Destiny

Levelling up the Vex Mythoclast might have to wait.  Just ran three Nightfalls, and on the last one I finally saw the words on the screen I've been waiting months for...

SimianWonder found Gjallarhorn

Suffice it to say, I was quite happy to see that. My current play time across my three current characters is 343 hours, though that doesn't include my previously deleted toon Warlock and short lived first foray into Titan-hood. I reckon I'm knocking on 400 hours in total, which is the most I've played any game ever. Probably.

A few House of Wolves tidbits revealed on Bungie's stream

...revealed a lot more than I thought they would.

To summarise;

* Queen's Wrath is back, and the bounties offered are different to the crappy ones from the last time it was here Destiny's infancy.

* The Reef has all the facilities of the Tower, though its not yet clear if the bounties/inventories of vendorsare shared between the two or each has unique.

* You do not need to have purchased the house of wolves to access the Reef area itself.

* Xur may or may not visit the Reef.  But probably will.

* Weapon upgrades will not require Xur, the costs have been greatly reduced, and even old 300 atk gear can be upgraded to 365, without resetting your progress.  All Vault of Glass gear will be upgradable as well, so we do have a chance of some unique looking end-game characters.

* House of Wolves gear can be reforged at the Gunsmith, a la Iron Banner.

* The Speaker is doing material exchange.  Sitting on hundreds of ascendant shards?  You can trade them for motes of light.  Need glimmer?  Trade in your energies, that sort of thing.

* Deej dismantled a Gjallarhorn.

I'm actually genuinely impressed.  They seem to have addressed a lot of the complaints about the way Dark Below handled this sort of thing, and actually listened to a lot of what the community wanted.

was about to post the same thing.

Great news indeed, especially the upgrading stuff and material exchange.

Short of the new area all of those things should be in a free update, not a $25 DLC.

Everything is free, including the new area. All the other new content like Trials Of Osiris, Prison Of Elders etc is paid.

Neo wrote:

Short of the new area all of those things should be in a free update, not a $25 DLC.

As psycho said, it appears all the new stuff is free, it's just the new events that are hidden behind the pay-wall. Didn't you buy the limited edition with the season pass though, giving you HoW already?

apparently, they will lose the commendations (fuck yeah) and you can just buy gear with your marks now like it used to be before the commendations.

You can trade in the ones you have for faction rep.

sweet, got Unwilling Soul from my first Nightfall today. it's another one of those auto-rifles that people call "pea shooters" but that's really the one I wanted from Dead Orbit..

alright, so with the new update and new bounties, I've been farming the chests that spawn when you complete them and already got myself 3 Treasure Keys for the Prison Of Elders, which is pretty sweet.


Not to mention that I'm swimming in engrams for the Cryptarch and I probably won't be needing to buy Spirit Bloom anytime soon.

I've hit plenty of chests, got more engrams than I can actually hold (vault is full, characters are full so all engrams are now going to postmaster) but still haven't got any Treasure Keys yet. Bah.

yeah, I farmed Venus for like 4 hours today. got 3 keys and 2 legendaries.

Alright, well, I'm pretty sure I won't be touching Trials Of Osiris again. It's a bullshit mode and I've had zero fun in it.

I've got other and more fun things to do with my time.

Isn't it literally just Iron Banner but you have to consistently be good? Considering that you have to have a premade group your performance should be fairly representative of your groups average skill level.

Trials of Osiris isn't really like Iron Banner. It's not control for a start, it's more like Skirmish, two teams of three competing in a first-to-five elimination. Revives are allowed, so it's actually pretty strategic. It's a mode that rewards only the best; you need to be really good to have any chance of claiming the best rewards (and the rewards are pretty sweet), but this does mean that the 95% of the player base that isn't good enough will never get a chance to see the new Social space on Mercury, nor to own the rewards within. Hence why some people are decrying it.

People have moaned about Destiny's RNG for months, but now there's an event that really does reward the highly-skilled it gets moaned about just as much. I had fun with it, even when getting wrecked, as I'm always happy to learn from those far better than I am!

To be honest, I hate the Trials gear and weapons anyways, i think they're butt ugly. I'll just focus on getting the PoE gear and weapons which I absolutely love and I'll enjoy myself that way.

Yeah, PoE is more fun, but only because the game is designed to let you win eventually. You'll get there with perserverance because eventually you'll come up with something that the AI cannot cope with. ToO doesn't have that; human players are endlessly adaptable, and if you're not good enough on the day - as we weren't - then you're not going to win.

I actually think farming PoE 28 will be replacing running strikes in my regular activity. It takes roughly twenty-twenty five minutes, and you can pull legendary or even exotic tier gear from the side chests at times, as well as rarely getting treasure keys to drop apparently.

Does PoE give marks though? I don't remember getting any when I played it. But if it gives 6 marks or more, than yeah, I'll be farming it too from now on.

I wouldn't swear to it, but I'd imagine so.  My vanguard marks are maxed on the warlock for the week, and I've only done two dailies, one Nightfall and one Weekly Heroic.  Everything else has been story missions, PoE and ToO.  I can't see how I'd have gotten max marks without PoE awarding some.

Besides, PoE at 28 also hands out things like motes and strange coins pretty handily. I got five strange coins and three motes from the two chests earlier, as well as some more "Token of Idenity/Flight..." thingies that you need to buy ships and shaders from Varriks.

yeah, it does give out 6 marks as well. and strange coins and motes guaranteed from the small chests it seems. I also got a legendary engram from one of the chests.

I managed to re-roll a couple of the Auto rifles I'd picked up; one is an Up-for-Anything archetype, with middling impact and high rate-of-fire, the other was a Shadow Price/Vanquisher archetype, with lower RoF, but much higher impact. Both rolled with the Focused Fire perk, as featured on Abyss Defiant and, more famously, Suros Regime, that slows down the fire rate but increases damage when you aim-down-sight. It'll be interesting to see how the two compare once I've unlocked the relevant perks.

ha, got a Blackhammer. did Crota with 2 others.

Finally got a Hawkmoon from a Nightfall.

I'm thinking they might have increased Exotic drops in Nightfalls maybe, I've gotten one in every Nightfall this week.

Got Hawkmoon, No Land Beyond which I both didn't have and got another Universal Remote on my last one. Usually, I'd get just one out of the 3 nightfalls I play.

This had a massive price drop I suspect a GOTY edition is coming.

It's likely in preparation for another full price release in September.