Korax

I got the Invective over the weekend. I got the five strikes by playing the Moon strike repeatedly and carefully (the Earth one is easier, but I find it more tedious). After that, it's a 25 kill-death spread in multiplayer. That one's not too bad. It spans over multiple matches and counts assists as kills, so it took me 3 or 4 rounds. Then you have to do a weekly event. That was the real challenge. The Weekly Strike is a beast. Then it was "purchasing" a component from the gunsmith for 50 special ammo synthesis modules, which just meant grinding glimmer to buy them from him, turn around, and get the part. I'm working on the Thorn right now: Do the Moon Strike to get an "uncharged" gun, kill 500 Hive on the Moon to partially charge it, kill players with void damage in multiplayer (a weird point-based thing where kills get you 3 or 4 points and deaths subtract a point), buy a thing from the Speaker for a Mote of Light, and then (what I'm currently on) do a special version of the Moon strike that's boosted to level 26 and requires the boss to be kept alive until a different unique boss appears and is killed. So if anyone wants to try that, it would be cool.

I hit rep 3 with the Future War Cult, and found out that the factions do a similar thing as the Cryptarch: reaching a new level from 3 onward awards you with a bonus item package, which happened to have some crafting material and one of the FWC's legendary scout rifles in my case. So now I'm not concerning myself with any other rep, except maybe getting vanguard rep to 2 so I can spend those stupid marks on something decent. Also, I got a weird legendary auto rifle from something. I had the sort of weekend where the only time I put on clothes was when I needed to greet a pizza delivery person.

I had some time to kill and some podcasts to listen to, so I decided to try that farming location. Unsurprisingly, there were already a couple people there, whereupon I discovered that the game has a sort of soft grouping system that counts kills from nearby players as yours. I then popped a black wax idol and sat nearby, letting them do all the work and scooping up the drops and glimmer.

This weekend's been good to me so far. Bought the Sunbreaker gauntlets and en exotic engram from the special vendor, and the engram gave me some Voidfang Vestments, after which I found out that you can only have one piece of exotic armor equipped at a time. Fortunately, each of those pieces give a bonus to abilities in opposite subclasses, so I've been switching them out along with subclass, depending on what I'm doing. I also got much further in the exotic weapon bounty, and now I just need to farm up some glimmer to buy the final (I think) part and I should have a cool shotgun, too!

The third part of the exotic weapon bounty I got requires me to complete a weekly event, so I'm still up for helping out anyone else who wants to take a crack at it.

The Heroic modifier adding in extra enemies didn't help. Even without flinching, a couple knights or wizards would probably be manageable, but throwing four or five out at once is ridiculous.

The best pro wrestling gimmick match.

I'd be down for that. There's no matchmaking for the weekly/daily stuff anyway, so even if you wanted to play with randos, you couldn't.

I IMAGINE YOU'RE WRONG PSN had an EA sale a few weeks ago and I decided that $5 was cheap enough for morbid curiosity, but then Destiny happened so I've only played about half of the first mission. I can totally play some co-op.

I think your shield/life are integrated into the single bar on the top of your screen. If I've interpreted it correctly, it's 2/3 shield, 1/3 health, and it all seems to recharge anyway, so it may not really matter. Just wait until you meet the Queen of the Awoken and your character acts like they don't know what an Awoken is despite being one.

I got a legendary machine gun out of a blue engram, so it can definitely happen, Too bad I prefer using rocket launchers. Unfortunately, white weapons only break down into meager amounts of glimmer. Perhaps a rare chance for parts, but I haven't seen it.

I just hit rep level 2 with the FWC, and promptly bought an ASTROLORD ROBE.

A few more coupons to throw on the pile: 2x 50% OFF Cloud Chamber 3x 25% OFF Heavy Bullets

I've definitely been hurting for weapon parts, but have an overabundant supply of hadronic essence (warlock armor material). Sometimes I will buy a few of the cheapest guns from the gunsmith in order to immediately dismantle them. I wish you could just buy the parts.

NOT SOON ENOUGH

http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/the-group-who-conquered-destinys-first-raid/1100-5021/ Guess I don't have to give a fuck about raids any more.

The vendor was selling exotic engrams for motes. Seeing as how I've only gotten a single item that was better than blue from purple engrams, I don't know if I think it would be worth it, but what the hell else is there to spend them on, I suppose.

I'm gear-boosted to 24, creeping up on 25. I'm not certain, but I think the exotic bounty triggers based on how many bounties you've completed. You get an item that you give to the bounty guy for the exotic bounty, which I got immediately after turning in some regular bounties, so I was already in the menus to do so. Bounty. The exotic helmet I found is called An Insurmountable Skullfort. I can't help but imagine a space marine wearing a miniature stone keep on his head.

