Destiny: Prison of Elders

We should have probably had one Warlock each run for back up, but that last Titan/Hunter run was epically intense. Funny how we crushed Tanniks before any of the captains could come out on that round. Icebreakers FTW. Two manning it, I'm normally use to my co-worker carrying me through with his Fatebringer/Blackhammer/Gjallarhorn combo, so doing it with equal weapon load outs tested our skills to the max and it was highly satifying.  Clutch saves on both sides, it was impressive we never had a wipe.

As always, I wanted Hawkmoon or Gally, but I can't complain about getting EL, thats my top choice outside of those. I'm pretty sure we can two man PoE 32 but we'll def have to use that 1 warlock method though. I'd like to do 34 to see what this new boss is all about if everyone is on sometimes this week. Exposure on the boss sounds like a bitch, but I want to experiance it. It looks like he turns the whole room into a slow field, which isn't as bad as Urrox or Forever Eater.

My problem is I got burned out on all the bounties. Its so repetitive and boring to keep doing the same things over and over. X_x I got burned out on gw2 for the same reasons. Endless world bosses and silverwastes. It's why I got into the gw2 pvp. I can get my daily done in roughly 10 minutes a day now in only 1-2 five minute matches. Most pvp players make the AI in PVE seem ridiculous. In pve everyone can run full zerk but in pvp you'll get your ass handed to you with a zerk build.

It's a different kind of challenging from destiny pve/pvp. Destiny pve is like running dungeons in gw2. You memorize where the enemies spawn, when the spawn, what enemy you have to pull to what location, etc. And you do it so many times you start speed running everything. After doing honor of the waves and cof paths for a couple weeks I go so burned out on dungeons I hardly touch them anymore. I think that's also why I don't turn on destiny as much. After I do the same strike, mission, bounty, etc more than five times it loses alot of my interest. :/

The more I read Destiny's reddit and play the game the more I have realized Bungie could never live up to what the game was hyped to be becasue they are tied down by last gen hardware. The inventory problems will likely never be fixed becasue of last gen hardware limitations. The tower and reef can only hold 12 people an instance, and a map instance can only hold around 6. I remember seeing the public event a E3 and seeing 10-15 guardians working to take down the Fallen Walker in the divide and obviously that never happens. The game is completely crippled by last gen, and isn't the social game that it was meant to be. The lack of 1st party games amongst Sony and MS is what has started this trend of the big publishers continually making games that are supported on old hardware to squeeze out every penny they can get, rather than only have them on the next gen hardware to sell the system. You buy a new console for next and better games, but as long as the old console is supported, more people have reason to hold off on buying the next gen system and effectively hurting everyone that was an early adopter.

Bungie screwed up the inventory by having rng rolls on the weapons. After adding crap loads of more weapons with the two expansions there was no more inventory space for all the weapons. In hind sight they could have left all guns with set upgrades and then updated the weapon inventory to be the same style as bf4. Imagine quickly changing your weapon load out in crucible by easily navigating your unlocked weapons in an easy drop down menu that takes no inventory space in the bank. It would have been a much better system but with all the rng perk differences between the exact same weapons that would never work now.

I hate the limitations of old gen systems. I still wonder how much better the game could have been if they didn't waste so many work hours on old gen compatability issues.

And it's been a while since I played bf4.. I turned that on the other day and forgot just how great it looks. All the plant life blew me away all over again since I've been so used to looking at destiny shrubs and spin metal.

Luckily for us Old Gen is starting to be dropped by most publishers now, more or less due to the reason you guys stated above. I'm pretty damn sure Destiny 2 (or whatever the game will be called) will be next gen only as Destiny should of been. The other thing that is killing Destiny, at least for me and quite a few others, is that the story is complete garbage. Hell HoW is the best set of story missions we've gotten since the game came out and this is only an expansion, the core story should be better then this but what it ended up being was 20 or so missions that left us with more questions then answers. The only interesting characters from the entire core story are two characters we've yet to see in the game since, The Stranger (who just disappears after handing us a gun) and The Queen (who this whole expansion is supposed to be about outside of the House of Wolves and we only see her in the damn trailer).  

