titan – Page 4 – AggroChat

A Matched Set

December 29, 2015 by Belghast

Holiday Goals

A Matched Set — 270 After Sifting Through Bank

There are a lot of folks that have goals going into the holiday season, for me… these tend to involve some gaming feat that would normally take a silly amount of time to do. One Christmas break I played through Mass Effect 3, and then started over from scratch and played from 1 to 3 again trying to control the outcome. The Christmas break that SWTOR was released I leveled as part of a duo from level 1 to 50. Other years my mission has been to level a character from start to finish in World of Warcraft, and I made a decent dent in that with pushing the druid from 1 to 40 so I could use that Yeti mount. This year one of the things on my list has been to finish leveling my Warlock who before this week was sitting at level 30 from the last time I got the urge to level. I am not exactly sure why but I have wanted to have a matched set of level capped characters in Destiny for awhile now. I think largely it is because when I am farming exotics, I hate the concept of items going to waste… and I pretty regularly got exotics for Warlocks in spite of not having one. So sitting in my bank I had 3 exotic helms and 1 exotic chest that were warlock only, as well as a few legendary warlock only items as well.

Throughout the course of yesterday afternoon, while the ice was falling outside… I was sitting upstairs in the warmth of my office plugging away at my warlock. Originally I started doing the House of Wolves content, since I tend to like it better than the Dark Below. However I quickly noticed that I was leveling way faster while simply working my way through the back log of bounties I had accumulated. As a result I spent most of my afternoon meticulously narrowing down the number of bounties I had until finally I was a sliver away from 40. I hopped down to Mars and completed a few missions and dinged. After sifting through my bank and spending a few legendary marks, I managed to push my overall light level up to 270 which is not too shabby for a fresh 40. The only negative is… some of my exotics are really specific to sub class and the only one I have made ANY movement in thusfar is Voidwalker. I really like jumping up into the air and throwing down three bombs at people… but at some point I need to push up sunsinger because for group activity that seems to be the best option. Self resurrection is slightly overpowered, but I figure it is something you save in reserve for when it looks like your group is going to wipe. However it should do well to feed Tlaloc whenever I get one.

Matched Set

It feels nice to have a matched set, and the funniest thing is…. every single one of my characters is an Exo. Mostly I had issues with not liking the other races character creation options. The humans were out because they lacked a beard…. because seriously… I cannot ever bring myself to play a human that doesn’t have a decent beard. The Awoken were out because well… space elves…. and I have a pretty deep hatred of most things elven. I am fine if other people want to play them… but they are very much not my thing. The best elves ever… were both from the Elder Scrolls setting… because Cannibal Wood Elves and Nasty Vile Dark Elves… are the only ones I can embrace fully. That left me with one race left to play… and since Destiny ultimately reminds me of playing Phantasy Star Online… and Exo is about as close as I can get to my Cast it was the clear winner. The awesome thing is though that each of my classes has a very fitting look and feel for their class, even though they are all technically just big robots.

I’ve not dwelled on it too much, but I really think that Phantasy Star Online being my first MMO… has greatly shaped how I feel about Destiny. The games have a very similar feel, with a lobby system of sorts being the tower… which equates pretty similar to the tower like area you ran around in PSO. Then you go out on missions that involve you going to planets and often times retracing the same areas over and over with slightly different features and creatures dependent upon your mission. I played the hell out of that game, up until the point when I got hooked on Everquest. The funny thing about it is, that as melee heavy as I was in other games… in PSO I always played a Cast Ranger. So the fact that I really enjoy Destiny doesn’t seem that shocking. It feels very much like the spiritual successor, minus the anime skin. At some point I really want to get into the raid in Destiny, but similarly to WoW…. I mostly just want to do it for the gear. Downing new content is cool and all, but the force that always drives me forward in these types of games… is the acquisition of new and cool things. When you take loot out of the equation, like in Final Fantasy XIV it is a serious hit to my enjoyment. Most of my dungeon running in FFXIV was in an attempt to complete cosmetic sets, and ultimately was still gear driven… just gear as an appearance not necessarily as function.

