Destiny [PS3,X360,PS4,XO]

[nightshade]

I got the Soros rifle after finishing the Nexus Roc strike, my friends hate me for that. lol

Anyways for the bit with four wizards the best thing to do is just run back all the way to the top of the staircase and snipe from there as they will only attack from the stairs but never come out to chase you. We never died in that part and we had two guys sniping using the icebreaker from there while one guy just went in to finish em with style by using the fist of havoc. For the boss fight just snipe using the icebreaker from the room and hit all 7-8 shots, by this time the shrieker would have spawned so just run back to the previous room and wait for your icebreaker ammo to regenerate, by the time it regenerates fully the shrieker would be gone. Repeat until end.

You can just play like this and even finish this week's Nightfall solo, it'll just take an awful lot of time mostly because of the arc shields. The only bit where you will have trouble is the part with Thralls but if you have a hand canon with firefly perk then that's sorted too.

 

[Rangers]

You can just sit in the middle room, right on the edge of the first, and slam phogoth through the crack. a lot easier and safer, but time consuming solo. The shrieker wont spawn.

Since I have patience and Time it's better to use that, just equip icebreaker to regen your ammo, then switch back, as with Arc Burn P&T shots will do more damage.. Hit him with Fatebringer and your heavy while Icebreaker is regenning. Still will take a long time, because I cant seem to crit hit him anymore from that spot.

Yeah with the Wizards everybody runs up the stairs, but it can still be quite difficult. I've always in the past tried to take them with arc, but now I see Gjallahorn is far superior, Makes the hardest part of the strike much easier.

With nightfall it's only hard because, it's just easy for one single barrage of arc to hit you from some source and you die. Just a matter of patience. I may well try to solo it on my 2nd just for fun.

 

[nightshade]

You can just sit in the middle room, right on the edge of the first, and slam phogoth through the crack. a lot easier and safer, but time consuming solo. The shrieker wont spawn.

Yea you can do that it's just that you'll never hit critical points, so it'll take even longer

 

[Rangers]

Solo you wont want to be messing around. Besides there are tons of other adds.

You're playing in a group anyway by your post, so you wouldn't know

 

[Rangers]

Hard mode raid looks brutaaaaaaallllllllllll

Going to be a LOT of wiping and frustration, and I think better to not even attempt it without all 32's.

I mean just based on the changes. Yeah the group in the vid acts like it's no prob but keep in mind they're gonna be really good, and even he mentions wiping a lot on Crota. The average slightly disorganized pick up group is gonna struggle and get frustrated a lot I think. At least on certain sections like Deathsinger and Crota.

Haven't tried it myself yet though so we'll see.

Regardless it will make getting to 32 a whole lot easier because it DOES drop double mats (somehow I didn't remember if VoG did that on hard). Because he gets 6 shards at one drop.

So yeah, do normal, and now you're gonna get even more mats for whatever portions of hard you can complete, and I bet at least 2 or 3 will be completable not too bad even if you get stuck on crota. Plus the first chest.

32 will be a doddle now. Across 3 chars you could, if lucky, clear like 40-60 shards a week. And you only need 63 plus one exotic to get each character to 32.

With no chalice he recommends any kind of health regen possible. So, Red Death (dont have), Suros, Mask of the Third Man for hunters (I think super balls restore health with it), etc. Basically any gear that can restore health.

I think I had Mask and sharded it. I have Suros, I'm wondering if it's worth having a semi-crappy primary AND using up the exotic slot. What I guess would be best would be maybe using it as needed, but switching off it whenever not.

One other thing I just resolved to do is level up those Dont Touch Me gauntlets. Maybe they will make the first part of the raid a doddle because I see somebody using them in this vid. I can use those in conjunction with the raid helmet.

Edit 1: LOL at this dude using Icebreaker in the abyss.

And Edit 2: Crota now enrages with 3 hits left no matter what. Really brutal. Essentially along with everything else, you're going to have to time killing him just right now, where you have another down coming on him directly after he enrages, because if you dont you're toast.

Well, I guess it is HARD mode after all.

 

[Rangers]

IGN made a Destiny podcast, fireteam chat

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/01/17/fireteam-team-chat-the-big-cheese

I've listened to some IGN podcasts in the past and they tended to REALLY suck. Most of IGN's personalities are pretty bad imo. But I did listen to this one and it seemed pretty innoffensive. The IGN Destiny crew seem like a mostly decent crew of guys. Alfredo Diaz for one seems like a real gamer, been dabbling in his twitch for a while. Although he does not necessarily have much personality. Anyways the episode I listened to was only around 35 minutes so it's pretty light, which is probably good.

