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Light Rising

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Light Rising

I’ve been on a bit of a Destiny kick lately, and that has involved trying to do at a minimum all of the Rise of Iron bounties that Shiro hands out each week.  These largely involve running around the plaguelands and doing “stuff” like specific patrols and participating in world events.  I’ve also recently discovered the bounty that is the Archon’s Forge.  I admit I was a little intimidated for awhile, given that when you enter the forge it essentially locks you out of leaving.  My ultimate fear is that this place would murder me with great prejudice given my relatively low light levels.  That fortunately was not really the case, and I was also pleased to see that the same sort of “key trading” behavior exists in the forge as it did in the Court of Oryx.  I’ve been playing entirely solo so far since the launch of Rise of Iron, mostly because I am playing in short bursts rather than hanging out and making myself available to the clan for shenanigans.  However pretty much any time I have rolled down to the Forge, there have been people there waiting and willing to summon stuff for us to fight.  I still have trouble with the “purple” quality keys, but both green and blue ones seem largely feasible.  Unfortunately it seems like you have zero control over what sort of key drops for you, and at this very moment I happen to be sitting on a purple key myself.

Light Rising

The forge is quite literally a modern day version of the “loot cave” because after thirty minutes or so of running keys back to back… you end up with a full mail box.  This is not actually a screenshot from last night, but one I had laying around from one of my previous trips into the Forge.  Last night however it became significantly more lucrative for me personally.  Patch 2.4.1 did some juggling of things in preparation for the release of the Heroic Mode raid.  As a result the light economy of items got bumped up a bit, allowing folks a slightly easier time catching up.

  • Rare Engrams will now decrypt up to 365 Light
  • Legendary Engrams will now decrypt up to 385 Light
  • Exotic Engrams will now decrypt up to 400 Light
  • Faction packages will now provide drops up to 390 Light

So as a result to these tweaks… I entered last nights play session at 554 and exited at 560 and on the cusp of pushing over the line with several 361 items.  In the first screenshot I am decked out in Future War Cult colors… because I picked up some quest asking me to do a bunch of content both PVE and PVP repping the FWC.  I have no clue what that actually will lead to but I am interested to see.  The moment to moment gameplay of Destiny still feels as great as it ever did, and I am pumped that I can pop in for an hour and do a few things and feel like I moved the needle forward.  I am super loot centric in my games, and so long as I am progressing my gear levels I feel like I am making meaningful progress.

Light Rising

The ultimate short term goal is to get to 365 so that I can join in all of the reindeer games…  namely have access to the normal mode of the raid.  I’ve heard amazing things about it, but I have just lacked the drive to grind things out in the strike play list.  In fact I have yet to run a single strike since the implementation of Rise of Iron…  which seems a little odd given how often I used to run them for nothing more than burning Three of Coins.  I feel like I am torn in a bunch of different directions right now and trying to juggle actively playing four different games:  Destiny, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV.  As a result I am doing a somewhat shitty job of keeping up in any of them other than World of Warcraft, where I seem to be spending most of my time.  That said in WoW I feel like I am bumping up against the ceiling for the gear levels I can realistically achieve other than through my Wednesday night raid… so some of my drive there is siphoning off.  At the very least I am not really doing the world quests like I used to, because I know there is shit for gear out of them at my levels.  This excess time seems to be getting funneled right back into Destiny, but I do need to steal a little bit of it and work on my gearing in Final Fantasy XIV as well.  I am absolutely holding our group back from doing some of the new content because I am about 15 item levels short of being where I should be.  If only I could clone myself… and keep those clones at home all day long playing all the things I want to be playing.

Light Rising

by

Light Rising

I’ve been on a bit of a Destiny kick lately, and that has involved trying to do at a minimum all of the Rise of Iron bounties that Shiro hands out each week.  These largely involve running around the plaguelands and doing “stuff” like specific patrols and participating in world events.  I’ve also recently discovered the bounty that is the Archon’s Forge.  I admit I was a little intimidated for awhile, given that when you enter the forge it essentially locks you out of leaving.  My ultimate fear is that this place would murder me with great prejudice given my relatively low light levels.  That fortunately was not really the case, and I was also pleased to see that the same sort of “key trading” behavior exists in the forge as it did in the Court of Oryx.  I’ve been playing entirely solo so far since the launch of Rise of Iron, mostly because I am playing in short bursts rather than hanging out and making myself available to the clan for shenanigans.  However pretty much any time I have rolled down to the Forge, there have been people there waiting and willing to summon stuff for us to fight.  I still have trouble with the “purple” quality keys, but both green and blue ones seem largely feasible.  Unfortunately it seems like you have zero control over what sort of key drops for you, and at this very moment I happen to be sitting on a purple key myself.

