Destiny 2: Lightfall

[Thor]

I'm guessing Tess Everis showing as having something for me is a bug, and not Activision being even more obnoxious in its "buy more shit" shenanigans... 

[lordscotland]

14 minutes ago, Thor said:

I'm guessing Tess Everis showing as having something for me is a bug, and not Activision being even more obnoxious in its "buy more shit" shenanigans... 

Probably you need to click on and use the matrix thingy - I overlooked that at first.

[metallicfrodo]

Not feeling this at all, currently it’s making Curse of Osiris seem amazing. It’s terribly uninspired.

[dreamylittledream]

Well there’s a vote of confidence 

[Thor]

Well, that's a relief. I feared this would actually be revelatory, evoking the wonder and sheer thrill of the first game, thus ruining my studies for the two exams I have next month. 

 

But nope. It's all so very ... meh. Brilliant!

[Mr Do 71]

About the opening story level though..., 

Spoiler

that javelin weapon is cool.

 

[metallicfrodo]

19 minutes ago, Mr Do 71 said:

About the opening story level though..., 

  Reveal hidden contents

that javelin weapon is cool.

 

 

Yeah that is cool.

 

I do actually wonder if I missed something though in the dialogue because I have no idea what the connection is between the end of the first mission and going to Earth in the second mission. They suddenly start wanting to draw someone out who they have never mentioned before.

[DonRumsfeld]

54 minutes ago, metallicfrodo said:

 

Yeah that is cool.

 

I do actually wonder if I missed something though in the dialogue because I have no idea what the connection is between the end of the first mission and going to Earth in the second mission. They suddenly start wanting to draw someone out who they have never mentioned before.

 

They kinda brushed over it quickly in a poor bit of dialogue when you go back to vendor Ana Bray to progress the story.

[Gorf King]

4 hours ago, metallicfrodo said:

Played the first mission and opened up the patrol area, it’s all terribly uninspired. The mission dialogue is woeful. Hopefully it can only get better but I almost can’t actually be bothered.

 

Unfortunately it doesn't. It does the opposite, I'd say - by the end (which comes mercifully quickly) it becomes clear that they've done a proper Osiris on Rasputin. In story/character/dialogue terms, at least. I just don't get what they're going for with this approach to throwing away all the best bits of their old lore, their old characters, on such shallow retconned campaigns, and burning the mystery down to nothing. It feels just like D2 has since the end of the first campaign - like it's been penned as a budget Saturday morning cartoon spinoff of a cult film series in a hurry to get to the end of the once obscure, messy, interesting stories it now sees as an inconvenience to its intended audience and its writers.

[Mr Ben]

8 hours ago, Thor said:

Wait.  You can bind emotes to all four directions now? 

Its that thing what you always wanted....

 

Back in 2014.

 

Anyway, I played half (I think, up till the level 28 mission at least) of Warmind (carried as I was, being level 20 and having a quite low power level), and then half or more of Osiris before getting max level. The dialogue in both is woeful at best, but most of us already knew that.

 

I will say that if I hadnt used Sunshot I dont think I'd have managed to get as far as I did. The gun is now glorious to use - killing one enemy, only for it to explode and take another enemy with it, and then for it to domino effect is ridiculously beautiful to behold. If Graviton Lance is like that as well (and judging from that video they put out, it is), then packs of enemies are now a breeze to get rid of, even if they're high level or whatever; a few more shots and its buh-bye the entire room.

 

Not sure about the rest of the game really. Will see tomorrow when I have another go, but the story, dialogue and characters may as well be from a modern cartoon show - 90's cartoons had better plots than this, but then it is all about shooting things in the face, rather than the actual plot I suppose. But then Destiny 1 didnt treat its audience like children, even if the story was non existent. And it at least had good lore (Books of Sorrow case in point). They really need to sort out their story department, as its pretty shite at the moment.

 

So, that expansion then......Hmmm.

[Siri]

I'll be blunt - the Warmind campaign is diminutive, regurgitated shite.

 

On the other hand, the exotic weapon buffs are so good that the evening flew past (as did, uh, the campaign), and I'm actually excited to go back to the vastly improved nightfall mechanics and raiding without using Merciless for every occasion.

