Grinding to a Fault in Destiny.

My original plan was to have a blog written last Tuesday, so it would have been about my first week with the game. I had been thinking that I might make it a weekly thing, check in every week, but clearly it's too late for that now. Now the plan is to write what I want to write now, and just check in with Destiny in other blogs that I write, at least so long as I'm still playing the game regularly. But I do feel like, even though I'm not done with the game, and haven't technically done everything in the game, that I can say everything I need to say about this game, and nothing short of drastic amounts of changes to the amount of content, and to some of the "systems" in the game (for lack of a better term) will cause my thoughts on the overall experience of Destiny change radically. Did that sentence make sense? That was a run-on sentence, and I apologize for it, but this is about the third or fourth time I've tried to write this blog, so I'm not stopping for anything.

So, where am I in Destiny? Well, I've done all of the story missions, and all of the Strikes. Actually, I've done all of the content currently available in the game, aside from the (sole) Raid, The Vault of Glass. I'm not sure if that's literally the only Raid in the game, or if Bungie is just hiding the other(s) from us, which seems very possible. I've also spent a lot of time in the Crucible, which is the competitive multiplayer portion of Destiny.

In fact, I've spent a lot of time with the game as a whole. According to the stats screen on Bungie's website (because these stats are not visible in game), I've spent 2 days, 22 hours, 56 minutes, and 23 seconds playing Destiny. About 11 hours of that in the story missions, about 22 hours in the Strikes, about 23 hours in the Crucible, and about 13 hours on Patrol. Keep in mind, these stats don't take several parts of Destiny into account. They don't count the loading screens (which are plentiful and lengthy), and they don't count time spent in the Tower. I get not counting the loading screens, but I wish I could see my time spent in the Tower. Between it being the only location with vendors in the game, it's also the "social" area where the game goes into third person, and your character's helmet is removed so you can see the face you spent time making in the character creation screen. Speaking of which, here's the one I made.

As you may remember, this is pretty much what I went with in the Beta (which I put about 50 hours into, well, 50 if you include the Alpha). I made an Awoken male with blue skin, pink hair, and the most feminine face available. Under other circumstances, I might have gone with an Exo, which are the robots, but I really didn't like the dance animation they had in the Beta. It wasn't The Robot, it was some dumb Michael Jackson type dance, and I hate that stuff. Well, it's mostly because I hate Michael Jackson, but I don't want to completely derail this blog yet. I didn't go with a human guy because there's no beards in this game. None. I'm not saying the game needs to have anything crazy beard wise, but no beards at all is upsetting to me, as a bearded man.

And so far as playing as a lady goes, I dunno, but playing as ladies in these sorts of games has always felt...weird to me. It's hard to put my finger on to why, exactly. I think part of it might be subconsciously rejecting the old "Dave Snider Logic" for playing as a lady in a MMO type game, which if I remember correctly, was something along the lines of wanting to look at a lady's butt. Which, given that this is primarily a first person game where you don't see your character's butt, and I'm bi so I'd kinda get that with either gender, but I dunno. I play as dudes in games, usually. I got off topic again, oh well, but before I move on, here's another screen shot, this one of my current character screen in game, with all my gear and stuff.

So, I'm level 27, and most of my gear are Legendaries. The only ones that aren't are my Exotic (the highest tier in the game, so far) gauntlets, and my cosmetic class item, which...I'll get to in a few minutes. I want to at least mention the good parts of this game before I get into the meat of this blog.

Anyway, in addition to the normal things like higher defense, the armor in the game provides buffs to various skills that affect the cool downs of the three powers (grenade, melee, and super), and also some other bonuses, like faster reloads with certain weapons, carrying more ammo, etc. The weapons do too (well, not so much the cooldown reductions), and both can be upgraded over time. XP earned whilst wearing armor or using weapons also goes into the items in question, and at certain points they can be upgraded, and some, like the main skill trees, require choices to be made between different options. But you can swap between them at any time (both for the weapons and the main skill trees), so nothing is ever set in stone. Some upgrades only require Glimmer ("the" currency in the game), whereas others require materials that are found in the game, either in the environments, or as rewards for completing. But...I'll get back to that in a minute.

Or, no, I think I'll get to it now. I was going to do a big roundabout thing where I talked about the mission design, the shooting, the music, the graphics, pretty much everything else, but I'll just get to it now. This game is designed in a way that forces you to grind and grind and grind, and then wait until next week, at which point you grind some more. How so? Well, I'll get to explaining that.