Next Mission

At this point I really need to buckle down and finish Fallout 4 main storyline, because this coming weekend we need to record the review show. I am not sure what exactly has happened but I have simply not been playing Fallout much over the last few weeks. I think we can blame most of it, on my re-entry into World of Warcraft and my desire to play “catch up”. Then this week has been a bit of a resurgence in Destiny, this combined with the only machine I have that plays Fallout 4 well enough is my upstairs computer. Over the course of our movie and television marathons I have largely been downstairs on the sofa in my comfy blanket cocoon. This has meant that Fallout sadly has been abandoned for the moment. I tried last night to play it some over steam in home streaming, and once I sorted out the many technically difficulties, I finally got it up and running. The only problem there was that the video stream would artifact out anytime I encountered much action, making it questionable if it is really worth playing it on my desktop… or if I would simply be better playing it on my laptop with greatly reduced graphical fidelity. My laptop will run it after all, but with a somewhat potato quality. In any case… I need to pick up where I left off and make some forward movement.

Week in Gaming 12/13/2015

December 13, 2015 by Belghast

Blogging is Hard

I’ve been in a bit of a relative funk this week, and found it extremely hard to get started writing most mornings. It is like for whatever reason my will to put fingers to keyboard and make important sounding things happen… has been drained out of me. At this point we are a few months away from going three whole years worth of blog posts, and I guess in a way it is having its toll on me. At this point I have far more regular readers than I have ever had at any other point in the blogs history, and that is freaking awesome. The fact that I have so many supportive people with my back… is ultimately the thing that keeps me moving forward on days like today. We recorded this insanely huge podcast last night where we took the normal crew of myself, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen… and included some other friends InkyBrushes, Nephsys and Pizzmaid. Sadly we were missing Ash but he had his own version of a really rough week. Combined we focused a single topic… and recorded for over two hours… which compressed down to just under it. The problem being… by the time I did even the most basic editing pass… it was around one in the morning.

I’ve been fighting what I think is largely sleep deprivation most of the week, and it has ended up with me falling asleep as early as 8 pm on a couple of the nights. Well granted I went to bed at 8pm… and read comics on my new kindle but still I ended up drifting off to sleep about 30 minutes to an hour later. I have been getting a lot of use out of my Marvel Unlimited account, and largely using it to read the backlog of awesome Star Wars comics. At first I went through what was available of the modern series, namely Star Wars and the Vader series. I started on the Princess Leia series but struggled with it, mostly because I simply was not a huge fan of the art style. Recently though I have been running back through and reading the Knights of the Old Republic series from the start. I am maybe a dozen episodes in at this point and I am loving it… this totally feels like I am consuming comics in the same way I binge Netflix shows. I just wish the lag between print and them showing up on Marvel Unlimited was not quite so great. The latest issues of the modern Star Wars comic to show up are from August of this year, but what I am really hoping is that they release the issues on a semi-monthly basis just with that lag. I can totally deal with reading comics late… I just want to be able to read them with a certain regularity.

World of Shipyards

This week has largely been about reconciling my differences with the Shipyard system. I commented last week that they were essentially a worst possible version of the Garrison system…. and in many ways I don’t have a significant change in that opinion. What did change however is that I realized that after so many of you told me about it… the Garrison addon I was already using had built in functionality to automate a good deal of the shipyard bullshittery as well. The end result is that I have somehow managed to learn to live with the Shipyards and they have rewarded me well for my blind submission. At this point between the three characters that have them… I have earned a hippo mount, a bunch of hellfire citadel gear caches, and more left sharks than I could ever have a use for… I seriously have three sitting in the inventory of my MooCowAdin. The problem with all of this of course is the fact that I now need to feed the beast that is the shipyard, and the only reliable way of doing this… is schlepping out to Tanaan jungle and completing the daily mission. Now some of my characters have been stockpiling oil from Garrison missions for along time now and won’t really have this problem… but Belghast is constantly struggling to pay his daily upkeep.

Other than this I have been slowly inching up my gear levels on Belghast and Belgrace, and attempting to run the Timewalking event on my alts… that can actually benefit from the 660-675 gear that they can drop. The funniest part of the week however has been learning that I don’t simply remember the BC era content as being significantly rougher… that it actually really is. PUG groups are simply not prepared for mobs that crowd control and fear the hell out of players… and are in no way ready for just how hard everything hits. There have been more wipes from the party finder than I have had in ages… and I am really enjoying every minute of it. The alliance side… has been a colossal mess of chain group joins and splits until finally we push through the dungeon. Horde side on the other hand.. people just buckle down and pick themselves up after a wipe and keep pushing forward. I guess when you have to wait through a thirty minute dps queue… you are significantly less likely to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble. Alliance will always be my first home because that is where my army of alts lives… but I have to say Horde is growing on me really quickly.

