Basara

Tremendous, only Bungie could leave out the part that could make them money from an update.

The hunt is over. Nightmare Slain. Somehow I actually managed to beat all of the mandatory bosses and several optional bosses in Bloodborne without levelling up! Once the Shadows of Yharnam fell it got a lot easier. I've never really had a problem with Rom, Micolash or the Wet Nurse and i played The One Reborn incredibly cautiously and got it second try. While I didn't kill every boss, I killed all 8 required to beat the main game, 3 optional bosses and 5 chalice dungeon bosses. I purposely didn't progress the game to NG+ so I can always go back and fight the optional bosses if i am ever feeling crazy enough to do so. Never really thought i would get that far on this run so i'm pretty happy with my self.

Went on somewhat of a tear in the Iron Banner today, in 9 games across 3 characters i accumulated 79 tokens thanks to the daily milestones and actually getting matched with some decent people. It was enough to hit rank 10 on the Titan and get all of the gear aside from the mark which i need 4 more tokens to buy. One more win or 2 losses will do it. I might jump on after the reset tonight and tomorrow to make a start on the Hunter gear. And hopefully get the new scout rifle to drop. Bungie have also released a road map for their next few updates. The things that stand out to me are the changes to the Nightfall on the 27th. They are going back to a scoring system like Rise of Iron rather than the tedious timer. Heroic Strike modifiers and 6v6 Iron Banner in the March 27th update. And exotic Masterworks and vault space increase in season 3 starting May. Eater of Worlds prestige dropping in May also pretty much confirms that the second DLC wont be released until season 4. That would put it almost a year, maybe even a year if it's September, since the base game was released. At this point in Destiny 1 lifespan that was The Taken King. I can't see the second season pass DLC being TTK sized so Bungie could have a lack of content problem on their hands like they did in Year 2 of Destiny.

Just a tip if you plan on buying the Fated Engram from Xur J.T. It's a special engram that guarantees a drop of an exotic you don't have. So make sure you finish up any weekly milestones you plan on doing first in case they drop an exotic for you. This is Destiny. It will screw you over and probably drop the exotic you just spent 97 shards on from Xur. I've been slacking with my Iron Banner commitments this week. I hit rank 5 with the Titan a few days ago but he needs to be rank 10 if i want to buy the rest of the gear (unless RNG favours me and it drops from packages). I plan on grinding out a bunch tomorrow. I'm hoping the daily challenges are somewhat simple and not the tedious double kills or kill someone on a super.

It's taken more hours than i'd like to admit, and I've been stuck on this boss for 4 days, but the Shadows of Yharnam are finally dead at BL4. Up until them it's felt like if I've died it's because i got greedy or hadn't completely learned a bosses move set but there's so much randomness to the Shadows fight it just feels unfair at times. The fireballs one shot you and any normal attack takes about 80% health off. There's decent amounts of cover but trying to keep track of all threes attacks, while only damaging one is a nightmare. I ended up having to take my time with the first, bait him out, then parry him and just go all in super aggressive on the remaining 2 to try and skip their phases. I got real lucky i think and managed to stun lock the last guy before he could summon snakes. Fuck that fight. I've got farther than i ever thought i would with this run. I figured the Shadows would be what ended it. There's nothing else now i can do to gain more damage, my weapon is +9 and while i could try and farm a slightly better 3rd gem i don't think the extra damage at this point will make a huge difference compared to how long it will take to slog through the chalice dungeons to get one. I'm just going to keep going now until i cant master a boss, or it just get's too frustrating and no longer fun. Rom, you're next!

If i remember right isn't there a dragon on a bridge near the blacksmith you can bait into killing a bunch of enemies for easy souls? Rinse and repeat, and you've got your 8k fairly quickly and safely. But again, you've gotta know this stuff going in and a new player wouldn't. I absolutely fell into the trap of not upgrading my weapon and putting everything into levelling early game. These games will never be 'easy' but you can definitely make them easier on yourself once you know what you're doing. Add Darkbeast Paarl to the list of the BL4 victims! That bastard hits so damn hard and is so fast, it's taken me the better part of 2 hours to figure him out and kill him. I was wildly inconsistent while figuring him out. He'd literally one shot me in the first couple of seconds of one attempt, then i'd get him down to 20% of the next one. Next on the hit list is the Shadows of Yharnam. Yeah...