The first thing about Destiny that you need to know to understand this is that there isn't a lot of content for the type of game that Bungie made. Not a first person shooter. If Bungie had taken the amount of level geometry in this game, and built more interesting missions around that stuff, they could have had a fantastic 8 hour shooter. The shooting and core game play here is absolutely rock solid, so I don't think people would complain if it was that sort of game, especially when this game has substantially more variety in enemy design and tactics than most first person shooters do these days.

No, Destiny is trying to be Diablo. Now, I haven't actually played any of the Diablo games, but the impression I get from people is that they're lengthy, right? Like, there's a lot of stuff in them, correct? It doesn't feel like there's a lot of stuff in Destiny. There's four main areas of the game: Earth, The Moon, Venus, and Mars. There's also a Crucible map on Mercury, and I feel like they went through a lot of effort for that Mercury sky box and the shots of Mercury from orbit for it to just be that one map (there might be another, I dunno, apparently that map was only in the free for all mode, so maybe there's another?), but who knows.

That's from the Mercury map.

Anyway, there's 19 story missions in the game, and only 6 Strikes. But one of those Strikes is a PlayStation exclusive, so that's only 5 if you're playing on an Xbox of any sort. And there's the Raid, but I haven't tried that yet. I don't know how many Crucible maps there are, because the Crucible is hella obtuse in letting me know about things, but I'll get to that in a bit.

So, to make up for this relative lack of content in the game, Bungie's implemented a bunch of systems meant only to be roadblocks to force you to replay missions over and over again, eventually at higher levels. The first of these is the level cap, which is only 20. But, once you get to 20, you start finding gear that has "Light." If your Light gets high enough, you level up. As I said earlier, I'm 27, which requires quite a bit of Light. What this means is that post level 20, leveling is completely dependent upon gear. That's fine, assuming you get gear at a reasonable rate.

See, in Destiny, leveling up to 20 is really fast. I didn't time it, so I don't know off hand, but the road to 20 feels fast. The road to any level over 20 is incredibly slow by comparison. Or, more accurately, it slows quite a bit until you get to 24, at which point it just stops for what feels like forever.

The blue gear (Rares) will only give you so much Light, and at a certain point, you need Legendaries to keep leveling. But the game drops Legendaries so rarely that it's become a joke. I've seen two separate (popular) Twitter accounts made just to joke about this. One is of The Cryptarch (the character in game that decrypts loot, as a lot of the loot doesn't tell you what it is when you get it), and the other is literally of the Legendary Engram itself. Engrams being the encrypted loot, if you don't know. The joke is that Legendary Engrams are incredibly rare, and then on top of that, most of the time they don't decrypt to Legendary gear, and even when they do, it's probably for the wrong class.

Seriously, the first three Legendaries that I got were all for the Titan class, and I'm playing a Warlock. And the one time I had a Legendary Engram decrypt to an Exotic item, it was for the Hunter class. I should also point out that by the time I had enough Motes of Light (one of the several other currencies in the game) to buy an Exotic Engram from Xur (a merchant that appears on Friday mornings and then leaves on Sunday morning), it decrypted to a piece of Titan gear.

(I found this gun on The Moon.)

Now, these things wouldn't be so bothersome if I could trade these things with other players. Hell, I'd GIVE them to some of my internet friends that can use the stuff, just so it'd be used. But instead, my options are to put them in storage in case I ever play characters that can use them, or dismantle them for materials. There's no way to sell them to vendors in game for currency either, because you can't sell things in this game. It's either keep it, or dismantle it. At least decrypting things is free, though now that I think about it, I'm a little surprised that it is.

But, fear not, there is a way to get Legendary and Exotic items in game without having to depend upon random drops! You can buy Legendaries from the various vendors in the Tower. But NOT with Glimmer. No, you need to buy them with vendor specific currencies, and only after leveling up with them individually. Well, mostly individually, because the Vanguards and Crucible technically have multiple vendors, with some for gear, and another for weapons.

So, let me explain how this system works. When you hit level 18, you start earning reputation for the Vanguards and the Crucible, the former for completely missions, Strikes, Patrol missions, the Raid (I assume), etc. And you get Crucible rep by playing the Crucible, and you get more for winning, which makes sense. And on top of getting rep, you also get Vanguard Marks and Crucible Marks, which are two more forms of currency in the game. You use Vanguard Marks to buy Vanguard things, and Crucible Marks to buy Crucible things. But it's yet more complicated than that. See, if you want to buy things from Dead Orbit, Future War Cult, or New Monarchy, you need to rank up with them as well. And you do that by buying a class item from them, and equipping it, at which point you get rep for them instead of the Vanguards, and then when you level up enough, you can buy things from them...with Crucible Marks, not Vanguard Marks.

