Guardians Report! A Destiny Thread.

My Warlock fights at 293 or so--pretty much maxed out unless I rustle up some folks for endgame Raids, Temple of Osiris, or getting really lucky. I am happy where I am by-and-large though. Strikes are such a blast. I decided to do the Weekly Hard Strikes a couple of nights ago--here is my tale...

I get paired with some randos and we get the "Echo Chamber". The one with the giant Harpy that is immune most of the time. We fight our way there with some struggle. You need to clear waves of really tough Fallen in this region and those damn wire rifles are picking us off left and right. Get through those, and then it's piles of Minotaurs and Hydras--meanwhile all kinds of Taken are popping up and being obnoxious. We manage to fight our way to the end boss without a ton of teamwork--this becomes a theme.

Echo Chamber is a PS4 exclusive strike, I guess, so I will describe it. With this boss, you need a little teamwork. It's a huge Harpy that shoots tons of bullets and occasionally summons batches of Vex (starts with the Goblins, adds Harpies, Hobgoblins and Minotaurs as the strike progresses). It's immune except when traveling. To get it to travel, a player runs up to a kiosk right it front of it and grabs a charge ball (it has some fancier name) and runs it across the (small) map to another kiosk. The boss opens up and starts to fly across the map to the new location. You blast the shit out of it while it does this. Repeat. There's not a lot of cover, but there is some, and it's critical; because once the boss is 1/2 dead or so, it begins its move with a "Medusa Ray" that instantly kills you unless you are in cover from it when it fires.

The teamwork aspect comes up with that charge ball. Someone needs to run up and get it, and they are slowed and unable to fire when carrying it. Hence, they are shot to shit by the boss and everything else. You need your teammates to run up and take hits, drawing the attention, or to cloak you or make a bubble you can hide in or whatever. Something. Finally, as the strike progresses, the map shrinks, and actually starts to move. Sometimes you cannot get to a fireteam member's ghost to revive them if they were too close to the moving edge.

So we make it to the last 20% or so and wipe. We return to the beginning of the boss battle and wipe even earlier in the fight the second time. At this point, I notice the other members are on the team channel when one of them says "Fucking idiot!" and chuckles. I assume he was talking about his play--it takes a team to wipe. I hop on the comms too (unjammed by Variks!). When the fight starts, your ghost says "There's a [[chargeball], you know what to do," and I wonder aloud, "Do we?" This cracks everyone up and through another wipe and finally a narrow win, we were just laughing and chatting as the fights went on. The game takes itself very seriously sometimes, but its hilarious when someone is saying "ooh, ouch, ouch, yikes" as they try to bring that ball from one side to the other and someone else is saying "die! die! die!" when trying to kill Hobgoblin snipers.

Normally, a strike takes about 10-20 minutes to get through--we did this one for 52 minutes! For a lot of folks, this would be a frustrating nightmare. Me, I got a Friend Invite at the end of it and accepted.

I saw mattthr online the other day and joined his Fireteam! We killed some Cabal and Vex and defended a Warsat. It was only about 30 minutes, but it was great. Kudos to Bungie for letting a couple of dads 7,000 miles apart shoot up some aliens together.

jeb wrote: I saw mattthr online the other day and joined his Fireteam! We killed some Cabal and Vex and defended a Warsat. It was only about 30 minutes, but it was great. Kudos to Bungie for letting a couple of dads 7,000 miles apart shoot up some aliens together.

Yeah, it was a pretty sweet 30 minutes.

I can't believe how Destiny has given me the chance to chat and game with FAT:ties I thought I'd only ever share a forum with. It's great. I'm still pretty new to Destiny and I might never get the time to get into it properly, but I'm mattthr on PS4 if anyone else wants to tag me.

MattDP wrote:

jeb wrote: I saw mattthr online the other day and joined his Fireteam! We killed some Cabal and Vex and defended a Warsat. It was only about 30 minutes, but it was great. Kudos to Bungie for letting a couple of dads 7,000 miles apart shoot up some aliens together.

Yeah, it was a pretty sweet 30 minutes.

I can't believe how Destiny has given me the chance to chat and game with FAT:ties I thought I'd only ever share a forum with. It's great. I'm still pretty new to Destiny and I might never get the time to get into it properly, but I'm mattthr on PS4 if anyone else wants to tag me.