See doing things repeatedly doesn't bug me any in every other game other then Destiny. This is the only game where I find myself thinking of playing Destiny as a job because the daily bounty grind feels exactly like going to work and doing the same shit there over and over every day. I get on FF everyday to do one random instance run for a boost in the current top tear currency and I do my daily mark hunts for alliance seals (both of which are extremely tedious as the random instance is chosen between the same three instances and the mark hunts are a random assortment of mobs that are generated from the same list) and it doesn't feel anything like a chore to do. Maybe it's because I enjoy playing FF more then Destiny but it's just odd that I can run the same shit over and over in every other game and not have a problem but getting on Destiny everyday to grind bounties just bores the fuck out of me.

I'd also hope that Destiny 2 will not have a god like weapon that will be a be all, end all. Gjallarhorn is massively OP, and the only reason it has never been nerfed is because its a heavy weapon so you can go around tearing ass in crucible with it like you could with Mythoclast. That and the player base would drop off immensely if you couldn't just Gjallarhorn hard stuff. Honestly they will have to step up there game. The last mission on HoW was amazing with the jump puzzle... stuff like that should be in more strikes to make them more interesting. Its a speed run fest now just to get to the end and get the reward... there is nothing fulfilling about them. Shadow Thief is by far the best strike in the game only because you fight the end boss through out the strike, and you have to find one of the most powerful pieces of fallen tech in a small ass room. The Undying Mind is my second favorite because you can't speed run it, and it will kick your ass. But oddly enough, Undying Mind and Omnigul are not in the Dragonstrike playlist.

The story in Destiny is basically nonexistent. Much of the story is locked behind grimoire cards that we get for doing anything.. but those cards can't be viewed in game. Only on their website or through the app. The only other game I played that did this was Xenosaga 2 and 3.. we'd have a database instead of cards, but that database would update all the time.. there was literally a novel's worth of reading in there. But even with all that lore in the database it didn't detract from the massive amounts of voice acting and cut scenes in the game. If anything they wanted to make 2-3 more games but decided to through the extra plot lines into the database than let all that writing go to waste. But in Destiny, I only get a handful of plot lines that are never picked up again. Where did the stranger go? And where is the queen.. on the tower we can see the speaker.. at the reef.. there is no queen.

When I first watched this trailer all those months ago I got the impression that it was a father telling his son a story..

In the description:

 

As a Guardian of the City sets out on an epic, action-packed adventure to reclaim our Solar System, he recalls the moment when he was first taught the most important lesson of all -- The Law of the Jungle.

But in the game, we start off as a resurrected corpse with a ghost robot telling us to kill things.

I don't consider the dark below or house of wolves as an expansion.. maybe HoW because it expanded the map with the reef.. but thats just a social hub.. The next expansion will give us 3 new subclasses a couple new strikes, some new weapons, no new locations that have been announced.. for $40.

GW2 will have their first expansion.. We get 8 new subclasses, a new profession also with a subclass, a new campaign expansion that'll probably take a couple weeks for me to beat, new pvp and wvw game modes, a massive new map, a large campaign boss, probably a couple new world bosses, new mastery and trait systems, etc.. etc.. for probably $60.

All of Destiny's expansions combined, including the one not yet released, don't provide nearly as much and costs more money. Bungie needs to step up their game.

Destiny Weapon Tuning 2.0

https://www.bungie.net/en/News/News?aid=13147

So many nerfs... so much rage.. lol. The Ice Breaker nerf is pretty huge to me. The extra time per ammo regen is pretty huge.

Autos getting a buff again. People will be crying about Suros and Hardlight once more. All the rage over gally is hysterical... but Thorn def needed a nerf.

Sigh, Bungie just killed the game for me. While I'm happy Auto Rifles are getting another much needed buff the nerf to Ice Breaker (and yes it's a nerf) and the drop in the amount of ammo Handcannons now carry is the last straw for me. Hand Cannons, while not meant to be a long range alternative, have probably been the best weapons this game has (after the initial scout rifle nerf from alpha) for both long range and close combat situations and now they're killing our ability to kill shit by dropping how many shots we have. Plus they're nerfing Last Word for what, whiners complaining that the gun can kill you at range when it shouldn't (stability and range nerf will make the gun even harder to use correctly, yea it's minor but it still pisses me off). I never thought I'd like the Last Word but it's one of my favorite guns in the game outside of my Fulcrum and Ice Breaker and now they're nerfing it and Ice Breaker. Sigh, Bungie needs to learn how to balance the game while not killing what makes the game enjoyable to some of us and they need to quit caving into the whiners (except in the Thorn situation).