Also, you can only get 100 Vanguard Marks a week, and only get 100 Crucible Marks a week. And the "start of the new week" is Tuesday, because of course it is. I hit the caps for last week on Thursday, I think. I could probably go back and check, but it was then or Friday, I forget. So far as I know, there is no cap on how many Marks of either sort that you can get, but more likely it's just so high that people can't have gotten to it yet. There's a cap for how much Glimmer you can have (25,000), and I've bought some stupid stuff like another new ship (which is purely cosmetic) just so I wouldn't be endlessly getting Glimmer without actually having more money. Kinda like buying stuff to keep from paying income taxes, in a way.

And it takes a while to rank up with these groups. I'm ALMOST rank three with the Vanguards, and still a fair bit away from rank 3 with the Crucible. I would be rank 3 with the Vanguards by now if I hadn't stupidly started trying to rank up in Future War Cult after getting some of the information about this from my internet friend Jay (I dunno his GB user name, but he's Chatman_Jay on Twitter, hopefully he'll see this blog). He plays a lot more of these sorts of games (not first person shooters, I mean Diablo types), and just generally knows more about the game than I do, so I usually go to him with my questions. We're neck and neck in terms of level right now, unless he secretly found a way past 27 while I was writing this blog.

There's my first, and so far only (for my class) Exotic item.

Anyway, we both quickly realized that it was better to just stick with the Vanguards and level them up instead. So far as I can tell, the only benefit to leveling one of the other vendors is to get branded gear for them, which seems dumb when I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to use one of the shaders you get access to after getting to level 20. I've been using this nice pink one for a while, because real men wear pink. And part of that is that after years of being in the closet and actively avoiding anything that would be perceived as "girly" or "gay," it's nice to not give a F any more and just make my character pink and dumb looking, but that's a topic for another day (though tomorrow is "Celebrate Bisexuality Day," so yay for that!).

I got off topic again. So, that's how you buy Legendary gear, and if you want Exotics, you have to pay Xur Strange Coins for definite items, or Mote of Light for an Engram that will probably not be for your class, because Bungie decided it was a good idea to give people items for not their class. You get Strange Coins and Motes of Light as rewards (some of the time) for doing things like Strikes, and you get a Mote of Light every time you would have leveled up, if this was a normal game where you leveled by getting XP for every level in the game.

Oh, and speaking of Exotics, you can only have one Exotic piece of armor and one Exotic weapon equipped at a time. Why? Hell if I know. I don't have any Exotic weapons yet, but I do have a Bounty for one. Oh, I haven't mentioned Bounties. So, Bounties are daily things where you are tasked with doing something, and they come in Vanguard and Crucible varieties. Vanguard ones are for things like killing 30 enemies with melee attacks without dying, or doing a specific story mission on a harder difficulty than the default. The Crucible ones are things like defeat 25 Warlocks, or getting 10 medals for going on a spree with a shotgun, that sort of thing. They're mostly manageable, and they're a good way to get rep, XP, and Marks for both the Vanguards and the Crucible.

Well, most of the time it is, at least. See, (and I know I've changed the topic, but I was going to discuss this anyway) some of the Crucible ones have been impossible to accomplish. How so? Well, having ones related to the Salvage game type when it's impossible to play Salvage matches makes it impossible. See, not every Crucible mode is open all the time. Last week (as in right after launch, not a couple days ago) Salvage was open, but then it was closed, and has been since. But that didn't stop playing Salvage from popping up SEVERAL TIMES as daily Bounties.

Which brings me to a bigger problem, which is the lack of options in the Crucible. As of this writing, there are four options in the Crucible. Control (capture points mode with 6v6 teams), Clash (team deathmatch with 6v6), Rumble (free for all with six players), and Skirmish (team deathmatch with 3v3). Now, this most recent weekend Combined Arms was open, which was team death match only on the maps with vehicles. But that and Salvage (which was a 3v3 mode where you need to control points until a meter runs down thing) are inaccessible. There's no way to play them right now. None. Zero. It's all dependent on when Bungie decides to let us play that mode.

And that is incredibly stupid. Not letting people play certain parts of the game because of some stupid whim on Bungie's part is horrible game design. Sure, it MIGHT get more people to play during the times when it is playable, but the correct answer is to just let people play it whenever they want. And the same thing applies to all the parts of the story/Strike/Raid stuff that don't have matchmaking. Yeah, it might be smarter to play with friends, but if someone wants to play with random people, then that should be an option. I would do the Raid if I had people to play with, but I don't have enough friends that are level 26 or higher. (Speaking of which, if you want me to join in on a raid attempt, just tell me and we'll try to figure out an okay time.)