"Play it properly," pfft. Shoot the aliens, dance when you're done. That's how it's played. There's all this stuff (Raids, special missions for swords and superguns, all the PvP content), but you don't need it to have a blast. Once you get to level 40 the PvE opens up even more as you can do the Heroic Strikes without getting carried and maybe dabble in a Nightfall or two (they are BRUTALLY hard for me at ~295 light). I was having jumping contests in the Reef yesterday with some folks that happened to be around. The game is a riot.

I am sure there's a lot of min-maxing I could be doing--other folks on the forum here know much more than I. I would sign up with Dead Orbit faction though, I forget who it was here, but they are right, their Hung Jury Scout Rifle is crazy good. If you sign up with them now you should be close to earning it by the time you are level 40 and allowed to buy it. It holds 20 shots and has Triple Tap (return a bullet to the gun when hitting three precise shots in a row) and Firefly (Kills by precision shot make the enemy explode). It's as good or better than most Exotic guns and it's Legendary. That's one I have been leveling up. It's at 298 now and I am going to keep it rolling. I use that and a Telesto Fusion Rifle (basically a void scatter grenade on a stick) on all my toughest missions.

Bungie's free demo of Destiny enticed me to give it a try, and I've been on board since January. So far I'm loving it, although because I don't run strikes and raids I think the end may be in sight for me for a while. I'm doing a bit of the Crucible stuff and making my way through the post-Oryx quest chains.

My main is at 295 Light and I think that that's about as high as I'll be able to go without raiding or running heroic mode strikes, right? I invested in some of those consumables from Xur, so exotics have been dropping here and there. And that's fine with me! My years with World of Warcraft sort of inured me to the siren song of gear progression: run dungeons to get good enough gear to run the same dungeons in heroic mode to get better gear to run raids to get better gear to run the same raids in heroic mode to get gear to lord over casuals in PvP, then an expansion comes out and quest greens are better than your purples. Been there, done that.

Coming into the game as late as I have, the many complaints from veteran players that I read in various message boards are largely leaving me unmoved. There still seems to be plenty to do. I'm still figuring out how stuff works, and finding new places on patrol. The Hive still gives me the heebie jeebies. I guess the main complaint that I have is that the Taken make it pretty hard to get stuff done on Mars and Venus sometimes. Of course I've only been playing for 2 1/2 months too!

PvP is interesting, and I know I have a lot to learn about it. I've crawled my way up to a 1.00 K/D ratio (hooray), but I get schooled quite easily in some situations. I went 0-for-10 a couple of "Skirmish days" ago before finally winning one, and even though I usually did pretty well at some point I have to wonder what all those matches had in common. Oh yeah: me. I find myself going through the same ritual with these pick-up group PvP matches though. "Okay, we're getting started. Looks like everyone on my team has an expensive ship, so that's a good sign, right? Ooo, look how badass our team looks in our hero poses! We're gonna wreck some fools. (3 minutes later) No, don't-- don't release early when I've just run through hell to revive you! Argh, a little help on the revive please? My ghost is right in front of you! No no, go running off on your own again, definitely a good plan. Well, at least it was quick and I finished a bounty." Some things about PvP transcend game and genre, apparently.

For the other F:AT casuals out there, how do you handle the end game stuff if you're not raiding? Hunting down fragments and ghosts, trying to complete your grimoire, collecting all the exotics, focusing on alts...?

Feelitmon wrote: For the other F:AT casuals out there, how do you handle the end game stuff if you're not raiding? Hunting down fragments and ghosts, trying to complete your grimoire, collecting all the exotics, focusing on alts...?

I do almost exclusively Strikes, dabbling in PvP maybe one round a night, and then only Control. I can hold my own there, now, but I am obviously not as comfortable there as most. Every now and then they have Mayhem Control, where the cooldown times for Grenade and Super are greatly reduced and that I do like. It is a madhouse in there. I used a Voidwalker and the Exotic gloves that give Scatter Grenade tracking ("Nothing Manacles"). It is a romp there is a stuff flying everywhere all the time. I can throw a grenade about every ten seconds on average, and I do. If you like PvE, I would do those Lvl 20 Strikes, man. They are a blast when you are at level 40. If it's not Omnigul or Psion Flayers, pop a Three of Coins and go for it. They take less than ten minutes usually. Dance parties at the end, guaranteed. If you have TTK then the Dreadnaught has that boss battle arena that can be fun.