Yeah, when I played these games for the first time I was too concerned about using up upgrade materials etc that you end up making the game harder than it needs to be at the start. And I think DS is even more generous with the amount of weapons you can upgrade than BB is. Im looking forward to the remaster. The first Dark Souls is the only one I never beat. I played the series in a sort of wonky order and I never got around to finishing it. Bloodborne was the first, wanting more of the same I picked up Dark Souls 2. I played a bit of Dark Souls on the Xbox One via backwards compatibility but sort of just forgot about it once I picked up DS3 on the PS4.

The Bloodborne BL4 run roles on! I finished off the first chalice dungeon, took out the Witches of Hemwick without even taking damage and unlocked Cainhurst castle. Ok so no damage on the Witches isn't exactly a huge accomplishment, they are a joke boss, but I'm still happy with how this is going. Its surprising how powerful you can get early on, even without levelling, by having a knowledge of the game and how weapons upgrades, gems and runes work. It's possible to get a +3 weapon after just killing one boss, a +6 after 2 bosses and a +9 after 4 if you know where to go and what to grind. Being able to access the first Chalace Dungeon after 2 bosses and grinding some good early/mid game gems helps a lot too. I was probably 4 or 5 bosses in before I upgraded a weapon on my first ever playthrough. I'm now torn between trying to kill Paarl to unlock bolt paper to make Shadows easier or skipping the headache that is Paarl and dealing with the Shadows without a buff.

Jumped on for some Iron Banner last night. I was hoping to get a set of ornaments for my Warlocks IB gear but that grind looks too much for me. It does appear to be season based rather than having to be done in one week so I might get it done over multiple Banners but it's not something I'm going out of my way to do. Instead I'll work on a full set of armour for the Titan. He's lacking a decent set of gear and just wearing a mishmash of whatever random stuff has dropped for him. I cashed in 3 ranks worth of tokens and scored the chest, shotgun and handcannon so I'm off to a fairly decent start. If I get a helm to drop it will be a lot easier since you have to hit rank 10 to buy the helm, we'll see how RNG is feeling. Masterworks armour could be interesting. The increased health while in a super would have saved me a bunch of times in PVP and PVE. Roaming supers might not be useless anymore now. They really need to add some masterworks perks to exotics though. At the moment I'd rather rock a MW kinetic and energy weapon due to the orbs from double kills and creating orbs for yourself. That's a better perk to have than most exotics have at the moment.

Yeah, a fitting way to hit a milestone. I'm not sure how you do it, 101 platinums is crazy! Jumped back into my BL4 Bloodborne run this afternoon since PSN was acting up and any game requiring an internet connection was pretty much broken. Managed to make some solid progress. Vicar Amelia and the Undead Giant (in the first chalice dungeon) can be added to the dead list. Amelia was a pretty tough fight just because she has a bunch of health and staying consistent for so long is a challenge. Undead Giant was't too bad, he hits hard but has a simple move set, once i stopped getting greedy and trying for too much damage he went down. I tried Darkbeast Paarl. He kicked my ass. Hard. I had a couple of decent runs getting him down to about 25% but he's so damn quick and hits so hard it's tough to get his move set down, i'm usually dead seconds into the fight unless i can rush him and take out a leg. The arenas quite small too so i can't hang back out of range and watch and learn his moves. Fortunately hes an optional boss and doesn't drop anything too valuable for the run so i might just skip him or come back later. I still think the Shadows will be where i hit a wall. I'm experiencing problems during this run that i didn't notice on my original playthroughs. Problems that a lot of people seemed to have like running out of blood vials/bullets/blood echoes etc. Since Bloodborne was my first Souls style game i absolutely sucked at it at first and because of that i played and died in the first section of the game for hours unknowingly hoarding up a large amount of vials and bullets that the enemies generously drop there. Enough that i never really had a problem with running out during the rest of the game. Since i'm not levelling and not needing huge amounts of blood echos i'm just running through areas to fight the bosses. Doing this means i'm forever running out of supplies. I think i might have to just take some time to farm some stuff up before going for the next boss.

