1681

Agreed.

I think Moore is right that there is not enough loot in the game considering that it is a loot based game. But also I think there is not enough fine tuning of that loot. The gear really needs sockets and schematics or something similar so that you can tweak your guy a bit. Not only does that create more to do, it serves to personalize your character a bit and slant it to your play style. This gives the player more agency over their character, which helps form a stronger connection to the game.

Right now it’s pretty much “well, I guess this is my play style since that’s what dropped…and that other guy is pretty much the same too”.

I also think that a sub system of skill points that give minor buffs to things like recovery speed and crit damage would help further define different characters and also serve as a reward for long time players.

I hope we start seeing some of this type of stuff going forward.

Also, man do I feel bad for Smorts on the Nightfall last night. He got screwed.

1682

There are worse things than 10 strange coins.
I’d rather get 10 strange coins than a garbage roll Legendary which is just gonna be sharded into 3-5 energy or something.

Or you could get No Land Beyond. That’s worse.

1683

I logged in to get my free gift. I am pretty impressed. My favorite weapon in the game is the scout rifles. And no scout rifles have ever dropped for me. Not even level 20 blues. Best that ever dropped scout rifle-wise was a level 19 blue scout rifle.

Anyway, I remedied that by buying the Mida Multitool, an exotic scout rifle that I love. But I was one Strange coin short from being able to upgrade it post-expansion. I played the hell out of the game that weekend, hoping to get that Strange coin before Xur left. But I finally got the strange coin I needed on Sunday. A few hours too late.

But the free gift? It’s a Legendary Scout rifle! Yay! I think a gift from Bungie counts as a drop, right? So this is my first level 20 or above scout rifle drop. Sweet.

1684

Which rifle is it?
The iron banner oven, gheleons demise, was pretty good.

1685

The cheese stands alone;
http://www.bungie.net/en/News/News?aid=12483

Crota’s End – Updates
The existing Pit treasure chest reward moved to killing Ir Yut, the Deathsinger. She has a chance to drop Exotic weapons and armor, class pieces, and Radiant materials.
The Pit treasure chest will now contain Radiant Materials.
*
Pit Encounter
Removed the physics impulse caused by exploding lanterns.*
*
Bridge Encounter
Players will now be required to cross the bridge in order to complete the bridge encounter.
Players will now be required to wait for the bridge to be completed prior to crossing with the sword.

1686

Ugh i am level 11 and i had to choose between doing this story mission as level 8 (cake walk) or level 14 (near impossible bullet sponges of death). There wasn’t an up to date patrol mission area with bounties open either. These level ranges are way too big :(

1687

The change to the pit/Ir Yut rewards makes a lot of sense. In retrospect it’s ridiculous they didn’t have it like that from the start. I never used any of the other cheese tactics, so nothing changes for me. edit: also just realized that if they worded that correctly, the pit still has radiant materials, but Ir Yut can also give radiant materials. So it sounds like the total potential radiant materials from CE is slightly increased. That’s helpful.

Patch notes also mention Vault of Glass Exotic drops are now level 32. Glad they came around on this.

I haven’t done either raid at all yet this week, but by volume, my three Guardians have been cleaning up on Exotics. Three runs to the pit chest (pre-patch) got me two Exotics: Dragon’s Breath and 4th Horseman. Three runs through the Nightfall got me three more Exotics: Hawkmoon, Apotheosis Veil (my second), and another Dragon’s Breath. Hawkmoon is the highlight, obviously, but now I’m all set on Exotic Shards for a while too.

I’m not really sure what I want Xûr to sell any more, really. I guess there’s some armor that might be fun, but I forget what it is.

1688

That does suck, but just cake-walk it. There’s plenty of time to get experience later, for now just keep moving through the story.

1689

Awww… the cheese train has pulled into station. Oh well, at least I got a bunch of loot prior to them fixing all that stuff.

The abyss will still be trivial for anyone who bought the “Don’t Touch Me” gloves.

1690

None of that stuff really matters at this point… I’d recommend you just blow through the story at normal difficulty and enjoy the ride.

The difficulty comes later, after your character has all his perks and junk, and your equipment doesn’t suck. Bear in mind, that once you hit 20, it opens up Heroic difficulty, and you actually end up doing it and receive additional rewards in the form of rare materials, strange coins, etc.

1691

Forgive me if this has been touched upon already, but does anyone read the grimoire cards? I recently picked up the destiny app for my phone, and have been going through the cards during downtime at work, and boy oh boy there is some serious story goodness, and badass lore tucked into those suckers. Also, there is some top notch writing, and really mind bending concepts (the vault of glass, and concept of “darkness” is truly batshit and awesome).

I know the lack of story and crappy use of Dinklage as the interlocutor has been dinged time and again, but it’s truly odd they couldn’t have found a better way to lay out all the good stuff they have clearly thought out and written.

I guess it was a time thing, I dunno, but reading the cards you get a real sense for the universe and the major players. Highly recommended.

1692

http://destiny-grimoire.info/ is great for reading them online. You can load your PSN/Xbox profile so it only shows you the ones you’ve found, or just read them all. Simpler format than the official site.

Potential bandwidth warning: it pretty much loads them all from the start.

