Destiny 2: Lightfall

[Qazimod]

I only ever played that strike in regular quests and stuff (e.g. Relics of the Golden Age) so I probably never saw it at its worst  Even then I'll admit that it was very gimmicky.

 

EDIT: re. @K's link

[Nate Dogg III]

Current heroic strike pattern is really enjoy working through the mission, freshened up as it is by the modifiers. Die a lot but understand what happened and what you did wrong.

 

Then get to the boss and spend 20 minutes dying, to a different thing each time, learning nothing, the modifiers that were fun before now effective death sentences. Quit to orbit.

 

Weirdly I got through Savathun, which has a whole mess of void damage, without too many problems. Loaded into the Taken one which I thought would be fine but there's just too much going on during the boss for Glass to be workable, at least at 350 light. I can work around the elemental burn, but halving my health in an activity for which I am already underpowered is just, nope, sorry.

 

And lo, it was Wednesday, and all that remained was the milestones I was not able, or willing, to do. Plus ca change.

[Mr Ben]

Inverted Spire is the easiest strike, if you have enough heavy (and not using the hand cannon from Ana for the 5 strikes quest).

[Broker]

Is the only way for me to get up to 370 to try out escalation protocol to grind milestones for the next month?! Seems like a weird thing to do to the one new activity in the expansion?

[Qazimod]

Found myself in a pretty strong crowd and managed to see more levels of EP...up to about level four I think. Things get nuts pretty fast. And yes, this progressed the IKELOS questline, so yay.

[Lyrical Donut]

6 hours ago, Nate Dogg III said:

Current heroic strike pattern is really enjoy working through the mission, freshened up as it is by the modifiers. Die a lot but understand what happened and what you did wrong.

 

Then get to the boss and spend 20 minutes dying, to a different thing each time, learning nothing, the modifiers that were fun before now effective death sentences. Quit to orbit.

 

Weirdly I got through Savathun, which has a whole mess of void damage, without too many problems. Loaded into the Taken one which I thought would be fine but there's just too much going on during the boss for Glass to be workable, at least at 350 light. I can work around the elemental burn, but halving my health in an activity for which I am already underpowered is just, nope, sorry.

 

And lo, it was Wednesday, and all that remained was the milestones I was not able, or willing, to do. Plus ca change.

 

Part of it is probably unfamiliarity with Strikes, then the other bit is getting matched with people who were probably used to cheesing / afk-ing Strikes in D1 and never reviving your fucking team mates. But sometimes you get lucky and it's all OK. In fact, it's not far off the most fun you've had shooting pretend bad men over the internet in quite a while.

 

[pinholestar]

Conversely, I’ve really enjoyed them & heroic strikes should always be this level of challenge in my opinion, so enjoy the hair’s breadth victories while you can, because in a few weeks when everyone’s 360+ they’ll be back to being a breeze. Just a shame the rewards were rendered completely obsolete almost immediately.

[Qazimod]

2 hours ago, Qazimod said:

Found myself in a pretty strong crowd and managed to see more levels of EP...up to about level four I think. Things get nuts pretty fast. And yes, this progressed the IKELOS questline, so yay.

 

Aaaand Sleeper get! It's kind of funny how I did the final part in the same evening while those EPs took days of attempts.  I guess I have done the mission before, so familiarity wasn't an issue... but the increased damage was still a problem.

 

The sticking points of the questline seemed to be: finding quick farming spots for powerful enemies (more of a timewasting thing than anything), heroic strikes (do-able but you'll still die a lot and progress will be slow) and EPs (probably the most time-consuming...because who can tell how good the other players will be?).

[Mafro]

Why am I getting level 340 clan engrams for completing the nightfall when I'm level 345? Shouldn't it have scaled up a bit?

[Gorf King]

The clan engram's for the clan completing the NF, not for you completing it. Zavala should have your own and it'll be powerful. Hawthorne has the clan one and it isn't. (All clan engrams are now capped at 340 - except for the personal clan contribution one, which is, due to a bug, but shouldn't be, so you need to leave that with Hawthorne until reset and it'll auto decrypt to a powerful reward at the postie.)