 

The actual weekly gameplay loop for powerful gear has got interesting again post-masterworks, if only through the efforts of fusing said BPL weapons into setups that let you use 'X' exotic. And that's positive.

[K]

I had a couple of hours on this last night, and really enjoyed it. The new campaign starts off in a dull cave, but quickly moves towards and through classic Bungie megastructures that look absolutely splendid. They really need to do a Rise of Iron at some point, and add Heroic versions of story missions and the ability to replay them, because it’s a real shame not to make more use of the unique environments.

 

The rebalanced exotics are great too – Skyburner’s Oath is actually a usable weapon now. It’s the size of a rocket launcher, but handles like a massive hand cannon, which makes sense given that it’s a Cabal sidearm. Tractor Cannon too is madly powerful, and seems like pretty much the first viable use case for a shotgun in D2. Crimson was the real surprise though, as it was pretty good anyway, and is now utterly brutal – it feels like a halfway house between Red Death and Bad Juju, in that it fires three round bursts, recharges your health, AND reloads itself on headshots. I’d love to see either of Red Death and Juju back, but this will do nicely.

 

So far, the expansion feels like a statement of intent. Bungie seemed to have ditched ideas of balance, so instead of nerfing Uriel’s Gift, they’ve added a new auto rifle that handles exactly like UG but also causes elemental explosions on precision kills. Graviton Lance now fires nuclear weapons. Sunshot fires bigger nuclear weapons. It’s fun! I did a public event with about four other guardians on Nessus, and it was like being trapped inside a detonating firework. I have a full loadout of exotics that I actually want to try out; I have to agonise over which weapons to use, rather than just alternating between Nameless Midnight, Better Devils, and Uriel’s Gift (and Garden Progeny, and Atalanta-D, etc etc). It’s a gun jamboree.

 

Also, the javelin is fun. Finally, Hunters and Warlocks get the chance to experience just a little bit of how it felt to be a D1 Sunbreaker, except only once every few levels, rather than every sixty seconds.

[MDY]

6 minutes ago, K said:

The rebalanced exotics are great too – Skyburner’s Oath is actually a usable weapon now. It’s the size of a rocket launcher, but handles like a massive hand cannon, which makes sense given that it’s a Cabal sidearm. Tractor Cannon too is madly powerful, and seems like pretty much the first viable use case for a shotgun in D2. Crimson was the real surprise though, as it was pretty good anyway, and is now utterly brutal – it feels like a halfway house between Red Death and Bad Juju, in that it fires three round bursts, recharges your health, AND reloads itself on headshots. I’d love to see either of Red Death and Juju back, but this will do nicely.

 

 

Was just going to post that I ended up using Skyburners for a good while playing yesterday.. the hip fire explosive drop shots are great fun to use and it seems to absolutely chew through stuff.. a really good buff and so much more fun to use..

 

[Nate Dogg III]

Yeah I had a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours with this last night. Obviously the campaign is guff and the writing is still all over the place, but those things were set in stone long ago and you won't see meaningful change on that stuff until September at the earliest. The sandbox changes are the meat of the thing and it feels like a much improved game now. I'm excited to use exotics (unfortunately they haven't updated the app API yet so I was stuck with the handful I had on my Warlock) in a way I haven't been since D1; there seems to be an awful lot more to do beyond just blitzing through the new stuff and waiting for the raid, which admittedly is probably for the best since not one person on my friends list was playing it. I got the Borealis masterwork catalyst and it's like, ok, I guess I'm using Borealis now. Not even Destiny 1 managed to push you out of a loadout comfort zone like that.

 

I ran about blowing things up with Graviton Lance, I got a 19k crit on a Hive Knight with DARCI, I used masterwork weapons to build super stupidly quickly and thanks to Devour and Healing Rift, felt pretty much invincible.

Oh and that bit with the javelin was delicious. 

 

I am playing Destiny again.

 

 

[Siri]

I should absolutely stress that the second I equipped Rat King at the start of the campaign, I was cackling while melting packs of hive with that delicious full auto fire for a good half of the campaign with @Moodmon.

 

And that's absolutely what I want from Destiny. Even the small meta changes to enemy shields is forcing me to constantly swap and be delighted by what's in my loadout, and it feels great.

[K]

13 minutes ago, Nate Dogg III said:

I am playing Destiny again.

