sammo21

@zevvion: Super surprised about that. After I hit level 20 I was probably light level 22 by a few hours after. After about a week I had maxed out my marks in both Vanguard and Crucible (100 a piece) and was able to get to Vanguard and Crucible levels 2 by that point as well. This gained me 2 pieces of armor (65 marks a piece) because of my marks from the first week of crucible doing a few events. This gave me legs, arms, and chest.

Before I could get to level 3 in Crucible or Vanguard (and be able to spend 135[?] marks on a helmet) I was able to get the Exotic helmet from the guy who shows up from Fri to Sun morning. This put me at, total, around light level 26+ or so. As you upgrade legendary and exotic armor with light levels you will actually increase the light amount even more, so right now I am sitting at level 28+. Here are a few tips but they will only work as well as you have the time.

1. Here's a ways to get armor and weapons, reliably. Play crucible and get engrams/reward drops Playing crucible will gain you various amounts of rep for Crucible (unless you are wearing a faction's class item) as well as +2 marks for losing a match, or +3 marks for winning. There is no cap on rep gained or drops acquired, but you can only gain 100 marks in a week.

2. Play the Vanguard strike playlist. This playlist puts you in matchmaking for a random strike. There are 5 levels for strikes and completing a strike from this list gains you Vanguard rep (unless you are wearing a faction's class item) as well as varying amounts of marks. I remember the level 24 strike gains +25 Vanguard rep as well as +6 marks. You can also gain completion rewards as well as green to purple drops during the strike.

3. Take some time and do the bounties in free roam and beyond. Free roam is important because this the time you will more than likely get to do a public event. If I am lucky I will get 2+ public events in the span of 2+ hours, but this varies quite a bit. Completing a public event will do several things: possible give you loot drops, possible chance of gaining strange coins or Ascendant materials, gain Vanguard rep (unless you are wearing a faction's class item), and also getting a reward "mailed" to you at the tower (I think this only happens the first time you get a gold star rating on an event each day). The reward you will be mailed is typically an Ascendant material or Strange coin, but sometimes there can be ships, weapons, or armor.

4. Level up Vanguard and Crucible factions. While already discussed, I noticed that when I hit levels 2 and 3 in both factions I was mailed either engrams or actual items.

5. Do bounties and missions for The Queen. This was a weekly event and while you are still playing the exact same content as before there are new bounties to do and harder versions of missions. Once you complete a bounty for The Queen you gain a quest item called "Queen's Wrath". For each one of these items you can play a random mission with heroic modifiers. Finishing these missions gains you a legendary piece of armor or a legendary weapon. Unfortunately, these purple items can no longer be broken down for Ascendant materials. This is an idiotic decision, but most of Destiny is an idiotic decision in my opinion.

6. The fastest factions to level, in terms of time, are the "sub factions": Dead Orbit, Future War Cult, and New Monarchy. These are faster to level (once you get to level 20, which you are) because as long as you are wearing the class item they sell you will only gain rep for that faction. Example, if you play a Crucible match while wearing the faction item you won't gain Crucible rep but you will gain rep for the faction whose item you are wearing. You will still gain the appropriate marks and these are also used as currency at these other factions.

7. Do the daily/weekly challenges. Specifically, do the ones that give the most Ascendant materials and Strange Coins. This currency is used for upgrading your legendary weapons (thus increasing your level) as well as Strange Coins being used to purchase Exotic items.

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It does suck you played so long without getting that high, but I'm super confused as to how outside of just having God awful luck. Everyone in my clan (6+ people) got to level 24 super quick. The hardest thing is getting Ascendant Materials to level but as I mentioned above there are ways to, at least slowly, get that done. Also as I mentioned, your availability to play can drastically effect what you are able to do.