Thorn should get an even bigger nerf but I'm happy the damn thing is finally getting nerfed. It's long overdue.

The Messenger is the best PvP gun in this game right now... its muzzle rise with headseaker makes it a 2 shot kill every time. Its as deadly at long range as shotgun is at close rage. Red Death is a close second. Suros is going to be beast again, but It will probably only be 2nd tier compared to pulse rifles... Red Death was complete garbage in the game's early life, and now its a powerhouse.... I expect people to cry about pulse rifles next and RD will go back to being as crappy as it was when it first came out... The messenger is a real issue however. I own it, and its deadly accurate. Now that Thorn and HC altogether have been nerfed, nothing can come close to it. It has no rival right now in PvP... meaning it will get nerfed sadly.... I'm all for listening to the community... but they aren't always right. Destiny is not an MMO... and even if it was.. the normal rules of an MMO don't apply when FPS is involved... when people love their weapons and you wreck them, you lose audience. Gally should have been nerfed sooo long ago... but Bungie waited way too long to do this and now there is going to be severe backlash. I had high hopes for them outside of Halo and I wish them the best... but they really dropped the ball in so many places with this game.... so many missed opportunities.

Pulse Rifles are getting a minor nerf but yea they'll probably get an even bigger nerf once it's apparent that PR's are the go to gun for PVP (it happened to shotguns, auto rifles, and now to handcannons). It's going to suck even more for those of you who have guns like the Messenger as they're not exactly the easiest weapons to get a hold of (especially the adept versions) and after doing all that work to get them they'll get bitch slapped like HC and Gally. The Gally nerf really makes no sense to me. It's an exotic weapon, it's supposed to be an all powerful weapon that you want to use. Even more so when you can only have one exotic weapon equipped at a time. Yea it's a crutch weapon but so are most of the exotics in this game. Last Word, a gun used solely for PVP reasons due to fast fire rate and hip fire abilities. Ice Breaker, long range rifle with ammo regeneration that hits hard and comes in handy in tricky situations where replenishing ammo is a problem. Invective, a crutch weapon if I've ever seen on. Full-auto shotgun that hits like a truck and regens its own ammo. These weapons were designed to be go to weapons for certain situations. Hell even if I got Gally I most likely wouldn't give up Ice Breaker for PVE situations as Ice Breaker, imo, is the far superior weapon as it has more uses outside of being a boss weapon. 

The Gally nerf will cause quite a few people to leave the game but sadly they'll go back. Why? Why do we keep going back everytime we say we're done with the game? Why does anyone go back to a game they say they'll quit (like WoW, GW, FF, etc)? Because it's addicting and fun for a short time. The only bonus to Destiny is it's F2P so it doesn't require real money to play when you want to actually play it or when you give it up (as much as you all claim it's F2P with the amount of money you throw into GW2 you might as well be paying a monthly fee (I have no room to talk, I've thrown more money into STO then I care to admit while playing FFXIV, which I've also spent money on outside of the monthly fee)). This is the key selling point for Destiny, you play an MMO like game without any monthly fees or without any pay-to-win/pay-for-fashion (yea I had to it) items. Plus, while it's currently backfiring, Bungie is actually listening to their community and making balance changes and changes to the game to keep people playing. Most developers won't do that (Blizzard being one of the biggest) and it's a major plus for a game like this to have an active and helpful developer that actually listens. Sadly they've been taking changes to far or making changes that make no sense in one aspect of the game but make complete sense in the other aspect. Bungie really needs to get players play testing these changes/ideas before they implement/tell us about them. This way they get direct player feed back and know if these changes are what the community wants or if they're even necessary based on what the player base thinks.

I justify my purchases on gw2 as a monthly fee they deserve... lmao

Alot of ppl compare destiny to an MMO and that it's a free to play model but bungie is actually doing a combination of grind to win and pay to win model imo. The only way to get the next best weapons is to buy the dlc because the new weapons have a higher bar damage. And then if you want to get the even better weapons you have to grind endlessly until you get it or the bounty from rng. As much as I complain about dlc, if bungie had xur sell exotic bounties for higher coin costs and then sold coins in a dlc pack like how gw2 sells gems, I would have bought coins, then bought a gally bounty half a year ago and I'd have enjoyed the game much more.