I was turning in bounties last night and got the opportunity to take an Exotic Weapon Bounty, which looks like a series of smaller bounties with the ultimate prize of an exotic weapon. So, barring a ridiculous difficulty curve, I have a guaranteed way to get a sweet gun now.

A legendary engram finally gave me something cool and I got an exotic helmet! For a different class! ARGH Also, unless I'm just not looking in the right place, it's currently impossible to use the in-game player reporting system to report someone for quitting early! As soon as they do, they no longer show up in any menu that lets you report them. Not only are people leaving Crucible matches they are losing (without any apparent penalty), but I've had people leave missions in the Vanguard Strike playlist, presumably because they aren't getting the mission required for whatever item grinding scheme they're trying. It's fucking frustrating. Something that's really fun, though: The Warlock's second subclass, the Sunsinger, unlocks the ability to set your super ability trigger to rez you if you're dead. It's incredibly satisfying to get killed when capturing a control point, wait until the enemy turns their back while they are capping, popping the rez and beating the fuck out of them.

I also got a purple shader and have been rocking a purple wizard robe since then. I found a cool-looking gold one last night, though, so I might try that one out for a while... I'm a bit surprised that some publications haven't been giving more provisional reviews given that some of the game content is locked up in delaying systems, especially when most places didn't get a review out until later in the week because the multiplayer servers weren't up until a day before release. The first boss raid didn't go live until today. You can get legendary gear as random drops, but if you want to buy it from vendors, the cheapest I've seen is 150 vanguard/crucible marks, for which your earning is capped at 100/week. Even then, anything more than profile icons requires a faction reputation of 2+, which you can't start gaining until you reach level 20, because that's the level requirement to wear the bit of faction flair. The guy who sells exotic gear is only around on weekends, but the gear he sells costs 13-23 strange coins, so it was possible to get something last weekend, but would have taken some deliberate grinding (even after my weekend binge, I have 10 coins).

Yeah, I guess I actually meant public events. And it's apparently possible to get something other than strange coins for you first event of the day, because yesterday I got a piece (?) of Ascendant Energy, whatever the hell that is.

Daily Events are mostly on Earth, mostly on half-hour timers, and even then both personal experience and online comments have shown that they sometimes don't trigger. They usually involve a special mini-boss-esque baddie spawning in and you're given a few minutes of countdown timer to kill them. If you fail, you get a bronze rating, if you get close, silver, and successful completion gives you a gold. I had a pretty intense one within my first hour or so of playing, and managed to get the final killing sniper rifle crit with one second left on the clock.

You also get them from the reward package for completing your first Daily Event of the day. And, because you can put them in your cross-character vault, you can do Dailies with alts and farm coins. As frustrating as the lack of explanation can be for figuring out game systems and menus, it's just that much worse when it extends to the story. It's sort of justified at first, because you've been dead or whatever for some ambiguous amount of time and aren't expected to know anything about what's going on. But very quickly it seems that your character must have taken a trip to the library and read up on things off-camera, because all sorts of shit is just whipped around without any context, and none of it seems to faze them. Any important information is relegated to Grimoire entries rather than actual in-game conversations. You want to know anything about the Fallen? Check the Grimoire. Background info on the Gunsmith? Check that Grimoire, son. You just met the Queen of the Awoken and are wondering what the fuck has been going on for the last half hour? You just unlocked a Grimoire entry, better hope it tells you something useful (it probably won't). All of which is made worse by the fact that THE GRIMOIRE IS ONLY ACCESSIBLE THROUGH THE BUNGIE WEBSITE, so you have to load up your web browser (or Destiny smartphone app) and get all this information outside the game. Even the ending is handled poorly; you complete the final boss fight, get a brief cutscene where the Stranger give you some vaguely ominous exposition, and are then unceremoniously dumped back to the In Orbit lobby. No real wrap-up, no credit roll, nothing. I wasn't actually sure that I had finished the story until I clicked through to the destination map and saw that there weren't any more story missions to play. At some point I decided that the people telling the story didn't care enough to actually tell it, so I wasn't going to care enough to try to decipher it. All that said, I played something around 20 hours over the weekend. Regardless of what I think about the story, I really like playing the game. It's fun to jump in with a couple friends and shoot Cabal troops on Mars (who totally aren't 40K Space Marines, oh god don't let anyone from Games Workshop see them). It's fun to matchmake into a 3v3 squad deathmatch on Venusian ruins. And it's definitely fun to run around on the Moon, trying to find dumb things to dance on top of.

Anyone want to try doing the weekly heroic Strike on PS4 later today? There are barely any people in public matchmaking, and there's no way I can do it by myself.