This is even more baffling when you consider that Bungie's previous games are known for having TONS of options for the multiplayer stuff. I get not having that same level of customization if the game had to be rushed to get it out in time (and I bet it was), but not letting us play all the modes whenever we want is inexcusable. They should change that. Like the grind. I have a bunch of gear that I could upgrade so they have higher defense and Light, but can't because I don't have enough Ascendant Shards. How do you get those? By grinding the same missions and Strikes and the Crucible, except it's even rarer unless you're doing level 28 content. Jay and I were able to do a story mission at level 28, but it wasn't easy, and there's no matchmaking for any level 28 stuff in the game.

Which brings me back to the grinding. It's all grinding. Grinding, grinding, grinding. I was thinking about it, and Destiny feels like a free to play game, except you pay $60 and there's no microtransactions to buy in game stuff. Seriously, I checked. You can buy the game, and the expansions (either separately for $20 each or as a bundle for $35), but nothing else. On the one hand, I think it's good that there isn't, especially since this is an Activision published game, but on the other, this is still really bad design. It's grinding to make a short game feel long because of the lack of content.

It's a shame too, because there is a lot of great stuff in the game. When it's fun, it's super fun. Getting in and playing with friends is easy if they're on your friends list (don't get me started on how useless clans are for anything other than making a clan tag appear), the game looks great, and has some of the best music I've ever heard. Seriously, it's absolutely phenomenal stuff. To the point where I'm bummed that Marty O'Donnell left, because I just assume the great music is all from him and no one else. Well, I've been told the end credits music is terrible, but I didn't see the credits and it was done by Paul McCartney, and really, what were you expecting from one of The Beatles? Their music was bad then, it's bad now, and I bet anything he or Ringo tries to do musically now will also be bad. But I've gotten off topic again.

At its best, Destiny is one of the best first person shooters I've ever played. But at its worst, it's all the worst parts of free to play games, just without the part where you pay to get past the grind. Hopefully Bungie responds to the feedback and changes it for the better, but by the time they do, I might be done with this game....

Ah, who am I kidding? I know I'll buy the expansions and keep playing this stupid game. As much as I complain, I am still having a ton of fun playing it, and I don't plan to stop any time soon. Oh, right! I forgot about the Exotic Bounty! Let me get back to that quickly.

See, the first step of the Bounty was to do a Weekly Heroic or Nightfall Strike, which I did, then I had to do 25 strikes of any sort, which I did, and now my next step is to give a Strange Coin to Xur for something, but I have to wait until Friday to do that. According to the internet, the next step is to "kill Guardians in the Crucible." How many? I don't know! But I bet it's something absurd, like, a hundred or two hundred. But once I do that, I should have an exotic pulse rifle, which should be cool, I guess. I dunno.

This game is weird. It's kind of terrible but also kind of fantastic. I'm going to keep playing it. Oh, and I made a YouTube video with some footage from the game. I'll make a longer, better one at some point. Hopefully Sony adds direct upload to YouTube sometime soon.

I won't keep you for too much longer, but I do have a couple non-Destiny things I want to mention. The first is that I finally took my road test for my driver's license...AND PASSED! Which, would be less impressive if I wasn't turning 24 in a couple weeks and have been feeling bad for years for not having one.

In relation to "Celebrate Bisexuality Day" tomorrow, a couple days ago was the five month mark after the day I came out, so that's cool! Still one of the, if not the, best decisions I've ever made! Nothing else to say for the time being, but it's good to not be in the closet any more. :D

I played enough of most of this month's PlayStation Plus games to write about that, so I will probably next week. It'd be nice to have someone to play Sports Friends with, but if I don't, I don't.

I bought Super Mario 3D World off the eShop when it was on sale for $40 instead of the usual $60, but I haven't touched it yet. Been too busy with Destiny, but now that I've got some time before I can get going on my Exotic Bounty again, I'm going to start going on that.

And that's everything. I hope this wasn't too much of a rambling mess. And as I said before, if you are looking for someone to Raid with in Destiny, just get in touch with me. I'd prefer to do it with someone I kind of know (like Jay), but whatever. Actually, I'd say have two open slots, one for me and one for Jay. I feel like he deserves that after teaching me some of the more absurd systems in this game.

And now THAT'S everything.