As it is now the destiny model of endless grinding for randomness is to time consuming for me.

If I compare destiny to other fps games like bf4, destiny fails to deliver. In bf4 everyone can grind to win also thanks to the assignments / weapon bounties. But at least in bf4 we all have the assignments by default and all our play time counts towards that progression. So even if I do just a few rounds of conquest I'm unlocking up to 10-20 new weapons. I see that progress and feel a sense of accomplishment. But in destiny I have to keep doing the exact same bounties over and over again and hope for an exotic bounty to drop. I've only had 1 exotic bounty ever and I still didn't finish it yet. Bf4 assignments got me addicted to it.. but in destiny I have no real goals or any possible way of getting even the first step to even getting a goal because everything is rng.

I do like that the next destiny dlc will include a new subclass because it'll be something to unlock and enjoy as we get the new perks. But at this point I'd rather not pay $50 just to give myself a new goal.

https://www.vg247.com/2015/08/04/destiny-you-cant-upgrade-year-one-legendaries-in-the-taken-king/

Wow, its not a new game Bungie, its an expansion. The inconsistency is so jarring in this game... "hey lets finally make it reasonable for you to upgrade your old weapons"... "now we aren't going to let you upgrade your old weapons". Now nerfing gally, breaker, and black hammer makes zero sense, because they're going to be left behind... not to mention is makes Hawkmoon useless to XB1 players.

Doesn't surprise me any. They've been making bad choices ever since The Dark Below (and even some before then). They're just following the formula they think works for them and pissing off their fans while doing so. I feel bad for the X-Box players because Hawkmoon will now be useless to them (and I know plenty of XB players that have wanted to get their hands on HM). I'm really glad I decided not to buy this expansion, I knew Bungie was going to do something stupid and this just proves I was right. So many other games to spend money on that will be leaps and bounds better then Destiny (Battlefront, SC2: LoV (just preordered the Collector's Edition), The Division, etc).

Sadly I got on last weekend just because Xur was selling Suros so now I own it but it's practically worthless to have now.

And this confirms their "pay to win, grind to win" strategy. Everyone has to pay $40 to do all the same stuff over and over again in hopes of getting a new better weapon from rng, and whoever doesn't will have subpar weapons and armor that can't keep up with the newer minimum level requirements for the raids, weekly, nightfall and iron banner. And I'm sure they'll bust out another dlc as big as taken king by the end of this year and all the taken king weapons will be able to level up to "year 2" max damage.

This is bungie's way of scrapping about 75% of the weapons from having future balance issues and also "fixing" the limited storage options.. once all your old weapons are crap, ppl will get rid of them instead of hoarding everything, thus everyone will have more storage.

Bungie needs to hire more MMO consultants before they make Destiny 2. They have to learn more about the structure of an actual "social game". You can't force people to be social and that's what they've tried to do. Even when they opened up fireteam chat in Strikes, no one used it. Social aspects of games like these are nice, but a lot of people, including myself like to play solo if none of my friend are on. I don't mind playing casually with randoms, but I don't want to talk to them... especially if they are 11 years old.  A game like this should have offered something for everyone, but instead, it neglected everyone with less than 6 friends that could be on at the same time regularly. Raids should indeed contain exclusive loot that only players that do them can get, but they should not be a gate to be stuck behind for players that can't or don't want to do them. I get that Bungie was proud of their one good raid, and wanted everyone to play it, but they went about it the wrong way. Bungie was too proud of what they had made and didn't like the way people circumvented aspects of the game because they didn't want to do them. They didn't like how people favored other aspects of the game either. From the loot cave, to the nerf of auto-rifles, Bungie consistently George Lucas'ed their game.

