• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Destiny |OTForever29| The Season Finale

Kadey

Mrs. Harvey
MtNbnkE.png
 

Jblanks

Member
Anyone doing any Raids ? I've never done them (just got back a couple weeks ago from a hiatus). I used to post in these threads a lot, I think the last one I posed in was OT7 lol.
 

someday

Banned
psn same as gaf

Sounds good, we just need one more, then. What's your PSN?



Sent you a friend request.
You two guys rock! We almost got Skolas down the first try but wiped at the second set of mines. But, second time was a charm and we have Triumphs (and that sexy black shader soon)! Thanks Alucard for coaching us through and both of you for the great attitudes. Whew. I'm never stepping foot in Prison of Elders ever again.
 
You two guys rock! We almost got Skolas down the first try but wiped at the second set of mines. But, second time was a charm and we have Triumphs (and that sexy black shader soon)! Thanks Alucard for coaching us through and both of you for the great attitudes. Whew. I'm never stepping foot in Prison of Elders ever again.

Yeah, huge thanks to someday and AlucardShinigami! Awesome group, had lots of fun and laughs! Extra huge thank you to Alucard for being our guide through the Skolas fight!
 
You two guys rock! We almost got Skolas down the first try but wiped at the second set of mines. But, second time was a charm and we have Triumphs (and that sexy black shader soon)! Thanks Alucard for coaching us through and both of you for the great attitudes. Whew. I'm never stepping foot in Prison of Elders ever again.

It was an awesome run, glad I could help with the triumphs. Was my best run of Skolas.
 

Namikaze1

Member
Oh so now everyone is sending me their emblems. Waited till the last minute to do this huh?


I do the same with projects and such. :p

And I still end up getting a high grade for them. I once did an 18 page paper AND prepared a full PowerPoint presentation a day before it was even due. Had a month to do it. Did it just 24 hours before the deadline. Got an A- for that shit.
 

Hawkian

The Cryptarch's Bane
home!

I've realized I really would quite like the Titan Trials helm before it all goes away for awhile. Would anyone like to make a go of it for a few cards? Not out hoping for a carry to the Lighthouse or anything, but unfortunately I am the weakest with my Titan in the Crucible and could use any help I can get.
 

NastyBook

Member
Oh so now everyone is sending me their emblems. Waited till the last minute to do this huh?


I do the same with projects and such. :p

And I still end up getting a high grade for them. I once did an 18 page paper AND prepared a full PowerPoint presentation a day before it was even due. Had a month to do it. Did it just 24 hours before the deadline. Got an A- for that shit.
I forgot to send it to you yesterday after I posted up here. Was really torn between the first and third one, but the first had a good color scheme, and circles are neat, so I finally went with that.
 

Wallach

Member
So I pretty much have tonight and tomorrow to try and do Skolas for the thingamajig.

Anyone have a comfortable backpack I could fit in to get that out of the way?
 

Hawkian

The Cryptarch's Bane
I mean, of course the luck bonus chance per bullet is decreased but a mag size increase certainly isn't an outright nerf... Hawkmoon's an outstanding HC to begin with so an extra bullet or two in the chamber isn't a universally bad thing.
So I pretty much have tonight and tomorrow to try and do Skolas for the thingamajig.

Anyone have a comfortable backpack I could fit in to get that out of the way?
Just in case you didn't know, you do have until the 14th, but I'm happy to help sometime tomorrow if you're around :)
 

Wallach

Member
Just in case you didn't know, you do have until the 14th, but I'm happy to help sometime tomorrow if you're around :)

Oh, I was just going by what the web page says. Tomorrow works though. The following week may be busier so I'd like to get it done on the holiday weekend if possible.
 

Gammacide

Member
Oh so now everyone is sending me their emblems. Waited till the last minute to do this huh?


I do the same with projects and such. :p

And I still end up getting a high grade for them. I once did an 18 page paper AND prepared a full PowerPoint presentation a day before it was even due. Had a month to do it. Did it just 24 hours before the deadline. Got an A- for that shit.
In Trials. Can I send it right after if I promise? Photoshop is open as we speak!!
 

vid

Member
WARNING: Long rambling post ahead. Having just finished it, I think it's basically a fishing story. Nothing special, just a personal Destiny experience. Consider the wall of text a use of all of the words I never posted while just lurking in the thread for pretty much all of Year One.

Back before Destiny was released, I remember someone at Bungie describing it as each player being able to tell their own unique story. Until recently, I had long since given up on that dream, but now...

I pre-ordered Destiny as soon as it was an option. I believed in Bungie, I was all in on the dream of the ten year story, and I was even crazy enough to go in for the Ghost edition of the game.