Also, there's a dedicated dance button in Destiny, which is just great.

Yep, destiny is a weird one, so much grind but at the same time so much fun, I think that it's just that the presentation is so absolutely fantastic and the shooting feels so good that in the end I don't mind the grind at all, even playing it on the PS3 the graphics(all things considered) look great, animations are top notch, sound design is spot on and the music is just fucking awesome, besides I think the story missions took me a good 15-18 hours or so to go through so I guess that's alright.

For me the grind is doubly terrible because I don't much like competitive MP, because I suck at it, so playing in the crucible is not really for me, I tried, but is just a source of frustration really.. and I understand that it's much faster to gather rep for crucible vendors than it is for the ones that take vanguard rep, jesus I've played a LOT of stuff by now and still I wasn't able to amass even 100 vanguard marks yet, I'm far off from my first legendary.

It seems clear the DLC will have much of the story locked behind it, I don't know how I feel about that, on one side I hate it and want to condemn the game for not uncovering enough on the main experience and on other hand I had (and am still having) so much fun with it that it's hard to be angry towards it, I got my moneys worth anyway.

Maybe you should be playing Diablo instead of Destiny. It's pretty good.

@veektarius: Nothing about the combat/game play in Diablo seems even remotely interesting or fun to me, though.

@mooseymcman: Well, I can't tell you to buy it on sale because Blizzard games never go on sale. But if you ever do try it, try a Demon Hunter. If you have your difficulty set high enough, it'll give you some pretty decent fast-twitch gameplay.

Everything about Destiny's end game makes me not want to play more of it. I'm level 20 and in the process of the gear grind but I just can't seem to bring myself to want to do anything end game related. The dailies aren't really worth doing, the strikes are more of a time sink then difficult, and I never felt like my power was growing with my level. Early on a Nova Bomb would destroy most mobs it hits and now I'm barely if it kills mobs my level.

Diablo is really good too. I've got close to 300 hours on multiple level 70 Torrment difficulty characters.

"This game is weird. It's kind of terrible but also kind of fantastic. I'm going to keep playing it."

this sums up my thoughts on the game 100%, im going to keep playing as well, cause fuck, i have a level 26 warlock and 2 exotic weapons, so im in for the grind all the way, but mannnn i HOPE, on the faith that its bungie, that they improve the game. they are out there saying "this is just the beginning" "we're just getting started" so we'ill see.

also that mercury map looks amazing, i hope eventually we get to go there and do actual missions. and (i know its a pipedream) introduce another race of enemies.

@mrfluke: I wouldn't be too upset if they stick with this enemy set until we get to Destiny 2. But yeah, I hope there's some Mercury stuff coming in the expansions. And more, even!

@mooseymcman: so i just did today's daily, and the ghost talked about how the vex took over mercury....so yea...

and word is, this is the stuff to expect in the coming expansions. http://destinynews.net/look-whats-come/

and this is what to expect for tommorow's queen wrath event http://destinynews.net/queens-wrath-bounties-new-missions/

@mrfluke: Huh, interesting. Not really much else to say about that stuff for now.

To be honest Diablo grind is not THAT much different from Destiny grind if you think about it, sure you can level up independent of items, but even at level 70 with all skills unlocked and everything you're nothing without high end gear, so you're grinding for items either way, and the more (obviously) action focused combat of destiny I end up finding it more enticing, even though I still love Diablo of course.

I expect to keep playing destiny until I have each of one class up at least to lvl 20, then I'll just set it aside and wait for the DLC (which I'll probably get day one)

The fact that legendary items have the possibility to be for other classes than your own seems like one of the dumbest decision someone could make. I'm really not one to actually get mad about stuff like that, but there's seriously no reason to do that given how incredibly rare they drop.

All of the leveling up past 20 is such a crap shoot just to encourage you to keep playing (Grinding). I could find myself more behind it all if I just felt rewarded more often, like in a Diablo game.

...yet I still keep playing (because it's so much fun) In the end, I really hope they try and re balance aspects of the game in the future.

@mooseymcman: Rarely has a game managed to make me feel like I'd done so little whilst playing.

From everything I have seen and read about Destiny it seems less like Diablo and way more like an MMO (World of Warcraft type). The faction rep, the crazy amount of different currencies, the raid atunement, the grinding of instances to get gear for raids, the boring and repetitive mission types are all straight out of MMO games over the last ten years. The only Diablo comparison I'm seeing is you grind for loot in the same areas, but at least Diablo (now that the game is fun and not broken like it used to be) gives you random areas filled with random enemy types and you get tons of loot that actually affects the way you play and the skills you use. Destiny seems to be strictly a stats/numbers game even more so than Diablo.