House of Wolves seemed to be a step in the right direction. Interesting story, better reward system, A horde mode they could have expanded on, no raid to get locked behind... all seemed to be going right... and now this. Once again Bungie wants you to play their game, the way they want you to play it... you don't know what is fun, Bungie knows better than you. You'll use the guns and armor they want you to use. Oh you finally just got Fatebringer? Too bad. Hey check out this new strike.... you'll only have to play Archon Priest 5 out of the next 7 Strikes in the rotation before you get to it in a more challenging setting. Btw, here is a new Raid, you kinda sorta have to play it to get to the max level again... you just don't know it yet because we might possibly be trying to trick non raid players into buying this expansion by getting rid of the light system... maybe in 2-3 more chapters we'll let them catch up again.

They should have made the core PvE game all you needed to level to max. Public Events should have been stronger, and unsoloable. I'll give them this one though. It's clear the game was neutered by last gen... the 6 person instance limit is ridiculous. If they made Public Events challenging, they would be avoided because it would be impossible to find a full instance most the time. Strikes should have had a diverse reward system that was unique to each strike, thus making them more desirable to play. PvP should have an rewards exclusive to itself, instead of making PvE players play PvP for specific exotics. There should have been exotics/exotic bounties gained via playing PvP only, PvE only, and Raids only. Instead they tried to force each player to play every aspect of the game... that not how MMOs work. The PvPers, The PvErs, and the Raid/Dunegon runners are generally 3 separate hardcore communities, and then you have players that enjoy all aspects. Destiny isn't a true MMO, but it was sold like one, and attracted that type of player base.

With almost 1400 hours into Guild Wars 2, I spent the first 1000 doing nothing but PvE. I didn't touch PvP for a whole year. When I played SWTOR, I played nothing but the story, no PvP, no flashpoints, nothing else... Neither one of those games seem to hold me back in accomplishing my goals like Destiny had for not doing ALL the content... I can only imagine how more dedicated players than myself must feel about the game that constantly changes to counteract the way they play.

When I first started playing Destiny I was just finishing playing Defiance on the ps3. I had expectations of the public events to be similar to defiance except in 1st person mode. Look at this video:

All the purple dots on the minimap are players. Even on the ps3 the maps were that populated for public events. And the minimap alerted everyone that events were going on to encourage teamwork. The events would upscale based on the player count and it was enjoyable. But in destiny there is no minimap and you'd only know when an event was going to happen based off a timer online and with all maps only having 6-10 ppl there were no huge events in destiny. Even on ps3 I'd see events with 30+ ppl on my screen, but destiny has so many maps with no sign of life or other players that it feels completely empty in comparison.

Defiance also had pvp and instanced dungeon maps with team matchmaking for pve dungeons. In the end I thought defiance was a failed game because it turned f2p and their marketing was horrible. But even now it is a better executed game than destiny.

So after almost an entire year Xur finally has Gally on sale this weekend. It's kinda interesting that they put it on sale almost a month before Taken King comes out when it's going to be obsolete in the expansion. If you want to get your hands on the defining gun for Year One go get your 17 coins and buy it up before Sunday. Sigh, one of two guns I want and I have no interest in getting on and grinding out the weekly to get the coins for it. Thanks for nothing Bungie.

I'll log in and buy it just because I saved coins specifically for it for over 6 months. I'll use it once and log off.

I bought it, Ill probably never level it.

I logged on long enough to buy it. I equipped it and didn't feel any sense of happiness. This day could have been huge for me 6 months ago and revitalized my experience with the game. But after all this time and knowing it'll be a mostly pointless weapon in a month it feels like I'm having salt rubbed in a wound.

Part of me really wants to get on today, do the weekly twice, and go buy it. Then another part of me wants to break the Destiny disc in half and throw it in the garbage due to this blatant slap in the face by Bungie. The hugest slap in the face is I think the Gally nerf went into effect yesterday as well as I had a Destiny update file when I got on to play AC4 yesterday. They basically said "Here's Gally for everyone to buy but btw we're nerfing it today so none of you can experience what Gally is really like."

Yea I think it's time to pack Destiny away into the games that never get played drawer and never look at it again.

As many times as I read that gally was in the random selection Xur would sell.. the only other time he finally sells it is literally right when it's getting nerfed and will be obsolete with the next dlc. There was no randomness in Xur's inventory. It was obviously picked every week. And gally was the thing that kept everyone checking back. Now that its been sold, it really is the end of "year 1". I won't stick around for year 2. Its a shame.. so much potential.. so many problems.