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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.

Light Improving

April 20, 2016 by Belghast

Catching Up

One of my favorite things about the April patch is that I finally feel like I am catching up to all of the folks who have been playing since the dawn of time. More important than that… I feel like I have a clear path to be able to reach 335. There are things within my control that I can do solo that will allow me to slowly but certainly make progress. Namely one of the big ones right now is faction packages. Many of the factions have the code that make sure an item that comes from that package is better than your current light level. So this means I am constantly getting upgrades that I can either use as is, or infuse into my existing item from doing Vanguard and the three Tower faction missions. This also means that those daily bounties are more important than they have ever been, and the same goes with the crucible bounties whenever I am feeling my Wheaties and decide to do some serious pvp. More importantly than any of this… I feel in control of my own “Destiny”… pun intended.

Much of my early frustration with this game is it felt like there were missing rungs on the ladder that I had to have someone show me where I should be climbing. Now I feel like there are objectives that I completely understand that I can be knocking out regularly to better myself. At this point as the above image shows I have managed to take my Titan to 321, Hunter to 310 and as of last night Warlock to 302. The Warlock and Hunter will likely always be second stringers for me, but I do want to spend more time pushing them up. Namely I would really like to unlock all of the stuff on all three sub classes but that simply requires a lot of play. As for now I am still very much enjoying the process of infusing up old weapons and dusting them off to enjoy them once more. I have a lot of really great weapons, that were just lacking light level to be used on a regular basis. At some point however I am going to have to reconcile a bunch of the stuff and figure out which versions of which weapons I intend to keep permanently. For example I have six different Havoc Pidgeons sitting in the bank and five different 1000 Yard Stares… as well as a large assortment of Zarinaea-D. I don’t really need ALL of them… just keep the best rolls and swap weapons as needed via the web site or mobile apps.

Pipe Dream

Every so often I come up with an idea that while I lack the technical know how to actually build it… I know it is functionally possible. Within the server services world.. there is a marvel of modern science referred to collectively as the IP KVM or remote keyboard/video/mouse switch. While remote desktop is a thing that works great most of the time… there are times when you need to literally lay hands on a box because something has hung on boot up. This is where the IP KVM steps into play, because it emulates sitting physically at the keyboard from quite literally anywhere on the network that can reach it. The other awesome thing about them is that generally speaking they are almost as good as sitting on the box with many of them getting to the point where you can hardly tell the difference. What I want is for some budding entrepreneur or kickstarter campaign to come up with this technology… but for consoles. Sure PS4 Remote Play is cool, but I also want to be able to play remotely from my PS3… or even say older analog systems. The idea would be a rack mounted type system so in theory you could dump all of your consoles in the equivalent of a server room. Instead of harddrive arrays you could build special four unit high rack cases that allowed you to plug in a whole slew of console games and have them selectable remotely.

The other idea would be that each console had custom hookups and the hardware KVM device would allow you to configure emulation of the devices. So you could remake your Nintendo controller to be fully functional from something like a PC connected Xbox 360 controller. Now there are oddities like the Wii/Wii U that would be difficult to emulate but in theory most controllers work just fine for other controllers. For years I’ve loved this idea of having all of the games I want to play “on tap” and thanks to both the Twisted and official PS4 Remote Play app I am using the hell out of this functionality. It is cool as hell to be able to sit downstairs on the sofa with my laptop and have full access to all of my PS4 games, and be able to play them with minimal latency. I just wish this same concept worked with everything. It feels like this is the sort of thing that would be doable, just no one has tried to make it work. Even if you started with only consoles that supported USB controls and HDMI output… that would give you a decent base unit that could then maybe be expanded with retro modules that daisy chained onto the base unit. So here you go… I give this idea freely to the world… just someone make it happen because I want to throw money at you.

Children are Strange

April 16, 2016 by Belghast

Unexpected Evening

Last night I had one of the strangest evenings I have had in a very long time. Firstly you have to understand that I sometimes take photos as a hobby. While I have not really mentioned this in the blog in a very long time, it is still one of those things that is at least somewhat in my life. My wife and I used to go off on these photo shoots on the weekends, and now that it is getting nicer we probably need to start doing it again. The problem with being into photography is that people seem to think that you might be interested in taking photos for them. You have to understand that the sort of photos I enjoy taking are landscapes, buildings that show “urban decay”, and interesting advertising signs. People photography has always bored me, and while I used to help my dad as an assistant while he did portrait photography… it is not exactly something that I feel I am very good at. However when asked by friends I will give it the good ole college try. Several years ago I photographed a wedding of some neighbors, and another time I did some family photos for them. Recently when they decided to adopt two kids there was talk of needing photos for the adoption ceremony. This always seemed like a far off destination, but a few weeks ago they got back the date and it was the first part of May meaning we needed to get something done quickly.

So as a result we settled on meeting up after work yesterday, hoping that maybe just maybe we would have some light to work with. All in all I think it went pretty well and over the course of about thirty to forty minutes I took close to 400 photos. Now granted some of those were rapid fire to account for blinks and eyes closed etc, but it was still a lot of posing and trying to keep two small children 2 and 4 from going into full blown meltdown. I am thankful to my wife especially who is not bored by portrait photography and actually somewhat enjoys it, who helped to figure out how to pose people and wrangle them. Afterwards we had planned on having a quiet dinner at IHOP because for whatever reason breakfast as dinner sounded amazing. However when we mentioned that we were going out to eat everyone seemed to want to tag along. This was fine, just unexpected and before we knew it we were dining with five adults, 2 kids and 1 kiddult… developmentally still a child but otherwise seems like an adult. The two soon to be adopted children, you could tell spent a good chunk of their lives just not receiving enough attention. Both are hungry for adult interaction, and at numerous points during the evening I ended up with one of them up on my knee answering a bevy of questions… or with them being completely enthralled and fascinated by my beard.

