mmofps – Page 28 – AggroChat

All Hail Patch Day

April 12, 2016 by Belghast

Light be Praised

Today is the most magical of all days… patch day in Destiny. There have been times in the past when something so cool was being released that I have been giddy about the patch, and today is definitely one of those days. If you have not been following Destiny since the original launch, I have to say you have been missing something. This is one of those games that a lot of people wrote off completely after being frustrated with the original release. To be truthful even among the AggroChat folks… even though I talk about Destiny constantly… there are a handful of people that were burned so bad on this game that they never want to play it again. This is however a huge unfortunate thing since Taken King was for Destiny what the 2.0 patch was for Diablo 3. It was that period of time where so many things were just “made better”, because in many ways it was the start of Bungie realizing that a somewhat adversarial loot policy was a bad idea. That said there was still quite a bit of grind in Taken King, but it was the sort of grind that never made me feel like it was utterly hopeless. I could go out, get a bunch of engrams… and maybe just maybe one of them would be worth using to help infuse up all of the 280 weapons that I had sitting in my vault. The infusion system was so much better than hoping for a drop… and then not being able to use it because it didn’t have enough light on it like happened so often in Year One.

That said the infusion system was still a pain in the ass. I had my vault lined with 285 items that I could use as stepping stones to get those 280 arms day and vendor drops up to decent levels of light to make them usable in most activities. Last night I cleared every last bit of that out of my vault, because with today’s patch infusion will be 1 to 1. Meaning that if I get a 280 weapon, I can drop a 310 item into it and it becomes 310… no fiddling or calculations required. With today’s patch the light level is also being increased… to 335, with pretty much all of the “end game” activities from Iron Banner to Court of Oryx to the existing raid being able to drop high light level items. There is a part of the patch preview on the Bungie site that is a bit ambiguous talking about engrams now decoding to a minimum of whatever your equipped light level is. If that is the case I will sing the praises of this game from the rooftops because I have a vault full of weapons I would LOVE to use… but they are simply too low of light level to be viable. While I didn’t start saving nearly as far back as my friend Squirrel did (simply for lack of bank space) I did start saving pretty much every engram I have gotten in the last few days. The hope is that tonight when I log in I can start decoding them and hopefully get some really nice upgrades to my overall light levels.

Hope of Stability

As is often the case on various game subreddits, some user has created a really excellent list of all of the content that players might need to know about coming back to the game. While I fully expect there to be a deluge of returning players, this really is the ideal time to reinstall the game and start once more. This patch packed some pretty massive quality of life issues, and if the grind bothered you before… that should be significantly lessened now. As far as how I spent my last night before the patch… we were attempting to play clean up on the stranded Kings Fall raid from Tuesday. I’m part of the group formerly known as the Rookie Raid, that has now been renamed to the Squirrel Squad. Though based on the folks that sign up instantly… I was going to suggest Jexy Squirrelghast for the unofficial name. While I still very much feel like a rookie, I guess I have picked up more information than I realize. Granted I still suck horribly at the jumping puzzles and more than likely always will. I died so many times to the wall last night it wasn’t even funny. That said I wasn’t the last person to get to the chest, nor the last person to get up through the rock pillar vertical puzzle either. As far as the stranded raid… well we spent most of our time attempting to get the Warpriest challenge mode, and as a result we simply ran out of time to move on beyond it. We wound up simply killing the Warpriest in non-challenge mode, which I felt was at least in part my fault… given that it was my first time doing platforms.

Last night we more or less cruised along nicely thought Golgoroth, and Sisters… only to run into some logistical first timer issues on Oryx. The fight has a lot of things to take in and we straight up got robbed of at least one kill when half of the orbs didn’t detonate even when players were standing on them. The raid ended in frustration, because we simply ran out of time and available resources to keep pushing. I greatly appreciate all the non-rookies that stuck in and pushed forward trying to get Nidrew his first kill, and it is my hope that tonight the servers will be stable enough for us to give a good push at trying to get that kill this evening. Part of the becoming “Squirrel Squad” is that we moved the start time back to 8pm CST giving us an extra hour worth of attempts on stuff to hopefully get the clear. That 9pm start just guaranteed that by the time we hit Oryx we were all a little loopy and out of it. The only gotcha tonight is that given my history of big landmark patches in the various MMORPGs I have played… I totally do not expect the servers to actually be playable tonight. I will be totally fine with just doing small activities roaming around this evening, and maybe taking in some Court of Oryx. However I am still holding out hope that we might be able to do the 320 version of the Kings Fall raid tonight, and get folks some new and shiny upgrades.

