JonCole

Considering most have already covered what would have been my long, detailed response, I'll put it another way. I'm actually looking for cliqueish places to post on the internet. I like places with a culture and a history. If I didn't want cliques, I would post in the forums on IGN dot com.

Yeah, I'm dying for that but my wife just told me that there is a perk in the Strength tree that lets you fast travel while over-encumbered. So, I'm definitely aiming for that as soon as possible in lieu of such a Torchlight option.

For what it's worth, Nirwen's is essentially the best PvP legendary weapon available so I wouldn't undersell it. They did change the rewards structure this time around, now when you hit ranks 3 and 5 you get a package. Seems like the rank 3 package drops a guaranteed 310 artifact, not to 5 yet but I'd expect it to be something interesting. They are saying that the rank 5 package could have an IB ghost. Also hitting higher ranks means you get better random rewards at the end of match, since hitting rank 3 I've gotten two chest pieces, a hand cannon, and some arms. So yeah, I wouldn't say that IB is offering anything mindblowing but the rewards to playtime ratio is significantly, measurably better than before. What I've heard some of my clan members doing is getting all the daily bounties every day then not playing. Daily bounties aren't repeating entirely (yesterday had one bounty in common with today) so you can build up a nice cache. Plus, when you turn in the bounties on later days you get more rep. So, potentially if you build up the bounties on all your characters and then play a few hours on Sunday/Monday, you could hit rank 5 on all chars with ease (particularly since there's another XP bonus applied when one character hits rank 5).

Iron Banner is great guys - Hope you all are having fun with your other games

I had one set of power armor just show up when a skull-laden legendary raider suddenly emerged from a raider compound I was attacking to try to beat me down with a baseball bat. Horrifying.

Goddamn, Trials. Did five real attempts at flawless, got five 8-1 cards. They really did an excellent job with the Trials matchmaking, if you haven't heard they basically made it so that teams with the same number of wins play against each other as much as possible. So, theoretically you all have the same skin in the game and you all are good enough to get to the point you're at. What this means is that for me, wins 1-5 are fairly effortless affairs. 6-7 are quite hard, and 8-9 are practically impossible. All of that being said, Trials is far more accessible and worthwhile to non-PvP-focused players. Instead of having bronze, silver, and gold tier packages rewarded on wins, they're now attributed to bounties. All of the bronze tier bounties are relatively easy and attainable through regular play, stuff like revives and kill streaks as a team. Two of the bronze tier packages reward 25 marks each, 50 legendary marks in total per character. Beyond that, the silver and gold tier bounties are not insanely hard to get and quite attainable through a prolonged play. Silver requires a point total that you build faster with wins but still build with losses or ties. Gold requires 10 matches played and 75 total kills by your team. The silver and gold tier packages reward Trials gear and Exotics at over 310 light level. Beyond the bounties, armor is awarded at 5 wins as per usual and weapons are awarded at 7 wins. Gear is 300-310 light and universally have quite solid rolls. Flawless of course grants you access to Mercury, which rewards Adept weapons. Adept weapons don't feel as essential as before when they had elemental damage, instead they all now have a different skin as the regular drops and they have a built in extra perk called Last Resort that grants you bonus agility if you're the last person on your team alive. Overall, Trials has EXCELLENT rewards. It's still grueling if you're going for that ever elusive flawless, but more accessible than ever to the more casual PvP crowd. I'd still recommend playing Elimination in the off time (which is now an always playable game type) to get accustomed to the mode, but I think you all should give it a shot now and then.

I dunno, maybe I'm just not the right audience for this type of complaint. Certainly I don't think it's meaningless that you and other fans are frustrated by this, but this game is years old at this point. You've certainly gotten your money's worth out of it. I know that they made a promise to never get into microtransactions, but then again I really don't think there's a substantive difference between buying small, low-cost expansions that unlock weapons that are definitively better than the core offerings and what is characterized as "microtransactions". I also don't know how reasonable it is to expect them to stick to that promise forever, it's kind of like in politics how someone can get slammed for either not changing their positions as time moves on or being characterized as unreliable because they choose to change their positions as time moves on. Put another way, Payday 2 changed significantly within the span of a year or so via expansions and updates to the core systems. At that point, Overkill had the option of simply calling that new product Payday 3, or maybe calling it Payday 2: Remastered, or whatever. Had they chose to go with that option and then changed their position that they might consider microtransactions, would they be oathkeepers because Payday 3 is the one adding microtransactions and they're not breaking their promise on Payday 2? Are we effectively dinging them because they made a promise a long time ago, acted in the best interest of customers by not releasing their systems changes as an entirely new game, and now they're going back on that extremely old promise (by games industry terms, 2+ years is FOREVER)?