But it's one of iTunes most popular gaming podcasts already, more proof of Destiny's underground popularity imo http://www.itunescharts.net/us/charts/podcasts/games-hobbies/

It's funny because I had been thinking Destiny would be perfect for podcasts and wondering if there were any.

 

[orangpelupa]

corta hard mode makes me remembers my rant a few pages back.
about what is the correct way to play destiny as bungie intended.

Crota. Left and middle location was used as strategy in Normal. But in hard, bungie say this is not the correct strategy by spawning witch and gatekeeper (seriously? what gate do he "keep">?????). Okay then, so we use the ledge near glass to stand.

Next patch will be
- a kill barrier on the glass ledge was added.

bah.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

corta hard mode makes me remembers my rant a few pages back.
about what is the correct way to play destiny as bungie intended.

Crota. Left and middle location was used as strategy in Normal. But in hard, bungie say this is not the correct strategy by spawning witch and gatekeeper (seriously? what gate do he "keep">?????). Okay then, so we use the ledge near glass to stand.

Next patch will be
- a kill barrier on the glass ledge was added.

bah.

Yup, wiping off strategies like tick marks on their "correction board" is seriously stupid. Make the game hard by making the encounters hard not by limiting players in every way possible.In fact give hidden areas to the players which are "discovered" are spread like wild fire, like Urban legends. Keep those areas, make them harder to do it right. make it feel like an achievement ! Make it so that it only works in specific combinations with team work. but, keep them!
its like what will the players do now? okay lets take that off in our next patch !
Still VOG rocks over Crota anyday in the way it does feel special, while Crota is just another mission, no magic, no wonder and no mysticism to it at all.

 

[orangpelupa]

VoG surprises
- alternate jump puzzle
- alternate route to templar
- various strategy to beat Atheon (err... forget this, bungie patched it out)
- hidden chest room after templar
- hidden chest path with broken portal
- various way of beatin gorgon level, heck, killing them give grimoire.
- Templar no teleport = more chest
- gameplay elements thats fresh for raid (teleporting people, oracles, cleansing, etc).

VoG mysteries
- Floating island in jump puzzle
- Broken portal near jump puzzle
- Extra room on Atheon room that only available in present and future but not past (or its the reverse, i forgot).

CE
- Shield that connected to Crota's stamina
- Swordbearing to cross bridge
- chest with atomatic door
what else? O_O oh oh oh i know
- Alternate strategy to beat bridge by only 1 people crossing the bridge, others sniping (this is not bungie meant to be played)
- Alternate strategy to beat crota by hiding on middle hall or left side (this is not bungie meant to be played)
- alternate strategy by cleverly use PHYSICS to fly to bridge-spawn area in dark zone (forgot the name)... ugh (this is not bungie meant to be played)

now people using Titan's bubble to blocks Hive Boomers. I wonder do bungie will patch that out too? O_O

Does crota's end was made haphazardly without much time?
but looking at the blocked content for HoW, it seems it will have muuuuuuuch better Strike and Raid.

EDIT:
bungie really have high amount of hate to people's feeling of satisfaction when solved the puzzle with their own brains. People MUST play bungie how bungie intended, dont be creative.

they even put blocking cheese and strategies as higher priority than fixing genuine bugs that affect everyone that play however they wanted and those that play how bungie intended.

EDIT:
lol egoraptor's critic for zelda also relevant for Destiny downfalls and ups.

 

[Rangers]

Xur selling No Land Beyond...yuck

 

[djskribbles]

Not surprisingly, Crota hard is filled with glitches or inconsistencies. We should have beat him at least 6-7 times if it weren't for glitches. And even with all the glitches, we got him down to a sliver of health several times. This is the longest I've attempted something in Destiny without succeeding. Crota HM is hard as f***.

On the plus side, I already got two of the weapons (pulse and auto). Hoping for that scout rifle though.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Who do you play with?
I know there is this one particular Indian group that has a lot of people, enough to make two teams of 6 for raids. I play with these guys as no one else here in UK among my friend list plays it.

Well, I am not on IVG these days. These guys are a group from south

Who do you play with?
I know there is this one particular Indian group that has a lot of people, enough to make two teams of 6 for raids. I play with these guys as no one else here in UK among my friend list plays it.