I played the Alpha to cap, spending hours exploring every nook and cranny of the Cosmodrome. What was this mysterious diamond shaped door under the surface? And why were the guys guarding it so tough? I spent just as much time in Beta, now invested in the small sampling of story missions and the joy of Dinklebot declaring "That wizard came from the moon!"

When the game arrived, the box had become quite mangled in shipping. This was disappointing, but Amazon was willing to refund a portion of the price, and the contents were fine so I got over it quickly. And then I dove it. I punched through the story, founds groups to do strikes with, and.... then that was it. I hit the wall of the mid-twenties and had no idea how to proceed. Even the legendary "Loot Cave" or as I frequently called it "the Murder Cave" didn't smile upon me.

Months later, sometime around March, I finally forced my way up to Level 26, largely with the help of Hawkian's leveling guides. "This was it!", I thought, I'm ready for the Vault of Glass, the thing everyone says turns the game around! But I wasn't. DGAF told me to hit Level 28 before giving the vault a shot. I was crushed by the idea of more grinding on the same old stuff. And so the game went back into the case, and Destiny just became a novelty to follow on GAF from time to time. Something to check in on occasionally and see where it was going.

And then Xur came to town with his Gjallarhorn.

I didn't really have a grasp on what Gjallarhorn was, other than a particular rocket launcher that was currently making the current player base lose their minds. And so I thought "You know what, okay, let's go buy this thing and see what's going on." Oh, wait. I spent almost all of my strange coins before I stopped playing before, probably on some random armor piece. Well, I still had most of the weekend left, let's grind them out.

So I worked my way up. I grinded the marks and materials that I needed to buy some new pieces of gear from the Vanguard, knocked out the Weekly Heroic, and found a group on LFG to run PoE 28 with. This order might be mixed up, it's all sort of a blur now, but... in the end, I was one coin short and there wasn't much time left before Xur would be leaving. But there was one blue engram in my inventory. I was at the mercy of Rahool, and... well, the stingy was a huge part of why I stopped playing to start with.

But there was a coin. One last coin. I had my rocket launcher, the famous Gjallarhorn. I went down to Earth and obliterated the first low level guy I saw. Cool. Well, now what? I had gotten a pretty amazing feeling from playing 'Beat the Clock' with Destiny, so I thought... let's go ahead and give those Triumphs a shot. Getting the chests would be a minor grind. I hated playing Crucible, but figured I could still knock that out relatively quickly. But those raids...

I queued up for VoG on DestinyLFG and found myself in the middle of a raid group for the first time.


After a few hours, we finished it up, I now understood how to run the raid, and I was in a position to ascend some gear and get myself to Level 30. So it was time to run it again on Hard. Pretty sure that it actually ended up going more smoothly than the first attempt. One more circle was lit up on the Triumphs page, and it felt amazing. This thing was possible. I could "finish" Destiny: Year One before it was too late.

I ran PoE 30 and 32, boosting my Light enough to get me to a respectable Level 33. A seven level increase in just a few days. Crota was next, right? So I jumped on a train of GAF folks who were preparing to run it.


It was a little tougher than I had expected. I figured Level 33 would be more than enough to run Normal Crota with no issues, but a few enemies were hitting harder than I expected, and not being able to be revived after a death was a pretty shocking addition. It wasn't until after the raid was over than I checked my Triumphs and saw Crota was also lit.

"Whoa, guys! I think the raid bugged or something, I got Triumph credit for this, even though we didn't do it on hard!" - Somehow I still hadn't put together the obvious. "Oh, this was Hard! Didn't you notice the lack of revives?"

Oh!

Then it was time for PAX. I spent a week immersed in that landscape, and came back ready to finish up Year One. My level of commitment at this point is best displayed by the fact that I had The Phantom Pain sitting on the coffee table waiting for me when I got home, and instead of starting it up right away, I just installed and updated it before diving right back into Destiny.

There were only six days left, but that seemed like more than enough time to finish getting myself to Level 34 and take down Skolas. All I had to do was change my boots and I'd be all set and Variks DID have a decent looking set of shoes in store...

Before I got around to doing that, though, the weekly update happened and two things happened: Number One was the time extension for triumphs. It now ran all the way up to the launch of The Taken King, giving me about a full week longer than I expected. Even so, I still wanted to do it before the original time limit. Also of interest was the retirement of certain bounties and enemies, meaning that a significant number of grimoire cards were about to become unobtainable.

I'd never particularly cared about grimoire score, but I loved reading the cards themselves. No matter how exhausted I had become of early Destiny, I clung to every tidbit of lore as a treasure, and I hated the idea of these texts becoming unobtainable at an account level. So I started making my way down that list as well, checking off each and every name until... "What do you mean I have to have the bounty for Skoriks?!"