1693

You know what? I thought they were dumb, and still do (putting the story, fragmented, outside the game? idiocy) BUT - I blast through novels on my phone at a rate of maybe one every 3 days. This gets expensive. feeling a little lite on $ after the holidays, I started reading these and you are totally right, there is some interesting stuff in there.

It just makes me more frustrated the story is not in the game, really, but it is fun to read.

Also, XUR! Fuck you mister no engrams. I have these important motes of light that I can buy fashion garbage with (what?) or buy useful stuff from you. Otherwise, they are worthless, which makes no sense. Saved em up for nothing. That said, Skullfort, yay!

1694

Ya, lots of folks have said the same re: the Grimoire.

There’s definitely the impression that they have a LOT of stuff laid out in terms of the overall backstory for this new universe. But it just wasn’t incorporated that well into the actual game.

There’s still tons of crap though in the game, that folks haven’t found… If you go into the Vault of Glass, for instance… there’s that hole secondary secret path to the Templar. I don’t believe anyone’s actually found anything in there, but there kind of MUST be something in there, because who would go to the trouble of making such a large area that had nothing at all in it? It’s got weird lights that have strange particle effects when you shoot them… and it’s got all kinds of nooks and crannies that you can jump around though… and you can’t even find the area unless you are really trying to find secret stuff.

1695

This has been a problem with Bungie’s games since Halo at least, and it’s a shame that Destiny is even worse instead of an improvement.

1696

I dunno if it was that huge a problem with Halo though, at least with the later ones. Its story was kind of cool, and it told it reasonably well.

A big part of Destiny’s issue though, I think, is the MMO aspect of it.

I can’t recall any MMO, ever, having anything approaching a coherent and well designed story. The disconnected, mission based aspect of it almost seems to preclude any meaningful storyline. Destiny’s might even have been better in this regard than most MMO’s, since at least there was SOME sort of story.

1697

The two main criticisms I remember of Halo was the repetition of levels (or similar architecture) and the story. My memories might not be that representative of the situation at the time though, I don’t know, and certainly ODST and Reach improved considerably.

As for Destiny and MMOs, narratives are particularly difficult to do well—I imagine—by nature. How is your story important and effectively told if you’re one of thousands of others doing the same thing, or repeating the same things, or doing things in an order the narrative doesn’t control?

But beyond that difficulty, Destiny particularly struggles to even convey relevant information to the player about the moment to moment stakes. It’s one thing for my guardian to not have a meaningful character arc or personality, but it’s crazy that they literally just don’t tell you what you’re actually doing. Who is that? Why are they important? Why am I killing this thing? There’s the infamous line about “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain” or something. It’s there that Destiny’s strikingly bad by any standard, MMO or not.

1698

Eh, I can see that just being left unfinished. I’m sure they say there were never plans for flyable ships, but I think that can’t be true - too much effort for loading screens alone, I think they did some work and walked away with it half assed. There is a lot of half assed stuff in this game (how hard it is to show precision kills in the mission wrap up screen? And if you are NEVER going to show them, why are they listed? At least patch the text to null and remove the score tally of zero, that would be a pretty quick fix.

The people who did the visuals, audio, and shooty bits did a great job, everyone else phoned this thing in. Luckily the work on the first 3 was stellar.

This could’ve used something along the lines of Mordor’s nemesis system to drive a single guardian through a unique story, with dynamic missions instead of shitty bounties etc… It would’ve been a clever way to mitigate the story problem of an MMO. (same missions, but you have a unique foil actively trying to achieve their mission: to stop you.)

1699

I got NLB this week. It’s fine, it decombobulated into a shard I’ll use to upgrade my Hard Light since I already have an unused NLB rotting in the bank…

1700

Ya, this is definitely the case. If you never read the Grimoire cards, then you basically get no info on the backstory at all. And what’s funny, is that there are MULTIPLE times when the voice actors say crap like you mention. Aside from the Exo chick saying that, you also have the Speaker guy say, “I could tell you stories about the traveler, and the collapse, and all this shit you totally probably want to know… but whatev’s, I’m not gonna.”

The Vex, for instance… the thing you kill at the end of the game? Apparently NOT actually the central core of the Vex themselves… instead, perhaps, it’s some thing that they either encountered or created, and started following/worshipping. That’s kind of cool. I’d like to know more about that. Likewise, the whole notion of time manipulation by the Vex is pretty cool, and how you actually end up fighting Vex from different points along the timeline, with the precursor and ancestor Vex.

And then there are the Fallen, who also have some fairly complex social hierarchy, and apparently had some big advanced empire at some point.

And then you have the Queen of the Awoken, who apparently killed/defeated the Kell from the House of Wolves, and now runs that house of the Fallen. But this itself is basically not explained other than a 5 second sequence where you see the fallen body guards she has.

Then there’s the Hive, who apparently worship/follow some god/king way the hell out in space somewhere, called Oryx, who sent Crota to this area to subjugate things. There is some suggestion that the Hive guys are almost undead type entities. Not really explained beyond that though.

There’s just so much stuff that is THERE, but is seemingly only developed to a foundational degree. It gives me high hopes for the game moving forward, as I think Bungie could really make some awesome stuff around what’s there. But I also kind of want to know more about that stuff NOW.