We managed to 2 man yet another Nightfall this week. And without Hunter cheesing it too! To be fair, it was a fairly good combination of modifiers, killing enemies extends the timer and recharges your health and super. So basically: Kill Everything. Still, i wont miss the timer when they finally get rid of it in a few weeks. Still no max light character. RNG has finally started to turn on me at the end. My Warlock needs boots, my Hunter a cape and the Titan a chest and mark but on the plus side at 334 on all characters everything drops at max light now so it's only a matter of time and i'm getting a bunch of infusion fodder.

I must have missed your 100th Plat, what game earned that prestigious spot?

It preparation for Dark Souls Remastered I've gone back to replay my first, and favourite, 'soulsborne' game, Bloodborne. It's probably my favourite game of this generation of consoles and it's been about a year or so since i last did a run through. I'm attempting a no levelling BL4 run, I don't imagine i'll actually complete the whole game but it's going decently enough so far. I've killed the Cleric Beast, Father Gascoigne and the Blood Starved Beast. The first 2 weren't actually too bad, the BSB took about 2 hours of trial and error getting it's timing down. I anticipate hitting a wall when i get to the Shadows since that fight is tough enough to manage without putting limitations on your self. Still, i'm going to stick with it for as long as possible just to see how far i can get. And how much i can torture myself until common sense kicks in and i stop.

Shouldn't take you too long to catch up JT, levelling up goes pretty quickly now. Even solo playing you can net yourself 3 powerful engrams a week, 4 if you're in a clan. And that's just solo playing not including Nightfalls/Trails/Raids. Scored myself a full set of New Monarchy gear for the Hunter in the faction rally. It's time to give the Hunter and Titan some love since the Warlock has had all the seasonal gear so far. I'm working my way through unlocking the ornaments for the NW Hunter gear now so i can look like a goddamn space lion! We 2 manned the Nightfall again (a requirement for the Helm ornament), not an easy one this week, we did it with 56 seconds left on the clock. I cant wait for the February update when the are ditching that annoying mechanic. The boots ornament is a grind though, 150 super kills and the tether doesn't count so it's gotta be pole dancer or golden gun. Slow goings so far. All 3 of my characters are just one or 2 pieces of gear away from max light now and as always, that final piece of the puzzle just doesn't want to drop.

For anyone in the UK wanting XBox Live, Microsoft are currently selling 6 months for £12.49. And if you have auto renewal turned off before redeeming it, they offer you an additional month for turning it on. https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/d/xbox-live-gold-membership-digital-code/CFQ7TTC0K5ZM/0003?OCID=AID620866_SEM___EFID_&s_kwcid=AL!4249!3!198090721843!!!g!385208793095!&ef_id=We4umgAAAGjv5kX5:20180115104708:s

The thing i'm looking forward to most out of all of that is the removal of the Nightfall timer. I think I've done maybe 4 Nightfalls since Destiny 2 dropped just because that timer sucks all of the fun out of it.

All of my schematics auto complete into rewards now. I think it's something to do with it giving you the same schematic a second time. Once you've completed it it will auto complete if you get it again. I think there's only maybe 5 or so different ones so once you've done them all once you can just log in, pick up your rewards and not have to complete the tasks. As for the rewards the things I've had from them so far are: shaders, ghosts, sparrows, ships, class items, a sword and the previously mentioned light level 10 exotic engram. But yeah, mostly sparrows, ships and ghosts. Some of them look pretty good but most are just reskins. You don't get silver dust for breaking them down either unlike regular bright engram rewards, they just turn into shards and glimmer. I think completing the actual Dawning quest has a small chance of dropping gear though. I got the warlock helm from somewhere and i didn't buy it from Eververse. It involves playing 5 mayhem crucible games and 5 strikes. These also stack with the normal weekly milestones so you can knock out A Call to Arms and the Heroic Strike milestone at the same time.

