Had a couple of decent drops from call to arms so I hit 280...still haven't done a raid or nightfall yet haha. At least I shouldn't have any damage penalty when I do raid. Now I just need the rat king quest line done and I should be good to go. Is this an awful nightfall to complete it with 5 minutes left?

I’m running 2/3 in getting good groups using guides for nightfall runs. You should give them a shot.

I waited 30 mins in the match making screen, no luck yet.

Yep waiting multiple times for 20 minutes. Not really worth it.

The wait times are long, a good time to straighten up the room or browse the Internet, particularly on a Monday when you've done everything else for the week...

Not quite sure how to explain what they broke in PVP, but basically if you ever have to play alone or if you ever enjoyed flanking / lone wolfing, then "**** you" appears to be the guiding game design philosophy.

Less people = teamwork element is more important

I don't play this game, but I do drink Rockstar and have a bunch of tabs w/ codes that get you xp or some ****. PM me if you want them, I don't read this thread. I don't want anything, had just put them aside & will just trash if no one claims

It's not just less people, they monkeyed with TTK so that 1-2 and 1-3 are almost impossible anymore. Reddit thinks they are trying to position themselves as an Esport but they've made the games boring. Most of my deaths in D1 PVP where dying in 1-1s which is my skill and you can fool yourself that you'll get better. Most of my deaths in D2 PVP are getting roasted by 1-3 and 1-4s as I try and get back to my team, that's just boring.

I think I'd explain it with a comparison. In CS:GO, probably the GOAT competitive eSport FPS, it is possible through superior skill and positioning to overcome a 3v1, etc., by making heroic, sick plays and out-skilling your opponents - and you don't need some special mechanic, weapon or ability to do it. You may reasonably be able to "get a pick" in its true parlance, which is to nail a filthy headshot on one of your enemies before they return the favor even though you're outnumbered, thereby earning a benefit for your team because of your better / pro aim.

In Destiny 2, it is impossible - literally - to get a 2v1 or 3v1 pick in the beginning of the game because it takes so long to kill an enemy that the 2 or 3 against you will always kill you before it's possible to kill one enemy.¹ Your only options are to disengage while their shields recharge or to peek and flee without ever even firing - what's the point? - in order to group up and get angles with your squad at a later time. You can seek a pick if you are team firing, but getting a pick in a 2v1 or 3v1 situation is basically not a thing.

By way of example, I won a 3v1 to clutch a trials round by using the trials shotgun to kill three consecutive people who attacked me one at a time from stupid wide open angles. Had any 2 of them ever shot me simultaneously, I could not have done that - I probably could not have killed the first guy without dying. Had I not had a special weapon with limited ammo that basically breaks the rules of engagement, it is literally impossible that I ever would have won that with my kinetic and energy weapons. My shields would be low before the second engagement, and I would die.

And that's an exception that proves the rule. In competitive eSports, never shall you ever encounter three people so incompetent that they get single-file owned by your tiny range power weapon, or any weapon. Never shall a good team allow you to survive a 3 on 1.

And here's the thing: it doesn't MATTER if you land sick headshots throughout that fight. No one is dying but you, even if they miss a few and you don't miss anything.

And then, finally, here's the worst thing: let's pretend you head to one plant location in countdown and your 3 teammates go the other way. You encounter no one, while your teammates encounter a push from all 4 opponents. You decide to flank quickly. You do so. This is viable in the sense that you may pick off one or two of the opponents, but the gunplay and radar work together to guarantee that no good team will fail to team fire at you, which will usually ~ instantly kill you even if you got off the first THREE shots of the engagement. EVEN THEN, you cannot kill quickly enough to survive the onslaught.

Thus, flanks are no longer a real thing. What is a thing is WORKING ANGLES and retreating. But alpha flanks and hero plays and pro clutches are all-but-impossible against any but the worst Destiny 2 players and teams, which means it will never be an eSport. Nothing interesting can ever happen.


¹ I am intentionally ignoring circumstances where your opponents are so bad that they just miss all day or never even notice you, because those people are not eSports or even competitive opponents, and thus this analysis doesn't have anything at all to do with how their team engagements work out (and the way they work out is LOL bullets everywhere while people look at walls while dying).

EDIT: Have to add, you could make such plays and get such picks in D1, partly because weapons like sniper rifles had one-shot kill capacity and were available at the beginning of rounds, and partly because even stock weapons (eyasluna, clever dragon, hawksaw, last word, etc.) had the potential if wielded perfectly to swiftly end engagements. That's just impossible now.

And that is not to mention the true misery of playing alone and trying to work on getting better. There truly is NO game mode that allows or even encourages you to have the opportunity to work on 1v1s or gun skills.

For that reason, it is unfathomable that this game lacks Rumble.

It feels like most of D2 is a step backwards from where D1 finished. Hopefully the DLC will fix something...

I got the nightfall done with about 2 minutes left so no rat king gun this time. I then hopped into the raid for the first time and we got the first part, then Pleasure Gardens, and then Royal Pools done before someone had to leave so then the team dispersed.

Oh, and fk Pleasure Gardens...wtf lol. Talk about being lost as a noob. Royal Pools wasn't that bad at all once the mechanics were explained. So far even though I think we only did about half of the raid I would definitely say it isn't as fun as any of the other raids and is too mechanical but I am guessing they just wanted a change of pace on that.

I think this raid is most puzzly and mechanical of all raids but the less challenging in terms of gun play/technical skill. Once you figure "it" out, execution really isn't ever going to be a major problem. Only exception I could see is the boss fight but this boss fight is much less demanding than crota oryx and atheon.

Hopefully hard mode changes that

What is the best titan subclass/ability tree/grenades for crucible?

I like Striker with double pulse grenades

Top tree of striker Titan. Double pulse and the large barricade.


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Kind of cool perk in Winter's Guile that people may not know about is that it stacks I want to say 5x so in certain areas you can use that and devour and not only melee stuff to maintain full health, but you can 1-2 slap some shielded enemies. It is actually pretty damn strong on it's cap...just has the downside 5 second timer. Too bad the timer isn't the same as devour.

Iron Banner sucked.

I quite enjoyed it, mostly running solo though Got near-full set of Titan (missing class item) and a load of the guns from ~14 packages. Mostly just played enough to complete the bounties on 2 characters each day except last, then turned them all in on the last day so all the gear is 300 (305) too!

I’ve been addicted to Dwarf Fortress, a precursor to Minecraft and one of the hardest games to play. Primarily because of the ****ty ASCII UI...

I got the Raid Rocket launcher from an engram from Hawthorne after the clan I am in completed a nightfall lolz. 300 now and still haven't done a full raid...not much incentive to do it being very mechanically based if I'm getting raid weapon drops this way. Oh well, when does the DLC come out lol?

I was a hardcore D1 player and I have absolutely no regrets about skipping D2.

Hoya, your post just solidified my suspicians about where I felt this game was heading.

It's the direction they've been taking Destiny basically ever since the first "balancing" patch dropped.

Vanilla D1 (first 4-5 months) > everything since AINEC. Gameplay and skill gap had a massive drop-off right around when they came out with the first Trials.

I'm still gonna go HAM on the PC version because I think it'll play somewhat differently with M&K and no aim assist. I suspect hand cannons will be noticeably better and ARs noticeably less dominant. Also, PC version is gorgeous. Here's hoping!

Bungie is keeping aim assist the same as it was during the PC beta, which was terrible.