Destiny Vault of Glass Raid

Okay, so the first week that the raid came out was an exciting one. I spent a lot of time on the forums seeing which clan would beat it first as I was sure someone could beat it day one despite what Bungie said about it being really hard. Although I was ready to go on Tuesday my clanmates would not be lvled up or have the time ready for the raid until Saturday so I was forced to sit back and watch. As it was we ended up having to grab 2 people from the forums to help out.

                                                               The fabled entrance

Saturday morning finally came around and we were ready to start playing. At approximately 11AM we started playing. During the week I had read up and watched some videos in preparation. I was going to keep my mouth shut for a while during the raid and only answer questions as I wanted it to be fresh and new for the other players. But if we had a question we didn't have to spend a ton of time trying to look it up because I had a good idea of what to do.

We got through the first gate easily enough. We split into 3 teams of 2 and covered the 3 rings. It got a little hairy at times but we were never wiped and eventually got through. I believe I got some ascendant shards for my trouble.

We then got into the area where the Templar was. The first thing we had to do was to protect the 3 areas from the various spawns as they attempted to overwhelm us and sacrifice themselves. This part we lost several times as we were just having too much trouble doing enough damage to the Minotaurs that would charge into the sacrificial ring. We didn't have trouble with the green goo-spawning goblins though so that was nice. We eventually beat it and then moved onto the Oracles part, which was also beaten.

                                                                      The Templar

Then we had to beat the Templar himself. This one took us the longest time. Someone had to pick up the relic shield and use it on the various harpies in the area, charge the super ability, and then shoot it at the Templar in order to take down its invulnerability shield so we could damage it. We went through several different relic carriers. I started out but after a few runs we decided we needed my DPS on the boss (I was the highest lvl character with the only legendary primary weapon). We learned a little more after every death and started getting very good at spreading ourselves out to cover incoming Oracles and prevent the Templar from teleporting so we could shoot at him longer. It took a ton of coordination but after a couple of hours of intense gameplay we finally managed to beat him. It was a huge relief. I got a legendary rifle that could be upgraded to do bonus damage to Oracles. Other more lucky players got the legendary raid armor pieces that are needed in order to reach lvl 30.

We managed to find one of the hidden chests in the raid and I got some more shards which allowed me to upgrade my armor and got me to lvl 28.

We then had to get through the Gorgon's Labyrinth. This part was highly entertaining and I'm glad they put this in as it was a fun break from the regular combat. You have to navigate through the Labyrinth without being seen by the Gorgon. If ANYONE is seen you all die. It was intense and the Gorgons have a nice creepy sound and look about them that really added to the tension. This took much longer to complete than normal as the servers for Bungie went down right in the middle of this and we had to wait for people to sign back on. But eventually came and we mapped out the path to get through unseen. It helped that most of us were Hunters and could cloak ourselves so we couldn't be seen. I kind of wish the path was more elaborate and long because it is pretty easily done and very easily done once you know how to do it.

                                                          Gorgon and their horrible gaze

The next part was the jumping puzzle which didn't take too long. It wasn't as difficult as I originally thought it would be. A part of me is disappointed but then again I would get very frustrated about losing at a jumping puzzle as they are not very much fun. I was entertaining myself by sitting on the other end and watching my clanmates fall to their doom over and over again though.

We finally made it to the last room. The first thing we had to do was kill the Gatekeeper which was easy. The next part, however, was very difficult. We had to activate a time gate one at a time, send 2 guys in to destroy a relic keeper and grab the relic, then come out and do it again. All the while everyone had to protect a conflux in the middle of the map from sacrificial Vex. We got wiped quite a lot of times trying to do this. It took us a while to find a good team of 2 to go in and get the relics (eventually was myself and another player), and then it took even longer to figure out a way of just surviving and killing the various minions. But eventually we finally got through it.

By this time we had been playing the raid for around 7 hours I think. We had the final boss to complete, but we were starting to get weary and tired. I, myself, was still recovering from a midnight Magic release tournament that I went to with a friend (I went 2-1 and got 6 packs of cards thank you very much), but I got home at 4AM and didn't get very much sleep.

This last part was the hardest thing we've ever had to do. I will spoil the ending and say that we did not complete it. We got close though and I am confident that given a week's time until Saturday will allow us to be ready to beat it then. We had to beat Atheon. Atheon spawns kamikaze harpies throughout the battle and he teleports the 3 furthest players into another dimension. Those 3 players need to grab the relic and constantly heal the debuff on all the players or else we all lose. Those same 3 then have to destroy 7 Oracles as they spawn very quickly or everyone loses, all the while being attacked by various Vex. Meanwhile, on the outside, the remaining 3 players have to keep the 2 gates open to allow the original 3 to get back, all the while dodging Atheon attacks and kamikaze harpies.
Once the original group is back everyone gets a damage buff and can start to unload on the boss. After the buff wears off the furthest 3 players are teleported and the process starts again.

