JonCole

If I had to devise to pre-TTK minimal-grind maximum-preparation schedule, it'd be something like - 1. Run Nightfalls and Weekly Heroic Strikes every week. This lets you get chances at etheric light to hit 34 and coins to buy any exotics from Xur that pop up that you still want/don't have. You can also just save the strange coins for post-TTK, they'll probably still be valuable. 2. Run Vanguard Dragon Strikes. Probably the most efficient way to farm good loot without grinding at bounties or for marks specifically. There are excellent weapons for every weapon class there - Hopscotch Pilgrim for Pulse, Snakebite Surgeon for Fusion, High Road Soldier for Scout, Loner.Rebel for Hand Cannon, etc. Having at least one good weapon of every weapon class is sure to be valuable in early TTK. And the legendary engram drop rate from Dragon Strikes is phenomenal, you can just get good gear by accident while running them. 3. Only run 32 POE up until the point where you hit level 34, then only run 34 POE. POE is pretty darn inefficient for getting good loot since it's all fairly situational, but it is the most direct way to hit level 34 by running 32 POE. Also, the weapons that you can get from weapon cores at 34 POE are already max damage at 365 and will probably be worth taking into TTK in terms of pure damage values without needing to ascend. Plus, more etheric light for upgrading gear you get from marks/dragon strikes. Unless you really need the Vanguard/Crucible/DO/NM/FWC rep, just do bounties that you can get while running content that you'd normally like (get 100 kills without dying, get 100 precision kills, etc). Also, raid gear is probably not going to be incredibly useful post-TTK so I'd mostly skip raiding unless you have a group that you have doing them with. And there's really not a whole lot of cost/benefit reasons to run Skolas unless you are going for the triumph.

Do you guys really have a problem buying finding (updated for clarity) digital games at a discount? Xbox and Playstation have both gotten so much better at pricing things well on their respective stores, I just bought Payday 2 for $40 (from $50) during the first week it was out. I just bought Borderlands: The Handsome Collection for $30 (50% off) about two months after it came out. Both stores have scheduled monthly sales and "free with subscription"-esque deals all the time. I just didn't have to buy Journey on PS4 again because I bought it previously on PS3. I guess I could understand complaints that they don't reduce the regular price fast enough or they don't have /enough/ sales, but on the whole I don't think digital is particularly more expensive than physical.

Many people clearly hold the same ideas about whether or not it's "worth it" to get current gear in the run up to the next expansion, it's basically what Jeff Gerstmann has always complained about the game (why bust my ass to get level 32 now when it'll be easy to reach when the level cap is increased to 34?) It's an attitude of someone who doesn't play the game regularly and I'm not really convinced ever will. I mean, if you're willing to dedicate at least a few hours a week to the game until TTK, it's probably still "worth it" to get current armor and weapons as they'll benefit you quite obviously right now and will probably help bridge the difficulty gap at the beginning of TTK. If you're playing now singularly as a means to prepare for TTK, then perhaps it's not in your best interest to make the investment of time as the value of current gear will go down. I mean, half of the game is collecting loot. You should play it for the sake of getting that loot, even if it's devalued in the future. But this gets into the whole "you should play this game THIS way" thing that presumes I know the ideal method of enjoyment in this game, which I don't.

Two websites - http://destinystatus.com/ - has various information about your guardian, but also a grimoire tab that is like 10x more accessible and quicker than Bungie's website. http://destinychesthunter.net/ - great tool for hunting chests, plug in your PSN ID and it'll tell you which one's you're missing. Screenshots and videos for each ghost.

That's pretty depressing. I guess I partially use the Grimoire as a means of metering progress through the game, but I'm getting pretty darn close to maxing out any stats that would be tracked with normal gameplay so I wonder if I'll feel a similar lack of meaning in my play. That said, I really just enjoy the mechanics of the game massively and I feel like I get sufficient satisfaction just from those. I started playing Payday 2 on my PS4 last night and couldn't get over just how crappy that game feels in the fit-and-finish sense and the "way the guns feel" sense as compared to Destiny. I'm actually afraid to go back to Black Ops 3 this holiday because I think it'll feel kinda garbage after Destiny.

