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Destiny |OT36| Fifty Shades of TTK

T

toastyToast

Member
spyder_ur said:
Sneaky of them.

Working on probably over 20 hours in HM without any clears....testing my patience a bit but I'll keep at it.

Rest of HM did nothing for me drop wise. Oh well.
Click to expand...

Oh that sucks. I'm gonna try again later and if I see you on I'll send an invite. Believe me that was an anomaly lol
 
X

xir

Likely to be eaten by a grue
If I was to write a wall of text about TTK/Halo/Vanilla and trench warfare would you want to read it?
 
R

Reagan's BR

Banned
Ran the raid and had some great drops today.

Infused some things and hit 306 on my Warlock and 307 on my Hunter. Ready for the hard raid.


Now to recollect a full easy raid set.
 
G

GustyGardens

Banned
Yikes! I used up 15 Three of Coins and not one drop! I still have 20-something left. I tried out the Trials Hand Cannon in The Crucible just now, and it performs fairly decently. It's worth noting that it's not upgraded yet, so I couldn't take advantage of Luck in the Chamber.
 
P

Pat_DC

Member
Reagan's BR said:
Will Bungie address weapon parts? People really need to be more vocal about it.
Click to expand...

I really hope so. For all the talk of trying to push people to use a wider toolset (removing primary elementals for example) the way the light level and economy works it actually actively discourages experimentation.

For example I get a scout that isn't as good as my Hung Jury but has some perks that might be kind of fun to play with but I will need weapon parts to fully upgrade and even more to infuse it as it dropped at 280. I have about 8 parts left and need parts to also infuse another weapon that I actually use, in the end I'll just break that new scout down.
Plus even weapons I normally wouldn't have kept and would have got parts out of might now drop at a higher light level, so instead of getting weapon parts they get infused (costing me ten parts).

I played from day one but HoW and weapon rerolls chewed through my weapon parts stash. Whenever I hit 25k glimmer I buy a whole bunch of exotic weapons just to break down into parts, which is boring and a silly thing to do just to get a bunch of mats.
I think any element should be able to be traded for another and 'Wormspore'->'Weapon Parts' trade would make me a happy man.
 
T

TheAquaticApe

Member
3x HM clears. A bunch of stuff. I think each toon moved one light level and still 0 HM helmets after 9 clears. Boo. This has been you weekly HM loot rant.
 
devon the dude

devon the dude

Member
have 2 open spots for step 10 of No Time to Explain quest. If anyone needs to do it, or just wants to help out that would be appreciated. xbox one gamertag devon the dude
 
X

xVaalbarAx

Member
1st HM Clear.

318 Fusion Rifle (Infuse it with my 1000 Yard Stare)
320 Chest Piece!
315 Helmet
312 Fusion Rifle.

I'll take it for my Warlock which is now sitting pretty at 316. :D
 
B

Boombloxer

Member
Every character over 300, but the last few raids haven't given me anything except another 300 ghost and a 306 shotgun.

BO3 is in a few days, I'm taking a break.
 
R

Reagan's BR

Banned
MomoPufflet said:
It's frequently bemoaned in highly visible, highly upvoted reddit threads so if they don't address it they're intentionally ignoring the outcry for their own reasons.
Click to expand...

Tempted to make a reddit account and make a daily post "Upvote for Visibility: Weapon Parts need to be fixed" until they address it.
 
jasminlovesyoux

jasminlovesyoux

Banned
Don't you guys think weapon parts being an actual useful resource again is a good thing? I mean, they were always useful because they're necessary to upgrade guns, but they were seemingly pointless before when everyone had over 1000 sitting around. There should at least be other ways to aquire them though. You should be able to buy stacks with glimmer.
 
X

xir

Likely to be eaten by a grue
Wall of text, TLDR, no one likes trench warfare and destiny has moved away from it. This is a WIP, hopefully on the bottom of the page
Trenched
No one wants to make a World War 1 FPS, or at least a realistic one. Beyond the glorified Saharan tanks and legendary, if mostly useless, birth of air combat was trench warfare. Men, modernism, and machines, stood on equal ground, that is six feet under it, in a trench, where yards (like football!) were traded for blood at levels unseen before in history. Living and fighting in the trenches could also be extremely boring. It was brutal attrition, banal and insane. No one makes games about the trenches.

O.K., the forgotten Darkest of Days had a hot minute in the trenches amidst its time travel hopscotch, and there is a multiplayer PC game, Verdun that replicates all the fun of a foxhole with friends, but anything multiplayer is fun. Even Haze. Remember Haze? But really, there’s no one trying to replicated the tedium of No Man’s Land in any realistic manner outside the bandes dessinée approach of Valiant Hearts, which simultaneously houses one of best attempts at edutainment and worst DDR-style rhythm mini games in history.

