Using lower than your maximum possible power level gear doesn’t hurt for things like crucible (no level/power advantage) or the power of your engram rewards and drops, but it is technically dragging down your effectiveness in PvE. I don’t know the math but I think it’s sort of like the delta between your overall power level and an enemy is a factor applied to both damage dealt and received against them, and at the high end (raid, prestige nightfalls), it matters more.
I certainly don’t run around with my maximum power loadout all the time—right now that would mean a hand cannon that I don’t really love—but it’s a good idea to keep your favorite gear somewhere close to your maximum. You should at least be infusing it with your current level drops for auto rifles you don’t like every now and then as that power level rises.
Do you know your Base Power Level right now? You can find it with Destiny Item Manager if you don’t know.
Yeah I’ve seen all three of those thrown around as excellent choices. In some brief time in the crucible yesterday I thought Origin Story felt better than Scathelock, but I haven’t used Uriel’s Gift much. It’s dizzying trying to keep up with the slight differences though, so I guess I’ll just keep sticking with what feels fun.
Got a Better Devils hand cannon yesterday, I think that’s supposed to be a really good one, but again, hand cannons aren’t quite my style.
Last night an exotic engram dropped for the first time for me. And you guys were right, it dropped during a public event.
So I finally finished that part of the quest. Unfortunately the next step involves killing boss spawns. But not just any boss spawns! Only Fallen boss spawns. But not any Fallen boss spawns! Only Fallen boss spawns on Nessus, where most of the enemies are the Vex. So basically it was hanging out in this narrow area where I managed to kill 2 of them. But my god, any more of this mindless MMO activity and I’m liable to quit this game, so I might or might not come back to this stupid quest. I just hate that the quest is so specific, forcing me to do a boring activity in this one narrow area.
The Exotic quests are supposed to be a little bit of a pain and very specific like that though. Whether the payoff is worth it is up for debate—as we’ve discussed a little bit, exotics overall don’t feel quite as special as they did in D1—but I think it’s by design that they’re more specific and challenging than most of the other goals.
As bad as they may be, they still aren’t as bad as the Thorn quest from the first game. I remember I never did actually finish the quest, but at some point Bungie just said screw it, and completed everyone’s open year one quests. And that, kiddos, is the story of how divedivedive finally got his Thorn.
I didn’t have a problem with the Thorn quest. I don’t remember the steps anymore, but I think you could get all of it done over time just by doing challenging single player missions. And those were so fun and so hard, that was never a grind for me, it was just me doing my favorite part of the game.
Nope, there was a crucible element to the quest, and you made progress by getting kills there. Except you lost progress by getting killed, and for a guy whose k/d ratio tends to be right around 1.0, forward progress was a bitch.
And I think the quest ended with a harder (at the time) version of the moon strike that ends with the big ogre. I remember that was pretty tricky even with your team, and definitely not something you were supposed to solo.
I did Thorn in the Taken King expansion by hiding in a corner with a void sword and stabbing guys in the back after they ran through a doorway. I played a hunter so I’d be invisible while crouching and not on radar most of the time. That was the only way I could make progress.
Haha. I’d forgotten about that quest. IIRC, all I had was a void shotgun, so I had to learn to use it really well in the Crucible. I’d have really good matches, then it would all come crashing back with a bad match. It was excruciating.
I got my Warlock up to 291 last night by running the weekly milestones, and doing the MIDA questline/unlocks. It spawned at 301! Now I really should get around to Sturm+Drang.
They max at 300 base. If you consider mods, they max at 305.
The whole legendary mod system was one of the bigger mistakes Bungie made. It’s clearly very confusing to people. Then you have the whole “buy normal mods, convert them to legendary mods, dismantle the legendary mods to mod mod components, buy random legendary mods with the components” loop, which is a real drag. And what gameplay purpose does any of this serve? None at all.
I was also really, really successful with drops last night in the European Dead Zone. You guys might not believe me, since I’ve never seen this before, but I even found a purple engram from a chest. A chest! Instead of finding maybe 3 purple items a week before last night, suddenly I found like a dozen or more in the space of one hour.
To put that in perspective, after I bought that weird rocket launcher from Xur two weeks ago, I had accumulated 4 purple currency since this. And after last night’s bounty, I now have 48 I think. All in one hour!!!
