JonCole

Did you guys end up doing it?

Fast-res is extremely useful in the raid. Hunters may want to consider picking up Celestial Nighthawk.

Oryx is dead, long live the king. After two nights and many hours (like, 6+) of bashing my head against the last boss in the raid, my group finally managed the execution and went from barely being able to do a single rotation to doing five rotations. Man, so hard but the feeling of beating the raid was so, so good. If you guys find yourselves wanting for hints/tips on the raid without having to consult videos or guides, let me know or invite me to party chat while you're at it. I had a ton of fun doing a blind run, but my raid group got to a point at the very end where the mechanics were so exact that it really was less fun to play. Like, we had 100% knowledge of the mechanics but for some reason the execution wasn't right because almost invisibly some mechanic has to be done in a very specific way that can only be perceived by tons of failure. Figuring things out is fun, but at a couple moments it came at the expense of stressing us out and losing some serious sleep. I'm moving next week so I'll be spending most of the weekend packing, but also if you need a sub at some point I can probably spend an hour or two helping out in that way.

Yeah, but you can still use the 310 version (if anyone here got it, just an FYI) to infuse another weapon and that weapon won't be debuffed like the drop will. And you'll still be able to rebuy it at 280 via the kiosk.

Yeah, that mission is pretty awful. I couldn't manage it over 7-8 attempts (I'm light level 300) and I just didn't have time to do more. Oh well, I'm sure it'll come up in the rotation sometime soon. They only thing we're missing out on is a 310 weapon to infuse with.

Time-sensitive (maybe) exotic weapon quest spoilers -

Another option for what you guys can do to farm plus complete the Court of Oryx quest from Eris is all match up in the same patrol instance and run Court together - https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/3lubqa/spoilers_sga_guarantee_a_fireteam_of_6_for_court/ If you have 5-6 people that are coordinated in two fireteams, Court can go by INCREDIBLY quickly and level 3 is infinitely easier to complete. Engrams will drop like crazy.

Some additional protips -

My raid group got to Oryx last night and banged our heads against it for a couple hours. Definitely a tough fight requiring almost perfect execution, gonna make another attempt tonight. I won't go on about it in case anyone is trying for a blind run, but suffice it to say that my general advice regarding the raid is that you have a scout rifle, sniper rifle, and rocket launcher/machine gun (sword won't be of much use) ready to go for every boss battle. Also, even if you don't think you can make it to Oryx the raid is still worth doing. Armor and weapon drops are guaranteed to be more than 300 light, which can definitely help your light level. Plus you get Moldering Shards without even having to kill bosses, which can help you get better loot in the future when the raid is more doable.

I don't really think it ruins the end game, they've done a good job gating a lot of content behind quests so some of the absolute best and most attractive exotics aren't in the regular loot table. Also, boss-specific armor drops are really appealing in my mind and those inherently requires a more manual process. I've tried the raid. We got stuck on the first boss because most of us only just broke the 290 light barrier and not with weapons/armor that were exactly perfect for DPS. We're spending today trying to get our hands on scout rifles and snipers to make it a little easier. I was able to put like 200k damage on the boss while people on my team were pulling 120k and the like. You can get into the raid at 250 light because you get a 25% damage reduction per 10 light levels below the recommended. So you'd get 100% damage reduction at 250 and the enemies would have their light level shown but would practically one shot you.

It's (boss battles, at least) essentially impossible if you're underleveled. 290 shouldn't be recommended, it should be minimum/required.

I don't... really understand why a PvP-specific bounty is inherently bad. If you don't like to participate in PvP, then don't. If you played enough PvP once to get Invective, you can just get the Year 2 version and have a perfectly good exotic shotgun with no further suffering.

