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FINALLY got Imago Loop to drop from the Nightfall this week.  Pretty solid roll with Luck in the Chamber, a stability perk, and Hot Swap.

I also completed my Desolate set on my warlock, but it was only after I leveled them up to 335 that I realized EVERY piece of the armor had a Dis/Str roll.  I have essentially ZERO intellect, depending on which artifcact I use.

And that really sucked for a while, until I realized how awesomely that might pair with the new artifact that takes away your super in exchange for double grenades and melees.  We'll see how that works out.

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Since I'm pursuing a refund on No Man's Sky, I was curious about what all has changed with Destiny. Keep in mind that I only played up through the first expansion, the one with the busted Krota raid (I think).

So how is it different now? If my last experience was what you would consider "vanilla" Destiny, then would it be worth jumping back in? Any videos or write ups worth checking out that review how far along Destiny has come? Or is it worth waiting until the fall and seeing what the next expansion brings?

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Destiny is night and day different from where it was back during The Dark Below expansion.  If you liked the idea of Destiny but were frustrated by the loot grind and the glitchy raid, I would definitely say give it another shot, because it has significantly improved.  The Taken King expansion was a huge leap forward from Vanilla, and the update this past April further refined loot/leveling systems to the point that it's very simple and accessible.

Basara has some good posts in this thread where he sums things up at length, but in general, reaching max light level (which kinda replaced XP level in TTK as the important number you grind for) has never been simpler and there are multiple options for pursuing max light level now (as opposed to just grinding the raid over and over again).  And Bungie isn't changing any of that for the next expansion and is, in fact, adding yet another new path to max light level with refinements to how you acquire strike-specific loot (another TTK addition - think of it like mini-raid loot).

There is just SO much stuff to do right now.  Off the top of my head, you can get max light level gear from:

-the raid (obviously)

-the nightfall (obviously)

-Iron Banner (monthly 6v6 pvp event that you probably remember)

-Trials of Osiris (weekly 3v3 pvp event that was added in House of Wolves)

-Lord Shaxx's weekly bounty (bascially a gimme award for completing his not-hard-at-all pvp bounty set every week)

-Challenge of Elders (arcade-style pve horde mode that rewards based on hitting certain score thresholds)

-Strike specific loot (each boss has a chance of dropping a unique weapon and/or armor piece)

-special events like Sparrow Racing League

There's something for every type of player now.  And if you like doing it all, well, you can burn up light levels astonishingly quickly.  Not saying it's a perfect game or anything (RNG is still a thing), but no longer is the endgame totally built around getting your 3 chances per week at getting Crota to drop that helmet you need.

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That's cool then. The other issue is that during TDB, there was an obvious ceiling and you would suddenly but that ceiling very hard. I played in a group of 6 or 7 of us where all of us at the same time just quit. We hit the max level and we were done. There was just no point to grinding Crota because the weapons were shit and we had the weapons we wanted. No one wanted a 4th shitty yellow bolt action sniper rifle (and my reward in one of those raids or nightfalls was 2 of them). 

So what do you do when you hit that PvE ceiling? Switch to PvP? There's going to be another ceiling there though I'd imagine. 

Oh, and now I remember my other issue, which was how buggy raids were. You'd spend so much time getting to Crota and a bug would prevent him from dying. That, or the boss fights were so contrived and difficult that you couldn't win without exploiting some kind of jank or cheese. How is that now? Is that any better? 

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Depending on if you are more PVE or PVP based there's still somewhat of a ceiling. If you think of max light as 'completing' the game then there isn't a huge amount to do with your new power once you've hit it. Unless you are after specific gear or are a collector. However, there's a hell of a lot more to do now on the way there. It depends what you are after. This isn't World of Warcraft meets Halo like a lot of people wanted. It does have a good amount of content now though. I tend to play it pretty heavily when new content is out until I've done everything there is to do, then casually until the next expansion.

If you stopped playing at Crota there's 3 (and a half) expansions to play once Rise of Iron is out on the 20th. Here's a (not so) brief run down of what's been added/taken away/still relevant.

House of Wolves: Destinys second expansion. Increased the level cap to 34.

Pretty redundant at this point. The story is still relevant and add maybe another hour or so of missions to play through and a new strike but it's end game content has been left behind.

Key Points: 

Etheric Light. Destinys first attempt at an infusion system. By completing the end game content you could increase your old base game and Dark Below gear to the new light level. Ultimately, it was left behind when Bungie decided the Year One gear was too powerful.