[Gorf King]

Development roadmap updated:

 

 

Christopher Barrett:

 

Quote

Now that Warmind has officially launched, we're ready to add some additional details to the upcoming roadmap. There are a lot of eagerly awaited updates that are scheduled to arrive in September, and we’ll tell you more about those in the coming months, including our plans for year two of Destiny 2. But this summer won’t just be spent playing the waiting game. We'll be delivering the Prestige modes you’ve been waiting for, bringing back Bounties, providing quality of life fixes, and more. In addition, we're launching a new seasonal event called ‘Solstice of Heroes’ where Guardians will celebrate their accomplishments and, of course, earn sweet new rewards.

 

Derek Carroll:

 

Quote

I can already hear you asking “What is Crucible Labs?” and I’m glad you want to know more. Update 1.2.1 will include a new feature intended to give you a peek behind the scenes and a louder voice in our creative process. Crucible Labs will give every player of Destiny 2 access to experimental PvP content. We’ll then have a chance to solicit your feedback to guide our final iterations. You'll learn more about Labs before launch. For today, with it making an appearance on the Roadmap, I wanted to give you a preview of our goals. More to come on this soon.

 

https://www.bungie.net/en/Explore/Detail/News/46871

[Oz]

has anyone noticed the tractor cannon sound effect seems to be played when you loose a crucible streak? 

[Mr Ben]

Wow, so is that an actual public test "realm" (server? I dunno wtf to call it in Destiny's case). They actually listened to feedback for once - reddit has been banging on about a public test server for PvP and testing weapons and the like for months.

 

Mainly as bungie themselves seem incapable of doing so (Prometheus Lens, among other things)

[Broker]

So it’s a test server? Why do they have to give everything some fucking stupid name instead of calling it what it is? Do they honestly think we’re stupid enough to think it’s their brand new idea because they call it something else?

[Mr Ben]

Looks like its only for new crucible gametypes to start, but hopefully it'll be for new guns, abilities or whatever in the future.

 

They really need the playerbase to test stuff too, as they've been so out of touch with PvP, weapons and the like up till now.

 

Also Triumphs - could these be record books like in Destiny 1? Hope so.

[Harsin]

 

Why do they have to give everything some fucking stupid name instead of calling it what it is?

 

I like to think it's like that across the board there and their canteen is like this.

 

"What's on the menu?"

"Ascendant Piscine, Refracted Tubers and Podless Jade Legumes"

"What?"

"Fish, chips and peas."

[Scruff]

 

has anyone noticed the tractor cannon sound effect seems to be played when you loose a crucible streak? 

 

I think you'll find it's a Mida 'ping'. 

[Mr Ben]

Graviton Lance is the new Mida (medium to long range "scout")

You could, theoretically, use this and nothing else in Crucible right now, depending on match type.

[Mr Ben]

So that new exotic sword then....

That scream

[Oz]

WE GIVE UP! YOU TEST THIS SHIT! 

[Oz]

1 hour ago, Mr Ben said:

Graviton Lance is the new Mida (medium to long range "scout")

You could, theoretically, use this and nothing else in Crucible right now, depending on match type.

It's also the least fun you could be having in crucible just shooting this when there are so many weapons that are viable.

[Mafro]

5 hours ago, Harsin said:

 

I like to think it's like that across the board there and their canteen is like this.

 

"What's on the menu?"

"Ascendant Piscine, Refracted Tubers and Podless Jade Legumes"

"What?"

"Fish, chips and peas."

 

Looks like Deej's shopping list.

[Gorf King]

Amongst other things, the latest TWAB contains an acknowledgement that progression and rewards in Warmind move too slowly above 340/45, and promises some fixes. First, coming on 29 May, improvements to heroic strike rewards:

 

Quote

 

Heroic strikes are a great example of something we definitely want to keep iterating on. In the May 29 update, you’ll see a small change to help make these better. 

• Escalation Protocol Key Fragments will become a 100 percent drop chance from each Heroic strike. The goal here is to make getting these fragments more accessible while also preserving the need to go play non-open-world content to get the fragments. 
• Heroic strikes will be able to drop better rewards. Every three to five Heroic strikes will drop a Legendary that can carry you up to 360 Power (before mods). This should better align the rewards of Heroic strikes with the difficulty of the activity and help solo players have a more reliable source of upgrades. 

