True Reviews, Updates and Common Sense Opinions
In the past, I would be writing this post to give you tips and tricks on how to prepare for the grind of leveling your first character in Destiny 2’s upcoming expansion. Seeing how I’ve done that in the past and ended up either running out of content (or at least feeling like I did), I have a different suggestion for you this time around.
Continue reading “How to prepare for Destiny 2: Beyond Light (Bungie ViDoc)”
The new dungeon, Prophecy, was released at 5 pm PST yesterday, the first day of the new season in Destiny 2, Season of the Arrivals. I’ve put together easy to follow instructions on how to finish the encounter.
Continue reading “Prophecy Dungeon Guide (simplified) | Destiny 2: Season of the Arrivals”
Watch Bungie Destiny 2’s General Manager Mark Noseworthy and Game Director Luke Smith discuss the future of the Destiny franchise.
Continue reading “Destiny 2: Season of the Arrival, Beyond Light, and more”
Continue reading “Destiny 2: Shadowkeep – Guardian Games – Gameplay Trailer”
Trailer alert!
Continue reading “Destiny 2: Season of the Worthy – Gameplay Trailer and Roadmap”
Guardians rejoice!
Continue reading “Trials of Osiris returns! | Destiny 2: Season of the Worthy (Dev Insight)”
Now that we are a full month into Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, it’s time for a well-rounded opinion regarding the latest addition to the Destiny franchise.
Continue reading “Did Bungie find the balance between hardore and hobby with Destiny 2: Shadowkeep?”
A big piece of playing any looter shooter involves optimizing your gear set to be most efficient in the game. In the Destiny universe, we have been grinding for gear since 2014. Destiny 2: Shadowkeep is no different. (Full Destiny 2: Shadowkeep review available here).
Continue reading “Easy guide to level up to 900 light, 920 light for raid | Destiny 2: Shadowkeep”
When I logged into Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, I was excited to return to the moon. There is a lot of nostalgia in returning to the moon in this game and it’s obvious as soon as you load in that Bungie was wisely aware of that.
Continue reading “Destiny 2: Shadowkeep is nostalgic and enjoyable (story review)”
A lot of cool news came out of Gamescom this week, including game-play looks at anticipated games like Death Stranding, Watch Dog: Legion, Cyberpunk 2077, Borderlands 3, Gears 5 and Doom Eternal. In addition to those announcements, we also found out about some existing games that will be updating their content for the fall season.
Bungie announces two different content loops for October expansion!
On the Xbox stage at Gamescom, Bungie showed up to discuss some of the changes being made to the Destiny 2 interface going into the fall expansion. They also released a trailer for the next story of the franchise, Destiny 2: Shadowkeep.
Later that night, they released another trailer on the Opening Night Live stage to announce the Season of the Undying content loop. While the main story of Destiny 2: Shadowkeep focuses on the Hives’ further perversion of the moon, Season of the Undying will focus on the Vex and revisiting of the Black Garden. Destiny 2: Shadowkeep will be available on October 1, 2019.
Monster Hunter World: Iceborne gets Horizon Zero Dawn crossover!
Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy will be a playable character in a crossover event with Monster Hunter World: Iceborne. Capcom released a trailer announces the collaboration in the Monster Hunter Worlds new expansion this week though a date has not been revealed. The full expansion for Monster Hunter World: Iceborne will be available on September 6, 2019.
DLC Packs Galor!
Several DLC packs were announced this week.
Rocket League’s Rocket Pass 4 will offer a new Mudcat Battle-Car, additional rewards, and bonus XP starting August 28, 2019.
Mortal Kombat 11’s new pack will bring Shang Tsung, Nightwolf, Terminator T-800, Sindel, Joker, and Spawn to the game as playable characters. While Shang Tsung and Nightwolf are available now, Terminator will be available on October 8, 2019, Sindel will be available on November 26, 2019, Joker on January 20, 2020, and Spawn on March 20, 2020.
Jump Force added new playable characters to its game as well. Majin Buu of Dragon Ball Z and Katsuki Bakugo from My Hero Academia will be available with early access to the DLC on August 23, 2019.
Rodney Thomas, Lisa Brown, Tomonori Kinoshita joined the Bungie live stream with Deej today to talk about Armor 2.0 in preparation for Destiny 2: Shadowkeep releasing October 1, 2019. They revealed great information that already has my mind reeling about the character builds I can create.
Here are some key points.
Basic Stats:
Intellect, discipline, strength return to our baseline statistics with mobility, recovery and resilience and they stat from 0 to 100 percent. Every time you reach a tier you will hit the next checkpoint of the base stat.
Mods:
Looks like randomized perks are gone from all armor now. At least legendary armor.