But let me posit there is a trench-ish game, actually a whole developer out there, and its theater isn’t Europe before the great influenza. No, it’s a series of ringworlds. To this day, I don’t see the Legendary (proper noun, not an accolade adjective) difficulty of Halo as challenging; I see it as a total conversion of a fast-paced, sci-fi shooter into a World War I gain ground trudge.

There’s still glory to be had, but let’s be honest here: closely comparing any simulator of War to the real thing is brazen move at the very best.

I never understood the savants who took Halo’s hardest difficulty as gospel, considering Halo gave us shields, mitigated health, and cemented the 30 second fun loop which became the go-to for any FPS outside of iD. Legendary difficulty is undeniably hard, and as I wrote, it’s not challenging. Those two items aren’t exclusively concordant. If there is challenge, it’s of conquering the banality of cowering at corners with sissy offensive pushes on a Covenant Elite whose shield is finally downed. It’s strategically numb and dare I say? Linear. Just betray the sandbox of A.I. and options for optimal efficiency. Safely paint by numbers, because standard operating procedures must be followed.

That’s a touch of hyperbole, though the venom is real. Playing Silent Cartographer isn’t storming Normandy, it’s crawling towards mayhem, reeling in yards as your marines perish and the enemy’s strength slowly shrivels.

Destined
With Destiny’s launch came the allure and digitally tangible lust for the exotic weapons and armor, singular among the decidedly non-sci-fi weaponry (I guess fusion rifles get a pass.) Wrapped in golden iconography, adorned with special perks and rendered with extra TLC, these relics were there to make you envious, with even the lesser offerings you’d never equip plucking the collect-em-all strings of your player heart. And they were rarer then a Kojima edit, with the best chance to snag one outside Xur’s weekend black market bonanza was the weekly Nightfall strike, a non-match making slice of hell, served with extra shields, server quitting wipes, and endless amounts of trench warfare, often served with a side of cheese. And in Destiny… no one is lactose intolerant.

It was a high holy day when solar burn was on rotation, where solar damage would triple in threat from both enemy weapons and your own, and you are your cowardly mates could hold back and wait for the Icebreaker sniper rifle to slowly generate ammo as you take pot shots from afar, or hope your Gjhallhorn bombardment would be YOLO enough to burn the boss before an actual sortie could appear.

Shudder at the thought of void burn.

When you couldn’t blaze an element in your favor, desperate times call for desperate cheese. Try hiding under the stairs of the Archon Priest or peaking between those goddamn crates of Valus Ta’aurc to eke out a safe, slow-pace victory. It’s the trench-y tunnel vision provided by a Halo-lens. The crafty designers had a few counterweights to these antics, like the Nexus Mind’s sole policing minotaur that wants to push you down into the fray from the safety of sniping. Alas, that just got wrapped into the art of the cheese, with someone taking on that particular ‘taur of duty. Like Halo’s difficulty, Nightfalls were hard. They weren’t challenging.

And the MMO tidings of persistent progression ever taints the shores of the action. Even non-nightfall Strikes I ran with Randoms had guardians playing it safe and as the people under the stairs, or sniping from the egress perch: shooting from safety. Tactically sound, dull as dishwater.

(SIDE
Shields should and do give a gung-ho bravado, but though shotguns, in their original incarnation, where the telltale signs of fools, where the distance game ruled.
)BAR

Cover is important and staying alive is tantamount to success, even for a Sunsinger. The dead don't shoot. Yet, clinging to geometry like northern moss on a bump on a log floating down a river without a paddle, just to peek out and sharpshoot some obscure pixels you feel certain belong to a foe practices only the most primal verb of an FPS: get the thing you want to obliterate in the center. It’s insulting, stilted gameplay, you aren’t legend, you’re at the optician pressing the little trigger button when the light appears. I think that test is looking for blindspots, and in a Destiny Nightfall that blindspot was fun.

(Again, that’s not to say Destiny doesn’t have a good gun game, just that when the difficulty ramped up, or when people wanted the guaranteed win, fun became the first casualty of war. Not inconsequentially, a friend recently told me he didn’t mind cheese spots, he didn’t want to have fun, he wanted to win, and I think that philosophy seems to have soaked in the player base. I’ve only done the bridge section of the Crota’s End raid legitimately once, for example, people prefer just to stick it to the stick and get munching on the carrot ASAP.)

Giveth
And that’s why The Taken King is such a breathe of fresh air, because it wants shooter ballet, encourages weapon juggling, and delivers adrenaline spikes. Sure, shields still recharge and taking cover offers safe haven, but I believe it’s fundamentally a different ballgame. Or, well, just a game.