                                                                Atheon in all his glory

 It took many many deaths to figure out a good combination and strategy in order to get through even one rotation of events. Myself and 2 others went through the gate to destroy the Oracles, but several times we either got killed by a Vex sniper or Minotaur, didn't kill the Oracles quickly enough, got debuffed so bad we couldn't see, or the people on the outside died or failed to open the portal. It was crazy. Oh, and if you don't beat the boss in 8 minutes, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose as he gets enraged and crushes everyone. We managed to go through the rotation several times but we never could do enough damage before losing, or a little mistake by someone cost us a wipe.

I think we just weren't lvled up enough. I was lvl 28 but I think everyone else was 26 and maybe one 27. That just isn't high enough. Also, nobody had any exotic weapons or even legendaries. We just couldn't do enough damage and couldn't stay alive easily enough. We gave up for the week but I am very confident we will beat him next week, and then I can finally say I've beaten everything Destiny has to offer. It was a ton of fun and I can't wait to do it again, and I hope they make many more raids. I just love the coordination and planning that is required as well as the new mechanics you don't run into while playing the regular game. I highly recommend finding 5 other people and giving it a try.

Destiny Weekly Nightfall Strike Adventure

Wow last night was a long one. I set out to try and beat the Nightfall Strike as I heard that the rewards were really nice. I am lvl 26, almost 27. I have an exotic helmet and all legendary armor except for boots. However, I am stuck and can't level my equipment without various ascendant materials. You apparently can get more from raids but obviously it isn't out til today, and I will be very lucky to figure out how to beat the raid anytime soon. So, in the meantime we attempted the Nightfall Strike.

This week's was for the Devil Walker strike. Spider Tank!!!! I actually love this strike. I find it fairly easy to do and I just enjoy the steps more so than some of the other strikes. The Nightfall Strike, however, made it extremely difficult. I first attempted it solo like I did for the weekly Epic Strike but quickly found out that would have either been impossible or taken too long for my liking. So I replied to posts in the bungie.net forums and managed to find some people to play with.

So with a Nightfall Strike all the enemies are lvl 28 and a lot of them have the yellow health bars (indicating they are very powerful and are called majors or ultras), as well as some kind of shield. These shields are weak to a certain element and you take a 50% damage penalty if you try to hit them without using the element. The AI is much smarter than normal and constantly will dive around avoiding shots, as well as retreat to regain shields and work together. There are also various skulls that are active and are listed when you view the Strike. It is similar to Halo. Here is the chart:

Skull	Effect
Juggler	No ammo drops for your equipped weapon.
Anger Issues	Minions of the Darkness display heightened aggression.
Angry	Minions of the Darkness won’t flinch, even after massive damage.
Arc Burn	Arc damage from any source is greatly increased.
Solar Burn	Solar damage from any source is greatly increased.
Void Burn	Void damage from any source is greatly increased.
Lightswitch	Minions of the Darkness deal much more melee damage.
Nightfall	You will face a relentless army that has never known defeat. If all players die, you will be returned to orbit.
Heroic	Enemies appear in greater numbers and are more aggressive.
Mythic	Heavily shielded and highly aggressive enemies appear in great numbers.

The biggest issue with the Nightfall Strike, however, is that if your whole team gets downed, you have to start back at the beginning! No respawns ever. If you get downed, you are downed until someone can revive you. If you win you get some nice rewards, an xp bonus for a week, as well as a sweet blue flames animation around your head for the week as well.

So we set off on our adventure....and promptly died. The hardest part of that strike is the area where you have survive a couple of waves of enemies while your ghost tries to remove the barriers. It was really tough. We adopted the heroic strategy of hiding down in the tunnel on the one end of the map near the train gas car, poking our heads out to snipe before diving back into cover. We still got sniped in the head by vanguards and dropped all the time, but someone was standing behind to revive us if needed. We still got eliminated lots of times because of those stupid homing bullets the Fallen captain's guns have.

We had 2 hunters and a warlock in our party. I think it was a decent combination. Us hunters were blade dancers mainly for the various stealth abilities. We could crouch or use our ultimate and stealth, then go out to attack or gather ammo. The warlock was awesome but it would have been better if he was a sunsinger I think so that he could have the ability to revive himself if he died (he wasn't lvled up enough for that). The strategy was decent though, but still hard.

We finally managed to beat that first part, and promptly died against the Spider Tank due to stupidity. We finally made it back to the Spider Tank after about another hour. This time we crushed it pretty easily by just staying back and shooting. Sure I had to stealth and run around to revive people a couple of times, but it wasn't too scary. We were then ready to take on Sepik Prime.