It is really a shame because the little I have played of it I thought the game looked amazing and the shooting felt solid, I'm just very surprised by how little effort Bungie put into the story and quest design. I applaud them for making the raid ridiculously hard and for not putting in any matchmaking, but it is a shame you have to slog through hours of repetitive content in order to even be able to do the raid (if you even have 5 other people to do it with). With all that money I really thought Destiny would be a lot bigger and a lot more unique than it is.

yeah that is very dumb.. but diablo 3 wasn't that much different actually, loot 2.0 made everything a billion times better, I expect Bungie to mess around with loot drop rates and how legendary stuff works in the future, at least I hope they do.

I've been standing outside that cave for a while now and still nothing remotely good. I simply can't get past level 20 it seems. The Crypfarch js a real piece of shit.

The way they doll out loot definitely leaves something to be desired. But the game is fun enough that getting new loot isn't as big a draw for me as it is in Diablo.

Didn't find the music all that noteworthy. It was nice to actually hear music in parts, but there weren't really any moments where I thought "fuckin yeah, this music's great!"

I just want to congratulate you on that title.

@humanity: Do strikes, I found a lot of blue items with the light thing, got to 22.

Wait, I just realised Diablo 3 doesn't have a dance function, I don't know about that game anymore...

I hit the grinding phase and it sucks. As you pointed out, they tried to make Diablo, but they missed the most important part of loot based games, the constant handing out of loot. Maybe it's me, but I am just not excited by any of it. The loot comes too slowly, it all feels the same (an assault rifle is an assault rifle with a higher number or added effect to that number), and repeating missions never feels satisfying. Maybe Borderland set my expectations too high for an loot driven FPS, but at the same time, press square (or X) to deploy the dink just feels bad.

It feels like the grind is just there to artificially extend the content which has undoubtedly been stripped out for repackaging as DLC.

@lnin0: I think that's being a little harsh. Well, at least your tone and wording, to me, implies that you think they did it intentionally just for profit, whereas I'd like to think it's because they aimed too high and had to cut A LOT of content prior to release. But we may never know!

I played all weekend and didn't get any legendary anything. All weekend...at least 8 hours....nothing.

I am level 21.

I'd be fine with that if there was more game.

Like the guys said during the bombcast. This game feels like it needed to ship as it was. There isn't remotely enough content.

Can't wait to buy it when it comes out later...because it's 2014 and the game industry is a fucking dirty mooch...so that's how games work.

I'll start doing that because I just realized I've spent several hours in a videogame just shooting into a damn cave. This doesn't qualify as "playing a game" or "having fun" anymore. Might as well see the rest of the content before I call it quits. Maybe I'll even finish the actual storyline..

@humanity: If you can get one or two people to run strikes through the playlists, the two higher tiers of them are not difficult and will give you blue level gear with light on it for completing them. The strikes will take between 15-25 minutes depending on your gear and how well you know them. It's much more enjoyable than shooting at a cave and you'll earn gear, vanguard points and vanguard rep which can then be used to buy additional legendary gear.

I just hit level 20 (I'm 21 now) -- what do you think I should focus on to get gear? Last night I went to the Cosmodrome and ran around and did public quests and got 20-25 vanguard marks in 2 or 3 hours. It was fun but I wonder if I'm doing the wrong thing.

@boatorious: No, sadly doing public quests and Patrol quests is actually the most efficient, albeit boring, way to get that stuff. You could be doing Strikes, which are more fun and probably drop more loot, but they're more time consuming. Just keep in mind that there is that 100 Marks per week cap, but there is no cap on reputation.

I'd recommend grinding rep for both the Vanguards and Crucible until you get to rank 2 in each, and then buy some purples. Also, start saving your Strange Coins for Xur on Friday (well, it's not like there's any other use for them). At least during the last two weeks, he's had the same items for each class. I think (THINK) it was a chest piece of Titans, a helmet for Hunters, and gauntlets for Warlocks. Well, I know it was the gauntlets for Warlocks. So, I'd go online and check which it is that he sells for your class, and don't buy that one from the Vanguards or Crucible.

Also, for whatever reason, helmets cost (I think) 120 Marks, whereas chest pieces and the rest are all 65 (again, I think), so keep that in mind.

@boatorious: Oh, and Bounties! If you aren't already doing Bounties, do those too. You can get a lot of vendor rep and XP from those. And you still need XP for your armor and weapons, and skill trees if you haven't maxed out both of your subclasses yet.

