Guardians Report! A Destiny Thread.

Thought I would make a new thread for this topic because I want to talk about it all the time. As you may have read, I fired up DESTINY about a month ago for the Backlog Attack. As such, I missed a year's worth of cursing Bungie, hating the voiceover, and boring-ass storylines. Instead, I got to enjoy one of the prettiest games I have ever played.

I leveled to the vanilla cap (20) a couple of days before The Taken King dropped, then leveled to its new cap (34) a week later. Loving the scary new Taken guys, enjoying Strikes, shitting all over myself in Crucible--and trying to minmax my gear as much as a vanilla player in a TTK world could, topping out at ~160 for armor (had a 167 exotic helm) and 140 attack (had a legendary Auto rifle at 140).

Then, of course, I got the itch. Crucible was.... a challenge. It's not like it was a bunch of Lvl 34s running around in that one lonely corner we could use. It was me and bunch of Lvl 40s with 280 weapons flinging Sun Hammers from here to shinola. Tough out there for a little guy. All these purple thingies on the map I couldn't access without Darkness, Wolves, or King. So I traded in vanilla DESTINY for the new one, tacking on an extra coupon to get it just under $50. (It's $50 at Costco, but I wanted to get rid of the other disk--space is a premium in videogame land).

Put in some hours last night to get to 40 x 221. jeblucas on PSN, playing West Coast nights (9 to 12), except Fridays.

Loving it!

Responding to Legomancer's blog post.

You're playing it right! Without THE TAKEN KING, it is a laughably bad story, and abrupt is not the word I would use to describe the "ending" of the vanilla game. It's nonsensical. All this Hive, Taken stuff, Crota rumblings, the Moon is exploding--oh hey thanks for slowing down the newish guys (Vex) kthxbye.

You and I overlap strongly in experience space here. I never played an MMO, have no interest in talking to strangers, and prefer PVE to PVP. Also using vanilla Destiny in a The Taken King world. Shop around for a TTK code (you just need the code, there's nothing on that new disk that you didn't download in that fat ass file the other day) and fire that up.* The game is transformed for me. I can access everything. I can finally equip the sweet ass weapons I bought from hairface guy, and I don't die in the Crucible instantaneously. Well, yes, I do, but I might take out them too! Prior to this I was literally emptying a 24-shot clip of a 140 Auto Rifle into a dude as he ran up and sworded me. Crucible was a chore.

If you hold off on The Taken King,* I recommend playing the 6v6 Crucible to mimimize your impact--stick with the team as they approach, capture Control points, and mop up guys as they reload after killing your teammates. Every now and then you'll have a grenade or Super that you can use to great effect. I also had a lot of luck going "high" on stuff and shooting down. The radar is not able to detect this well and the opponents sometimes couldn't find me as I killed them. Also, join a faction. Just pick one, it doesn't matter and you'll have access to cool weapons if you decide to go to Taken King.*

Other than that, just do Patrols and Strikes. Strikes are great. This is the teamwork-required stuff. I have never spoken to a Strike teammate--so don't sweat that. No one bothers, for the most part. If you see you are paired with Lvl 40s--follow their lead. They know where the strike is, and often jet away on bikes when it launches. Just try to keep up. When on Patrol, just hop around, kill dudes, help folks, and wait for events, get to those and pray other folks show up. I think you get prizes for "Gold" on those, so it's worth it.

//edit
*I see you have The Taken King version. Game ain't even close to "over" then, as you've got literally hours and hours to go to get through the The Dark Below and House of Wolves before The Taken King stuff even starts. The advice above still stands, you can hop on daily, get fresh bounties from the robot, do a little Patrol, a couple of Strikes, and get a bunch of XP in about an hour.

i've only been played it for a few weeks, I like it so far, but i only play with friends. I haven't fired it up solo yet, there's always another game I'd rather play solo. And I need to solo some of these missions so i'm kind of stuck.

I did Crucible last night for the first time. I got some double kills and some sweet snipes but mostly got melted. I played a shotgun intelligently sometimes, othertimes not. I really want to try Zone Control which plays like CoD's domination and isn't kill-based. Haven't tried it yet. We played Control last night and I kept trying to just cap, which is dumb since kills matter in that one.

Black Barney wrote: i've only been played it for a few weeks, I like it so far, but i only play with friends. I haven't fired it up solo yet, there's always another game I'd rather play solo. And I need to solo some of these missions so i'm kind of stuck.