Sword Logic

April 9, 2016 by Belghast

Conversions Away

Last night I had every intent of logging into The Division and playing it all night long. If nothing else I knew I needed to pop in long enough to convert all of my materials to orange or blue quality. This Tuesday there is a pretty horrible nerf coming down the pipe in crafting. In the case of high end crafting it is more than doubling the amount of materials needed to craft something through the form of an extremely lossy conversion of materials. Right now it takes 5 greens to make 1 blue, and 5 blues to make 1 orange crafting material. Which has always felt like a pretty fair method. However after the patch it will take 10 green mats to make a single blue, and 15 blues to make a single orange. To make matters worse they are also nerfing the amount of materials you get off of deconstruction which right now usually yields two materials… but after the patch it will more consistently yield a single material. Essentially all of the love I have for Destiny and the quality of life improvements… I am feeling the opposite for Division and what seems to be some very unfair changes for the casual player. As a result I highly suggest you get into the game and convert everything you have up to the highest tier of material you can make.

Unfortunately there is no batch conversion option so you will be holding space bar and hitting escape a bunch to burn through your materials. It took me about twenty minutes to convert everything up because I really did have a lot of materials. I need to focus on farming some more weapon nodes this weekend so that I can hopefully convert up at least enough to get 10 for one weapon. Right now high end craftables take 8 orange mats, and after the patch they are going to require 10. I didn’t notice any mentioned nerfs to the world nodes, so I am wondering if these changes are designed to get players to prioritize going after them instead of simply killing a bunch of stuff to deconstruct. In any case I know today/tonight I plan on farming as many nodes as I can get my hands on with the hopes of converting it all upwards into shiny orange materials. In the process of screwing around yesterday I did manage to complete a mission and hit 23 so at some point I really need to make the final push to 30 so I can join in all the fun end game “reindeer games”.

Unintended Exotics

As unexcited as I am about The Division patch…. I am insanely so about the Destiny patch. Yesterday I was super pumped to see what the next Playstation exclusives would look like, namely I really really want that new exotic sniper because it has an almost Tex Mechanica vibe. I also think the new Jovian Guard armor set is probably the coolest Titan armor to date, so I will absolutely be farming up a set of it, which should go a lot more smoothly given that I can infuse things much easier. On the infusion department there is some conflicting information up on the Bungie site, but it makes it sound like we will no longer get engrams to decode to less light than our converted light total. Meaning that if you are 309 light when you decode you should get items of level 309 or higher. What is confusing is this seems like a massive change, but one that I really welcome. I am sick of getting 260 blues and 270 purples from engrams. I’ve been holding onto a vault full of interesting weapons, that just need to be infused to use… so I am amped that this might mean that process becomes super simple. At some point before Tuesday I really need to sort through my vault and deconstruct all of the lower level items that I was holding onto as stepping stones for leveling higher stuff from 280 and beyond.

I didn’t intend to play Destiny last night, but at some point during the evening I flipped over to the clan messaging app and saw that my friend Jex was trying to get ahold of me. Now I have needed to finish up the Exotic sword quest for some time, but I wasn’t really pushing the issue. It turns out that Jex and Squirrel were looking for something to do last night, and thought that it would be the perfect time to work on that quest for me. The sunless cell is probably my least favorite strike because I don’t like the whole “not being able to see” aspect, and the exploding thralls coming out in close proximity. That said the worst part about it last night was the anxiety of not wanting to screw up the pattern. You have to bleed down the main boss to where you can finish him off in a hit or two… and then drop the warden of your elemental type and then within 30 seconds finish off the boss to complete the quest. The problem being that the flame sword warden is apparently the most annoying because he could almost one shot all of us.. and we were well above the suggested 300 light. We managed to do it in a single attempt, but with a lot of resurrections in the process. Afterwards we popped over to the dreadnaught and did some Court of Oryx, with the goal of finishing some antiquated runes so we would each have a stack to go through with the patch on Tuesday. I know personally I have six, but it sounded like Squirrel had a full stack of them. The hope is that we can farm up one or more of those 335 artifacts to boost our light level before the raid that same night. In any case I am super grateful for the group, and my shiny new exotic 310 sword.

