1821

This… is amazing!

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1822

I accidentally did some math. I’ve averaged 2.5 hours of Destiny every day since launch.

1823

Crota rambling:

Hahaha. I was on the tower as my Hunter and was planning to go solo the abyss of Crota for some shards. Some random 12 year old messaged me to run the Nightfall, he was level 30, so why not. Did that no problem. Other friends of his jumped into the party chat and began discussing running Crota (on normal), so I said sure, why not.

So I find myself on normal mode Crota with five strangers, none of whom have ever done it completely. The abyss falls apart quickly, but like I said, I was gonna solo it anyway. So I do, and carry them through (I love Don’t Touch Me). I guessed the bridge would be our downfall. Several of them had theories about how to cheese it, none of which apparently still work.

These were all reasonably capable players, and no one had bad attitudes, but it was kind of a mess of people talking over each other and sometimes hard to agree on a plan. We wiped a couple times trying to organize who was standing where to get the bridge going, and it still took a while to disabuse them of some misconceptions about when and how to keep the bridge going.

But hey, I made it across the bridge with the sword first. I spent a really long time dancing with knights over there, but eventually we got a second person across. Things got harrier then because he didn’t kill his gatekeeper, but somehow, gradually, with lots of avoiding unkilled gatekeepers, we actually got this crew across the bridge. Several almost wipes and heroic rescues, but we did it!

That felt pretty awesome. We got through Ir Yut (or whatever) with some trial and error too, but we were no match for Crota. Which I expected. I hung with them for literally two hours of Crota attempts, but that really just takes more coordination than we could manage (and no level 32s to wield the sword). I finally dropped when one of their friends who’d done Crota a bunch jumped on and started giving the party chat good advice. I offered to bow out and let him jump into the fire team.

I spent another 45 minutes doing bounties but I kept lurking in the party chat. The guy who joined was fantastic, incredibly patient, and really knew the raid. I have no idea if they ever made it though. The best they’d done when I signed off was getting him down about a 1/4 of his life.

So blah blah blah, unsuccessful Crota attempt, but it felt really good just getting across that bridge. I think that’s the sweet spot for what a bunch of inexperienced randoms can accomplish learning as they go, and it was a lot of fun.

1824

A hunter can pretty easily solo across the abyss on hard mode. Do that, and get yourself a cool arc damage pulse rifle.

Which, by the way, absolutely wrecks on nightfall this week with arc burn.

1825

Is anyone here playing on the 360? I might need some help.

I was playing the other day, and the game gives me a choice of Exotic Weapon Bounties. I look them up online to see if there’s any difference between them, and I chose the one that will ultimately give me Thorn, a hand cannon that has a cool-sounding damage-over-time effect.

It turns out that this is a multi-stage quest chain. The first couple were easy. Then came the Crucible stage. I don’t do PvP, well, ever. They wanted me to get 500 points of kills, only using Void damage. I’m a hunter (no access to void specials), and my only void weapon is a semi-upgraded Legendary shotgun. Each kill is worth 5 points (full kills only, no assists), and every time I die, I lose 2. Holy crap. I played team deathmatch for hours, finally figuring out that unfortunately I had to be a dick and play super cautiously, so as to rack up kills and minimize deaths, while not particularly helping my team actually win the match. Kind of counter-productive to how I think you’d want to design a quest, but whatever. I got through. If I’d been smarter, I’d have actually picked up crucible bounties to turn it while I was grinding, but I’m an idiot. As it stands, I’m nearing the weekly cap on crucible marks, and still only rank 0, so they won’t sell anything to me. Oh, well. But I digress.

The final stage of the exotic bounty is a special epic strike in the summoning pits. I can’t even solo the heroic weekly summoning pits strike, so this is pretty much impossible. Anyone around to help in the next few days?

1826

I can’t believe you finished that crucible bounty without void powers. Much respect brother.

Me and my friends would have gladly helped you with Xaroc the unwed, or whatever his name is, that sexy bachelor that has to die. But we’re on XB1, not the 360.

1827

Hey I’d like to play some XB1 multi, if you guys are ok with a low level dude (just hit lvl 6).

1828

Sure. I was out doing some extra work this morning, and I just got back. My wife is out at the YMCA and won’t be back until about 6 (one hour). So I’ll fire up XB1 now, and text a couple of my friends, see if they are free to hop on. I’ll use my ALT and maybe we can get through some story missions together on Hard.

1829

Whoops, I was on a little earlier (dinged 7!) but had to go take care of some stuff. I’ll just see if I can catch you online sometime.

1830

You didn’t join us, but that was a productive hour for my Alt. Went from level 12 to level 13.

I discovered grouping with my level 31 buddy helps not at all for leveling up purposes. We tried to do a mission on Very Hard Level 15 (to my level 12 guy), and we finished it, earning almost no experience for me, since I wasn’t high enough level to really get any of the kills. Then we did a mission where I was over leveled, we were fighting level 8 stuff, and since I was getting kills I leveled up faster. God, I hate the low level missions in this game so much now. With the four level differential now between Normal and Hard, it means all the new levels open to me are either Normal (i.e. tooooo easy), or Impossible (can’t even attempt them).

Maybe I should play him in the Crucible for a while, and level up that way. Then I can come back do the missions on Hard.

1831

Two pick-up group attempts on Crota yesterday, two stalls at Crota. I think running Crota with randoms is almost impossible, and certainly a lot more difficult that Vault of Glass.