I did Crucible last night for the first time. I got some double kills and some sweet snipes but mostly got melted. I played a shotgun intelligently sometimes, othertimes not. I really want to try Zone Control which plays like CoD's domination and isn't kill-based. Haven't tried it yet. We played Control last night and I kept trying to just cap, which is dumb since kills matter in that one.

Control is Control--I think you mean "Clash" in that last one. That's the other 6v6 mode that counts kills instead of capturing/holding a zone. I guess there's also Combined Arms, which is just Control with tanks here and there. They don't really change things.

Some other tidbits:

• When you are going to cash in bounties/finish quests, equip the gear and power that you want to level up. It levels up with you if equipped. When having engrams decrypted, equip the highest Light stuff you have--higher Light means better stuff from the Cryptarch.
• Make sure you find Xur on the weekends (Friday AM to Sunday AM). He's somewhere in the Tower and has the best shit for sale if you have Strange Coins. You can get Strange Coins for just playing Destiny basically. They are Strike rewards, Crucible rewards, Event rewards, pop out of engrams, &c.
• Don't mock Fusion Rifles in PVE. They reload much faster than Shotguns and still deal decent damage at range. I routinely use them against majors (Knights, Captains, Minotaurs, Commanders) and Strike bosses. They deal tons of damage and shred armor.

Ugh I hate fusion. In pvp it's all about pulse rifle and shotgun. In pve it's scout rifle and sniper

Eh. A Scout Rifle is OK, but I have more luck taking on mobs with Auto Rifles or a Pulse Rifle that can fire fully automatic. I like the option to grenade and spray. You're a finesse guy, I get that. But man, nothing takes out Fallen Majors (named, yellow-healthbar) like a Fusion Rifle. Two hits, max, and you don't even need to be that accurate, which is handy for those teleporting jerks.

Can someone explain The Arena to me? It's like a Raid, I get paired with some randos and we kill everything. It's hard as hell in that last wave with the Ultra (especially if Cabal, cripes). Then we all rush down a needlessly deep and dangerous pit to get treasure? I had a Treasure Key from helping folks beat some Wolves a few weeks ago and used it to get... Two Lvl 20 guns? (Exotic and Legendary, sure... but Lvl 20? That's a LOT of work for Lvl 20 loot).

On the same idea, what the hell is the Temple of Osiris?

//Xur is hiding out waaaay over by The Speaker's end of the Tower this week (Oct 2) and has some nice stuff.

My comments on Destiny, from my blog , after finishing the main storyline:

The Comfortable Plain White T-Shirt of Destiny


The other night I "finished" Destiny. Meaning, I finished the main storyline, the two small expansions, and the large "The Taken King" expansion. Let's talk about that first.

As I said before , the storyline in Destiny is nothing amazing. It's kind of critique-proof because there's not really anything there of any substance to critique. You have to go places and shoot aliens because they want to kill humans. The Taken King is a guy's dad who is angry because you killed his son earlier. He turns all the previous aliens into zombie like things. There really isn't anything else to it. The one thing I like about the lack of a plot (other than the lack of cutscenes dishing out crappy plot to me) is that even though you kill Crota and his dad, there isn't a sense of you single-handedly winning this war, or even of the war being won. It feels like you're always just barely pushing back the tide, and therefore there's a reason you're having to keep fighting Christopher Moeller's Iron Empires dudes on Mars.

In a discussion, some friends and I were talking about videogame-related articles of clothing we all own. I have numerous Fallout shirts. Someone mentioned having a Dragon Age shirt. Then I said, "I have a Destiny t-shirt. It's a plain white T that fits fine and adequately covers my torso." A joke, but it does kind of sum up how I feel about Destiny. The game feels like it's trying very hard to be a one-stop-shop for FPS. There's a little bit of everything in it. I don't have much FPS experience except with Borderlands and I see a LOT of things in Destiny that map straight to elements I was already familiar with. Perhaps that's just generic FPS elements common elsewhere, I don't know. But Destiny seems like a Chinese buffet where the food isn't that good, but there are a lot of different things to pick from.