 

 

 

The key thing for me is that I'm not only playing Destiny, I'm thinking about it when I'm not playing it. Obviously I'm a soft touch, and was keeping the bit of my brain that Destiny lives in free just in case, but if it can reclaim that mental space from other players as well, then it might have a chance.

[ph0rce]

I got Crimson out of an exotic engram I had as soon as I logged in, it’s not left my primary slot since then, just ridiculously good. 

 

I hadn’t played since before the Osiris DLC was released but honestly, it’s starting to feel like D1 in all the right ways. That might be because they’ve been making enough small change across the board over the past five months or maybe I’m just in a different frame of mind now, but it feels right. 

[flight]

Is there a way to power level a new character up to the expansion content? I seem to remember an item or something that came with one of the expansions in D1.

 

I'd like to play with my cousin on PS4 after playing most of vanilla D2 on PC but can't really be arsed starting from scratch.

[V3zna]

18 minutes ago, flight said:

Is there a way to power level a new character up to the expansion content? I seem to remember an item or something that came with one of the expansions in D1.

 

I'd like to play with my cousin on PS4 after playing most of vanilla D2 on PC but can't really be arsed starting from scratch.

 

I bought the PC version at the weekend and levelled a new Warlock to about 225 in preparation for the new DLC. I was pleased to find I needed to be 310 to attempt Warmind. Played for several hours   last night and got him to 260. I’d guess I’ll possibly be able to play the content by about the weekend. The time sink to get to Warmind is considerable. 

[df0]

Is this cross-play? A colleague started playing this on PC and I'd like to guide him through the game a bit. Also to show off the vast superiority of the Warlock.

[V3zna]

10 minutes ago, df0 said:

Is this cross-play? A colleague started playing this on PC and I'd like to guide him through the game a bit. Also to show off the vast superiority of the Warlock.

 

Nope.

 

PC version is stuffed full of new players currently due to the Humble Bundle deal.

[df0]

Blast. Well, I can once more forget all about Destiny 2.

[KartoffelKopf]

3 hours ago, ph0rce said:

I got Crimson out of an exotic engram I had as soon as I logged in, it’s not left my primary slot since then, just ridiculously good. 

 

I hadn’t played since before the Osiris DLC was released but honestly, it’s starting to feel like D1 in all the right ways. That might be because they’ve been making enough small change across the board over the past five months or maybe I’m just in a different frame of mind now, but it feels right. 

 

The exotic masterwork for Crimson apparently takes up the range to 100%!! Mental.

 

There are still issues with the game (the mod and shader vault-juggling minigame is still an utter abomination of UI and design) but they are clearly intent to make shooting aliens in their stupid fucking faces fun again. The exotic buffs, the strike modifiers, masterworks, new weapons, ranked PvP and the hardcore challenge of the new horde mode means I should be playing this for a good few months watching them explode in a shower of space magic.

 

Story and lore IS still a bit shit but that's never what drew me in in the first place. 

[Oz]

On 08/05/2018 at 09:38, Broker said:

Is the update live today? My PC is playing up so my gaming plans for the day are fucked...

You on PC now broker?

[Qazimod]

I echo people's views on the campaign - very brief, and I wanted to like Ana but all of the "if only you could talk to the Warmind" arguing with Zavala was a bit meh. Hawthorne and Osiris are way more likeable  

 

Meanwhile, my initial attempts at Escalation Protocol could have gone better...  

[Mr Ben]

Basically someone found out how to have massive amounts of rockets by using the Rat King, because of the way that gun now works.

 

Also Esoterick has posted how to get all the memory fragments in the dlc, and what you get for getting them here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/8i08cu/spoiler_lost_memory_fragment_locations_data/

 

For 35/45 (fragments) you receive an Exotic Sword, for all 45/45 you receive an Exotic Sparrow.

 

He's also done a video with all 45 here: https://youtu.be/nqzqbfrhJyw

 

Also this is back (from a post campaign quest line):

Apparently Black Spindle is also in this dlc, somewhere, but no-one seems to have found any info on where its from yet.

[Gorf King]

1 hour ago, Qazimod said:

Meanwhile, my initial attempts at Escalation Protocol could have gone better...  