Fabian Strategy Lives

I know I spent a good deal of my post yesterday gushing about the new and revised Fabian Strategy… but seriously I am in love with this gun. It had been roughly a month since I had seriously spent much time in Destiny, and yesterday I poked my head back in. Apart from being woefully out of practice, I am still amazed at just how fun the moment to moment play is in this game. I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to play Battlefront, and the gameplay just doesn’t hold a candle to just how good Destiny feels. Now that I have this weapon that allows me to abuse all of my instincts, I can see myself really settling on it as my main gun. Now I have said that numerous times… and I know I said it recently with the Xhalo Supercell… but seriously…. this gun is amazing. I will always be a Titan at heart, because I want to play like a tank in most games. This gun makes me FEEL like a tank, because the chance of regeneration upon kill ends up firing a lot more frequently than I think most people realize. There have been several strikes that I survived entirely because of this weapon constantly triggering my shield regeneration. It is my goal this week to pop in periodically, and not go quite so long between play sessions.

Spindle Envy

November 3, 2015 by Belghast

Game of the Month

This month for AggroChat Game Club we decided to do something a little different. This was the brain child of Tam, who wished we had the time to really dig in and explore a much larger game. If you’ve noticed we tend to pick relatively short games for the Game Club because it gives us a shot in hell of beating it before the end of the month and we record the show. We also tend to pick relatively cheap games, making it easier for all of us to pick the title up… which a lot of times limits us to Indie titles. Instead this month we are digging wholeheartedly into post apocalyptic Boston… in Fallout 4. Since we are hitting that time of the year when people start to have conflicts, and we have decided to make Fallout span two months. So the plan is to have it be both the game of the month for November and December, with a bit of a preview show at the end of November to talk about our progress so far. Then around Christmas a tell all show talking about our feelings about the game and more importantly our experiences. This is the sort of game where everyone who sits down in front of it will have slightly different experiences, and at least to some extent I plan on trying to keep a running journal of what all I find in the wastes.

Fallout and I go far back, and I can honestly say I have been a huge fan of the series since its launch. I remember going to the local Wal-mart to buy a copy for the PC shortly after it launched, and pretty much losing all sense of time playing it. I wish I could say that I went as far back as Wasteland, but alas I did not. I remember the game, I remember people talking about it… but when it existed I simply did not have a computer. Fallout is one of those games that changed the way I felt about PC gaming in general. In the years prior to it, I was pretty much heavily a Super Nintendo gamer… thinking that Final Fantasy and the JRPG thing was the superior gaming experience. Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment… changed all of that and I started moving heavily away from the consoles and focusing almost entirely on PC RPGs and eventually allowing myself to get sucked into the MMO world. So it is with zero hyperbole that say that Fallout shaped the way I feel about gaming, so when a new one releases… I end up almost vibrating with excitement. I realize in the coming months I am pretty much going to be dead to the world apart from poking my head into the occasional game here or there. For at least the first several weeks my blog is pretty much going to be entirely devoted to my travels in post apocalyptic Massachusetts. I am hoping that you will join me in this adventure, and we will sort out how best to convey your experiences so we can talk about them on the podcast as well.

Lost to Light

Yesterday the mission in Destiny called “Lost to Light” was the daily heroic, and as a result that meant Black Spindle the exotic sniper rifle was once again available. I had plotted and schemed all day long about this being the night we would actually go do this. I was so phenomenally wrong…. but we at least made an attempt. I grabbed Carthuun and Squirrel Pope and we made a valiant attempt. Earlier in the day Squirrel had actually managed to get through the quest with a group, and while we didn’t succeed we didn’t do that horrible in the grand scheme of things. Basically I think we are still slightly too low light, but that seems to be the general problem… because I have no clue how to get over 300 reliably other than run the raid. Everything was going pretty smoothly, we destroyed the Ogre which started the sequence where we run through the hive fortress and branch off to go up onto the Ketch instead. Once on the Ketch we did fairly well for the most part, other than the room with all the snipers. It took us a lot longer in that room than it probably should have, which made everything feel that much more stressful. We were sitting roughly at the 5 minute mark when we set foot into the final room to fight the taken version of Taniks. From there… things just went bad… we died a lot… we failed to knock out one of the blights in the far back of the room… and we simply were not doing enough damage to the boss fast enough.