Did they rebalance the game to make it harder in response to paid equipment being made available? Does paid equipment replace what was formerly the best equipment, or is it simply a tier above? I can only think of a handful of games that have been proven to function this way, namely Candy Crush. Essentially, it was found that once you make your first microtransaction in Candy Crush, the game is measurably harder and thus the powerups/boosts become that much more essential. If the exact same scenarios are available and they're just as completable as they were before except now there's just even more grease available to be placed between the wheels, I can't see that as being P2W. I can see being frustrated with the open question that "maybe if I had paid, I would have won" but unless it's proven that you can't win unless you pay, I can't see that as being anything more than frustrating.

I heard about this. However, I can't really make myself feel too bothered by it. Granted, I've not put in hundreds of hours into the game but I almost put in a hundred. But characterizing this as P2W in a game that is explicitly PvE is misleading and sensational. I also don't put much stock in the community being in flames, because communities are often in flames. Sure, Overkill could have done this a better way. I know that in Guild Wars 2, there is a somewhat similar system of locked chests dropping and you have to pay for keys. That game however offers a handful of in-game opportunities to get the keys without having to pay and it subverts some of the ill will that such a system could engender. At worst, I think this is a consumer-unfriendly, hamfisted move. But I don't feel like it negatively affects the actual mechanics of the game all that much. Sure, stats are affected by the new equipment and such, but the main system for getting gear modifications is randomized anyways so I don't think that it had a particularly strong loot mechanic to begin with.

That sucks. Can't remember if I added you on PSN, but if I'm available and you want to run it again let me know. There is a Taken major that spawns when the final boss reaches 50% health. It usually spawns out of the right side of the arena from the starting point. You kill him and that gets you the Essence, you technically don't need to even finish the strike.

I can't see them leaving POE as it is for much longer, it's just completely irrelevant and ripe for updating after Trials is added back in. I can't imagine this expansion lasting much longer than about now for myself either, if it wasn't for the fact that it's relatively easy for me to find raid groups with my clan and PvP offering a lot to me personally.

I beat Hard Mode last night. That whole thing is no joke. For the first two fights, you should really be above 300 if not in the 305-310 range. For the second two fights, you need to be 310+. Also, I'd say Touch of Malice is nearly essential for at least half of a raid team. Even if you guys don't all have a chance to run a full raid, you could at least run it to an extent to farm items you may need. If I had limited time/trouble getting a group together, I'd run a group with everyone's main accounts and make it to the Totem Checkpoint. From there, everyone switches characters to any raid-ready characters to save the checkpoint (one person just needs to stay in the instance as everyone else switches). Then switch back to main accounts, and Totems -> whatever you can make it through easily. It could just be Totems and Warpriest, or through Golgoroth, or even Daughters. Once you get to that point where you really face a lot of difficulty, switch characters and run it again from Totems to that point. Loot by boss are - Totems - Ghost, Fusion Rifle, Shards Warpriest - Ghost, Fusion Rifle, Sniper Rifle, Machine Gun, Rocket Launcher, Shards Golgoroth - Chest, Gloves, Boots, Fusion Rifle, Shotgun, Sniper, Shards Daughters - Class Item, Shotgun, Shards If it was me, I'd run Totems -> Golgoroth three times per week. After Golgoroth, proceed to the Exotic chest and then jump out to the next character.

For the record, HM King's Fall is NUTS. I spent 6 hours on everything through Sister's checkpoint.

Hadium Flakes are needed to create the frame for Touch of Malice, then you need 30 to fully upgrade it. You can also use them to buy Mouldering Shards from Eris.

3oC doesn't actually improve the exotic chance, it creates an exotic chance that stacks the more you use them. So actually, it's possible to get two exotic drops off the same ultra if you get the super small chance of exotic drop normally plus the 3oC bonus chance.