@zevvion: This really isn't me being a dick, but just do bounties and (when possible) also do the Vanguard playlist strikes. I'm not sure why people think this should be so fast, but if you do the bounties,a little free roam, and also do some of the strikes from the playlist you will get to level 3 in a pretty decent click but its not going to be a week long thing. I hit level 3 in Vanguard either late last week or early this week. I hit level 3 in Crucible morning. The bounties don't give much more than 300-400 rep for completed all 5, and that's if you can even complete them all. Each free roam mission gives about 10 rep a piece and completing some of the strikes give...25 rep, I think. You'll just have to stick with it; its a relatively short amount of time.

I'm also level 1+ in New Monarchy and level 1+ with the Queen, though the Queen's stuff is 100% useless for me since I'm also level 28+ and the gear no longer breaks down for Ascendant material, which is 100% ignorant. If you are more worried about gear then I'd say do Queen's bounty stuff until Tuesday and you will get at least 1 piece of gear every time you run it. That's a pretty good stop gap if you're only worried about gear right now. Crucible matches frequently drop level 20 gear as do high level strikes.

Let's stop pretending that the Metal Gear timeline makes complete sense :D I love MG and it makes little sense to me at times. At this point I fully believe that this is just eventually leading to remakes of Metal Gear - MGS4. This is why the tech and stuff feels out of place...its all a slow and subtle retcon/remake of existing material.

Kojima likes to reuse and make his universe smaller in each installment, so we might just find out that Quiet will become Wolf's mother, sister, whatever.

I cannot find anything about sequels being announced for this game let alone 5 sequels. I'm not the type of gamer who complains about sequels as long as they are good and worthy of my time. Assassins Creed 2 and Assassins Creed: Brotherhood came out really close to each other and those are two of my favorite games of the last generation. Either way, my copy gets delivered on Tuesday and I can't wait to play it. After the unimaginative and content lacking Destiny I need a good single player game with an actual story, even if it is just an OK story.

1. Loot caves aren't that weird. You are just farming respawns and there are actually tons of these exact same locations people will move to. I personally think they didn't need to change this as in the same amount of time I can get the exact same amount of loot doing lvl 24+ strikes.

2. Engrams were broken.

3. Implementing systems and immediately reversing the decision is annoying me. First they added the ability to buy Strange Coins for Glimmer, and they took it out because "too many people were doing this". Second they made it where if you were doing the Queen's Wrath missions and you got loot you couldn't break the Legendary items down for Ascendant Materials. This made it 100% pointless to bother with any of the bounties and quest for this event if you had purple gear already. Why waste the time if you cannot get anything out of it. They have no economy to ruin as there are no auction houses.

With there being nearly no endgame content, and the Crucible being unbalanced and lacking modes, I really can't see myself putting real time into Destiny. I can only imagine myself coming back for the DLC but I have a huge expectation that the DLC will be new strikes in the same zones we've went to 100x over. I really don't understand how it took Bungie that long to make Destiny.

@spraynardtatum: most reviews would say you're wrong.

@corruptedevil: yeah, nothing lasts forever. Something will kill you at some point. I'm not even certain the human brain and psyche could actually handle living "forever", at least not how we think of it.

When my 2nd PS3 died (the 60GB launch) it meant I had no access to the media server or netflix in the bedroom. I bought the just then released Roku USB stick and its pretty decent. All the apps I want (including a nifty Giant Bomb one) and its pretty reliable.

I agree with what you're saying, but like @therealnelsk said it was a relevant topic...just maybe not to the extent it was taken.

There's so much crap in GamerGate that is annoying from both sides. First off, people like Leigh and people who work at Kotaku who try and lash out at every gamer by painting them all as white, cis-male, racists who live in basements and sports neckbeards and then the other side of the coin with the extremists from GamerGate who think every person at every site related to games is corrupt and evil.

I started following Jenn around the same time I started following Patrick, with 1Up and its plethora of podcasts and video content (all of it fantastic). She didn't deserve the hate she got, but at the same time it was the wrong time to write that article, in my opinion.