Well, I am not on IVG these days. These guys are a group I found while raiding. Guys are DJsinghaero, VideepK, Luckyskh, Hellraiser and Harshadb. I know Harshadb and Luckyskh personally, rest are all psn friends. You can count on DJ to be always in Destiny and always ready for everything. Oh and he is a flawless raider in every sense !

BTW, good that Xur brought the Hawkmoon upgrade, now my best gun got even better !

 

[Rangers]

Not surprisingly, Crota hard is filled with glitches or inconsistencies. We should have beat him at least 6-7 times if it weren't for glitches. And even with all the glitches, we got him down to a sliver of health several times. This is the longest I've attempted something in Destiny without succeeding. Crota HM is hard as f***.

On the plus side, I already got two of the weapons (pulse and auto). Hoping for that scout rifle though.

Yeah I tried it too. The first 3 sections seem pretty easy (well, considering), Crota himself seems very hard. Did not beat Crota yet (although first attempt).

Sadly, I only cleared 4 shards out of that whole raid, bunch of energy. ughh.

I think though I found a new hunter build, the Dont Touch Me guantlets and the raid helm. I found out inverse shadow stacks, and both have it. Plus the gauntlets should be fun in the abyss. Also Shadowjack stacks with DTM.

I only give up the 4th Symbiote GG shot. Seems OK.

Warlock just really have an edge in PVE. Self res is really helpful in hard mode raid. I mean it's giving you 2X chance repeatedly. Whereas the hunter supers and powers are nigh useless (invisibility might be good for swordbearer). Honestly, I dont use Golden Gun for long stretches at times. I practically forget I have it. Gjallahorn is better when you need big damage fast.

 

[orangpelupa]

hmm does the new weapon from crota give any advantage?

Currently i already have too many exotic weapons because i always buy anything Xur sells lol. Legendaries some i got from VoG are still good while Murmur for free from Eris also good.

i think i have 331 exotics/legendaries for all elements except Thunder damage.

 

[Xalion]

corta hard mode makes me remembers my rant a few pages back.
about what is the correct way to play destiny as bungie intended.

Crota. Left and middle location was used as strategy in Normal. But in hard, bungie say this is not the correct strategy by spawning witch and gatekeeper (seriously? what gate do he "keep">?????). Okay then, so we use the ledge near glass to stand.

Next patch will be
- a kill barrier on the glass ledge was added.

bah.

I think this is off target here. Bungie was not trying to make the encounter be played the way they intended. They were trying to make it hard. In other words, they looked at ways the encounter could be made easy and added additional challenges. The Left strategy can still be used - it just requires two really good snipers. The center strategy would have trivialized the encounter - and they were trying to make it hard (you know, for the whole "hard mode" thing). Keep in mind that they left normal mode alone and those strats still work. They removed a couple of obvious exploits (long discussion about this up above - no need to rehash it here), but other than that you can still use all of the strategies you did on normal.

I actually think it is entirely unrealistic for people to think they could waltz into hard mode and use the exact same strategy they used on normal

As a side note, there was always a spawn where the witch spawns. Previously, it was a Knight with a sword and could kill people in the group or the sword bearer if not taken care of. People probably didn't know about him because he was a one shot for the boomer guy, but that spawn was always there. They just made it into an elite witch instead of a normal sword Knight.

 

[orangpelupa]

they way bungie did it is inconsistent with how it was on VoG.

VoG hard
- enemy max level = player max level
- no new enemy
- new loots

CE hard
- enemy max level > player max level
- new enemy
- a mix between new and old loot (so if you already do normal raid, you wont get another loot at hard).

on VoG, the hard mode genuinely a harder mode than normal. in CE, hardmore = more tedious and annoying. What people learnt from Normal cannot be simply scaled to Hard. Hard have new experience that breaks the previous logic.

okay, lets say wizard is an upgrade from knight. Think of this as a evolution of VoG. Instead of higher level enemy on Hard, now its higher-class enemy on Hard. But how about the gatekeeper? there is no gate to be protected, what gameplay mechanic does it serve? what the heck he's doing here... The inconsistencies is awful in CE.

and people already cheesed it. Gatekeeper is very aggresive chasing player. So it easily tricked to do merry-go-round with 1 guardian while others proceed as normal.

