Basara

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out and how soon it has an affect on the game. Most people are quick to blame Activision when there’s a bad decision made in Destiny. With Bungies ‘hands being tied’ with Microsoft for Halo and Activision with Destiny will this be their first major attempt at a solo project this large? I’m unfamiliar with their history outside of those 2 titles. I’m guessing nothing drastically changes until at least the September DLC. Possibly not until Destiny 3. I’d think the current plan for the annual pass continues as is. Whether that’s a good thing or not is debatable. I’m torn on the Black Armoury, ridiculous puzzle aside, for the cost it’s a decent amount of content. But it’s not the content I’d have liked. We’ll see how the next season goes down

The idea behind it is fine, and like you say it worked before. But i think they took it too far this time. As far as I remember the content in Forsaken that was locked behind the raid was a new mission and strike. The thing there is it was additional, unannounced extras unlocked from an activity (the new raid) that is aimed at a larg part of the player base. Granted it’s nearly always going to be a big streamer clan that beats it but any well organised team can make progress. With Black Armoury they announced the date the forth Forge was coming, then locked it behind an unannounced puzzle. A puzzle with no check points that wipes you after each failed attempt and you have to start from the beginning again. And unlike the raid the puzzle was clearly aimed at streamers. They hyped it up as a ‘worlds first’ attempt and linked to twitch so you could choose what streamer you watched attempt it. They never had any intention of casual players beating that thing, yet it blocked those majority of players from doing an activity that was announced for that day. I think these extra puzzles and challenges they put in are great. The original Sleeper Stimulant quest, The SIVA exotic from Wrath of Machines etc. Just the execution of it this time was way off. Add more of this stuff, it’s interesting to watch it unfold and figured out. But don’t lock 25% of the content of an expansion behind it next time.

So after 27 hours of failed attempts Bungie just acknowledged that locking the last forge behind a puzzle was a bad idea. They will be unlocking it for everyone at 2pm pacific time today. The puzzle still remains for anyone (streamers) crazy enough to want to endure it but the forge is now available for everyone who had already paid for it.

Yeah it absolutely is. From the looks of it some people have been streaming 20+ hours now trying to figure it out. It’s still not been beaten. It’s kind of crappy of Bungie to lock content, that we’ve already paid for, behind something clearly not designed for the normal player. And while they are not sitting there holding a gun to the streamers heads and forcing them to play you’ve got to think this is what they intended to happen. At some point it’s just not healthy for these people to still be playing after all these hours.

So in an uncharacteristic show of generosity RNG blessed me with both pieces of 650 gear i needed in the first 2 powerful engrams i opened. For the first time in Destiny 2 i am max light. I fired up the Titan and knocked out the first mission. Once he hits level 50 and has access to the 650 guns it shouldn't take too long to hit max light on him too. In other news, it looks like there's some sort of words first race going on right now to unlock a new force. I've not really looked into it much but it seems there's some sort of puzzle challenge that needs to be figured out before the new forge becomes available. Once a team has beaten it the forge will be available for everyone, much like what happened with new content after the Forsaken raid was beaten.

I've ended the week on 649 just needing boots and a bond to hit 650. This is Destiny after all so i expect that those 2 items will take weeks.... Hopefully this means i'll be starting on one of the alts at some point this week. Am i right in thinking tomorrow is Shattered Thrown week too? Looking forward to doing that again.

Purchased my first Ada mod today, and got the Dragonfly spec. The hunt continues for that god roll of a weapon. I will settle for nothing less than a scout rifle or hand cannon with outlaw and dragonfly now! I'll look into it later to see what weapons can actually drop with those rolls to narrow down the chase. In other news, i'm sitting on 646 and i got my first 650 piece of gear from a Prime Engram. I've still got a bunch of powerful rewards to do on my Warlock over the weekend. I still need to finish unlocking the 3rd forge since i want a crack at that pulse rifle this week too.

Fair enough, I’ll be happy with what I got then! I need to take a look sometime at what rolls are available on things so I know what to be chasing.

Got a pretty decent roll on the forge hand cannon today, dropped at 649 with Outlaw and Explosive Payload. Not the Outlaw/Dragonfly i dream of but maybe a close runner up. Aside from that i knocked out a bunch of powerful rewards that left me sitting on 645.5. I've still got maybe another 8 or so powerful rewards to complete this week too so i should be pretty close to max light by the end of the week, with RNGs blessing. Then it's time to actually start sorting through all the crap I've kept and find rolls on armour i want to infuse up. And start on the alts. Should go a little easier once i do actually start on them, once they hit level 50 i can start using all the 645+ weapons on them and drag their total light up to a respectable level.

Played a little yesterday morning and completed the forge hand cannon (with a terrible roll). I did get the forge exotic bow to drop though, it’s pretty fun although not as over powered as Thorn used to be. Haven't had chance to play since the weekly reset but I got a lot more in last week than usual so I’ve already got enough bounties finished to complete Ikori and the clans weekly milestone. Along with almost enough to do one the dreaming city and forge weekly bounties. I’m sitting on 641 now, inching ever closer to max light.

Ah, so you don't have to go through the whole process again once you've unlocked the initial frame for a weapon? That's not too bad. I got a half decent scout drop from the end of a forge earlier, triple tap and explosive rounds. Still not my dream role on anything. I guess it wouldn't be Destiny if it wasn't super grindy. Finished off the Dawning sparrow quest now and took a quick look at what my highest light could be, i'm sitting at 640 now. Although most of that is with gear i wouldn't really use. Once i hit 650 it's time to decide if i start grinding for perfect gear to infuse or dust off one of the alts.