Since we really didn't want to do it all again we decided that I would stand in a corner in the side room to the left and revive if needed. Everyone else stayed in the room but were constantly taking out the enemies. I of course couldn't just do that and would poke out a window to snipe and attack Sepik. It worked perfectly and after a long firefight we managed to kill him!

For all my trouble I was awarded with this little gem

Our warlock got a legendary heavy machine gun and the other hunter got 7 strange coins. We of course got our xp bonus and awesome blue head flames, even though it would only last for one day (since the world reset today). It was an awesome experience though. We had a ton of fun and although it was really hard, it's nice to get some sweet gear. I love auto rifles but the legendary I had had no impact and it was very inaccurate. This one seems much more like my style.

I can't wait to see what this week's one will be. But hopefully I will be playing the raid this week at some point. Today I plan on at least getting my last legendary armor with Vanguard marks, and we'll see about the raid!

Destiny Multiplayer and lvl 26

So yesterday/early this morning I finally gave Multiplayer a try. My primary reason for this was because I maxed out my Vanguard marks for the week and although I don't care that much about multiplayer, playing it can give me crucible marks. Crucible Marks can allow me to purchase some pretty sweet high end gear and since I am limited with Vanguard it might make sense to get something else so I can get as high of a lvl as possible in time for the raid or the weekly nightfall strike.

In Multiplayer you at first only have the Control mode unlocked, which is basically a capture and hold mission that lasts 10 minutes. It's a fun, simple, and familiar mode that anybody with multiplayer experience will be able to catch on. There are 3 points on the map and you have to capture them and kill the opposing team for points. At the end of 10 minutes the team with the most points wins. It is a 6v6 swirl of a game that occupied my time for 5 matches as I had a bounty giving me rewards for just that.

After that you can unlock the other modes. And, keep in mind, that you do not even unlock multiplayer until like lvl 4. You need to complete a couple of missions and lvl up to get your super ability as well as your special weapon. This isn't a bad thing really as trying to play multiplayer without your super ability or without at least the minimum of weapons would be dumb. As it is I would recommend starting it after you've unlocked several of your abilities, as they translate into multiplayer. I am not sure how exactly the game is scaled, but your skill build tree definitely translates into multiplayer, so me upgrading my Golden Gun to cause explosions when I kill an enemy is a beautiful thing, as is my cloak of invisibility while using my Blade Dancer:

But anyway I managed to start playing multiplayer, already looking quite awesome and decked out from all my time in PvE. And it didn't really help. Sure, I got over a 1.0 K/D ratio, but I consider myself a fairly decent video gamer with lots of experience playing the various Halo, Call of Duty, Gears of War, Titanfall, etc games. I still did not do very well. I was usually low on the totem poll for my team (although in my defense I was defending and capturing points a lot). It was still decently fun. Right now the meta is all shotguns all the time with assault rifles mixed in. It's very much like Halo, which isn't a bad thing if you like that.

Right now I am lvl 26, and now am running into the issue of having decent armor and weapons, but no way of upgrading them. They all require various ascendant materials, which are very hard to come by. I have 3 armor upgrades for several of my armors and they all require 6 ascendant shards among other things. I have one shard and 4 energy. It's gonna take a while I'm guessing. I still have my leg armor to upgrade to a legendary status but I need more vanguard marks to do that. Soon, assuming that the limit on marks gets lifted after today.

I also managed to snag my first legendary the Mask of the Third Man (http://www.bungie.net/en/Legend/1/4611686018429606097/2305843009215180483#gear).
I got this gem from Xur Agent of Nine who is this really cool ringwraith/cthulu looking NPC that sells exotic and other legendary items. It cost me all my strange coins but it was totally worth it. I may suck at Multiplayer but I look dang impressive.

Tuesday marks the availability of the raid. I hope my clan has enough people to do it. I think I'm ready to at least give it a try. I can't wait.

Day 3 and Destiny Events Inbound!

Ok I finally got to lvl 23. In the first day I beat the single player campaign and did all the strikes and such and was at lvl 20. In day 2 I started to try and get high end equipment and made it to lvl 22 early on in the day. I did a ton of exploring which doesn't yield good stuff, but then spent a lot of time in the strike playlist, which was awesome.

I just couldn't find good loot however. I kept getting green engrams and the blue ones were nothing special. I sat with 8-9 light on all my equipment and just couldn't get forward. I played the heroic weekly strike solo (didn't know you could bring a fireteam), and although it took over an hour, I finally beat it. Then on my next strike I managed to get a decent piece of armor with light on it and it pushed me to lvl 23!