Yeah i already had a DARCI, i don't mean that the gun it's self is rare, just the fact that it's at light level 15. I don't think i'll ever get an exotic at that lower level again, and i don't think it's possible to get one at a lower light level. It's completely pointless but i will keep it just because of it's novelty. There are Fanatics in the base game too. They spawn in the Vex public event when you are trying to defend plates to make it heroic. I'm pretty sure they are in the Vex strike on Io too.

Yeah there's nothing actively broken about the game. Aside from a Warlock glitch in Mayhem that lets you throw infinite nova bombs but Mayhem as a playlist is only available during The Dawning which finishes next week. What all the complaints are about are the loot boxes and the fact that there are things they introduced in Destiny that are missing from Destiny 2. Most of which i'm sure Bungie will patch back in at various points. We two manned a Nightfall today. First time we've done one since, i think, week 3 of Destiny 2. The timer makes them a real bitch to do with less than 3 people and even with 3 they're not much fun because of it. It had a decent set of modifiers though, a standard time limit of 22 mins instead of a mechanic based one and faster recharge rates on abilities, we basically just smoke bombed and grenaded our way to the boss room with 13 mins to spare, dropped the boss with a little over 4 mins left. I really wish they'd get rid of the time limit system in the nightfalls. I also got what might be the rarest thing in the game today. So Dawning rewards are Eververse based, even the free stuff you get from completing tasks rather than buying them. So because of that, any gear that drops is light level 10 to eliminate any 'pay to win' elements. Anyway, i got an exotic engram from the package. I didn't even know you could get exotics from them. But because it was from the Dawning it dropped at 15 light (all exotics get a guaranteed +5 mod). I now have a 15 light D.A.R.C.I, i'm pretty sure that's the lowest possible light on an exotic and i cant think of any other way of getting one other than the ridiculously low drop rate from a Dawning package.

I don't think the original Destiny season pass went on sale while it was still relevant. I think it only dropped in price when Year 2 started with The Taken King. I'd guess they follow the same pattern this time. Still, depending on how much you payed for the base game you can pretty much buy the base game and season pass separately for the cost of what the base game went for 3 months ago. I think the season pass is £25 and the game itself has dropped as low as £20 over here.

Put in a good session this afternoon to really try out the DLC. More time than I'd like to admit! About 6 hours! But it's snowing outside and the drive way was covered again almost as fast as I could clear it so why not! Spent the first half doing various quests and milestones. Loot seems a lot more plentiful but that might just be luck. I'm sitting on level 317 right now. Might be able to hit 18 or 19 with mods though. By the time I was finished I was getting blue engrams stronger than the old max light. At least from Vance and Zavala there are set paths to their loot. Vance involves collecting special materials from public events/chests/crucibles/strikes that you use to forge weapons. Zavala involves completing certain tasks involving the heroic strike play lists. I'm not sure if the rest of the vanguard have their own rewards too. The new strike? Very cheap, I'm pretty sure it's just the same as one of the missions with the difficulty ramped up. On the plus side, there are a decent amount of missions and a fairly sizeable quest. That tracer rifle Xur is selling? Broken! It's the best I've done in the Crucible since pre nerfed Thorn! I was regularly getting 2.0-3.0 ratios. Everyone is using it though. I imagine Trials this weekend must be hell. Hopefully when they inevitabley balance it, it doesn't effect PVE because it's damn fun to use. I got several pieces of new exotic armour for the Warlock but no other weapons yet. I've not looked at what's actually been added though. We tried the new raid. There's not enough of us left now for a full team so we joined up with 4 random Americans and went in blind. Took us about 2 hours to figure out and get to the last boss. And about an hour of attempts before calling it a night. Nothing in there seems impossible. The first 2 encounters are pretty much jumping puzzles. The 3rd took a bit of figuring but it's very manageable once you know what to do. There is a bit of RNG involved in the spawns that can screw you over though. We figured out the mechanics for the final boss but couldn't get the job done. Again, doesn't feel unfair, there's a lot of coordination but it feels doable with some practice. Maybe next week. Bungie and getting some (deserved) flack for micro transactions, and how they are handling old content now the DLC is out but the DLC is fine. A decent story, a reasonably long quest, a bunch of quality of life improvements and more on the way and a fun raid. It could be better but it's hardly as bad as people are making out. I've spent more on DLC for other games and felt like I got less content. The game still isn't as polished as Destiny was by the end of Rise of Iron, which really shouldn't be the case, but it's definitely moving in the right direction faster than the original did.