Remember that unlike Prison of Elders, this raid has checkpoints. So you can get to a stopping point and as long as you come back to it before reset, you can resume where you left off. So if everyone's schedules work out, you can do it over a couple days on the weekend. That said, I've already got a raid group so I'll have to pass. You guys check out this Legend of You promotion? It's clearly marketing but it's still cool nonetheless. Here's the video for my Warlock -

Niantic's logo was shown as working on, they made Ingress for Android (and later iPhone) for Google. I played it for a good six months or so and really got addicted to it, but it's hard to recommend at this point because 1) it's fairly esoteric, particularly to newcomers now that it's been out for like two years 2) the theme is not all that compelling. Starting out on the ground floor on this game with a theme that's a lot more accessible is sure to make Pokemon Go a great game. I'm curious to see the actual gameplay, Ingress had a very similar trailer (below) and the game is far more simplistic in interface with an Google Maps-like primary UI and mostly menus to traverse. Also, there are tons of Ingress meetups. The company itself creates in-game events where they the game's opposing teams fight it out for 24 hours in a certain city (can be all around the world) or something to get the higher score and get recognized. Beyond that, there are tons of smaller meetups by the local communities. I anticipate a similar thing happening here. I mean, in the actual Pokemon games they've messed around with capturing certain Pokemon at certain times of day or limited windows of real world time, that template will apply wonderfully to this AR game.

Got my first phantom medal yesterday, 7 kills without taking any damage. Also, Necrochasm and Vestian are OP - Definitely try the different Crucible modes, I saw maps on Control and Rumble that I hadn't seen once on Rift. Seems like there is some crossover between map availability between playlists but also some that are limited to only one.

Rift - yeah, this definitely seems to be in the same league of salvage where the objectives really are critically important and the games are prone to bad pub play. I rolled with a 6-person fireteam and we did some work in a few games, got our mercy rule on the second match we played. I like how appling is no longer a thing, it keeps you in the pipe and just resets who you matchmake with rather than kicking you out of the queue. New maps - hard to really remember which map you're talking about, I would say in general that the new maps really mess around with different elevations, different ways to switch between lanes, etc far more than vanilla/HoW maps. Not a ton of really long sniper lanes in any of the maps, which is kinda interesting. Also, I think there are either 4-5 new maps with Rift and then when Mayhem comes out on the 11th there are a handful more. Shotguns - yeah, still quite good. I did counter fairly often with auto rifles due to blink cooldown nerf + range nerf on shotguns. Lots of people rushing me head-on and me burning them to the ground. ARs - I found that high ROF, high stability ARs were most effective, the Low Down is quite good with the right perks. Hard Light is pretty solid and I found Necrochasm to be not bad at all.

It's a new thing. There are randomly spawned chains of quests that you can find in the environment similar to the way you mention.

I totally understand that. I've been grinding grimoire for the past couple weeks, I'm at 3575/3665.

It's hard to say if that'll be true, they're taking out the prowling wolves but in the patch notes it also suggests that there will be new weekly quests of some sort to get reputation for that faction. I wouldn't be very surprised if the missions also could reward that grimoire via staged fights with those enemies, this would be the first time that they denied grimoire score via the removal of old content. Also, this is a purely personal assessment but grimoire is barely "content". You can read the descriptions of each of the lore items from the grimoire cards but you can get that via a wiki, and otherwise all they serve to do is provide a numeric assessment of your commitment to inflating that number. It's like achievement score.

What do you mean, Dewar?

"It makes sense that certain kinds of nanomachines might require energy intake by sunlight and osmosis and thus requiring the human to expose maximum amounts of skin. That's just how nanomachines work."

I'll be there! Moving to San Antonio in a month so it'll be perfect. Maybe I'll try to scout out a good meet-up place.

This is the dumbest, worst preorder scheme that has ever happened. The voiceover sounds so ridiculously corporate I can barely stand it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJkzcQDqbpE

Nightfall - random drop, 1 possible per character per week Iron Banner - rank 3 and 5 rewards, 5000 glimmer each, 2 per character per Iron Banner event Level 34 and 35 POE - one guaranteed at the end of each, 2 per character per week Trials of Osiris - 6 win, 8 win, and flawless chest, 3 per character per week Generally recommended that you get to level 34 via Armor Cores and IB/NF etheric, then you farm the other end-game content for etheric to upgrade other armor and weapons.