1641

I’d be surprised if they sell Ice Breaker again… It’s so game breaking, that I think Bungie wants to limit its existence.

1642

Does anyone use shotguns outside of PvP? I’m almost always rolling with a sniper rifle as my secondary, or occasionally a plasma rifle. And in PvP, what’s the best one? My weapons inventory is starting to get tight so I’m looking for stuff to scrap.

1643

Got a PS4 and Destiny, hit level 11 in one day, but I have no PSN friend’s and it’s getting tough to keep at it alone. PSN name is tromsky/Tom Ross. Thanks!

1644

Stick with it! If you ever need a hand with a mission or bounty or whatever, feel free to send a message.

1645

Sadly it will only get tougher and tougher from level 11 onward, ever since the expansion came out. I don’t know why but the hard difficulty setting is now balanced for 3 player Co-op now. At least that’s my top theory so far on why they changed it. It used to be so much fun in single player pre-expansion.

1646

I didn’t actually mean tough as in game difficulty, although maybe I did indirectly. I’m about two levels above the missions I’m running (I’m level eleven and I just opened level nine story missions) so I don’t find them that hard, but running the same missions over alone to keep this pace is getting a bit boring and if it weren’t for Destiny’s shooting mechanics I would have probably checked out already. I do find the small random events pretty interesting as a bunch of random people will jump in, so I know playing with others can ease the pain.

Speaking of over-leveling, I noticed that once a story mission has been completed it doesn’t dole out a standard XP dump and a distinct reward at the end, which means I am gaining all this XP from killing baddies, I am correct about that? If so, is there a mission (normally 9 and under) that potentially gives you the most XP? The hive prices one comes to mind with it’s long build-up and double prince-knight thing takedown, plus you are killing a lot of guys at once with that sword, but that means you maybe aren’t earning weapon XP? Am I way off base here, or does everyone go through this process? Thanks!

1647

The encounter design and difficulty in general in this game is so stupid and lazy on the part of the developers.

Please tell me this game eventually evolves beyond walking tanks that take forever to kill and spam area effect attacks constantly. These are 100% not fun and just force me to take a shot or two and duck behind a box (or more likely, run back to the path in to the room until the dumb AI resets) for 5 minutes. It doesn’t help that some of these enemies basically take zero damage from my primary weapon, even if i head shot them (i’m not the best console shooter by far, but most of my magnum shots are head shots). So i have to use my fusion rifle and hope like hell i don’t run out of ammo for it.

I just quit the game in disgust tonight after doing a long, boring boss fight where i killed the mini bosses, killed a TON of trash with multiple generic walking talks with area effect weapons and then died when a bunch of melee guys who kill me two hits spawned on top of me. This was a 10-15 minute encounter so far with no respawning, so i wasn’t looking to restart it. Of course tomorrow i’ll have to do the whole hour long level again. Fucking joy.

I certainly do feel like i’m playing a mmorpg where you spend 20 minutes doing a long, boring encounter only to lose it in a second when you aren’t aware of one event.

1648

Again, Murbella, what you’re describing is the fruits of the changes brought by the expansion pack. In the original Destiny, they had the whole game balanced beautifully for single player on Hard difficulty, so the game was really challenging, but not because of bullet sponges (well, except for Strike bosses, but that’s why I never liked Strikes, but you can’t play those in single player anyway, you are always teamed up with strangers for those if you don’t bring your own friends). But they changed that when the expansion came out. I don’t know why. Maybe they detected that Murbella was about to buy the game.

Destiny designer: I don’t know why, but I had a dream last night. We must change all the harder missions to be much harder and make it a slog for people.

1649

You may find you have a checkpoint active and get to skip a bit of the mission when you go back. Though the weekly reset may dump that, not sure.

If you want a hand, I’m Webecomemonsters on PSN, I’ll be on later.

If you want XP, killing stuff does not really give much except at very low levels (kill XP is the same, regardless of levels, only bosses really give much - bounties and missions can give you tons, I’d say go story missions until they are done, and if you hit a higher level one than you, go do bounties and come back to it. Also do bounties and strikes as soon as you can to begin raising vanguard rep. strikes are also pretty good for engrams, eventually, not so much at lower levels.)