In Vault of Glass, it’s confusing, it was/is prone to glitches, and at least most of the group needs to be able to hold their own in any role (two or more weaker players really hoses you if you get a weak team teleported to take out the oracles). But if you get people who are capable and have done it before, everyone knows how it works. There might be some debate about small stuff like whether your relic holder wants you to ignore the Hobgoblins or toss grenades on “Mars”, but overall, there’s basically one way to fight Atheon, and at any given point, it’s clear from what’s happening to you exactly what you need to be doing in response once you have a big-picture understanding of the fight.

Crota might not be as glitchy, but it’s still confusing at first, most of the group needs to be able to hold their own, but on top of that it seems like there are a lot more variations on tactics for where to stand, where the sword bearer needs to be, how to handle the ogres, etc. The fight with Crota doesn’t force you to be organized the way Atheon does, but it’s absolutely still necessary, so you need a capable team and a capable leader who can get people to do the exact right things at the right time. You can know that the team needs to down Crota’s shields, and then the sword bearer needs to hit him, but that’s entirely up to the group to orchestrate. That’s been a lot harder to find in my experience.

1832

Well, like I said, I kind of felt like a heel, not really ‘playing to win’ with the rest of the team, but whatever. When I saw I was getting 5 or so points each match (I did mention I suck at PvP, right?), I quickly realized I wasn’t willing to play 100+ matches, especially with the five-minutes-of-loading-and-flying-through-space there are between each match. Whatever happened to the old days of start an old match and immediately start another? I don’t need an unskippable after-action report that drags on for minutes, and then a new matchmaking/loading/etc. All that said, with the way some of those guys played, though, it’s possible they were doing the same sort of thing- collecting a bounty that’s ‘Kill 2 enemies quickly with a Fusion Rifle’ or somesuch. I understand that it keeps the players interested by making them play in ways they normally wouldn’t, but it seems counter-productive toward actually, you know, winning the match. On the upside, I’m pretty good with the shotgun now- usually I’m more of a pistol/sniper guy.

After seeing no one here could help, I hopped on destinylfg.net this morning. Within a couple minutes, some dudes had invited me to their game- they had just started, and we went in. Holy hell. The one dude was level 31 and his friend was 27 like me. The 27 guy was the one that was trying to do the quest. I have no problem saying that if the L31 guy wasn’t there, we never would have made it. The room with the locks (three waves of baddies) was bad enough. The end room with the giant ogre, though, would have been impossible. There’s probably twenty or more armored and shielded kinghts and wizards, right when you walk in. And you have to survive three drops of those guys before the target even shows up (and not kill the boss before then, of course). The L31 guy had all sorts of fancy weapons, though, so he saved our butts more than once. So I have my first Exotic now. Hopefully, it helps me get more.

On that note, I did see a nice sniper rifle on Xur this weekend- I’m still using a (maxed-out) Blue rifle I like, but it’s really showing its age. I need a purple, at least. I saw the exotic, thought, ‘I can get another five coins before the end of the weekend’ (I had twelve), and then saw the note ‘Expansion Required’. Really? Oh well. It probably wouldn’t have been that useful now that I have the Thorn- its special power was that you could equip it in the Primary weapon slot. But still, bleh.

1833

You dodged a bullet, that exotic sniper is “No Land Beyond”, and it’s probably the worst exotic in the game.

1834

It’s probably the worst weapon in the game, period. There is essentially no benefit to using it.

Now, on some level I assume that it’s gonna get buffed heavily at some point… but for now? It’s kind of a joke weapon.

This past weekend, I did the first part of Crota on Hard and got the arc pulse rifle, which was cool, and then went back and did the Templar on hard and got fate bringer, so I got arc primaries out the wazoo now.

1835

Unless you do it with me and my friend. Which wouldn’t really make it a random pick-up group at that point. Thanks for joining yesterday, though I wasn’t able to stick around for the rest of VoG.

1836

Yeah, that guy RYAend was fantastic for Crota, and perfect for me, finished Crota on the two characters I started with in basically a matter of minutes.

Hilariously, we couldn’t finish Atheon off, at least not in the half a dozen attempts before I had to give up for the night. It really highlights again the differences in the two raids. The sword bearer is incredibly important for Crota, it’s almost a one man show. Whereas VoG still depends on any possible combination of 3 teammates being able to consistently take down the Oracles, and we just couldn’t pull that off with a couple level 30s who didn’t already have VoG weapons (something I take for granted but you can no longer really assume about people just because they’re level 29+).

In any case, thanks a ton for the invite. Still no Black Hammer or HoC for me, but I can definitely still use the Radiant Materials.

1837

Yeah, if you have a good level 32 swordbearer, Crota becomes almost trivial. You can have folks afk and beat him.

For VoG, if you have one incompetent guy, it can screw stuff up.

Another thing I noted about VoG compared to Crota’s End… VoG is IMMENSE by comparison. The Crota area is fairly confined and linear, where the Vault has massive areas to explore.

1838

If any folks are available, I am behind on my Destiny homework and need to run the weekly. I am going to give it a shot around 5 PST (traffic willing) on Ps4 if anyone is in the same boat or able to lend a hand.

1839

Glowhoo’d! First time beating a raid first week before reset for me.

1840

Why am i not eligible for the weekly?

I have the expansion