Trials of Osiris. End game for PVP. It's a 3v3 elimination game. Win 5 round to win a game. Win 9 games in a row and you go to the Lighthouse to collect your rewards. It matches you up with teams of similar skill and wins making 9 in a row very challenging. Still relevant in the current game. With each new expansion the gear is updated to match it. Can only be played Friday-Monday.

Prison of the Elders. There was no raid in HoW. Instead we got a sort of hoard mode with various difficulties. The hardest one, Skolas Revenge may well have been the hardest end game content yet for some. Horror stories of people taking 12+ hours to beat it. I'm guessing a lot of that is exaggerated but it was hard. Again it was a 3 player activity but was artificially hardened by making the enemies all higher light than your max. Basic enemies would be light 35 and Skolas (and a few captains) were 36. With the old light system that meant you were doing at least 33% less damage and taking 33% more damage. Coupled with the mechanics that required constant communication and the fact that there were no checkpoints so you had to beat it in one sitting, it made it damn hard to beat if you weren't playing with a regular team. While the Skolas prison is now irrelevant they would bring back the Prison game mode the following year.

Ultimately this was the expansion that drove a lot of people away. No raid, no 6 man activities and no worthwhile end game loot.

The Taken King: The biggest expansion yet and went a long way to repairing the damage from the first 2. Added a new location to the map (a Hive ship), with its own patrol missions and mini public boss fights with their own mechanics. Added maybe a dozen new story missions, 3 new strikes and some updated old ones and a new raid. On top of all of that they completely overhauled the levelling system, added quests and limited time events. It basically made Destiny the game it should have been at launch.

Key points:

Story. An actual, extensive, story! With characters that have personalities! Something missing from the base game and something so simple that actually makes you care about the story missions instead of just blowing through them to get to the good stuff.

::edit:: New Enemies: forgot to mention this initially despite it being a big thing. With the Taken King they added a new race of enemies in. The Taken. They also updated some of the older strikes with new Taken enemies.

New levelling system. Gone is the level 20 light level 34 of year one. The new system has a base level of 40. Which is levelled up through xp just like year ones level 20. But instead of the max being 34 it was changed to 320. It's now a combination of all your weapons, armour, ghost and artefact you have equipped. New Ghosts and artefacts provided limited abilities but were pretty worthless and seemed to be there just to increase the grind. Looks like that will change with the new expansion though. This was probably in response to the Skolas problem. With such a huge range of light level now, you never felt underpowered even in end game content unlike Skolas Revenge.

Infusion. Carrying on from Year Ones attempt with Etheric Light they added a proper infusion system. You could take any peice of year two Legendary or Exotic gear and increase its light level by infusion a higher level piece of gear into it. At the time of TTK it would only add about 80% of the difference which meant you needed at least 2 pieces of max light gear to level up one piece.

Quests. Everything seemed to get quests in year two. It was also the only way to get some of the exotics. Instead of having the Crota's End problem of people demanding a Gjallarhorn and excluding people that didn't get lucky from RNG drops most of the big exotics could be earned through completing a quest. Some had new story missions, some were harder versions of existing strikes, others had a ridiculous grind but at least you were guaranteed something at the end (even if it wasn't always worth it).

Limited time events. They added 3 special events during Year Two.

Festival of the Lost during Halloween added new quests to earn masks. Cosmetic items with no real benefit other than being a bit of fun.

Sparrow Racing League over Christmas. Sparrow racing that people had been asking for since day one. Only 2 tracks available since it was probably more of an experiment. You could earn different sets of racing gear, new sparrows and class item and helm infusion fodder.

Crimson Doubles over valentines Day. A 2v2 elimination game where you would 'enrage' when your partner died increasing your abilities. 2 exclusive ghosts are the rewards for this one.

Court of Oryx: A sort of beefed up public event with raid like mechanics for the bosses. 3 difficulty levels with varying degrees of cooperation required. Fun at first but made a bit pointless by end game. Looks like they are adding something similar in the next expansion so hopefully this one will have a longer life span.

King's Fall: The new raid. Back to being 6 man content again this was the most mechanic and team work heavy raid yet. Maybe too much so in my opinion. I think, not wanting to repeat the mistakes from Skolas and being under levelled they made it hard because of the mechanics rather than the enemies. It was great the first few times for me but it was no Vault of Glass. They eventually added the challenge modes. Kill each boss under specific mechanics for guaranteed rewards.