There’s a lot to like about The Taken King, and a laundry list of those likes could also read as bullet points of not-so-cheap shots of everything Bungie left out of the vanilla model. That’s been done (hey, look, a story!) What the missions have so delicately tinkered with are the fundamentals like enemy placement, and what enemies are placed, with the Taken living up to their name and taking the cake in terms of approach. The jittery thralls won’t let you mow them down, the Captains will turn your retreat into a myopic funeral, while Centurions toss out guardian-seeking dart, hitting a Hobgoblins means retaliation with extreme celerity, and Wizards enlist an endless army.

Sitting still simply won’t do.

Also. Outside of the protect the confluxes part of the Vault of Glass, I’ve never ran out of primary ammo. In the Taken King, it’s rare, but it happens. I even had to use a primary telemetry, a free refill, on primary ammo a few times. Even when you try to make every bullet count, an average player is going to shoot a few wide side of the barn. Fortunately, now the shotgun has some kick, while holding onto sweet, purply heavy ammo for a boss isn’t the ace in the Gjallarhorn it once was.

Again, the Halo legacy shines through with the limited amount of weapons you can equip at any one time. It’s strategic and it’s fun.

And. Finally, if you can allow me another rewind, let’s go back to Goldeneye on the N64. I cut my teeth on Wolf3d and Doom, and followed the IGN’s GoldenEye score straight to the Toys R’ Us. But what hell was this reloading thing? I wanted to shoot things in the face. I’m sure other games had reloading by then, but I hadn’t played them. (Did Turok have reloading? I know it had fog.)

I had to seriously readjust to this strange phenomena, from my meager Klobb to decimating RC-P90. In time, I got into the groove, auto-feathering the reload button often in anticipation of not getting shot.

The reload game in Destiny has evolved as well with the Taken King, and it’s most evident with the Exotics, the Raid guns and a smattering of Legendaries, the not-as-rare-as-Exotic crowd that rounds out any guardians armory.

While most of the vanilla anti-reload exotic crowd got a slight nerf, like the Black Hammer and Ice Breaker (I believe only the Bad Juju was spared) now there are many guns that retard reloading with effective play.

Just out of my inventory I see: The Ace of Spades, the Hereafter and the excruciating-to-get Black Spindle, all rewarding ammo for precision shots or kills, while the Zhalo Supercell, an auto rifle (!) refunds ammo on a double kill, making you wonder if designers have started planting enemy groups in odd numbered rotations just to mess with you. And while they eat ammo, you never have to top off your sword.

The raid weapons are the alpha and omega, the pudding and the proof, all rocking the raid-only perk Cocoon that refills the weapon after it’s been holstered for a few moments, encouraging you to fire some of those special weapons, or at least lean on the fullness of your agility unhampered by reloading animations. If only infusing the not-so-good raid weapons bestowed cocoon to the recipient.

And it really boils down to less reloading means less need for constant cover, more shooting, more action, and it’s not that I don’t want arc and pacing in my gun game. It’s just the urge to cheese (I actually am lactose intolerant) and turtle, while, again, strategically sound, drains all my urges to play.

The hardest mission in the game isn’t the raid or a Nightfall. It’s tucked away in a level 42 mission called Fear’s Embrace, which I guarantee is the number one solo mission spike on any LFG site.

Bungie sends you back to the very first local of the Taken King, the Cabal’s base on Phobos. It’s a background run from where you first escaped to the where you first met the Oryx and fought the Taken. Oryx is again a shadow, displaying the same familiar move set, with an unseen onslaught of the most relentless kind, even more damning to the heavy-footed guardian.

Waves of enemies swarm you, par for the course, but after you slice off enough of the shade’s health, a poison fills the lower pit, forcing you to higher ground, that’s laced with an interval of flames jettisoning down from the ceiling. There’s also those inky fingerprints, the blights, which summon enemies and slow you down strewn around the room along with the static-looking sparky mines ready to explode upon your general proximity and person. Oryx’s facsimile even punishes those slow to move with a homing attack that crisps you where you hide, so move move move.

It is the antithesis of trench warfare, movement is life, where instinct and tactics converge. It’s hard to manage with a fireteam, let alone as an over-leveled, over-lit Guardian. Fancy footwork, locational awareness, smart timing on reloads and strategic dismantling of foes all the while putting the hurt on the damage spewing phantasm.

Or you can pop a Titan bubble and hide in the hallway, but what’s the point? Winning? I guess so.

Alternative ending: I finally conquered Fear’s Embrace with someone, forgot the name, from NeoGAF. I think he was British. The next day a highly rated /r/DestinyTheGame reddit post offered a solution to Fear’s Embrace. The TLDR: Stand still, enemies tend to shoot where you are heading, it gets dicey at times, but it works.

Oh. Well.
 
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