Am i missing something with the forges? I've unlocked the forge on Neesus now and working on unlocking wherever this Vex quest is taking me but i'm not really seeing much return from all this effort. For a couple extra Powerful Rewards each week the weapon frame quests are real grindy and I've not really got anything good from them apart from a fancy paint scheme on a few guns. Am i just having bad luck with the ol' RNG or is there something specific i'm meant to be looking out for here? Aide from that, i'm sitting at around 634 now. I've gone up about 50 levels in a month and with RNGs blessing it wont be too long before i hit max light for the first time in Destiny 2 i believe. I'm about 20 gifts away from finishing the Dawning sparrow quest too so i'll probably try and find some time to finish that up. I have put together a full set of Dawning gear for my Warlock now, to go along with last years set and the other Eververse warlock armour. I collect too much crap.

I'm still hunting that elusive Dragonfly/Outlaw roll on a scout rifle, the Firefly/Outlaw combo was always my go to weapon in Destiny 1. I did get a god roll of a rocket launcher the other day. Dropping with Tracking and Cluster Bombs. It's basically a Hunger of Crota and the closest thing i'll probably ever get to a Gjallarhorn in Destiny 2.

So i am so far behind with this game it's insane. There's so much shit to do now it feels a bit overwhelming. After beating the Forsaken story and finally beating the Whisper of the Worm mission we kind of stopped playing for a while aside from the odd session to knock out a few weekly things for a bit of gear. Jumped back on when the new expansion dropped only to find that we basically couldn't play it due to the light level requirement of the Forge. I think this is the first time Bungie have set a level requirement higher than what normal people with casual playing could reach for an expansion. A dick move Bungie. So over the past 2 weeks we power levelled the hell out of our mains. I've gone from around 570 to 621 now. The 600 light kinetic from the Halloween event helped a lot since it dragged up the average light of gear quite a bit. Aside from the standard weekly and daily powerful gear rewards from stuff like strikes and gambit we jumped into our first Well. It's not as much fun as Escalation Protocol, feels a lot more repetitive but it's also a hell of a lot easier to do undermanned. Even the heroic level 3 wasn't that hard. Though i imagine that was a different story when it first dropped and everyone was underlevelled. Along the way we discovered something called The Shattered Throne that we've been missing out on. This might be my new favourite Destiny thing! sucks that it's time gated to once every 3 weeks because it's finally what we wanted since Prison and Challenge of the Eldars was a thing. End game content you don't need 6 people for. As a 2 man team at around high 590s/low 600s it was challenging enough with the high level enemies and mechanics but never really feeling like we needed a 3rd. I also like that all the mechanics in there are a gear check and more skill based than the normal 'stand 6 people in 6 different places, shoot boss' mechanics that most of the raids seem to have become. The first run took us about 90mins to figure out and get through. I'd love if each expansion came with something like this. Leave it time gated to once every 3 weeks but give each expansion one so there's 1 for each week. Give solo and small group players challenging end game content that doesn't require playing with randoms. Anyway, after beating it for the first time and getting a new quest we jumped back in to get it done a second time before the reset locking us out for 3 weeks. This time we had to google the mechanics for the quest. Who's figuring this stuff out! it's insane. The second encounter with the new quest mechanics seriously jumped up the difficulty level but we still (barely) managed to beat it with the 2 of us. After all of the power levelling i was sitting at around 615 with gear i'd actually use and 620 as my highest. Turns out that's just enough to beat the first forge. So I've now unlocked even more stuff to do on top of all the old stuff i haven't yet done.

A little late to the party since we couldn't jump on until Friday. We then proceeded to drop about 15 hours into this over 2 days and haven't even finished the story yet. So much stuff to do. I'm sitting on level 507 at the moment. We got about half way into the story then started doing a bunch of milestones since we wont get chance to do them before the reset so might as well take advantage of the while we can. There seems to be a near endless supply of activities for 'powerful gear'. I hit 500 pretty quick which seems to be a soft cap, i'm guessing there's several more along the way or it would be way to easy to hit 600. The collections is a real good idea. I can basically purge my entire vault and fill it with new gear with random rolls that i will obsess over and be afraid to delete in case it one day becomes relevant. Gambit is a ton of fun. I imagine it's pure hell as a solo player going up against a full team but all 3 games we played were against teams of randoms. Were undefeated so far, haven't event dropped a round! Exotics seem to be incredibly rare? Not a single drop yet and as i understand it, Xur wont be having Forsaken exotics in his Fated Engrams. Feels like Destiny 1 again when you were actually excited for one to drop, event he bad ones. We didn't play much during the last expansion and never got a chance to do a full Escalation Protocol. We knocked out 2 level 7 in a row with a bunch of randoms that jumped in. Absolute insanity and one of my favourite parts of the game now. Played 2 of the new strikes while doing bounties and milestones. The one based in the prison is great fun. Loved all the call backs to to PoE and CoE. House of Wolves was always one of my favourites because it was 3 man end game content instead of 6, Much easier to put a team together. Am i being blind or cant you access old raids? I'm guessing they unlock again when you finish the Forsaken story? Or have them moved them on the Director and i just cant find them? I'll be trying to finish off the story when i get chance over the next few days. Then the grind begins!