Overall, a huge improvement on year one. Plenty of new things to do and a bunch of changes that made the game more streamlined and fun to play. It finally felt like a complete game.

The April Update. No official name for this, the community took to calling it 'The Taken Spring'. It was a free update released to help with the lack of content between last Septembers Taken King and this years Rise of Iron. There wasn't a huge amount of content (it was free after all) but its biggest feature was the quality of life improvements.

Key points:

New content. Ok, so it was just one mission, one strike, a new Prison mode and a couple of quests, but hey, it was free.

Infusion. Improving yet again on the current system, infusion is now 100%. If you stick a max light piece of gear into any year 2 legendary or exotic, it will make it max light.

Light Level. A small increase to 335, the biggest improvement was the RNG involved. In TTK there was no guarantee the raid gear you got would be higher light than your current gear. Potentially making your raid run, the only chance at new gear that week, worthless. With the April update all end game gear was guaranteed to drop between 2-7 levels higher than your current max.

End game gear. The raid is no longer the only way to get to max light. Eva mentioned it in his post and I made a post about it a few pages back so I won't go into detail. But basically there's a bunch of relevant stuff to do each week while you are levelling up instead of just 1 raid.

Challenge of the Elders. A reworked Prison of Elders with new bosses. Its point based and timed. Get enough points in a run and you get a gun. Hit the max points and you get a piece of armour. Guaranteed gear at a higher light than your current.

Overall, a small, free update, more a gesture of goodwill for the lack of content that actually made the game a lot more fun. Improved upon most of the improvements from The Taken King.

Rise of Iron: There's plenty of info posted about this one over the past couple of pages so I won't go into detail here. It's out in 3 weeks. Doesn't look like it will completely overhaul the current system now that they've found one that works. 5 new missions, a strike and a raid. And another new race of enemies to fight bringing it up to 6. They are also extending the cosmodrome by about 1/3. The raid is apparently more Crota's End and less King's Fall. Meaning it's more of a 'fight your way through' than just bouncing from encounter to encounter and following the mechanics. They've also said Festival of the Lost and Sparrow Racing will be back in October and December again this year.

 

There are a bunch of small things that will have changed since you last played but that's the bulk of the main ones I can think of. As for glitches in the raids and the game in general, I can't think of any. King's Fall had a few problems that have all been fixed. There's still the occasional hiccup in there but I can't think of anything as buggy as the Crota fight used to be.

 

Hopefully this was some help and not too long and boring!

 

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Also one thing that Basara didn't mention (or I totally spaced) is that Taken King introduced a new enemy type.

And unless I am misreading things - the new expansion will too 

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7 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

Also one thing that Basara didn't mention (or I totally spaced) is that Taken King introduced a new enemy type.

And unless I am misreading things - the new expansion will too 

I somehow completely forgot that and it's kind of a big deal! I'll edit it in.

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22 minutes ago, Craig H said:

God dammit, I can't believe I'm going to get into Destiny again. You guys all put a lot of time into this information. I really appreciate it. 

The other thing worth mentioning is which version to buy if you only own the base game and first expansion. I'm not sure of the pricing in the US but in the UK it's cheaper to buy the Complete Collection, which contains the base game and every expansion including Rise of iron, than buying just the ones you are missing separately. Rise of Iron is £25 in the UK but the complete collection is only £35. So it's definitely the cheapest time to get back into it.

They also added purely cosmetic micro transactions with The Taken King. You can buy new emotes and some different event related stuff like sparrows and themed gear (with no light level) etc. Purely cosmetic and has no benefit or gives no advantage in the game itself. They use the money from this to fund the 'Live Events Team'. They are the ones that put together the free limited time events like sparrow racing and the free expansion last April.

They actually add the old emotes and things to the Nightfall loot table when new ones are released so it's possible to get them without paying anyway if RNG is on your side. I've had maybe half a dozen different dances and sparrows free from the Nightfall that I could have paid for if I wanted to.

As long as you go in not expecting each expansion to have enough content last until the next and accept there will be some downtime in between, its worth playing. I have no idea how some people have dropped 3000 hours+ into it though!

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Hmm, so $20 for TTK and $30 for ROI, or $60 to get both and a level 40 boost. 

Is the level boost really that necessary if I hit the level cap in TDB? It sounds like there's a lot to play so I could likely hit level 40 easily. Then again, I wonder if I could boost my alt that I never wanted to level up to level 40 and just focus on my main. 