A good example of this is the character of Cayde-6, who has chatted with me all throughout The Taken King. He's a robot voiced by Nation Fillion, and you immediately know this because it's Nathan Fillion as Nathan Fillion. There's no character there, just exactly what you think of when you think of Nathan Fillion. (I guess it's the character of Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly.) Destiny, eager to please everyone, got Fillion to do a voice but saw no need to actually create a character for him to do so. "People love Captain Firefly! Let's get him to do it just like that no matter what!"

This blandness extends throughout the Destinyverse. There are four bad guy races, all of whom are, for the most part, humanoid. They all naturally have a weak spot, and that spot is almost always the head. They are the only resistance you come across in the entire solar system. There are large maps, beautifully rendered with all sorts of hidey-holes in them that usually contain nothing. The only difference between shooting aliens on Mars and shooting aliens on the Moon are the types of aliens you'll shoot and which weird resource you'll sometimes be able to grab from the landscape. Even the fact that the Moon, since you get to it earlier in the story than Mars, has lower level aliens doesn't make that much of a difference.

Destiny kind of feels like they fed all previous FPSes into a neural network and had it generate a new game. Everything you'd expect to be is there, but there's something vital at the core missing, something that makes it all come together and shine instead of simply being adequate.

All that said, there's still a lot more to do with Destiny, even with the storylines completed. As with Diablo 3, the real meat of the game comes after finishing it, when you can do all kinds of special missions that give you the really good loot and introduce weird elements to play with. In addition, I haven't done much with multiplayer, though I'm hoping to do more. I should go on strike missions and such, and I'll probably do some of that this upcoming weekend. It may be what I need to make it all gel for me. But as it is, Destiny is going to be pushed aside for Fallout 4 in November, and right now I don't have much incentive to return to it afterwards. I'll play it for now, but once it's gone I don't expect to miss it much.

As I said before, the storyline in Destiny is nothing amazing. It's kind of critique-proof because there's not really anything there of any substance to critique. You have to go places and shoot aliens because they want to kill humans. The Taken King is a guy's dad who is angry because you killed his son earlier. He turns all the previous aliens into zombie like things. There really isn't anything else to it. The one thing I like about the lack of a plot (other than the lack of cutscenes dishing out crappy plot to me) is that even though you kill Crota and his dad, there isn't a sense of you single-handedly winning this war, or even of the war being won. It feels like you're always just barely pushing back the tide, and therefore there's a reason you're having to keep fighting Christopher Moeller's Iron Empires dudes on Mars.

I feel like it could be amazing, but they are kind of lazy about that aspect of the game. Deservedly I guess, the game is a huge hit, and no one seems to care very much. I haven't finished the game--I can't do Raids, basically, so I haven't killed Crota or Oryx, but I know what's going on. Here how I see things:
The game is set in the distant future. Centuries previous, Earth was visited by some kind of alien intelligence (the Traveler), and a Golden Age of awesomeness ensued as the Traveler advanced our technology immensely. We could travel to space easily, we colonized the solar system, outposts on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and the Asteroid Belt. Other aliens--hostile ones--started to show up--chasing the Traveler? Trying to "eat its light" and what not. They utterly kicked our asses, by and large. Humans were erased from Mars, Venus, and most of the Earth. The Moon was actually gouged in the battles. The Traveler itself was deeply damaged and largely went silent, but as it faded, some humans were essentially "blessed" to become Guardians. Superhumans with strength, agility, and abilities way past what normal folks can do, and seem to have some kind of immortality. Guardians are the last hope for humanity and they push back from small homebases on Earth and the Belt, trying to recapture the solar system from the aliens and hopefully, restore the Traveler to its former glory.

The aliens are hostile to each other--I feel like they are involved in some much more epic battle, and the Sol system is just battleground X in a long slog. They are The Fallen--militaristic four-armed pirates, basically. Trying to steal the marvels that follow in the wake of the Traveler. The Hive--chitinous creatures that consume and convert the light from the Traveler into what seems to be "magic." The Vex--a robotic race that wants to exterminate organic intelligence, leveraging pocket universes separated from normal time and space to accomplish all kinds of tricky maneuvers. The Cabal--essentially a roving totalitarian state, trying to monopolize the Traveler for their own advancement. Humans are basically annoying all of these factions as they vie for the Traveler and against each other.

That's a pretty cool concept to me. If the Traveler had never showed up, humanity would have missed out on the Golden Age and all that advancement, but we would also have missed being ruined by all these critters chasing that thing. Is the Traveler just using us as a defense? Did it use the Cabal and the Hive in the same way in the past?