Now I just need to get some decent weapons. I'm hoping to be able to move up to the lvl 24 strike playlist soon as I'm sure I'll get better gear that way. Plus it's double the marks which I desperately need to make sure I hit the 100 cap before the week is done.

The biggest news of the day, however, was the announcement that Destiny Events are Inbound! I am referring to this released article: http://www.bungie.net/en/News/News?aid=12133

 

Just look at all that new stuff! Obviously I don't care that much about crucible stuff so probably half of this stuff I won't check out, but the Vault of Glass and Queen's Wrath have me very interested. The first Destiny raid is Vault of Glass and I need to somehow get to lvl 26 and have my clan be lvled up as well. That will be tough but I can't wait to give it a try.

Speaking of, I joined a clan of like-minded fellows and we're called D3stinysChild. I'm proud of the clever name, feel free to apply! We could use more people.

But Queen's wrath also really has me interested. For one it seems like a free update, which is always great, but it looks like it will be something with single player and maybe a strike? I hope so. I would love to see more single player and I'm already bummed that we won't get some content as it is a Playstation exclusive for one year. That's a long time.

But yeah free updates, not a lot of games do that. Titanfall makes you pay $15 in order to get 3 maps, but this looks like it will be more. That's really cool. I just hope Bungie can keep getting out the news and hyping out the crowds because I'm gonna guess that a lot of the reviews for the game aren't too great. I have a feeling people either didn't play enough of it to see how much stuff gets unlocked later on, and/or don't know that this really is a first chapter to a larger game. People may want to hold off until the Game of the Year edition, but this game will probably keep getting bigger and better.

Can't wait to get home and play some more. See you starside!

Helpful hints for Destiny

Here is an ongoing helpful hints post with stuff I've found around the interwebs that have helped me so far. *This is probably more for the hardcore types that are playing end game content (Warning: Possible Spoilers):

- Pay attention to the shield type of your enemies. Although all enemies with a shield have a white bar that represents the shield, it's the color of the shield aura that you should pay attention to. The various colors correspond to a vulnerability to a weapon element type. Blue = Arc (spiky blue throwing star symbol). Orange = Solar (flame symbol). Purple - Void (purple swirl). Kinetic damage is the default that a weapon can have. If you try to attack someone with a damage type of anything other than the one they are vulnerable to, you take a 50% penalty!

- Every level you WOULD go past lvl 20 gives you a mote of light

- Save your blue engrams (and above) and don't cash them in until you are lvl 20 because they scale up to your lvl when you cash them in. Might has well have more chances to get that "light" gear.

- There is a cap on the amount of marks you can get from a faction, at 100 a week. You can still get rep but be wary. You can view how much you've gained by looking at your Bungie.net profile or in the game where the Vanguard and Crucible icons on the map are. You will see a ring start to surround the icons and when they are full you are done for the week.
 
- Although I love my single player, in multiplayer you can probably get Crucible marks a lot faster than Vanguard marks since you get the same amount from playing a Crucible control match as you do for a single player Strike, and since a control match is only 10 minutes, it will go a lot more quickly.

- If you love the stuff from the other Factions in Destiny make sure you buy the Faction piece, equip it, and then whenever you'd normally get Vanguard or Crucible marks and rep, you will instead get that Faction. Also, make sure you aren't accidentally wearing a faction item and thus getting rep and marks from a Faction you don't want.

- If you completely run out of ammo for your primary and secondary weapons, if you just stand still for like 30 seconds, it will automatically replenish. It's awesome! I'm not sure if this is supposed to happen because I don't know why anyone would bother to buy those ammo refills with this being around. It was invaluable during the Nightfall Strike. It also replenished some heavy ammo as well!

- Level up the Cryptarch. Every time you cash in an engram he gets some experience. Soon, after every level he gains, he will send you a package which will frequently be a legendary engram and you can get some really decent things. I'm even started to spend some glimmer and just bought some engrams from him, then cashed them back in in order to give him more xp. If you keep buying the same type of item the amount of xp he gets keeps increasing as well!

- Pick up any crafting materials you see. You don't want to be spending tons of time trying to farm them, and you will definitely need them all.

- Make sure you do at least one public event a day if at possible. You can get Ascendant Shards from it which are really hard to find and are needed to upgrade your higher lvl armor. Plus, if you have multiple characters that means multiple shards, and you can put them in your storage bank for anyone to use.

- Keep in mind that although it might be fun to do your Daily Heroic Story at a lesser Heroic level, if you do the top tier difficulty you can also get Ascendant Shards.

- Legendary and Exotic items can give you Ascendant Materials if they are dismantled. Have a legendary weapon you probably will never use? Break it down!