Considering the Awoken/Reef has a lot to do with the Taken storyline, I imagine that it'll change in a fairly significant way. At the very least, they'll probably make new queen's weapons to drop out of the big chest at the end. Maybe Variks will sell Taken-bonus gear instead of the Fallen-bonus weapons and POE-round-bonus gear.

My reading of the GI stuff is that they're really targeting the legendary gear rather than exotics. And my general impression is that exotics are supposed to be evergreen, so I'd venture to guess that they will continue to be ascend-able through exotic shards or some similar process. And one benefit to across-the-board nerfs of older perks is that they should, theoretically, continue to be viable but not quite overpowered. I can't imagine they'd dedicate so much of their weapons patch to balancing exotics if exotics would suddenly lose value as compared to new exotics. I don't know why TTK would really operate in any fundamentally different way than CE did, where exotics were added but appeared more regularly in new content loot tables. I would be surprised if you could get TTK exotics from POE chests, for instance, it would seemingly disrupt the economy of exotics if you could stockpile keys now and run 28 POE like 20 times on day 1 to get most of the new stuff.

I agree that the weapon balance changes seem weird when they could have just "nerfed" several weapon classes by stats alone on entirely new weapons. Like, is nerfing shot package and rangefinder specifically really necessary when my Matador won't be viable in PvP after TTK? And couldn't they just remove high range archetype shotguns from the new offerings? Very strange.

Their TrueSkill calculation is meant to be a kind of cumulative measure that isn't so directly influenced by the averages of stats. So if you play a million games but your K/D is low because the first half of your playtime you were garbage, you'd still have a high TrueSkill because you put in a lot of time, you have a lot of wins, etc. The formula is secret to prevent gaming of the stat, but the point is that if you play PvP somewhat regularly, you win fairly often, and so on your rank will continue to go up.

I basically don't use Bungie for stats, I use DestinyTracker which pulls from Bungie's APIs and puts things into a better context. Here's your Tracker page, I think I'm the first person to try to pull your stats so they're updating everything and ranking you among the DestinyTracker community right now - http://destinytracker.com/destiny/player/ps/xXZeusthecatXx

Totally understood. For future reference, I don't think you'd get into any trouble if you only played a couple times a week or something. I know guys who only play on weekends that are totally cool, it's mostly about when you are on that you join some clan parties/lobbies and make your presence known. And I won't be offended if any of you don't join, just wanted to put out the option. I'm clearly a bit obsessed with the game so running 3x NF, Trials, VoG and Crota is super crucial to me but I can easily, easily see why it wouldn't be for others. It might be a better idea for me to bring this up with better proximity to TTK, because that'll really be prime time for jumping into such a community. I know that me and the other admins will be burning some serious midnight oil to finish the raid multiple times on day 1 so we can sherpa members afterward. It's going to be a nightmare for me, but probably a great time to be involved. Trials this week was really bad. I thought I liked Burning Shrine, but I was really having a poor showing in the scheme of things. It's amazing how much I can see the meta move around, I saw my fair share of Messenger/Icebreaker guys who clearly saw how cool I was using it and decided to hop onto the bandwagon. Also saw a ton of Hopscotch Pilgrims and Skorri's Revenges. I managed one flawless pretty much no thanks to my own performance and ended up getting two (extra) Truth's and a duplicate Adept Messenger. Between that, Iron Banner still being a laggy mess and RNGesus boning us on NF/Heroic/POE34/35 this week, I might take a short break myself.

I never thought to bring this up until today, but my clan is always recruiting new members. I imagine that plenty of you are getting plenty of mileage out of activities with other forum members, but I personally had a desire to run a lot more end game content far more frequently than I would have been able to do otherwise that made me seek out a bigger group of likeminded people. It's a good group of dudes and I frequently can find teams to play POEs, raids, Trials, Iron Banner, etc with at nearly all hours. Anyways, my fellow admin posted this recruitment thread on Reddit with some more details (all the requirements are kinda loose, fwiw) - https://www.reddit.com/r/ps4clans/comments/3fnsk1/recruitingdestiny_immortalis_rising_is_looking/ And that was my dose of "plug your shit" for this thread, forgive me if this was inappropriate in any way.