I also top out at 297 with My Titan or Warlock. my Hunter maxes at 293 I think. I could switch some gear around and do some infusing to get it higher, but it's fine. Yeah, you need to do Raids to get north of 300 light. Not sure if the Heroic Strikes drop >300 loot or not, actually. If they drop engrams, then nope. Decrypting at < 300 will never yield a 300+ item.

I need something to spend Glimmer/Marks on. I am maxed out. I should probably do some Prison of Elders and get enough juice with Variks to spend my ship token.

jeb wrote: I do almost exclusively Strikes, dabbling in PvP maybe one round a night, and then only Control. I can hold my own there, now, but I am obviously not as comfortable there as most. Every now and then they have Mayhem Control, where the cooldown times for Grenade and Super are greatly reduced and that I do like. It is a madhouse in there. I used a Voidwalker and the Exotic gloves that give Scatter Grenade tracking ("Nothing Manacles"). It is a romp there is a stuff flying everywhere all the time. I can throw a grenade about every ten seconds on average, and I do.

My warlock has those same gauntlets! Definitely a lot of fun. At some point they seemed to get less effective, and sure enough one of the updates a few weeks ago toned them down a bit. Ahhh, my first Destiny nerfing... it brings a tear to my eye.

jeb wrote: If you like PvE, I would do those Lvl 20 Strikes, man. They are a blast when you are at level 40. If it's not Omnigul or Psion Flayers, pop a Three of Coins and go for it. They take less than ten minutes usually. Dance parties at the end, guaranteed. If you have TTK then the Dreadnaught has that boss battle arena that can be fun.

Oh, good call on the strikes and Court rune stuff. I've helped out a couple of times in the Court, but that was hardly organized. I just happened upon some people fighting a big bad guy the first time and decided to help out. The couple of times I've been back to the Court there wasn't anyone else around, and I've learned better than to think I can solo ultras.

jeb wrote: I also top out at 297 with My Titan or Warlock. my Hunter maxes at 293 I think. I could switch some gear around and do some infusing to get it higher, but it's fine. Yeah, you need to do Raids to get north of 300 light. Not sure if the Heroic Strikes drop >300 loot or not, actually. If they drop engrams, then nope. Decrypting at < 300 will never yield a 300+ item.

I wonder how this will change when the light cap gets raised. I mean, will we have quest rewards that are >300? Will exotics have a new light level floor that we'll have to reach before decrypting them efficiently? I haven't read up on any of this stuff, but on the other hand most of it is still speculation, right?

jeb wrote: I need something to spend Glimmer/Marks on. I am maxed out. I should probably do some Prison of Elders and get enough juice with Variks to spend my ship token.

I take no credit for this because I think I read it on a Youtube comment or something, but it's a good way to spend glimmer if you need exotic shards. Just take 2500 glimmer + 1 exotic shard to buy an exotic Year 2 heavy weapon. It will fully level up extremely quickly--either in the field or from 5 or 6 Motes of Light--and then you can disassemble it for about 500 glimmer, 5 or 6 weapon parts, and 2 exotic shards.

Lots of folks are guessing that the Prison of Elders is going to get updated here in the next content release. I've only done it once and it sort of reminds me of the old Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, which I loved. A bit more frantic than ME3 and with more open sight lines, but similar. That's a good call about getting some rep with the House of Judges now though.

Oh man, I hit rep 5 with Banshee-44 and he gave me this quest that I think is going to yield a new hand cannon. But one of the requirements is NUTBALL. You have to use this white-quality, crappy hand cannon to get seven precision kills in one crucible match. The gun's stats are all impact; it has terrible recoil, slow reloading, no range to speak of, and it seems pretty inaccurate. I don't know how I'm going to get this thing done, LOL.

I wonder how this will change when the light cap gets raised. I mean, will we have quest rewards that are >300? Will exotics have a new light level floor that we'll have to reach before decrypting them efficiently? I haven't read up on any of this stuff, but on the other hand most of it is still speculation, right?