 

[Xalion]

The CE encounter is a much larger step up in difficulty from normal than VoG ever was. VoG hard was actually really straight forward. Bugs caused more difficulty than any other change. CE the level difference was intentional (and you should have known it was coming from Normal - it is actually an excellent step in raid design from my opinion because it allows raids to scale as you progress). CE isn't the only encounter to add new mechanics. VoG also added new mechanics. For instance the containment bubble around players on Atheon. VoG hard also had a mix between old and new loot. As a matter of fact, the similarities between loot distribution between VoG and CE is almost exactly the same. The real change is that you can now get the helmet and some weapons from normal in CE, where you couldn't do so in VoG. That is a huge improvement in my book - not a step back.

Having lived through both, CE is a much improved hard mode over VoG. People liked VoG because they could cheese it. It had little to do with design.

 

[NRP]

I don't know. VoG feels "epic". CE feels like little more than a tedious strike mission.

 

[Rangers]

CE does have a lot of complex mechanics. Just imagine trying to tell somebody how all the various encounters work...

But yeah I definitely feel VoG felt a lot more epic and special.

I mean I kind of think VoG had tons of development time, with the base game, years, and CE just had a few months, with the DLC something like that

One annoying thing about CE raid is the simple fact on Crota restart you have to wait for those stupid glass panels to disappear. Every time. Ten-fifteen seconds but over and over seems like an hour.

I am interested to see how the House of Wolves raid compares to the prior two.

I also wonder how much of our experience is colored by VoG being the first raid, so we were wide eyed, where by CE the game itself was old hat. I definitely think VoG is far superior, but I think that may have played a role in how superior it seems.

This game in a short time will have three raids, and they are pretty epic. I mean as a new player coming in it's going to take you a lot of time to learn each raid just as you progress. Just as a counter to the "no content" people.

I was pretty shocked when my brother told me WoW only had one raid at first too, and the rest were added via DLC (although I think WoW DLC would contain more than one raid). I always assumed it had like 50 right from the start. The point is in time Destiny could have lots of raids, just like WoW.

In 5 years, some new Destiny player is going to come in to like 15-20+ raids.

Bungie said 1.143 million new IceBreakers were purchased when Xure had it. That gives me an idea of how many active players there are. Seems like a lot. And of course the real number will be a lot higher as those who didn't buy Ice Breaker, didn't play that week, new/didn't have enough coins or whatever.

 

[Strange]

Yeah I tried it too. The first 3 sections seem pretty easy (well, considering), Crota himself seems very hard. Did not beat Crota yet (although first attempt).

Sadly, I only cleared 4 shards out of that whole raid, bunch of energy. ughh.

I think though I found a new hunter build, the Dont Touch Me guantlets and the raid helm. I found out inverse shadow stacks, and both have it. Plus the gauntlets should be fun in the abyss. Also Shadowjack stacks with DTM.

I only give up the 4th Symbiote GG shot. Seems OK.

Warlock just really have an edge in PVE. Self res is really helpful in hard mode raid. I mean it's giving you 2X chance repeatedly. Whereas the hunter supers and powers are nigh useless (invisibility might be good for swordbearer). Honestly, I dont use Golden Gun for long stretches at times. I practically forget I have it. Gjallahorn is better when you need big damage fast.

For Crota's End, the main highlight of Hunters is invisibility. Hunters have a very easy time soloing through abyss (spam invisible after ogres spawn), and an even easier time killing Crota.
You do know that hunters can drop the sword, blink strike for invisibility, then pick up the sword, so that the rest of the team doesn't have to worry about timing. (I call out the first round since I jump up, I leave the second round to the team to time when Crota's Shield comes up for damage)

Hunters pretty much have two really safe 3 hit guarantees per sword if you have one that really knows what he's doing.

Oh, please don't 4 hit Crota on hard. You have to make sure you leave enough health on Crota so that you finish him off properly so that you trigger enrage on your first 3 hits and finish him off on the last three hits.

It takes 18 hits to kill Crota. His enrage timer triggers after the 14~15th hit. So it is a good idea to 3*2 him twice for 12 hits (still safe), and then on the final sword 3 hitting him for the enrage, and finishing him off with the last 3.

I was 4 hitting him before at times and I ended up enraging him at the 2nd sword once. Not good.
Being over-competent isn't good here. 4 hitting is relatively a bit more unsafe and doesn't really help you in HM if you aren't able to cut him down in two swords. It's better to stick to 3 hitting and playing it safe for 3 swords.

My run if you're interested. Cleared him 5 times thus far. (helping friends after 4th run)