Pre-HoW Efrideet's is pretty good because it has pre-HoW perks available. It hasn't really been nerfed, this is just a new version. The new version is still a good sniper rifle, as it's capable of res-sniping. That said, it is a bit of a different class of sniper as compared to Her Benevolence as it has fairly low aim-assist. It feels pretty similar to Praedyth's Revenge, though obviously without the same huge pool of reserve ammo. Of the two available weapons, I'd definitely recommend Efrideet's over Timur's. Timur's is a pretty limited use case. Edit: I guess I should clarify that I wasn't disagreeing with the use of the word "nerf" to be pedantic. Literally all pre-HoW weapons had the same available perks, so you could get a pretty similar roll to the one that people use with pre-HoW Efrideets with a Longbow Synthesis or LDR. The point here is that all of those weapons are no longer available, and all of the post-HoW weapons are currently available all with the same perk sets. So in some way, all the weapons were "nerfed" by just having a completely different pool of perks than previous generations of "equivalents" sold by vendors.

Use the NLB a bit in PvE before trying it in the Crucible. You'll notice you need to chamber a new bullet after every shot, learn the animation cancel - you reload and then sprint. If you do it wrong your gun will jam and it will take the same time it would have taken if the animation took place.

I think you mean "complete a strike with full fireteam consisting of only your clan members", Strength of the Pack. POEs count as strikes. (I double checked because this would be a great, easy way to get clan raider if it was true >_<) Also, congrats! Skolas kills feel great.

There are a ton of fireteams in Crucible, about 90% of the time I spend in Crucible is with a full party of six. They try to match us against groups of six or bigger groups (like two groups of three, a group of 4 and 2, etc) but it frequently is a mix of people on the other side. It gives us an advantage when it comes to winning as a group, if not necessarily doing well individually. Shotguns are going to be super effective for at least another month, but probably still quite effective after the patch. It doesn't hurt to get one when you're playing against a team that is wholly convinced that fast and furious, up in your face gameplay is what they want. If you want/need a good shotgun, the New Monarchy one is pretty slick and well worth grabbing.

I actually read about this earlier in the morning on Reddit and couldn't have guessed in a million years that a Thumb was close to the center of it. My deepest sympathies, gormanate.

It is good if you're trying to get the 15 captures. That one usually takes me the second longest to get outside of melee kills. I usually roll with a 6-person fireteam to get myself Hard Forged, Iron Wrath, Chaos and the Calm, and Heavy Metal then I hop into a lobby solo to finish Iron Embrace and Iron Grip. Play that favors melee kills and captures is sloppy play and I have a much easier time doing that with blueberries than a coordinated team.

One of my more enjoyable res snipes on Widow's Court last Sunday -

Use the new one. Aggressive will make every shot better while LitC just makes one shot better* (*timed/earlier).

Induction cooktops are only cool as compared to coils. Otherwise they're garbage.

I use Bing Rewards to get Amazon gift cards, it's pretty nice and I really don't mind the results (aside from maps and videos, but I have trained myself to just navigate to Google Maps and YouTube when searching for those things).

Honestly, Destiny server connectivity can be finnicky as all shit at times so I wouldn't rule out the possibility that you just had bad luck. There are lots of times where various people in my clan's chat complain about not being able to log in despite nobody else experiencing the seeming server issue.

Level 34 Prison of Elders - 1 Etheric Light per character per week Level 35 Prison of Elders - 1 Etheric Light per character per week Trials of Osiris - 3 Etheric Light per character per week (6 wins, 8 wins, flawless) Nightfall - 1 chance at 1 Etheric Light per character per week Iron Banner - 2 Etheric Light per character per event (rank 3, rank 5 - 5000 glimmer each) Also, armor that comes from Armor Cores (32 POE, 35 POE) grant 42 light level gear. All exotic armor are also 42 light level (some must be ascended with exotic shards to full light level).

I had no idea that was the case, usually because after I have a good run I switch characters to maximize the benefits of my Trials play. Sorry I couldn't join up last night on that Skolas run, I didn't really have the time/attention for it and I was already doing IB with a team.