It is 1 million percent true that the shooting is great, and everything else is fucked up at least a little and weird choices abound.

Here is another I never see discussed: I have a tough time understanding the tiny player limits. I think they could have super strikes or something that allowed a raid size team, and larger raid teams for extremely tough raid+ or something. PVP as well (and give some larger maps and those cabal tanks at least)

1650

What mission were you attempting?

There are a few things which affect things:

  1. If you are underleveled, and using a low ATK weapon, your damage will be significantly reduced, which will dramatically increase the time to kill a target.
  2. Enemies with shields don’t take precision damage (head shot damage) until you crack their shield. You need to use the appropriate damage type to bring their shield down (The color of their shield indicates the correct damage to use).

Honestly, the only “bullet sponges” that I’ve encountered in the entire game are generally on Nightfall missions. Most targets in normal play are succeptible to precision shooting.

1651

Speaking of bullet sponges, no “burn” on the weekly heroic or the nightfall strike this week. It’s Val’whatever on Mars. Yuck.

1652

Eh, he can go pretty fast if you have a good team and don’t do the cheese method. But if your team is a bit underequip than he can be trouble.

1653

I saw they found a new spot to kill him by jumping up in the rafters on the ceiling, might make it go quicker if you don’t consider it a cheese. Personally I don’t believe using zone geometry to be cheesy at all.

Speaking of cheese, I did my 3 thrall runs this morning and got 4x 2-3 shards, 1x 2 energy and finally got my warlock gloves not a bad haul.

1654

I got my Titan to level 29 last night, in time to get some help through the Nightfall (7 strange coins, wooo!) but none of the other weekly activities before the reset. So this might be the first week I can take three characters through everything. Or maybe it’s the week I come to my senses and wonder why I’m pushing three characters through this. I leave it up to the RNG. I’d definitely stop running VoG if I got a Mythoclast.

1655

God I hate the noob-o-clast in PvP. It’s such a broken gun.

1656

On my three trips to the first CE chest I got the Titan class item, Dragon’s Breath, and The 4th Horseman. Not sure how much use either of those two exotics will get, but not a bad haul even if I end up dismantling them.

1657

In other exotic news, the Nightfall yielded another Apotheosis Veil, my second. Maybe that will make merryprankster feel better about the time I got one when he needed a helmet. But probably not.

1658

I admit that i am playing on hard and have been since starting. Thus, this may be responsible for my seeing many stronger enemies as bullet sponges.

So i take it i should just stop being an idiot and do story missions on normal? I think i saw someone in this thread saw that you should do them on hard, but i notice the experience bonus for going to hard is actually not THAT much higher so maybe i’d be better served to just replace quality (experience per mission) with quantity (number of missions).

I am a level 10 Titan (striker) playing level 12 (hard) Chamber of Night on the moon.

At first i tried using a pretty nice level 9 green auto rifle i got recently, but it was doing too little damage on this level so i switched back to my handy green level 8 hand cannon which one shots the trash if i head shot and does pretty decent damage with a head shot on a the big melee hive guys (knights?). The knights probably 6-8 head shots to kill with my hand cannon, a slow firing 4 round model.

I am also using my beloved green level 8 fusion rifle which does Arc Damage and has a mod that makes me find a lot more ammo for it (YAY!). I would not be able to kill most of the harder enemies without this lovely.

My main problem is the wizards and the knight like guys who have a mortar attack instead of melee.

The wizards take about 2-3 Fusion rifle bursts to take down their shields and 2 more to take down their health. They do pretty heavy damage of course, but one vs one, they generally aren’t a threat if i don’t want to get hit. The problem is they frequently speed behind cover, so i spend a bit of ammo getting their shields down and then they disappear behind a corner and the shields are up again. These guys can be huge ammo drains if they want to be and while they aren’t dangerous on their own, they require that I spend a decent amount of my attention avoiding their shots or they will VERY quickly kill me.