From there we decided to lick our wounds and head into Nightfall, because according to Squirrel it would be far easier than what we just went through. I am not disappointed mind you in our progress… it at least gives us a goal to work towards. Nightfall had a few frustrating moments but we took it nice and slow after the rushed experience of trying to clear to and defeat Taniks in ten minutes. When we finally downed Alak-Hul I got lucky enough for him to drop his unique helmet, which I am now rocking after some fiddling with it. I really love collecting these unique items, like the arms with the chain fist from the bond brothers strike. For the Nightfall itself I was awarded a 4th Horseman, which sadly I already had… so it pretty much immediately became an exotic shard which is never a bad thing. I’ve talked about this before but as far as shotguns go… I just cannot think of a situation where I would want 4th Horseman over Invective. From there we attempted to run a few heroics… which we got through the first one without issue… then during the second one Carth disconnected. He has been having some internet issues lately… and I forgot to set the group to “locked” so the game filled for us… and we ended up finishing the restorative mind with a stranger. All in all… which we had some frustrations it was still a really fun night, and I am hoping to be able to get in again tonight and do some more fun stuff.

Week in Gaming 11/1/2015

November 1, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye Summer

This is the week where we finally started to see some colder temperatures. Its funny that this has been the case for the last few years… that October for the most part has still be warm and sunny and if we still had our pool open… we probably could have swam in it all month long. We still have yet to see a freeze but this past week it was regularly in the 40s, when the week before it pretty much never dropped much down past the 70s other than the early morning. As a result this means our hibernation instincts are starting to kick into overdrive. We recorded the AggroChat podcast Friday night, which left us with all of Saturday to do whatever we wanted. The end result… is that we pretty much just stayed inside apart from a mad dash out of the house around 4 pm to run a few errands. I am perfectly fine with a weekend like this… my wife however has some inborn instinct that tells her that we if did nothing over a weekend… that the weekend is somehow a failure. Me… I see those as the most wonderful weekends ever.

Destiny

I had all of these plans to play some themed games for Halloween… but those plans pretty much died yesterday. Instead I ended up working on my Warlock and getting it to 21 from about level 8. I have to say the Warlock is growing on me over time… and I really really like Nova Bomb as a super goes. It is this awesome mix of the way the Havoc Fist super and Shadowshot super feel, where I can deliver death from above… but at a target instead of jumping down in the middle of everything. Having played all three classes… I have to say they have done an excellent job of giving them all something really neat and special about them that makes it rewarding to play. The hardest thing for me so far however has been adjusting to the Warlock jump. It just works so different than all of the others… and while I am starting to get the hang of it… I still have zero desire to do any of the platforming encounters with it. We will see when I get to the dreadnaught if I can figure out how to do the various chasm jumps with it. Hunter is simple… double jump, and Titan is similarly simple… you just have to sort out when you want to hover over your target before you land. Warlock… is just fiddly and annoying and I never can seem to do the sort of jump I need when I need it.

The secret of my success honestly was getting high enough level to where I could break out my Stranger’s Rifle and I plan on riding that puppy up as long as I can. That weapon is just so damned amazing… and I am ultimately going to have to sort out the process for getting the modern version of it. Sadly I don’t have much faction with Future War Cult, which is ultimately required to get the No Time to Explain exotic. As it stands right now my hunter is running up Future War Cult faction, but since I don’t play him nearly as much as I do my Titan it is lagging behind. I did manage to get my hunter up to 285 light, and I can now consistently him 297 light on my Titan. Getting 300 and beyond items just seems to be the problem, and I still decode so many 260ish items that are just trash. While I don’t mind so much if they are weapons… since I am consistently struggling to keep enough weapon parts on all three of my characters… but armor… I have more than enough to share. I want to take a moment to talk about how much I love the Bungie.net website for swapping stuff between my characters, and the fact that you can do it in the middle of a game play session. This is a really amazing feature.. and I have heard there are chrome plugins that streamline this process considerably.

For the last several weeks I have been on this mission to grind as many strikes as possible to get Exotic Engrams… and there was a method behind my madness. There was one weapon in this game that I wanted more than anything else… and that was.. the Zhalo Supercell. From the moment I saw it in a video, I loved the look of it as some sort of futuristic AK-47/Bolt Action Hybrid thing. What I loved more about it was the functionality of being able to chain lightning to all of the mobs around your target. The only problem being… I never seem to get weapon engrams. I get Helms and Gloves… and the occasional Chestpiece… but have pure hell getting any sort of weapon to drop. So you can imagine my excitement this Friday when Xur had none other than the Xhalo Supercell available. The only negative of course is that all Xur weapons start at 280 instead of the 290 that they are usually dropping for me as. I have managed to pour enough stuff into it to get it to 287 which will have to do for the time being. I love this gun, and more importantly I love the way it rips through mobs that always frustrated me. I’ve noticed when the lightning procs… it can hit Phalanx and Knights even if their shields are up which makes this gun freaking amazing. When I wrap up my post this morning I think I am going to stream/record for a bit and talk about some of my favorite weapons currently.