Light Rising

The forge is quite literally a modern day version of the “loot cave” because after thirty minutes or so of running keys back to back… you end up with a full mail box.  This is not actually a screenshot from last night, but one I had laying around from one of my previous trips into the Forge.  Last night however it became significantly more lucrative for me personally.  Patch 2.4.1 did some juggling of things in preparation for the release of the Heroic Mode raid.  As a result the light economy of items got bumped up a bit, allowing folks a slightly easier time catching up.

  • Rare Engrams will now decrypt up to 365 Light
  • Legendary Engrams will now decrypt up to 385 Light
  • Exotic Engrams will now decrypt up to 400 Light
  • Faction packages will now provide drops up to 390 Light

So as a result to these tweaks… I entered last nights play session at 554 and exited at 560 and on the cusp of pushing over the line with several 361 items.  In the first screenshot I am decked out in Future War Cult colors… because I picked up some quest asking me to do a bunch of content both PVE and PVP repping the FWC.  I have no clue what that actually will lead to but I am interested to see.  The moment to moment gameplay of Destiny still feels as great as it ever did, and I am pumped that I can pop in for an hour and do a few things and feel like I moved the needle forward.  I am super loot centric in my games, and so long as I am progressing my gear levels I feel like I am making meaningful progress.

Light Rising

The ultimate short term goal is to get to 365 so that I can join in all of the reindeer games…  namely have access to the normal mode of the raid.  I’ve heard amazing things about it, but I have just lacked the drive to grind things out in the strike play list.  In fact I have yet to run a single strike since the implementation of Rise of Iron…  which seems a little odd given how often I used to run them for nothing more than burning Three of Coins.  I feel like I am torn in a bunch of different directions right now and trying to juggle actively playing four different games:  Destiny, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV.  As a result I am doing a somewhat shitty job of keeping up in any of them other than World of Warcraft, where I seem to be spending most of my time.  That said in WoW I feel like I am bumping up against the ceiling for the gear levels I can realistically achieve other than through my Wednesday night raid… so some of my drive there is siphoning off.  At the very least I am not really doing the world quests like I used to, because I know there is shit for gear out of them at my levels.  This excess time seems to be getting funneled right back into Destiny, but I do need to steal a little bit of it and work on my gearing in Final Fantasy XIV as well.  I am absolutely holding our group back from doing some of the new content because I am about 15 item levels short of being where I should be.  If only I could clone myself… and keep those clones at home all day long playing all the things I want to be playing.

Last Second Success

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Surprise! I played something in the last week that wasn’t Legion! I realized that the Diablo 3 season was ending on Friday evening so I decided to hop in quickly on Friday afternoon to sort through my stash and prepare for merging my seasonal characters back into my non-seasonal stable. Usually I end up doing this after the season ends and I have a ton of items in my mail, and let me tell you, doing it ahead of time is way easier. While I was throwing away everything that wasn’t an ancient legendary, I realized that I was one conquest away from finishing the Destroyer tier of the season journey for season 7. I was pretty close to having 3 gems at level 65, so I decided to run a few rifts and try to go for it. In the process of farming rifts for keystones, I saw the season progress pop up for getting a speed run on a TXIII rift, which is one of the requirements for the stash tab. With just about 2 hours left in the season, I got my gems leveled and completed the Destroyer tier. Since I had gotten that speed run, the only thing I needed to finish Conqueror was a second conquest. About 45 minutes worth of running the Ruins of Corvus over and over again and I finally managed to get a 50 million gold streak and unlock my extra stash tab. It was pretty close to the wire but I did it.