That seven precision kills thing can fuck right off. What a joke. And you can totally solo Ultras in the Court. It's more fun with others, but doable if you need em for a quest or something. Make sure your Fireteam preferences are set to "Public" instead of the default "Friends Only." I think if you have Friends Only on then the game "reserves" two slots in that instance for your Fireteam to occupy. You want to be on as busy a server as possible in the hopes that someone will come join the fights at the Court, for Public Events, &c.

Some more details came out from Bungie yesterday--the new content is Prison of Elders focused, and the leveling is going to be Light-based only, so my Quest hoarding seems to be a waste, sadly. The details are here:
www.polygon.com/2016/3/23/11292992/desti...son-of-elders-strike

But the highlights for folks like us are:

• New PoE bounties, and a challenge mode for PoE (Level 41 // LL 260) that supports matchmaking, and PoE foes will drop Engrams.
• New Quests from Petra Venj (PS only)
• Winter's Run strike updated (the one with the Archon Priest at the end, Vex + Fallen on Venus)
• New Strike: Blighted Chalice, culminates Variks' storyline
• Court of Oryx artifacts will drop at 335.

For Fireteams:

• All the above, plus Challenge of the Elders, (Level 42 // LL 320) that tracks progress like Trials of Osiris
• Normal mode King's Fall loot will drop at 320, Hard Mode at 335

There are more announcements coming about changes, but I think that's more about rolls, perks, and nerfs.

Feelitmon wrote: For the other F:AT casuals out there, how do you handle the end game stuff if you're not raiding? Hunting down fragments and ghosts, trying to complete your grimoire, collecting all the exotics, focusing on alts...?

Got the news here--not sure how I'd missed this before, but Iron Banner is how casuals get to 301+. It's as laid back as PvP gets (contrast to Trials of Osiris, which is sweaty as hell), and just participating can get you 313 Legendary Ghost Shells. Just go talk to the dude in the back room there at the Tower, load up on IB quests, and jump in. It's Control this time, which is great because I suck at everything else. I was even the top player on my (utterly ruined) team once last night.

Saw the fashion show for the update coming in a couple of weeks--first, you can buy the Elaine-dance-from-Seinfeld emote. I haven't wanted to spend any actual money on silver, but I am getting that shit right away. I hope it doesn't cost a MILLION DOLLARS because then my wife will leave me when I buy it.

They have new "chroma" colorants you can add to armor to make them glow in blue, red, white, or yellow. Looks fly, and the factions all have new kit and of course FWC looks fucking sick. But the coolest look by far is the Taken armor. You can collect helms, gloves, legs, and chests with a Taken look, and if you equip them all you have access to the Taken Shiver emote which makes your toon twitch and jitter. It's pretty awesome. I know this is basically dolls and dress up, but fuck you I like dressing up dolls.

They are also changing Infusion to be less grindy--infuse anything with a higher level item and it becomes that higher level. No more fractions and algebra. Just booooop, it's better. I like this a lot, so tired of the "infuse this, and then this, and then thiiiiiiis--almost there!"" bullshit. Just infuse, bam, done.

//also, a side note. I was in IB, and one of my teammates was on team chat and blasting Linkin Park. Singing along, the whole thing. Fuck me, right? It gets worse, after talking about how amazing that song is for a long time with another teammate, he starts asking if there are Jews on the chat. "Any Jews out there? Any Jews? No, OK, I got a Jew joke." And he tells a joke about Jews. Punchline: big noses related. He then says he "literally made that up in just a few minutes earlier today." He is the guy actually developing new anti-Semitic material, folks. I didn't have my mic set up to chew his ignorant ass out, and I reported him as "Unfriendly" but man, this actually happened. Glad it was me on the Fireteam and not my 10-year-old.

That was a great idea about Iron Banner. I had stayed away previously because my Light level was so low the first time I tried it I was completely overwhelmed. This time I started at about Light 290 in my IB-ready gear and did pretty well.

I never saw one of those IB class items, and they're not purchasable anymore apparently. So I only have +20% rep from the shader and emblem. Still, it was really fun and I did get one of those great ghosts. That plus some 300+ armor and a 317 sidearm for the rep 5 reward have me solidly at 300+ now! I'm excited but of course the Light cap increases in a week, LOL.