@mooseymcman
@boatorious

Once you can do the last tier of strikes in the playlist, it's the fastest way to earn rep and marks. You get 6 marks per strike and they only take about 20-30 minutes so you should be able to get about 12 marks on average an hour. You can also do some of the bounties while in the strikes such as collecting 200 of some drop, getting 9000 xp without dying etc etc.

Also, make sure to try get at least one public event done to a gold standard per day, as it's worth 10 vanguard points for every one you gold rank and you get a package from the postmaster for the first gold rank a day. I've seen people say that in 4 hours you can max out your vanguard marks by just doing public events and getting gold ranks in them.

For Marks, sure, but you get 10 Vanguard rep by doing one of those find a beacon missions during patrol, and you can get four or five of those done in the time it'd take to do one Strike, especially on Earth where everything is low level and easy.

Can I just mention one tiny thing that annoys me? Like, it's such a small thing that I can't even believe I'm mentioning it, but here I go.

You can't pre-buy something for future use. Sure, you can get items from drops that are for a higher level, but you can't see something, like a shader, that you really want and buy it from the vendor and save it. My husband told me a shader I wanted was on sale (PINKKKKKKKK) and so I logged in. I've been sitting on my glimmer so I was all excited. Anyway, I go to the vendor. Oh, you're not level 20 yet? Too bad! It just irks me. I'm being really petty, but it irks me. :D

Destiny is fun but it also has little quirks that drive me nuts. I love the shooting. It feels really good. I like the environments and the art direction. I don't like how little loot seems to be dropping. I feel like I have been playing a long time and I only have greens to show for it, and that was after a trip to the loot cave and stooping to buying guns from vendors. I hope that once I reach level 20 the loot gets better, but I don't know. I'd hate to spend all this time grinding just to get something for a class I'm not even playing. It would be like Diablo III before Loot 2.0. After playing this game, which is great and fun and I love shooting guys in it, I will go back to Diablo III and run a Greater Rift or Bounties and get 2-3 legendary drops. I hope that Destiny looks at their system and tweaks it in the future. I would appreciate a Loot 2.0 patch for Destiny, is all I'm saying. :D

That or a trade feature would be great. I'm never going to play all three classes, so getting gear for a Warlock or Titan would be a waste for me. I would gladly give it to people or trade if I could.

@jadegl: If it helps, then I'll say that I'm pretty sure that one vendor has only sold those four shaders for the entirety of my playing the game, so don't worry about it, Aurora Blur will still be there when you hit 20! :D

And yes, this game needs an overhaul for how the loot drops work. It's a little more (slightly) forgivable now when the game is new and tons of people are playing it obsessively, but they're going to need to change it eventually. Hopefully sooner, rather than later.

So I've had a weird experience with the last 3 pieces of gear I've found. They have more light so it raises my level, but the gear has marginally worse stats compared to the gear I already had. I'm still equipping it because I wanna see my level go up, but it's weird seeing my defense go down.

Is this maybe because I've leveled up that gear or something? It seems really odd.

@studsmckewl: It's probably because you leveled your past gear, I'm sure if you level your current stuff, it'll be better overall.

And you should be prioritizing light over other stats at this point. With the way the damage scaling in this game works, you're better off being higher level but having slightly lower defense. It's weird, I know, but the damage scaling is kind of ridiculous in this game. I don't know it exactly off hand, but it's something like taking an extra 30% damage and doing 30% less damage if you are one level lower than an enemy.

Yes, one level. It's nuts.

Yah but currently I can only run the lowest tier Strikes. Well I'm level 20, 3/4 of the way to 21 through light gear. Would that be sufficient to try the harder strikes? I've always felt that in Destiny when something was a level 8 quest it actually meant that you should probably be level 10 before doing it or else it will take a really long time.

@humanity: I'd suggest not doing the higher level ones unless you are higher level, or are doing it with higher level people you can depend upon.

What is it with you mods and your aversion to blog headers? :o

My most recent experience with the game is an exotic bounty for a hand cannon. This has been about a six step process of running around the game world doing favors and errands for people who I don't know. One of the steps required me to get 500 points worth of kills with a specific type of weapon, that I didn't even have. And it took points away if I died. Another step had me kill 500 hive enemies on the moon. They're all over the game, but I had to kill the moon ones. There was a point last night where I had to walk back and forth on the tower twice to talk to different quest givers for steps during this runaround. It was somewhere during that trek that I realized this is the worst thing I've done in a video game in years. By the time I finish this fucking quest I'll want to fire the game into the sun. What am I even going to use this pistol for? What if it's only marginally better than my current weapons?