Last Second Success

I think the most satisfying part of the whole thing is that this is the first season I can remember where I didn’t really get carried by anyone else. The friends who usually carry me didn’t play in season 7 or just barely played in the first week or 2 until the pre-Legion hype took hold. I managed to unlock the stash tab all on my own, and even got a personal best of greater rift level 71. Now I just can’t wait to see if there is finally some good news for Diablo fans from Blizzcon this year!


Last Second Success

Steam Game Crashes

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Steam Game Crashes

When I get to working on something I can be completely oblivious to the world around me.  Last night was one of those times.  I got a message from Tam asking if I needed Xephatol one of the new dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV, to which I replied that I had not touched the content yet.  I was in the middle of digging into an issue that had been bugging me since building this system over the weekend.  Certain games just would not load regardless of how many supposed “fixes” I attempted…  namely the whole compatibility mode and run as administrator nonsense that you seem to need to do with Windows 10.  He hinted that it might be good to test out Final Fantasy XIV…  which is the point where I got super oblivious.  Namely that I said I had tested all of the MMOs and they seem to be working…  but that I was largely having trouble with Fallout 4 and No Man’s Sky.  It did not dawn on me at the time that he was not so subtly hinting that I should come run the dungeon with them…  and it even included an obligatory smiley after his statement.  So finally it dawned on me what he was trying to get at and I ultimately logged in, and got caught up to the dungeon.  It was a good time, and this really is a dungeon of bad ideas.  These silly birbs cannot fly… but want to at all costs.  More importantly than that however was the fact that it unstuck the logjam my content was in, and the post dungeon revelations were quite interesting.  I largely want to finish the story content so that we can talk about it on Saturday during the podcast because it is sounding like we are going to get a really interesting expansion announcement this week as a result.

Steam Game Crashes

As to the more pressing matters…  the issues I had been having were maddening.  The key problem with windows gaming on a new machine… is that you never quite know if what you are experiencing is just strangeness with the game… or if it is the result of some bad combination of drivers.  However as a result I updated almost every sort of driver I could think of to make sure that was not it.  Like I hinted at before…  I tried several versions of compatibility mode, and running as administrator.  I tried launching from steam, nvidia experience, and directly from the executable to see if there were any different behaviors exhibited.  In all cases what would happen in Fallout 4 was that it would show the “Please Stand By” screen… and would hear about 5 seconds of static and sound…  then the spinning blue “not responding” wheel would pop up and Fallout 4 would either crash… or just sit in this zombie state indefinitely leading me to ultimately close it with task manager.  Since the weekend I have spent a good chunk of every evening trying different things and scouring the web looking at people who supposedly had eureka moments.  Each time I would feel hopeful only to have it dashed almost immediately as the next great fix didn’t do anything for my current situation.  So this is the mental quagmire I happened to be in last night when Tam was trying to reach through it… the repetitive pattern of trial and research only leading to miles of defeat.

Steam Game Crashes

After doing the dungeon run… I had a bit of my own eureeka moment.  One of the posts had mentioned that usb devices being connected could be causing crashes like this on startup.  Now when I built the computer I did so seperate from my main gaming rig.  Then Sunday afternoon I unhooked literally everything that was in the back of the previous machine and plugged it into this one.  That means with it came all of the devices I had been using on the previous setup.  While crawling through the config file for Fallout 4 I noticed a setting that I like flipping to disable controllers, because it is one of those games where it is going to try and use a controller if one is hooked to your system.  I flipped that setting and bam the game launched.  Now previously I had the Windows PS4 Remote Play application installed, and I largely used it as a way to extract screenshots easily from my Playstation 4 for the purpose of these blog posts, rather than ferrying them across on a thumb drive.  As a result when I last used my machine I had my Dual Shock 4 controller hooked to the PC.  On a whim I disconnected the DS4 from the usb cable, and then suddenly No Man’s Sky would load as well.  It seems as though something was timing out when these games were trying to identify controllers connected to my system, and then getting really confused with the DS4 that doesn’t have actual drivers that work successfully most of the time.  So it seems as though this has largely cleared up the issues I was having, which makes me pretty happy given that I spent from 5:30 until 7:30 last night trying random combinations of things to get Fallout 4 working… when in reality I didn’t even care about playing the game.  I was stuck in a loop of needing desperately to solve the problem, so that I knew everything was functional.