Solitude Required

The evening also thoroughly cemented in my mind how much we don’t want children. I mean the kids were awesome and I am more than happy to be an unofficial “uncle”, and this summer will be fun given that they already think our backyard is a “water park”. However given that we went to dinner around 7 pm and didn’t end up getting home until 9:30… I couldn’t handle the sheer amount of time it takes to do anything with a car load of children. The other aspect was the fact that at no point during the evening was there anything I could ever term as “peace and quiet”. I need my solitude and time to recharge my batteries without having to deal with any other human being… especially not one that is thoroughly dependent on me. This is why I have ferrets an cats… because in both cases they are completely happy entertaining themselves… but also equally happy to get attention. I know as a kid I used to think I wanted this huge family, because after growing up a single child I craved the big family life that always seemed so much more fulfilling. However I feel like I have a huge family… just pieced together out of my huge tapestry of friends. There are lots of opportunities for me to be an awesome uncle, official or otherwise… and that is more than enough child interaction for me. In other news the photos seem to have turned out well, and I need to sift through the stack and pull out the best ones to pass off today.

Rising Light

April 15, 2016 by Belghast

Unintended Kings Fall

The original plan for last night was to chill on the sofa and play some Ratchet and Clank over the PC Remote Play application. However as the day went on yesterday I noticed that there was a new raid scheduled for last night that my good friend Sagacyte would be attending. Since the Tuesday night Rookie Raid… now called the Squirrel Squad didn’t make due to the patch and too much newness for folks to be exploring, I thought it might be a good idea to pop in and at least get some boss kills for the week so I had a shot at loot. Things went pretty well overall, but I think I blew all of my jumping skill early on. I managed to make it through the ship puzzle without falling and even make it over onto the ledge that leads up to the chest. However by the time I got to the wall puzzle, I was apparently out of juice because I fell so many times trying to get over to the exotic chest. There was one jump where I kept bouncing off the damned wall. The jumping is the only thing that I dread each week when I run Kings Fall, and while I seem to be improving… there are times where it feels like I can simply do no right and either land too hard, or can’t quite get over the gap. In any case I eventually gave up and headed to the end of the puzzle and managed to do that without much issue. It was just the ledges leading up to that chest that I seemed to be having problems with.

As far as the raid itself things went really smoothly other than that time that I got torn during sisters… and had no clue what platform I was supposed to start from. Now I know however that you apparently look up and find the orb and then start counterclockwise to it. While we wiped on that round we managed to pick it up and wreck them on the next. Probably the best moment however was one-shotting Oryx doing it the challenge mode, especially considering how much issue we had with him in the previous few weeks. I failed to get back from the exploding balls in time, but we still managed to get the kill. The best best part however was getting a bunch of loot that were upgrades, and finally getting a Red Death. Smite of Merain has been my go to weapon for awhile now, and I ended up picking up a 318 version of exactly the same roll. Getting Red Death however was the icing on the cake since that was one of those exotics that I had been hoping to see. All in all the run went really well, and while Squirrel keeps trying to tell me that I am no longer a Rookie, I still very much feel like one. I know the fights, but I still feel like there is a certain amount of skill that I am lacking. The fight I feel the most comfortable on is Oryx oddly enough, because I really like the bubble titan duty there. Above is a gallery of all of the nifty things I picked up throughout the evening of playing.

Rapid Increases

The thing that has felt insane for me is how I floundered at sub 300 light level for the better part of a year, and over the last two months I have shot up to as of last night 318. I guess it is like any game, that if you have access to raiding your gear levels increase rapidly. Early in the evening I spent some time with Broken and Squirrel running the Challenge of Elders, which was one of the new pieces that went in with the patch. The idea is that once a week you grab a scorecard from Variks, and then there are two challenges that need to be completed. The first is to finish the three round Challenge of Elders while earning at least 30,000 total team score. We failed barely to get this on our first go, but on the second and third attempts we blew the score completely out of the water. The second challenge is to get a weekly total accumulated score of 90,000 which we easily hit within three outings in the area. Each match rewarded some decent infusion fodder, and at the end we managed to score a guaranteed weapon for the single match objective, and a guaranteed armor piece for the cumulative challenge. Unfortunately the roll on the helm and machine gun that I got were kinda crap, but they did serve nicely as infusion fodder taking my Iron Companion helm and my Bretomart’s Stand to 318. I have to say the Challenge of Elders was really damned fun, and I look forward to doing this one at least once a week.

Quite honestly all of the Prison of Elders content has been great, and it is the sort of thing that I am not really going to turn down if anyone is looking to run it. Squirrel mentioned that he plans on running Prison of Elders quite literally all day Sunday and that doesn’t seem like a horrible idea. I am wanting to see how doable the level 41 version of the event is to complete with total strangers. I am assuming that you can queue for a group like you can for a strike, and after experiencing it… it seems like it would be doable with strangers. As far as for farming gear this seems like a decent way to go since every match I ended up walking away with at least one if not two legendary engrams with a chance of one of the special legendaries to drop. Honestly the thing I am enjoying the most about this patch is it feels like I have lots of different ways that I can be increasing my light level. I’ve run a handful of crucible matches and each time I managed to get something at the end. The getting nothing problem seems to have either been fixed or greatly reduced, because now the consolation prize seems to be coins or a few motes… and the best option is some infusion fodder. Either way I am down with it, and will probably try and use crucible to farm a few more motes before Xur disappears this week. I need to replenish my stock of three of coins.