Destiny: Rise of Iron Review Part 2

Onto Part 2 of my Rise of Iron Review! If you missed Part 1, here it is. http://amazingspidertank.blogspot.com/2016/09/destiny-rise-of-iron-review-part-1.html

Rise of Iron introduced to us a whole slew of new things. We got a new record book, new ornaments, new types of artifacts, and of course new weapons and armor. We also got a new strike and 2 of our old strikes got minor facelifts. And lastly, I want to touch upon our new enemy. So let's dig in:

Yummm...grinding....

We got a new record book, similar to the SRL and Moments of Triumph record books of the past. These have been great ideas. It keeps players working towards something, and it's exciting when you get to a new level. The best part of this record book has to be the awesome armor that comes with it (see below). While the armor won't be catapulting you into high light levels, it sure does look awesome. The look of this can also be changed using the new Ornament system that Destiny offers.

Ornaments are things that can be added on certain weapons and armor in order to change their appearance. Random chance boxes can be bought with real money, but they can be earned in game. They can be gotten in a nightfall or raid, or from treasure chests that can be won weekly. These are a great idea. It's a chance for players to customize their look so we can all be precious little snowflakes. For instance, each of the Rise of Iron record book armor can have an ornament added to it to turn it into a sweet iron furnace-looking armor:

Is this Destiny or some weird Dark Souls DLC?

For you wannabe Lord Saurons out there

We also have new artifacts. Artifacts in Destiny have just been little modifiers that change your attributes. They haven't been anything too special. But in RoI, they have changed them up in a pretty significant way! You can earn these ornaments from weekly quests. Based off of 8 Iron Lords, each new artifact grants its user some kind of special ability. For example, one of the artifacts available this first week is the Memory of Jolder, which gives the player unlimited sprint! Another is the Memory of Timur, which allows you to convert enemies to your side for a limited amount of time! One of the ones I am most interested is the Memory of Radeghast:

No, not that one

The Memory of Radeghast allows you to use your heavy sword to reflect projectiles, rockets, even some supers! My mind races with the possibility of reflecting raid boss shots back at them, and the hilarity of watching a Hunter get killed by his own Golden Gun.

A face only a mother could love. Now THAT'S blind love!

We also got a new strike called the Wretched Eye. In this one we get to go fight Frankenstein and his monster. Well...run from his monster anyway. This strike feels different from previous ones. There is a lot of vertical movement in this strike as you go down into the depths of what looks like old missile silos, searching for your prey. All the while you are harassed by enemies. You are trying to find a Devil Splicer High Priest, who apparently likes to capture Hive Ogres, remove their eyes, and use their pew-pew-ness to power his own weapons. The final area is by far the best part as you need to dispose of the bullet spongey boss, all the while avoiding the Reagan-smashing blind Ogre that's stomping about with hands that look like they are made of WWII submarine mines. It's great, thrilling fun, all the better when done on Heroic Mode or during the Nightfall.

We also got 2 older strikes that were revisited: Sepiks Perfected and Abomination Heist Siva Phogoth. Sepiks Perfected has us revisiting our very first strike and rekilling our very first strike boss. The strike plays out mainly the same, although the enemies are slightly different, and the path is slightly different. At the end we fight the aforementioned boss, only this time he has an invulnerable shield that we have to take out by first killing a captain with the matching shield color boom gun. Once the shields are down (thanks Admiral Ackbar!), we can lay waste to the boss. My thoughts are those mechanics will be coming back in the raid.

However, Bungie got smart and removed all our old cheesing spots by putting respawning turrets everywhere, so we have to stay outdoors. Probably my favorite part of this strike is the awesome guitar music in the background. It definitely comes as a surprise, but it's a welcome one, and I wished more of Destiny had such epic music.

Abomination Heist has us revisiting Phogoth. Honestly I can't recall too much of a difference other than enemies. There is one part where you have to traverse some tomb ships that served as a pleasant reminder of the King's Fall Raid, but other than that the strike is pretty lackluster.

We also can get loot in a different way in the strikes. Now there are things called skeleton keys, which can be used on the treasure chest located at the end of every strike. Opening these things gives access to rewards at the top light level, and rewards can be specific to the strike. So if you really want that Darkblade Helm, just save your skeleton key for the Darkblade strike. However, good luck finding skeleton keys. I am finding those things harder to get than a Vex Mythoclast.

Lastly, I wanted to talk about the new enemy: Siva

I'm sure there's a cream for that...

***Story Spoiler Warning!!!*** Siva used to be a nanotechnology used in the Golden Age to help the human colonization of the galaxy. At some point it went rogue and became more of a virus. The Iron Lords attempted to destroy it but only managed to contain it in the Plaguelands, losing most of their members in the process. It is this weird red looking Twizzler mess that has infected everything.

Exactly like this

The Fallen, who are always up for pirating and using whatever they need to in order to win (Like Vex stuff in the House of Wolves), have brought it upon themselves to take it to the next level of evolution.

The new Splicer Fallen enemies are "enhanced", says the game. Honestly they are just reskinned, but they do behave slightly different just like the Taken did. They all have a red/black coloring about them and usually shoot red lasers, unlike their blue-brethren. The basic soldiers have peg legs for some reason.

Peg legs are great for snow traversing

The snipers shoot multiple bursts instead of one beam, and another thing Siva does apparently is burst out of your head when your head gets shot, to go and find who did and kill them in a red mist.

I feel about the same way I felt about the Taken, although the Taken did at least arrive in a unique way. Fallen Splicers are basically just reskinned Fallen troops that borrow some abilities.

In my next article I will hopefully get to talk about the new raid, and compare it with the previous ones. I hope you enjoyed this, happy gaming!

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!