, and I felt that it was bad that we forgot about it. Normally speaking this thing is supposed to happen during the last week of March, but instead I rescheduled it to happen the last week of April because I didn’t want a year to go by without this thing happening. I feel it is important for us as players to remember that the games we often complain about… are made by actual human beings who just want to do a good job. So it only seems fitting to spread a little love around during a single week in the year. I don’t really get anything out of doing it, and I am certain Scarybooster didn’t when he first started doing the event back in 2010. So if it is a marketing gimmick it is a piss poor design.

I’ve been pretty sick over the last few days, a combination of allergies and asthma, so last night I decided that I really needed to turn in early and get a full nights sleep. I had a really strange dream as a result and I can only assume it is due to me not exactly being all here right now. So I had this dream that I was being thrown a birthday party, but instead it was all of my internet friends. There is a lot of the dream I am already forgetting but there were some really strange moments. For example my friend Tam that I record AggroChat with, had this circa 1980s Lisa Frank folder with a rainbow colored tiger on it… and inside he had written on big chief notepad paper… these summaries of different pen and paper character archetypes. For some reason Markiplier was there, which I found odd because I only really know of him from various Pax panels. He ended up getting me a gift called a “Cat Tether” which is supposed to be I guess like a cat leash? The box looked like it came from the as seen on television aisle at Walgreens. The rest of the dream is pretty fuzzy but I thought it was strange enough that it was worth writing about. In any case I feel more rested this morning and feeling a little less horrible, so I guess it worked?

Iron Banana

The other reason why I wanted to take a day off from DAW is that I want to talk about the current Iron Banner. Largely I want to talk about it… while there is still enough time to people to get into Destiny and participate. In the past loot from Iron Banner felt like it was few and far between, but it seems like Bungie cranked the switch up to 11. On average it felt like every three to four matches I was getting a piece of legendary gear. This week the items up for grabs are boots, class items, Tormod’s Bellows Rocket Launcher, and Haakon’s Hatchet a bullet hose type Auto Rifle. The loot that you get as drops seems to be limited to these four items that are available. From the moment you hit rank 1, aka after your first match/bounty turn in you seem to be able to get either the Class Armor or Boots. When you hit rank 3 the weapons start dropping, and I got my first Hatchet from that next match after hitting the rank. The rank 3 package sadly is only a 320 artifact, which isn’t all that good for infusion, however all of the items that you end up getting are. For most of the matches I have been sitting between 327-330 depending on my weapon loadout, and all of my gear so far has been 332-334 with sadly no 335s as of yet.

Over the course of my matches so far I have managed to get four Auto Rifles, six boots, six titan marks, and a single rocket launcher. Now the dropped variants have wildly differing rolls, but I managed to latch onto one that wasn’t too horrible and have been using it for most of the banner. Hip Fire sadly is useless on an Auto Rifle, but the other stats on this one are pretty great. Right now I am a little over half of the way to Rank 5, and the goal is to buy the vendor roll which is phenomenal and infuse this 334 into it. The vendor rolls for pretty much everything are really good this time a round, and if I actually cared about rocket launchers I might consider picking that one up. If I ever use a rocket launcher I am going to use Truth for the tracking ability, because I suck at using rocket launchers. Other things I have figured out, is that 330 seems to be the current cap for faction packages, because during the course of the last few weeks I have turned in a ton of Future War Cult, Vanguard and Crucible packages… and essentially everything I have gotten stopped at 330. The funniest thing is that the last three Crucible packages have all rewarded me the exact same primary scout rifle The Saterienne Rapier, one of which was worth holding onto because it had hidden hand and explosive rounds… however the bulk have served as infusion fodder allowing me to bring up weapons I will actually use more often. As far as Scout Rifles go… I am most likely to use my brand new Hand of Judgement that I pulled out of Challenge of Elders this week.