The latest step in this bounty is to kill a specific enemy in a level 26 strike. The enemy only appears when you piss off the bad guys enough. Also, I'm level 23 or 24, so I have to actually grind until I'm 26 to even take a reasonable attempt at this.

Destiny is basically the video game version of calling Comcast.

@yummylee: What are you talking about?

Seriously though, I use those when I have things organized, but this was just a stream of my thoughts, so I didn't want to constrain myself with headers. Or some BS like that, I dunno. At least I put in pictures to break it up a little.

@humanity: You can do the first one marked as hard if you have two people with you who are high enough level for them.

After reading your blog post I logged into the game, looked at the equipment I wanted to buy from the Vanguard vendors, and did a little math. This may be old news to MMO veterans, but to someone like me who is new to this sort of thing it seems insane. It's particularly insane considering I'm not paying Bungie a monthly fee to play, so what exactly is their impetus to design the game as if I was?

The math: let's do best case scenario and use the Tiger playlist which earns you the most Marks per Strike.

• 6 Vanguard Marks per Strike
• 30 minutes per Strike (estimate based on my experience with the Wolf playlist)
• 100 Marks per week can be earned
• 645 Marks required for two weapons and a full set of gear
• 108 total Strikes required (645/6)
• 17 Strikes per week (100/6)
• 7 weeks (645/100)
• 8.5 hours per week (17*0.5)
• 59.5 total hours required (7*8.5)

That doesn't include the time required to reach level 20, earn Ascendant Energy/Shards, and to farm for upgrade materials. It also doesn't take into account Legendary Engrams or Marks earned along the way from other methods, which in my experience is close to nonexistent anyway.

I'm enjoying the gameplay a lot and I want to keep playing despite the repetitive nature of the game itself, but I honestly don't think it's got enough staying power to keep me playing for another 60+ hours, or more importantly another 8.5 hours per week. I've only got so many hours a week to play games, and there are other games coming out that are going to take those hours away from Destiny, pushing the date I may eventually get all my gear even further out.

@bane: Well, you're forgetting that you can also buy Crucible stuff, which is a different set of Marks and rep. I was able to get a full set of Legendary armor last week, not counting my exotic gauntlets from Xur.

It's still ridiculous, and requires way too much grinding, but not as bad as you think. Slightly less bad.

But yeah, if you're not obsessive and have WAY too much free time, it's not worth it. I'd recommend most people just finish the story, do all the strikes once, get to 20, and then stop. But I'm in too deep now.

Well, I guess the game sounds pretty bad if you don't want to play any competitive multiplayer. I'm having a good time mixing strikes and crusible to get the the gear I want. Besides, you can buy an exotic piece of armor or weapon from xur and exotic bounties guarantee an exotic weapon. There are other ways to get the gear instead of doing an absurd number of strikes and get burned on that content.

@bane: You can get 100 vanguard marks in about 3-4 hours of play time per week by doing Public Quests on earth alone. They're on set timers as to when they'll show up. If one doesn't show up, just do a patrol mission or two while you're waiting.

However, I get your point. You're sitting down calculating out how long it will take to get to these items but questioning if it's fun or not. I played WoW actively for about 5 years and raided in all that time and I had a blast until about the last year when really I was only doing it out of habit. The fun was in gearing up and beating the bosses and the boss fights where very fun. There was also a good sense of belonging to the guild and friendships formed. I enjoyed playing the game and as a result I got good gear. The problem with Destiny is people want the good gear, but maybe they don't enjoy the game.

Ask yourself this. If you're not really enjoying the game now, how will having better gear change that? It probably won't. I see a lot of people doing this sort of math and going "oh man, it's going to take so long to get to that level of gear" at which point I ask again, if you're not really enjoying the process of getting to that level of gear, you're not going to enjoy it when you have it because it won't make the game better in any way.

The most important thing I've taken from this is that @mooseymcman is not to be trusted when it comes to pop music. Not in the least.

@nodima: Huh?

@iamnotbatman: They added dancing in the last patch.

Those Michael Jackson and Beatles comments cripple my soul!

@nodima: Oh yeah! Sorry you have such bad taste in music, man.

It sounds to me like Destiny will be carried on by how many other good shooters or RPGs will be available. Sure the game sounds just ok but from pretty much everyone I know who plays it and has been playing it, it's one of those "play because there's nothing else out there" games. I still do want to play it, but maybe I will only get around to it when Destiny 2 is available.