Mods will be sold at the gunsmith and drop from gunsmith packages, world engrams, iron banner activities, and the raid. If you have your solstice gear, the gunsmith will give you the upgraded Armor 2.0 solstice gear on October 1st.
Your mod is yours. You can remove it or add it to as many pieces as you want, assuming you have the materials needed to do that.
Materials to mod and upgrade your gear include ascendant shards, energy, masterwork cores, and glimmer. There will be new pathways to get masterwork cores and other advanced materials.
I don’t believe the gear would need to be masterwork to mod them out. However, being masterwork does give your gear a base stat increase so it can only help.
Old armor with mods on them and old mods still in your inventory will dismantle into mod components. This is good news. Recycling our materials is better than rendering them unusable.
Super notes:
Shadowshot quiver (bottom tree) has more tethers available now for the Hunters. Five were used by Tomonori Kinoshita during the stream.
Weapons of Light is back with the Ward of Dawn Titan super. I wonder if Blessing of Light is available as well. They did not mention it during the stream.
Other interesting facts:
Final thoughts:
Going into Armor 2.0 will be like leaving kindergarten and going straight to college.
This is going to be so involved. You’ll need to mod every piece of armor on your guardian for it to be viable. This is an exciting assessment. It will be interesting to pick and piece together mods to have the most complementary experience while playing this game. I especially think that preparing for raids, dungeon activities, and PVP are going to be the most intense.
Imagine modding out your gear for the max amount of aim assist. Or putting all discipline on your Warlock as Lisa Brown did with Getaway Artist in the stream, adding some better passive traits, and taking that build into PVP.
For now, it seems like the possibilities are almost endless with Armor 2.0 and I’m looking forward to jumping into Shadowkeep on October 1st.
I made an interesting choice for this exotic questline. I started the quest on my hunter, but it’s account-wide which will come in handy later. It’s simple enough to start the quest.
Start the Quest/ Boons:
You’ll see a huge statue of Calus. When you approach him you’ll see four daily bounties that you need to pick up and complete in order to get purple Boons.
Go to Werner on Nessus and open the chest to the right of him. It will give you the Invitation exotic envelope in your pursuits and you’ll need to visit the Visage Tribute Hall by clicking on the icon on the Nessus map.
These boons will be turned back into this Calus statue in order to give you a discount for buying your tributes.
Your invitation bounty will turn into the Golden Hero bounty and prompt you to turn in tributes in order to make progress. You’ll need 18 in total to get the Bad Juju mission to open for you.
You’ll open up a door behind the statue and you’ll open up all of your tributes there.
Discounts:
Now, here is the discount workaround. If you only do 3 Visage bounties on each character, you’ll be able to get more than 4% discounts a day.
For instance, I did 3 on my hunter and 3 on my warlock. Please remember not to do more than 3 bounties per character per daily reset because you’ll get glimmer instead of your discount boon.
This is how you’ll be able to use fewer resources to fill up your tribute hall.
Once you have turned in 18 tributes, you’ll get a Pest Control message and then a Reality Shutters prompt you next to the chest in the middle of the tribute hall.
Once you click that, ‘The Other Side” adventure will be available at the chest with the Bad Juju’s Ahamkara’s skull in the case.
You can rally the flag once you start the mission.
This mission is based in the ascendant realm. You can solo it if you’d like. It’s not a timed encounter and you can always use your optimum loadout to melt majors in the encounter.
My loadout included Outbreak Prime, Calus Mini Tool Submachine Gun, and Bane of Sorrow Machine Gun. I ended up swapping my loadout around during the final part of the mission. I chose Blast Furnace, Beloved and 1K voices.
I played it slow at the end especially because of the axion darts and shriekers.
Once you finish the mission you’ll be able to open the chest and your Bad Juju is yours!
Yay!
Catalyst:
You need 45 tributes for the catalyst to be available for you. You can use the same method to earn your discount as before. It will save you time and resources. After the catalyst is available, you’ll pay 7 legendary shards to buy it from Calus statue.
Materials and Resources:
Here’s the thing, this mission can certainly feel punishing to the players that don’t store up resources. Players who don’t have a wealth of materials and resources to buy tributes outright will feel like they are left behind. The everyday player won’t feel the squeeze so much. Most likely because they have a wealth of materials to use without running out.
Glimmer will deplete very fast because the cost of the tributes is very high. But, it’s time to get used to this type of game in Destiny 2. As we phase into the MMO era of Destiny, it will be the player’s responsibility to predict the necessity of materials to make headway in the game.
I predict even the hardcore-est of players will feel the materials squeeze at some point during Shadowkeep.
Anyway. Good luck in your quest!