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21 minutes ago, Craig H said:

Hmm, so $20 for TTK and $30 for ROI, or $60 to get both and a level 40 boost. 

Is the level boost really that necessary if I hit the level cap in TDB? It sounds like there's a lot to play so I could likely hit level 40 easily. Then again, I wonder if I could boost my alt that I never wanted to level up to level 40 and just focus on my main. 

Do you already have House of Wolves? As that's needed to play both TTK and RoI. I 'think' TTK comes with both the original expansions now but that's something to check before pulling the trigger.

Be prepared for a massive download when you start again. It's probably up to around 50gig now with all the expansions.

I wouldn't bother with the level 40 boost since levelling up is half the fun but that's just my preference. And you'll easily hit level 40 playing normally by the time you get to a point where it's needed. 

The level boost is a good idea for your alt like you said. However you'd still need to play through all the missions to unlock everything on that character anyway. It'll just be a bit faster since you'll be over levelled for some of it.

If it costs $10 more over there for the whole thing in one go then the only benefit is if you do drop the $60 for the complete collection digitally then you get to go disc free. If that's important to you.

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I did the $90 preorder for Destiny on PSN that gave you the first two expansions so I should have HoW. That said, I never bothered to install it. I think my group dropped out a couple weeks before HoW's release.

I think I may do the $60 pre-order just for the level 40 boost for my alt. That will at least take some of the pain out of getting that one up to speed. Oh wait, can you no longer transfer items between alt characters?

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14 minutes ago, Craig H said:

I think I may do the $60 pre-order just for the level 40 boost for my alt. That will at least take some of the pain out of getting that one up to speed. Oh wait, can you no longer transfer items between alt characters?

You can transfer weapons between anyone, and armour if it's the same class.

However, if you wanted to do, for example, the King's Fall raid on your alt you'd have to complete The Taken King story missions on that character first to unlock it. So while the rep boost gets you to level 40 right away and you can share weapons (and armour if you made 2 warlocks or whichever) you'd still need to play through the game on that character to be able to do the weekly activities.

The only way around that is to join someone else's game. I've still not finished the Taken missions on my Hunter but I can join someone else's fireteam and still do the raid.

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Oh, you definitely can.  And like most things, it's never been easier with some functionality they added to the companion app.  You can swap things between characters without having to run back and forth to the vault, so definitely install that on your phone or tablet.

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10 minutes ago, EVA said:

Oh, you definitely can.  And like most things, it's never been easier with some functionality they added to the companion app.  You can swap things between characters without having to run back and forth to the vault, so definitely install that on your phone or tablet.

Yeah, those various apps are amazing. I use the Chrome extension. Thing is a life saver. It was hell juggling gear between 3 characters at the start of the game. Flying to and from the Tower, changing characters, then flying back again. Only to forget something and have to swap characters again. But now you literally drag and drop the gear you want into your character. Must have saved me hours of wasted time over the course of playing this game.

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On ‎8‎/‎28‎/‎2016 at 3:50 PM, EVA said:

FINALLY got Imago Loop to drop from the Nightfall this week.  Pretty solid roll with Luck in the Chamber, a stability perk, and Hot Swap.

Good on ya!  I got three ILs over the course of this dumb game and none of them had good rolls.  I'd always get some bullshit secondary perk like Icarus.

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A little up to date info on Rise of Iron:

Update 2.4.0 will drop on September 8th after 8 hours of maintenance. I'm guessing that pre-loads RoI like they did with TTK.

With the update on the 8th clan tags will be removed until the new in game clan roster starts on the 20th

Rise of Iron will go live at reset on the 20th. That's 2AM Bungie time and a more reasonable 10AM for me, and anyone be else in the UK.

No increase in vault space when RoI drops. But they are 'working on it'.

From the 8th of September you will only be able to get 1 Sterling Treasure a week. From the 41 Prison of Elders. Radiant Treasure begins on the 20th with Ornaments and Silver Dust (looks to be some sort of new currency that Xur accepts)

The Year 3 Thorn will keep the same balancing that it currently has. (So it still sucks)

They mentioned Challenge of the Elders as end game content for PVE. Not sure if that was a mistake or if there will be an updated version for RoI. I kind of hope there is because it doesn't require as many people as a raid, even if you don't get as much gear from it.