 

It's very, very hard. It'd have been nice if they'd done something more than turn the enemies' health and power bars up to 11 or 12, but it is good to have something that feels like a hard fight in Destiny again. Same's true of the upped-difficulty heroic strikes, which I had a lot of fun with this afternoon but have the usual Bungie thing of reward mismatch: they're recommended power 350 (and there doesn't seem to be any way of getting past 345 at the moment). That's fine - it's actually fun to have to sweat a bit for them - but the rewards for completion are two 335 blues and a token. Or at least they were when I just did them. (There's the powerful engram you get for completing three, of course, but they also seem to cap at 345 natural.) So with that and the fact that the regular Nightfall is LL 270, and is an absolute piece of piss without the timer etc, it all feels a bit weird - like, the Nightfall just feels like a really easy strike, and the heroic strikes feel more like Nightfalls. And the raids are basically LL 300 and give far higher power gear. (But that's without taking the scoring and modifiers on the prestige NF into account, which I haven't tried yet.)

 

Anyway, apart from it all feeling a little mixed up in terms of difficulties and rewards, which is hardly a new thing for Bungie, Escalation Protocol famously had its difficulty upped after feedback from the summittees, and at 380 recommended I'd imagine is the hardest activity to complete fully in terms of pure bullet-spongy combat, probably as hard as, if not harder than, the forthcoming raid lair. I think even the first wave will be challenging to complete since we're all effectively capped at 345 at the moment.

 

I do wish they hadn't removed the timers and set weekly modifiers from the prestige NF, though - they're the thing I most liked playing in vanilla D2. They just needed to add a few more modifiers and combinations really. But it'll be fun trying out the different handicaps and seeing how far we can push it down the risk/reward scale.

 

(Two 335 blues and an emblem ahoy, no doubt.)

[Baring]

Really enjoyed the couple of hours last night, its the company that makes this game tick. 

If you have a party going it makes it so fun, i dont mind the story and the NF was really fun with the yellow bar additions.

[Broker]

2 hours ago, Oz said:

You on PC now broker?

 

Nah my PC wasn’t connecting to the internet so I couldn’t play PUBG so I was looking for something to play on PS4.

[KartoffelKopf]

25 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

 

It's very, very hard. It'd have been nice if they'd done something more than turn the enemies' health and power bars up to 11 or 12, but it is good to have something that feels like a hard fight in Destiny again. Same's true of the upped-difficulty heroic strikes, which I had a lot of fun with this afternoon but have the usual Bungie thing of reward mismatch: they're recommended power 350 (and there doesn't seem to be any way of getting past 345 at the moment). That's fine - it's actually fun to have to sweat a bit for them - but the rewards for completion are two 335 blues and a token. Or at least they were when I just did them. (There's the powerful engram you get for completing three, of course, but they also seem to cap at 345 natural.) So with that and the fact that the regular Nightfall is LL 270, and is an absolute piece of piss without the timer etc, it all feels a bit weird - like, the Nightfall just feels like a really easy strike, and the heroic strikes feel more like Nightfalls. And the raids are basically LL 300 and give far higher power gear. (But that's without taking the scoring and modifiers on the prestige NF into account, which I haven't tried yet.)

 

Anyway, apart from it all feeling a little mixed up in terms of difficulties and rewards, which is hardly a new thing for Bungie, Escalation Protocol famously had its difficulty upped after feedback from the summittees, and at 380 recommended I'd imagine is the hardest activity to complete fully in terms of pure bullet-spongy combat, probably as hard as, if not harder than, the forthcoming raid lair. I think even the first wave will be challenging to complete since we're all effectively capped at 345 at the moment.

 

I do wish they hadn't removed the timers and set weekly modifiers from the prestige NF, though - they're the thing I most liked playing in vanilla D2. They just needed to add a few more modifiers and combinations really. But it'll be fun trying out the different handicaps and seeing how far we can push it down the risk/reward scale.

 

(Two 335 blues and an emblem ahoy, no doubt.)

 

I'm sure I read (or heard? or just plain imagined) that they tweaked EP to the point where nobody on the Bungie team could actually complete it as they know they'll always be outdone by the community and people playing it. 

 

It sounds like its ripe for some interesting strategies and team coordination for clearing out mass hordes of enemies against what seems like pretty strict timer. Like Court of Oryx though, crying shame that we can't patrol in teams of six.