I think Bright Engrams are fine, free cosmetic stuff you get just by playing the game. My problem is when it comes to buying them. Don't get me wrong, I've never brought any cosmetic items in Destiny or Destiny 2, but in Destiny you could spend real money to purchase whatever emote etc you wanted. In Destiny 2 it's a gamble. You spend real money to buy the same bright engrams you can get by playing, the content is still random. If i am spending real money i want to choose what i get. At least so far there's no Pay to Win aspect to it. You can get armour from Bright Engrams but it's light level is 10 so you need better gear to infuse it and it's stats are no better than any other legendary. What are peoples complaints with the light level system? It's the easiest one they've had so far. I hit max light on 2 of my characters and was 1 point away on my 3rd before the DLC and I've barley played (compared to how much time i put into the original). I've still not done the raid yet and i don't think there's been a single week where i completed all the milestones. Some weeks I've just done the flashpoint on one character and no other play time. For me, Destiny 2 problems aren't the loot boxes and light levels. It's just not hooking me in. We played the first to death, and when there was nothing left to do we'd still knock out the nightfalls/Crota/VoG each week for fun. There's nothing in Destiny 2 that keeps me coming back. I'll jump on on a Tuesday with a buddy to knock out the flashpoint and maybe a spot of crucible, more for the social side/out of habit rather than playing the game. I'm pretty sure at this point i was putting more time in Destiny in a week than I've put in on my alts in the past 3 months. There's just something 'missing' from Destiny 2.

I've been slacking in my Destiny playing lately but we jumped on for the new DLC. Took us about 3 hours to complete the story missions so it's definitely bigger than the old The Dark Below/House of Wolves expansions. Ended up at level 23 and power 308. I've not really looked into much of it other than the new story but it looks like the raid scales with the new DLC now rather than being left behind like VoG and CE. Leviathan is now 300 for normal and 330 for hard. There's also heroic strikes again and a powerful engram reward for completing 3 each week. I'm pretty sleepy so i'll look more into it during the week.

94 is out of my league! I'm sitting on 3 Platinums, Bloodborne, Destiny and Life is Strange and 3 100% that don't give out a Platinum if we include DLC in Bloodborne: The Old Hunters, Sky Force Anniversary and Destiny: The Taken King. I'm tempted to go back and Platinum Niar: Automata just because of how close i was to getting there. I appreciate the vote of confidence but the problem with some of Sine Mora EX trophies is the same i have with a lot of games. They are a grind for the sake of a grind. One of them involves playing for 24 hours. It's a fun game and it will definitely get my attention for a bit longer. Even if it is fairly short there's a bunch to do. But there's not 24 hours worth of content in it for me and so at that point i'm playing it for hours just for the sake of it. Still, i'll probably push on and get a couple more of the trophies just because of so few people actually completing them. I'm pretty close to one, and another doesn't seem unachievable.

Ended up buying Sine Mora EX in the PS sale to continue on that shoot em up kick. The basic story mode on normal difficulty is fairly easy, i completed it in one sitting and it's less than 2 hours. Anything past that though and it can get insanely tough. The health and time mechanic is pretty good. You get more time for killing enemies, you loose time for getting hit, timer reaches zero and you die. Doesn't sound too hard but on some of the later levels and bosses on higher difficulty things get incredibly tight. You can also slow down time for a limited amount too. I took a look at some of the trophies, holy hell! It's only got 12 and no platinum but 8 of those 12 trophies has a 1% or less completion rate. They range from massively grindy to the damn near impossible at my current skill level.