Bungie wouldn't say either way if hoarded exotics and legendaries would decide at the new light or if they could contain new gear.

Venders and the Gunsmith are getting new gear at a new, undisclosed, light level.

Also, I thought this was pretty cool:

 

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Looks like the pre-RoI patch went out yesterday. Haven't had chance to download it yet but a couple of early changes are already in there.

Hoarded Exotics are already decoding up to at least 339. I guess if you saved enough and had RNG on your side you could probably hit 337 now. I'm going to keep hold of mine though as I assume blues and legendaries will be dropping in the 370 range once RoI goes live. 

They also released a new exotic sidearm.

Blues seem to have the chance of turning into LL300 exotics now. Don't know if that's intended or not.

The nightfall currently rotates between 2 different strikes. Again, could just be a bug or could be something new introduced for RoI.

The old Heroic strike playlist is now 'The Taken War'. So at least they aren't completely blocking old content this time.

People are already glitching into new areas.

No new content yet but it's still over a week away. The weekend before HoW and TTK they added some new stuff to do so maybe next weekend.

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The only exotics decoding over 335 are boots. So kind of pointless to decrypt anything yet since it will only make you 335 and some change. 

A fair amount of weapon tuning in the patch. They buffed the mid rate of fire archetype pulse rifles like Nirwens Mercy. Also nerfed Touch of Malice to where it removes the Blessing of Light buff from ward of dawn.  Nerfed the high impact sniper rifle archetype also. Did some stuff with hands cannons and auto rifles as well. 

I've decrypted an ass load of blue and purple engrams and haven't seen any exotics from it so I don't know if that's actually a thing. 

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Nobody is going to be playing King's Fall in a week, but there goes everybody's Easy Mode Oryx strategy!

 

I was a little perturbed that they deleted all of the old Iron Banner bounties I was hoarding.  I mean, I'm fine with them doing it, I just wish they had given me some warning so I could at least cash them in for the XP and legendary marks before they did it.

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The sniper nerf apparently means you can't one shot the Light Eater Knights anymore either. They hit the Simulant with a nerf too, it no longer ricochets inside Oryx chest (or Golgroths orbs). Which means you can no longer stagger Oryx by yourself. I guess Bungie don't want people to solo Oryx anymore.

I kind of think that boots decoding up to 339 and a new exotic special was Bungies way of tricking people to blow through their stashed engrams before RoI drops. People are also reporting that blue engrams are only decoding in the 260 range and are giving out level 39 gear.

I've still not had time to jump on but i did leave the patch downloading last night so i might try and get a bit in today. Not that there's anything to do at this point except wait 10 days for the new content. I guess i could do some Nightfalls in hopes of 3 of Coins/Strange Coins.

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So I've been playing around with the new Tresspasser sidearm, and the "Unrepentant" perk is super OP.  That's the one where reloading after a kill makes your next shot fire a longer burst (by my count, it was a burst of 5 instead of 3).  What's crazy is that there's NO cooldown on that perk and a kill with the Unrepentant perk active can be used to trigger the Unrepentant perk on your next shot.

Its ridiculous and I love it.  Though it'll probably be one of the first things nerfed when the next weapon tuning comes down.

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1 hour ago, EVA said:

So I've been playing around with the new Tresspasser sidearm, and the "Unrepentant" perk is super OP.  That's the one where reloading after a kill makes your next shot fire a longer burst (by my count, it was a burst of 5 instead of 3).  What's crazy is that there's NO cooldown on that perk and a kill with the Unrepentant perk active can be used to trigger the Unrepentant perk on your next shot.

Its ridiculous and I love it.  Though it'll probably be one of the first things nerfed when the next weapon tuning comes down.

I've been fighting off the temptation to cash in all my special engrams to see if i can get it. I'm guessing its the 'Robocop' gun they mentioned? I played a couple of games of crucible the other night and got absolutely destroyed by it a few times.

Speaking of the crucible, private matches are now live. A week earlier than promised. Destiny can now complete the Call of Duty experience by getting spammed with "1v1 me!" messages every time you kill someone in a game. Granted it's not really my thing but it's something people have been asking for since day one so good on Bungie for finally implementing it. It also looks like there's a bunch of new Dead Ghosts hidden in crucible maps now that they can be explored at your own leisure without getting murdered every 5 seconds.

I'm still holding out on some PvE stuff to do pre Rise of Iron like they've done with previous expansions, even if it's just new patrol missions.

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