I was deflated. I wanted to see and do everything in Year One before it was too late, and now you're telling me that something is locked behind a bounty that isn't even available anymore? Then someone let me know that there was a Reddit thread based entirely around matching people who still had this bounty with people who still needed to do it. So I started watching that thread hawkishly, waiting to find someone running PS4 users during a time of day that I wasn't at work. Eventually, a connection was made, and I had a great time talking comic books with a random Redditor while we made our way down to Skoriks. Once he spawned, he bid me farewell, leaving so he could keep the bounty to shepherd the next guardian.

That was done. I had all of the retiring cards, including the one for completing Eris' quest line. Only one thing left to do now, take down Skolas himself. But wait. Trials of Osiris is going away for a while too? Shoot. I hate PvP in this game. Oh well, let's give it a shot. Another search on LFG later and we have three players in Trials, getting utterly destroyed. The best part was when one of the three revealed that he thought he was joining a Skolas run and was very surprised when he ended up in Trials. This led to lots of jokes about how much it sucked having to fight three Skolas at once. One victory and three losses later, we decided that perhaps Trials just wasn't going to happen for us, and that it was time to go after Skolas. Let's finish the fight.

Of the three of us, only one of us had completed PoE 35 before, so we were relying heavily on him for strategic advice one we had made it through the initial five rounds. After about an hour of getting decimated by Skolas, the experienced player headed out for the night and we picked up a new third. We very quickly realized that most of the information that the previous member had been giving us was less than ideal, and things started going much more smoothly.

We slammed through half his health and very quickly found the rhythm of trading the taint between the three of us. As Skolas neared a quarter of his health, we were advised to clear out the remaining adds and get ready with all of our firepower, so that we could try to destroy the boss before the mines spawned and became an additional problem. I popped my last heavy synth during a lull in the fight and got ready. When he gave the word, we started hammering Skolas.

Mines spawned. One member of our fireteam was dead and couldn't be revived for another thirty seconds. The other member was out of heavy ammo and was just picking away at Skolas' health as quickly as he could. I had two rockets left. I fired the first one, and ducked back behind our hiding spot. He was still up, and it seemed like he was now trying even harder to wipe us out. Mines are still ticking down.

The other surviving team member took off for the other end of the arena in hopes of catching the first mine before it was too late. Skolas' attention was now on him, giving me an opportunity to fire again. Enemies were convergiing on my spot, and I wouldn't be able to hold all of them off by myself. I stepped out, fired my last rocket, and watched as his health bar became practically invisible. I remember the next few seconds very vividly:

1. A long groan into the microphone. We didn't make it.
2. The realization that I'd have to leave the PoE35 in order to get more heavy synth.
3. Noticing that the Gjallarhorn's Wolfpack rounds hadn't connected yet.
4. Screaming "WE GOT HIM!" into the mic.

We did it. Skolas was down, we did it!

"Hey, you guys still have to get the mines, or we'll have to do it again!"

Oh shit!

And then we got the mines. We disabled the mines, picked our third member back up, and descended to collect the spoils. Tokens, a cipher, a shader. None of that mattered. All that mattered was that it was done. I had "beaten" Year One of Destiny.


In the last three weeks or so, I've experienced more tension and joy out of Destiny than the entire first three or four months that I played. Something about that initial rush to be a part of the Gjallarhorn lovefest flipped a switch inside of me and got me playing in ways that I really hadn't before. I rushed to complete things that I would have otherwise ignored, met and talked to cool people instead of sitting in silent matchmaking, and in the end... if only in my own mind... became legend.


I hope to meet and fight alongside a few more members of Destiny GAF in the upcoming months. Now I've just got to kill a few more days until then. Maybe I'll finally start up The Phantom Pain, but then again, I might be able to get a couple more Trials attempts in before it's too late...

TL;DR
I thought Destiny was cool. I got bored with Destiny. I stopped being bored with Destiny. I think Destiny is cool.
 

Wallach

Member
I'm actually pretty excited for Tuesday. Much to mess about with until TTK actually lands. Can't wait to see how my Summoner does after the AR changes.
 

Anastasis

Member
Awesome story vid! (I'd quote and "snip" but I'm on mobile)

You were so close to getting free of Destiny's grasp! Now you'll be a part of us FOREVER! Haha!
 
Oh so now everyone is sending me their emblems. Waited till the last minute to do this huh?


I do the same with projects and such. :p

And I still end up getting a high grade for them. I once did an 18 page paper AND prepared a full PowerPoint presentation a day before it was even due. Had a month to do it. Did it just 24 hours before the deadline. Got an A- for that shit.
I won't be home and in a position to send you a emblem picture in the next 24 hrs. If you're feeling extra generous, you can head to my bungie.net profile and pull one from there for me :) It's not a big deal really, I don't post anywhere near as much as I read.
 
Top Bottom