Sword Logic

April 9, 2016 by Belghast

Conversions Away

Unintended Exotics

Chasing Happy

April 8, 2016 by Belghast

Obliviously Chill

This week has been an interesting one so far. I’ve been trying to take these mood enhancers that I had fallen out of the habit of taking on a daily basis. According to my wife it makes a huge difference when I am taking them, versus when I am not. However on Wednesday night they caused me to more or less forget that I had a raid to attend. I was sitting there happily on the sofa watching Daredevil Season 2 and screwing around in Destiny through the official remote play application… and next thing I know around 9pm I check into Slack and realize that I had completely blown off the Wednesday night WoW Raid thing. Thankfully they were able to make it work without me, which is awesome… but I was otherwise completely oblivious to having anything going on that night. Like in the back of my head there was a vague feeling that I was supposed to be doing something, but I was so chill that apparently I never actually acted upon that thought. I partially blame Daredevil because really, this season so far has been enthralling. I only started watching it Wednesday night because our cable box was uncooperative, and I couldn’t seem to get anything else up on the screen.

I’ve been feeling generally disconnected from the world, and my hope is that the happy pills will help to curb that instinct and allow me to actually participate in it again. I’m not even certain what caused me to stop taking them, other than one day I simply forgot… and the next day I forgot… and so on until I was out of the habit. I’ve had quite a bit of work stress lately, combined with the stress of all of the home renovation “change” has kinda pushed me into another funk. After a sequence of bad mental health days, I came to the realization that I really should be taking them again. When I am not doing great, I tend to throw up this wall and paint a happy face on it… then duck behind it hoping the world will go away. I realize this is largely a defense mechanism, but it feels so much safer behind the wall than out in front of it interacting openly. Everything feels like it is buzzing past so fast that I can’t really grasp what is going on, or who is attempting to interact. So when I am sitting in this mode I spend a lot of time staring at things, without actually understanding what I am looking at or how it actually relates to me. One of the things I have tried to do with this blog is be pretty open about whatever is going on with me… even if it is the not so great stuff.

Warlock vs Oryx

Through the course of playing Destiny I managed to push all three classes to 40, but some of them get a lot less use. Namely my Warlock has kinda become the unloved child of the bunch, because no matter how much I try… I never can seem to get the hang of their damned jump. It always feels like a much less useful version of the Titan jump. Hunter makes perfect sense… they have triple or quadruple jump depending on if you have the Bones of Eao equipped. Warlock jump however never seems to do the thing I want it to do when I want it to do it. However lately thanks to the magic of the Remote Play application I have been poking around on that character, because in the grand scheme of things… it has the least impact on my other activities. The problem is that I really have not done much questing. I ground my way to 40 through the various patrol missions and had not even completed the Taken King content. So last night I decided to pick up where I had left off in that quest chain, which turns out about four quests from the end of it. This was a big nuisance since anytime I got one of those ever so lucrative “Patrol the Dreadnaught” bounties, I couldn’t actually do that… and would end up having to complete a story mission to get kill credit. Over the course of the night however I managed to finish the main story arc of the Taken King and it is ridiculously easy when you are sitting at 292 light.

Also while doing stuff on the Warlock, I decided to go ahead and do the Stormcaller quest chain so that I could unlock that class. I have to say having done all of them now, this one was probably my favorite. I loved the whole “taming the storm” aspect of the quest because it really seems to it the class as a whole. Now unfortunately I need to just do a bunch of leveling to top off my various subclasses. I have all three maxed on the Titan, but for the others… I have Nightstalker on the Hunter maxed, and absolutely none of the Warlock classes maxed with Sunsinger being the closest since I figured the whole self rez thing would be the most needed like a Titan bubble. I wish there were versions of the mark/bond/cloak that increased leveling for classes other than the ones added with Taken King. Even if you had to do some sort of a quest to earn them, it would be a welcome addition for anyone trying to top off all three classes. The only problem with running Strikes/Crucible to level is that I feel like I am not entirely effective because I am missing large chunks of my abilities. So instead I just end up running bounties and screwing around in the patrol missions which seems like the slowest way to level sub classes. However all of this is great “playing from the couch on the remote play app” fodder so it will probably see a lot more screen time than it previously did. Before the ability to reliably play remotely, the only time I was really playing Destiny was to go do group activities. Now I can do a lot of solo questing from the comfort of the living room and it is making me play catch up on all of those things I largely ignored.