We won’t have any time to make changes to what’s coming on the 29th, but please let us know how you feel about these rates; it is good information to inform future updates.

 

 

Too late for people who've been playing Warmind to its full extent since launch, of course.

 

In the longer term:

 

Quote

 

We’re tracking some additional issues that don’t have immediate solutions, but that I want to bring up as things we’re thinking and talking about. I don’t currently have any potential solutions to talk about, but I want to make sure we’re communicating the kinds of things we’re looking at and considering. In that spirit, here are some of the top progression-related issues we’re thinking about right now:

• How to smooth out the transition into the endgame grind once the campaign is over. Currently, there is a brick wall players seem to be running into at 345, where progression goes from fast to super frictioned. This is one of those areas we definitely don’t believe is perfect, so we’re looking at how to smooth this transition out.
• Once milestones are complete, there aren't rewards to chase. Exotic Masterworks and seasonal ranks help this problem a little bit (giving some amount of non-Power chase to work on once milestones are done) but these definitely aren’t enough. As highlighted in the roadmap, Weapon Randomization and Records should also help give players more to do once their milestones are done. That doesn’t mean we believe this is a fully solved problem, and we’re talking about other ways to help mitigate this.
• Endgame progression needs more tiers. Right now, everything gives similar-sized upgrades without discrete tiers in the progression system for players to climb to (so they can tackle new activities and, in turn, climb to a new tier with new activities). This is something I definitely wouldn’t expect a solution for prior to September, but it is on our radar.
• The quality of the rewards don’t always match the difficulty of the activity. We’re seeing a lot of this feedback around raid lair rewards in particular, so talking about how to better align with the quality of reward and the difficulty of activity is something we’re going to be thinking about more going forward.

 

 

Obviously the first point will mean even less to regular Warmind players in the context of this expansion, so you have to hope Bungie actually think more carefully about progression and tiered rewards in the next batch of substantial content before they release it, rather than after everyone's grinded their way beyond the low-set soft cap and hit a brick wall after a handful of milestones each week. Maybe they'll get it almost right next time, or the time after.

 

Also, sixes return this Tuesday in the form of Iron Banner: Control. Weapons:

 

 

Armour ornaments:

 

 

[Broker]

The exotic masterworks suck. Hoping for a random chance that I’ll get a catalyst (which seem really rare), and then it’s not even for a gun I use. Why not make it a consumable you can apply to any weapon?

[Oz]

50 minutes ago, Broker said:

The exotic masterworks suck. Hoping for a random chance that I’ll get a catalyst (which seem really rare), and then it’s not even for a gun I use. Why not make it a consumable you can apply to any weapon?

fair enough. what I like about the idea (as I don't have any yet) is that it might make me use something I don't already use. same with ornaments. incentivising variety. did you get a catalyst? what was it for? 

[Broker]

7 minutes ago, Oz said:

fair enough. what I like about the idea (as I don't have any yet) is that it might make me use something I don't already use. same with ornaments. incentivising variety. did you get a catalyst? what was it for? 

 

I've had one, for the Jade Rabbit. I'm not averse to trying out the gun but it needs me to get 250 crucible kills and after struggling to about 50 I'm not having much fun with it and also performing far worse generally in crucible than I normally do. Can't help but feel I'd be enjoying the item a lot more if I could've stuck it into Crimson, even if I would just be using the same weapon.

[Oz]

yeh Jade Rabbit is pants. fair enough. 250 kills with that to upgrade it to something you still won't use. yuck. unlucky indeed. 

[K]

They made extremely minimal adjustments to Jade Rabbit in the recent round of tuning, which is slightly odd as it still doesn't feel that great to use - I think they just boosted stability, and that was it. It makes me think I must be missing something, as Bungie had no qualms about beefing up guns like Crimson and Graviton Lance to the point where they feel a bit OP, so I'd be interested to hear why they think JR didn't need more tweaking. The Jade Rabbit in D1 was an absolute beast, it hit like a piledriver.

[mechamonkey]

I've not got any catalysts at all (254 now) which is really aggravating.
I really like Jade Rabbit in PvP with a sidearm (Travelers judgement usually)

[Ghost Pirate 101]

I got Crimson as my first catalyst, guess I got lucky! 

 

I've also had the DARCI one drop now.