Many of them are really odd. I think this is in part due to the fact that this is an update to the Taken King, which is an expansion in itself. Lots of downloads were being viewed as downloading the last like... 1% of a 18gb download, which is the exact download size of TTK + this minor update.

Your need for weapon parts will only go down as time goes on. That's not to say it's forgivable that they're making the most sparse upgrade material that much more sparse, just that it's only been a problem lately because post-expansion is exactly when you need them the most.

The random engrams can yield Vanguard QM and Crucible QM versions of the weapons. The different versions differ in stats and appearance, despite using the same model. Some of the perks you mentioned are good examples of what makes good PvE vs PvP perks (I'll get to weapons shortly). Triple Tap is a good PvE perk because it's pretty hard to get precision hits consecutively on human opponents vs AI opponents. Replenish is a decent PvP perk for special weapons, as you're ammo limited on them. I find myself quite frequently without any sniper ammo and having the chance to give me a clip on super activation is pretty handy if I'm having trouble with special ammo pickups. Icarus is not a great perk, but better than you'd think for both PvP and PvE - it really favors weapons with already good range/stability, particular weapons where you need to move to compensate for how they fire. For instance, Icarus shouldn't be undervalued for fusion rifles that have long charge time, because you could easily find yourself strafing and jumping while charging for a shot. As far as PvE vs PvP as it pertains to weapons, you just have to consider the general use cases of each of the weapon classes and how they fit into the meta. High impact, high range shotguns are greatly favored in Crucible for the simple fact that those two stats primarily govern how easily you can one-shot someone with a shotgun blast. In most shotgun vs something engagements, you only have one shot that can count. An auto rifle, hand cannon, or even melee can easily counter a shotgun that takes two shots to kill regardless of rate-of-fire. On Auto Rifles, high stability and range are most critical because almost by default you have to stay relatively still while firing one (versus hand cannons or scout rifles, where you can take a shot, strafe, take a shot, jump up and down, take a shot, etc) so you want every shot to hit for as much damage as possible. If you have any particular guns that you're looking at and aren't sure of their viability in various modes, feel free to ask about them.

The Omolon weapons like the Hung Jury/Last Extremity (the Crucible version of the Omolon Scout Rifle) definitely look the most fake, weirdly sleek and have a liquid ammo container. If you look at the gun model as you're firing, the little tank of liquid reduces with each shot you take. You should see one of the Omolon sniper rifles, they look so strange and tiny.

Our progress, spoiler-tagged in case people are still avoiding spoilers wrt names of things -

You can easily play for an hour or so per day. That'd give you time to do daily stuff, maybe a strike or two, etc. The campaign itself doesn't take too incredibly long, you could probably beat it in a week or so at that clip.

Mayhem Rumble is the weekly playlist, not the daily. With the weekly you have to win to get the marks and you get marks for your first three wins, for up to 30 marks/wk.

Moving tomorrow, today is my last day of work and I'm just feeling so weird cleaning out my office. By a stroke of bureaucratic luck, I've just been approved yesterday to continue my position (I manage the database that my non-profit uses, design it for use in new programs, and run statistics for grant reporting) remotely. That said, it's going to be an entirely different beast - this job is currently full-time in an office with a decent amount of facetime with coworkers, new position will be part-time and hours will be worked on an as-needed basis from home. I'll need to do training on how to use the database for new employees remotely via remote meeting software, via written materials, or in a recorded webinar-style thing. Communication with my boss is certain to be almost exclusively via email. This is going to be weird. Anyways, I'm glad to continue having a source of income which was one of my biggest concerns in moving. Neither my wife nor I have jobs lined up, we're moving for family reasons as my mother-in-law is going through a divorce and we're moving in with her for emotional support and eventually to help pay the mortgage. Now I just need to deal with the fact that we're supposed to start driving our moving van in about 16 hours and I've still only finished about half of my packing. As it turns out, moving is the worst. Also, I'm starting to feel really sentimental about this place as I'm doing my last drive down X street or my last walk from Y restaurant back to my office.

According to a not horribly statistically sound but still moderately interesting video from DestinyTracker, the level 20 strike playlist is the best way to farm engrams -

You can at least start the raid with one or two people below 290. I've become more convinced that high level isn't completely necessary at least for a bulk of the encounters, and really the raid is the most expedient way of leveling faster since all of the drops are 300-310.