This will be the first sizable update since I started playing (I don't really count the Valentines stuff) so I'm really looking forward to it.

I am sooo close. I think I can move some guns around and get a character to 300+. I got a 308 chest armor and I want to say a 306 Titan artifact or something. I have a 300 Primary on one account, a 299 Special on another, &c. I think I can get my average above 300. It'll be close. With the new PoE stuff and Strike drops I should be able to make it regardless, but that's days away.

I have, literally, dozens of engrams saved up for when I break the plane and can decrypt those.

I made it to 299.9 before the drop. Close! But once the new content dropped last night I went on a Heroic Strike and scored a 306 blue primary and that put me over. I decrypted the engrams I'd been hording and have enough 300+ items now to get at least two chars over 300 LL when decrypting. Telling you, the biggest change for me is the Infuse mechanic no longer being calculus. I was dismantling 296 LL stuff and it felt great. Nothing else too crazy so far. I'll try to get some time in this evening with the new content.

I agree, the new Infusion mechanic is wonderful. It's so simple that I'm having to re-think my gear.

I was able to get my main to Rank 5 in the last Iron Banner, so he scored a couple of 300+ items including a 317(!) sidearm. This really helped out, and now the new content is helping too. Here are some things that I've learned:

1. Variks of House Judgement will sell you a 310 class item in exchange for 5000 glimmer and a legendary class item engram. That's so doable! Unfortunately the three purple trinket engrams that I've been saving are "sublime" engrams, not legendary, so they don't work. Apparently a sublime engram is just like a legendary engram except that it will decrypt into a Playstation-exclusive item.

2. The exotic engrams appear to be decrypting at 4-5 light higher than your current light level, pretty consistently. For example, at 306 light I was getting 310 and 311 items from those. If you have enough exotic engrams lying around I imagine you could use that to bootstrap yourself up into high light levels.

3. The sterling chests that you can buy or earn in-game seem to be dropping some nice gear. Well, nice for us low-light types, and good enough to get our average light above 300 and closer to 310. Your account can get three of those per week: one for just logging in with a character (although lots of people including me have not had this work for them), one for completing a match of the weekly Crucible, and one for completing the level 41 Prison of the Elders.

4. Hoo boy, that level 41 Prison of the Elders was tougher than I thought it would be. Well, I should say that the end boss was tougher, at least. The preceding waves were fine, but that last wave with the boss was pretty fierce. The whole time I kept thinking "they say you only need 260 light for this?!?!"

5. All the faction, vanguard, and crucible weapons got re-rolled, so be sure to check them out. Some weapons that I had written off suddenly look nicer, especially with the new infusion system.

6. Faction reputation reward packages seem to be dropping ships and emblems at far greater frequency than they had been. I don't know if Bungie raised the drop percentages or what, but I'll take it.


So far it's looking like a very nice update. Nothing revolutionary, but lots of nice tweaks and a bit of new content. I like it!

If you don't have it, get the Ishtar Commander app on iOS or Android. It's the best gear manager I have ever seen. My mind boggles, honestly. You can just press a button to equip Max Light, build loadouts that share everything (shareable) between all your toons--it's awesome. I can press SweatyPvP on my Wlo and all the goodies beam to me and even equip--it's nuts.

I did the Level 41 PoE with a couple of fellow barely-there 300 or so randos. We handled the boss fine, but the wave where Taken Psions come out by the zillions and you gotta get to the mines wiped us twice.

This Infuse thing has me thinking deeply now. I can save gear I like the look of instead of just looking at the LL. The buffs are now where the minmaxing is--it's such a different dynamic with the gear. Smart move, Bungie!

You see The Vacancy at FWC? High Impact Fusion Rifle with Braced Frame, Rangefinder, and Aim Assist on one of the scopes--hits like a hammer but can do it from across the room. This is the Hung Jury of the season I think.

Thanks for the tip on Ishtar Commander! That thing is amazing, wow.

And you're so right about that fusion rifle. My warlock main had been using the Susanoo warlock-only fusion rifle in the Crucible, but I have picked up and am loving The Vacancy. It has a slightly slower charge time but yeah, the range is really long, the bolt grouping is tight, and it hits like a truck.

Have you been getting new ships in faction packages too, or did I just get lucky?