Destiny 2 - I don't have time to explain Bungie's MMO shooter 2.0

Titans alway mooching of Warlocks…

That was great fun tonight @Don_Quixote, sorry I had to bail at the end. I wish we could have finished the Nightfall. We were so close!

I apologize, I did see the invite but my wife decided it was time to watch Gray’s Anatomy so I had too bail out.

3 step guide to getting your alts through the campaign missions and up to level 20
This is a relatively “frictionless” way to do it without getting stuck by level gates in the campgain.

  1. Play the campaign normally until you’ve unlocked all the planets. If you try to rush through the missions, you’ll slowly drop below the leveling curve and some of them will be a bit difficult. You should be around level 12 by the time you’ve opened up Io.
  2. Find a friend or two and run public events until you’re level 20—it goes faster than you’d think. I took my guardian from level 11 to 20 last night just running public events. You’ll gain a level approximately every 2.5 heroic public event completions. Make sure you know how to trigger the heroic versions of all the different public events. You could do this without a friend if you want, but having at least two of you who know what you’re doing should be enough to make sure you pull off the heroic triggers even when working with uncoordinated party crashing randos. I liked Nessus for this, you can get into a pretty good rhythm of fast traveling around the map after each event and there’s always another about to start.
  3. Now you can just sprint your way through the remaining half dozen campaign missions. You don’t have to worry about getting caught under-leveled, and since you hit 20 you’ll have access to the good weapons your other character has found. Skip every fight it doesn’t force you to complete. I even rode my sparrow instead of taking the tank on the tank mission right up until the end when you actually need the tank to take down the shields.

Congratulations! You’ve got a new alt at level 20 and the world is your oyster. Pledge your second-favorite faction if you pull this off while the faction rally is still live, and now you can spend the rest of the weekend grinding Firebase Hades Lost Sectors for faction tokens for additional shaders!

Since o k ow you were all on pins and needles about my adventures, I should probably add that my 265 plateau didn’t really last that long. I made it to 270 last night, got a 275 chest piece from Cayde and a couple new weapons. Also - it’s worth it to buy maps and find those Cayde stashes. I got a legendary and exotic drop from them, and you’ll get the glimmer back in no time.

But I agree that public events, especially heroic ones, will level you like nobody’s business. I was running Dead Orbit rep missions last night (with my exo hunter. Yes, I’ve carefully thought this out - my awoken titan reps with Future War Cult and my human warlock runs with New Monarchy. It makes total sense in my head) and also helping out with any public events I encountered. I got a couple levels, and so much loot! Still can’t believe how much they cranked up the drops for the sequel, I feel like they’ll be scaling it back in a patch or something.

Xur is disappointing this week.
Although, if you don’t have riskrunner for some reason, you need to buy it, because it’s easily one of the best weapons in the game for PVE.

Isn’t that the one you get early in the story as a quest reward? The void pulse rifle where every 3rd shot in a burst does extra damage and causes enemies to explode if you kill them with it?

That was a great gun, but I leveled way past it long ago. I think I recycled it so that I could earn enough currency to buy Xur’s weapon last week.

It will be interesting to see if I can actually recycle enough legendary weapons to be able to buy that back this weekend. Currently my Xur currency is exactly zero.

That’s the graviton lance.

Riskrunner is a possible reward from the same quest… you can choose either the lance, sunshot, or Riskrunner.

All are good, and if you make 3 characters you’ll then have access to all of them.

But if you don’t have it? Riskrunner is INSANE.

I didn’t fully grasp this until I picked it up on my warlock, already having both other weapons, so riskrunner was the only option for that quest reward. The thing is, it’s a normal, pretty good SMG. But it has a perk that triggers when you take arc damage.

Initially, I sold that short… but I’ve since realized that you take arc damage a LOT. Especially if you are going up against Fallen, where you take arc damage constantly.

When you get hit with an arc weapon, it triggers its power, which makes it so that every shot you land creates crazy damage chain lightning to nearby enemies, while simultaneously reloading your gun (creating ammo, not pulling from reserves).

So as soon as anything shoots you with arc, you become an insane murder machine, where you can just hold down the trigger for 5 seconds straight, dumping out infinity bullets, each of which is effectively an AOE death chain. Against trash mobs, it’ll kill everything in sight before the thing runs out… against big guys, you can just dump insane damage on them.

As an example… that one fallen public event where they drop the tanks? You just move near one, which causes it to do its little arc discharge move that zaps you slightly… and then you just aim at a leg and hold the trigger down, melting it. It fires 750 rpm, so in the 5 seconds of arc conductor, you’re firing 37 shots for free, then you can fire the remaining 40 shots, without reloading. And that assumes you take no more arc damage… but you WILL take arc damage, which means you end up being able to just hold down the trigger for ages. And if anything else gets close, the damage arcs onto them and kills them.

Seriously, one of the best PvE guns in the game, hands down.

That seems really weird to me… I’m sitting on like… 300 shards? Don’t you get shards constantly? I’m always finding crap that I break down into shards, just to keep my inventory from being full.

I don’t care for SMGs, Riskrunner included. They’re good for if you’re surrounded or in a crowd of enemies, total spray and pray. Which makes it a fair backup for a more precise weapon, I suppose, and explains how the two MIDA weapons work as a pair.

I like the way Destiny breaks down weapon attributes, and has the one that means the most to me: impact. I want to max my per-projectile bang for my buck.

Riskrunner is a goddamn murder machine against Fallen, decent against Hive if there’s a wizard up. Against other enemies, not so much.

Also with Hive, thralls do arc damage.
A lot of the time I’ll just LET them get to me and land a shot, and then just start melting them as well as anything else around. As soon as they trigger arc conductor and you pull the trigger, the entire swarm of them around you die almost instantly due to the chain lightning.

I find Sunshot to be really good, especially against swarms. Graviton Lance is kind of junk IMO, especially when compared to Sunshot. I get death explosion chains with Sunshot, with G.Lance you’re lucky if anything even takes damage from the explosion.

Sunshot is awesome

If you can land headshots with the Lance, it does IMMENSE damage.
The 3rd bullet does 6x damage… but you need to land that bullet. If you land it as a crtit, it does huge damage. If you miss that shot, then its damage is garbage.

Yeah, that was a lot of fun! Sorry we couldn’t quite finish it, but it was a good time. Thanks for the invite!

The prevailing sentiment on reddit is that most Exotics have been watered down in the name of PvP balance, and that community can be quick to be cynical, but I haven’t seen anything really challenge that feeling yet.

Between Xûr’s limited inventory (in D1 the Exotics were the draw, but he also sold useful buffs and items), the fact that the currency isn’t anything I have to carefully manage just for Xûr, and the fact that there’s no Exotic I’m just dying to acquire, Xûr is a lot less exciting this time around.

I need to give Graviton Lance another look. I dismissed it as a garbage weapon because even with the big crit it looked like my Scathelocke was doing twice the DPS.

The ubiquity of the currency and drops is giving me a pretty serious “gotta catch 'me all” fever for exotics that I never had in D1. I had laser focus on just the stuff I really needed and now, hell I’ve already got all three hunter leg armors without even trying. Why not go all the way?

I’m pretty sure the first two shots do lower than normal damage though, so if you are missing that third shot your dps is reduced.

I can agree with this. I’ve yet to find any exotic which is that great in PvP.

Risk runner is awesome in summer pve, but totally useless in most pvp