The story missions convey aspects of this, but a lot of it is in the online Grimoire, and largely ignored by all the minmax-gear-obsessed MMORPGers and PvP FPS fanatics. I am largely PvE, and having a grand old time, slowly grinding my way to higher light levels.

Back to back posting! Aw yeah.... here's why though--this is really real.

I'm still sluggin' for light too...this game...

I'm up to about 260 light, going full arc with my Warlock. I've got the Impossible Machines gauntlets, which are just awesome. I reload my pulse rifle (Apple of Discord) almost instantaneously. I bought Hawkmoon off of Xur, really enjoying that even though I'm not a hand cannon player. It's good to put the last few shots on a boss.

It's weird, I've kind of lost track of where I am with the story missions...I don't really know which one is from which expansion. I just kind of do them whenever.

As much as I really liked SW Battlefront, the whole time I was having to admit to myself that it just wasn't as good a game as Destiny. I would...this is difficult to say...almost state that Destiny is, at this stage, one of the very best FPS games I have ever played. I would almost be willing to put it at #1 in terms of pure gameplay and visual design. It just doesn't have the powerful writing of Metro 2033 or the pioneer qualities of some of the 1990s-era titles. But I would rate it over all of the Halo games, and I think that Halo 5 is almost a pointless redundancy when this game is really what Halo 5 should have evolved into.

My Warlock maxes out at 283 now, but that's wearing non-synergistic shit. I fight at around 275 or so, and am pretty even be it Solar, Void, or Arc. My quests dictate what my subclass is. Here's my current recipe for getting better gear.

1. Buy Three of Coins "3oC" from Xur. Get a whole bunch. Enough to last the week given you will take at least one per Strike. I think it's 5 3oC for 7 Strange Coins or something?
2. Start Striking. The Level 20 Strike is fine. Pop a Three of Coins as you start it up. Repeat. (By all means do the Heroic once a week, it's a fucking struggle at our level, but doable. You get a bunch of Legendary marks and an Exotic, so at least giving it a shot is worth it.)
3. You should accumulate a few Exotic engrams over the week. Make sure to put on your most-light-enhancing gear and get them decrypted.
4. Then put on the gear you actually want to be wearing and turn in your quests to level it.

I got the best PvE gun, a Zhalo Supercell at 290. It's ridiculous. As you hit an enemy, lightning chains out to hit nearby enemies, and ammo refills as you get double kills. Basically, those hordes of Thralls that come running at you? They all die and I don't even have to reload. I pair it with a 284-Solar sidearm with a 15-shot magazine to handle bigger dudes, and 283-Void machine gun to handle anything else.

I've had it with my Suros Regime. I'm gonna start up my hawk moon now.

Playing Destiny almost guaranteed I wouldn't enjoy the battlefront demo

I'm a Warlock, 297ish light. I run Zhalo/Hung Jury, Black Spindle/1000 Yard Stare, Void Sword/Whatever LMG I've got with the most light. Still desperately looking for a Telesto. Hopefully Xur sells it soon.

But seriously people. The Hung Jury scout rifle from Dead Orbit in the Tower and the 1000 Yard Stare from the Vanguard guy are two of the best guns in the game, and all you need to get them are legendary marks, which the game gives out 30 of a day.

Hung Jury is basically a laser beam, accuracy wise, and the perks on the one the emo dude sells are triple tap (three precision shots in a row give you an extra round in your mag) and firefly (precision kills make your enemy explode)

1000 yard stare has the highest impact (Impact = damage relative to the rest of its class of weapons) of all Snipers aside from Black Spindle and it has triple tap and mulligan.

This is literally the only video game I've played in the last month and a half aside from Hearthstone on my phone at lunch and before bed.

JohnTheAverage on PSN if you guys wanna run Kings Fall sometime, or just goof off in patrol. Just need the last two calcified fragments in the raid and I can get Touch of Malice.

Jeb, dear god man stop using sidearms in PvE.

Touch of Malice will change your life.
I have 1000 yard stare and never use it

Black Barney wrote: Touch of Malice will change your life.
I have 1000 yard stare and never use it

Which sniper do you use instead?

And which 1000 yard stare roll do you have, the vendor one, or another one? It's not nearly as good without triple tap.