Another huge positive from this week is that one of the Armsday orders was the above Suros DIS-43 Scout Rifle. One of the rolls available had full auto… which makes this gun freaking amazing. It has good impact, solid range and really great stability which makes it pretty much the perfect scout rifle for me. This has now completely replaced Hung Jury in my current weapon load out. My Hung Jury essentially has maxed range which is nice… because I can use it much in the same way as I would a sniper rifle, but the Suros DIS-43 is just a much better all around weapon. I noticed it was available for Armsday orders again this week, and I put in for another one… so hoping that I can end up getting a third one for my Warlock. I have two of these now and they are just excellent. Hoping that everyone managed to get in on the full auto version from this past week because man… I am really enjoying it. My only problem with Suros weapons… is that I really don’t like the Red and White paint job. So this is another case that I would love to be able to repaint my weapons… like if I could put a Dead Orbit paint scheme on this thing… it would be perfect.

Secrets of Grindea

Another title that I played this week was Secrets of Grindea to get prepared for the Friday night podcast. I of course talked about this at length on the podcast, but this is a game where I went through a few different phases with it. At first… it didn’t really grab me. This was my pick for the month, and I largely picked it because some of the game footage I saw reminded me of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Secret of Mana. The early gameplay however… is kinda boring, and the first “boss battle” on the bridge felt a little uninspired. That was quickly followed up by the Giga Slime boss… which was absolutely brutal to do as a melee character. So I have to admit that knocked a lot of wind out of my sails as far as this game went. I did however manage to pick it back up this week and saw the game that I had not quite gotten to yet.

All I can say is… boy was I wrong to doubt this game. The quests are cute, and a parody of traditional RPG tropes…. without being cruel or slapstick about it. It is kinda a sly nod and wink to the fans of this genre… saying “we know” rather than trying to rub your face in it. We talked about this on the podcast, but this is essentially the game I had wished Citizens of Earth was. It is well written, has some interesting and often times hilarious characters, and presents a world for the grown up fans of the original Zelda games… not necessarily the same audience those games were targetting. The boss fights are really challenging, but each of them have a trick or a pattern that once you figure it out it becomes doable. That said I do think this game might have significantly more challenging encounters than Zelda did, because the above Hydra was essentially the point where the game broke me. After talking with my friends on the podcast… there was essentially a pattern that I was missing that hopefully means I can get in and wreck it now. There was not a single boss that did not take me multiple attempts… other that the first bridge encounter mind you. The game does a great job of check-pointing your progress so you start pretty close to where you died allowing you to get right back into the action and try again. Even though this is early access… I highly suggest checking it out… though admittedly you might just wait for the final version.

Devilian

The other game that I spent some time playing is Devilian, that was having another beta test weekend. I still have issues with the game, at least in the style of the character classes… and their gender locked nature. That said I do actually enjoy playing it, and I think it is a cool take on a normally Diablo clone environment. It feels like something different, and I find it significantly more challenging already than anything I saw in Diablo. Diablo gameplay felt “cheap” at times… where bosses would just straight oneshot you if you were unlucky or lacked the armor/skills to deflect the blows. This game requires you to react a lot more quickly to things happening and dodge out of the way of incoming damage. I’ve already encountered a boss that I just cannot currently beat, and I am hoping to come back to it once I have picked up a few more levels. I have this feeling that the boss is designed for multiple players to take him down… because he is right there out in the open rather than hidden behind a bunch of mobs.

The game is really damned pretty, and I will give it marks too for running extremely smoothly. I am still getting used to its somewhat quirky control scheme, but it makes sense. If I were in the permanent test group I would probably be playing this more regularly but with only having weekends to play it… it somewhat disincentives my time spent. My ultimate hope is that Trion has more control over this one than they do over ArchAge and that maybe just maybe they can get some of the changes in that will make the game more enjoyable. Like for example the game is desperately in need of some inventory management tools… like sort and compact. It feels so odd to be playing a game without those things at this point. I doubt the whole Gender locked classes thing will ever be solved, because that will mean a TON of art and animation work to get there. In truth, as I look at the other classes… it is highly unlikely that I would play any of them other than the berserker in the first place. I am just not much for ranged classes… and I have zero desire to play a character with a habitually open shirt. In truth I wish there was some sort of a “tanky” character like the Crusader in Diablo 3. That would probably ultimately be the class for me.