The mortar guys take a TON of fusion rifle shots to kill and appear to take almost no damage when shot in the head with my hand cannon. The main problem with them is they spam rapid fire mortar shots that will 3-4 hit me, so i always need to be avoiding them as they seem to home a little and they have a large area of effect.

On their own, i can get through the sponge, but both of these enemies take a lot of time to kill and suppress me (so that i don’t die). In groups and combined with other enemies (especially the melee husks), it can make for an EXTREMELY long and dangerous fight.

1659

For wizards, with their orange shield, you want to use solar damage. If you were hitting it with a solar damage fusion rifle, for instance it’d kill it in either one or two shots.

1660

Yep. They broke the game after level 10 upward since the expansion came out.

So i take it i should just stop being an idiot and do story missions on normal? I think i saw someone in this thread saw that you should do them on hard, but i notice the experience bonus for going to hard is actually not THAT much higher so maybe i’d be better served to just replace quality (experience per mission) with quantity (number of missions).

I honestly don’t know what to do anymore. In the original pre-expansion Destiny, doing them on Hard was worth it for two reasons:

  1. It was more fun.
  2. You got more experience.

Now, it’s not worth it, because:

  1. It’s too hard, enemies take too long to kill, some enemies are almost impossible to kill with the weapon limits you have.
  2. You still get the same experience you used to get pre-expansion, for doing it on Hard. Only now that’s way harder, and more time consuming. Now it makes no sense to do it on harder difficulty just for a bit more experience.

I am a level 10 Titan (striker) playing level 12 (hard) Chamber of Night on the moon.

Ha! You’re at the exact spot where it’s about to insanely hard. Everything from here to 20 is where they completely broke the balancing.

At first i tried using a pretty nice level 9 green auto rifle i got recently, but it was doing too little damage on this level so i switched back to my handy green level 8 hand cannon which one shots the trash if i head shot and does pretty decent damage with a head shot on a the big melee hive guys (knights?). The knights probably 6-8 head shots to kill with my hand cannon, a slow firing 4 round model.

I am also using my beloved green level 8 fusion rifle which does Arc Damage and has a mod that makes me find a lot more ammo for it (YAY!). I would not be able to kill most of the harder enemies without this lovely.

My main problem is the wizards and the knight like guys who have a mortar attack instead of melee.

The wizards take about 2-3 Fusion rifle bursts to take down their shields and 2 more to take down their health. They do pretty heavy damage of course, but one vs one, they generally aren’t a threat if i don’t want to get hit. The problem is they frequently speed behind cover, so i spend a bit of ammo getting their shields down and then they disappear behind a corner and the shields are up again. These guys can be huge ammo drains if they want to be and while they aren’t dangerous on their own, they require that I spend a decent amount of my attention avoiding their shots or they will VERY quickly kill me.

Yeah, they upped the difficulty so much, and ammo has become a huge problem. But worse is that they kept the old level requirements on the weapons. So you’re going up against level 13 enemies as a level 10 character, but you can’t procure better weapons to go with the higher level enemies post-expansion. You’re still stuck with level 10 weapons because of level requirements. Even if you have found or bought a level 11 weapon, you can’t use it yet. Which means enemies are way harder to kill, which means you’re always low on ammo because they require more shots to kill, and more time, and more lives, because you tend to die more.

It’s a total mess. So what’s the solution? Go to normal difficulty versions of the missions? Nope, because they didn’t adjust those at all. Those missions are still pansy ass Easy mode and totally not fun.

Since they basically broke the level 10-20 single player content, I’m not really sure what players are supposed to do, except to play through it on Easy Peasy mode, then go back to the older missions once you’re higher level, and play them on the harder difficulty to find out how it should have played the first time.

Gah, it’s such a mess. I can’t believe they’d break their own game like this in such a major way. And yet, most players didn’t notice because most of their player base is already level 20+, so the only players noticing this are people like me trying to level up an ALT for the first time, or new players like yourself.