Destiny questions that probably don't deserve their own thread

I thought it might be a good idea to have a catch-all question / advice thread for Destiny, seeing as some smaller questions probably don't need their own thread.

One question I had is related to the arms day weapons. Does everyone get the same choices, or are they tied to your account?

To explain, I have two characters at level 1 arms vendor rep, and one character at level 3. All three characters had a chance to get the hakke pulse rifle with headseaker and rangefinder, but my level 3 character had two other options to select from. I also had three options for my Suros Ari auto rifle, and I ended up going with one that offered glass half full and nearly perfect stability.

So what's the deal here? Did all of you who have a level three vendor rank get that same perk set as an option? Are these random perk sets tied to your account, or does everyone get the same set of perks to select from, as long as they have a high enough rank with the weapons vendor? I can't imagine I was just really lucky and got the same perks on the same gun with all three characters.

@spaceinsomniac: As far as I've seen, personally and from Twitch, everyone gets the same option choices between two variations of the same 5 weapons that were offered the previous week. I have only hit rank 2 with 2 of my characters though and 1 on the other. I should hit rank 3 on those 2 and 2 and the other one today though. I'll let you know if I notice a difference next week or hopefully someone with higher ranks than me can today.

I hit rank 4 and there seems to be no difference between rank 3 in the case of weapon options on Armsday. Everyone gets the same rolls on the weapons at each rank, as you level up you are just given more weapons to choose from (one option at rank one, two at rank two, and it seems to be capped three options at rank three)

Thank you both for the info. I looked up a video on you tube and saw someone getting the exact same choices as well, so I guess that solves that. That Suros Ari is pretty good in PVP, btw. It's probably the most effective Taken King legendary weapon I've found for PVP yet.

If anyone has any other questions, feel free to use the thread. Perhaps I can even explain a thing or two myself.

I just started taken king this week and was curious about my year one gear. What do I do with my year one exotics? Should I just scrap them?

@mems1224: Double check but I think you can because the collections stations around The Tower just allow you to re-acquire any exotics you have previously found.

@matt_f606: yea, I know I can buy the year two upgraded versions of year one gear but I wasn't sure if I had to hold on the year one version or if it was good for anything other than pvp

Unless you really need the vault space or exotic shards, I'd just keep them for PVP. You can also use them for less difficult PVE sections, such as patrols and bounties. Speaking of which, some of the year one weapons are still really good in basic PVP, so be careful before getting rid of older legendary weapons as well.

@mems1224: Unless your short on Vault space go ahead and keep your stuff just like Space said. They are still good in Normal PvP and all non Dreadnaught Patrols. Actually Gjallarhorn is still the preferred heavy for a few of the patrol Quests, aka Taken Wars. Same with any other great Year 1 gear because it's damage is normalized for those activities so you can knock out low light enemies just as quick as current gear. That is especially true if you run those without a fireteam because those champions can be a pain and randoms patrol teammates don't always help the best. Hope this helps.

Is anyone from GB playing on the 360? I have 2 low level characters on the PS4 and I fully plan to join the GB clan there at some point, but my main lives on the 360 and I would really love to play with some duders there.

@nux: A friend of mine's dad plays on the 360 but I don't know of any GBers that do. I'm sure there are a few, but we rarely even see Xbox One guys, and usually they are struggling to find groups. Most of the Giantbomb Community is on PS4 sadly. At least if you start playing on PS4 often there are a lot of people to play with though. Cerberus Wolves is packed and their clan is maxed out at 100 last I checked with many still wanting to join. My group NA Central has like 50 guys. And there are seemingly a lot more that are in the unorganized Lincoln Force groups here. With PS4 communities out now hopefully the Giantbomb Destiny community will grow so that many can just use that to find people to group up with. I think there were at least 75 people in that last I checked. Hopefully that will grow enough that most of the GBers on PS4 will join. I hope you find some guys on 360. But you may be better off looking somewhere with a larger user base. Good luck.

Are you limited to only player from your own region when trying to group up? I'm asking because I'd like to join one of the Giant Bomb clans, but I don't know how many Europeans are around.

@nux: Yo, right here. 360 players are few and far between around these parts.

XBL: Itwongo

Is destiny a good game? A lot of mainstream media seems to think that it is alright at best, but a lot of same media covers a lot of destiny. Heck even GB seems to think it is alright but then more than 15 hours of video content you can find here about this game. So I don't understand.

BAD WOLF02 Is my gamer tag! Let's do this!

EDIT: you have been added

@soluzar: No, you are not limited to only people from your own region, I'm from the US and have grouped with people from Europe several times. If you are on PS4 you should check out Cerberus Wolves and join Giantbomb Destiny in the PS4 communities.

What does the XBox One community for this look like? I'm leaning towards that as my console this gen and I really, really want to play Destiny unless: the community on the XBox is either hot garbage or non-existent. I doubt it's the ladder but hey, it's a possibility.

I couldn't get an answer to that question during the raid stream and don't really want to make a whole thread about it, so thanks to the OP for making this thread.

EDIT: I don't mean the community here on GB. I know it's very PS4 focused. I just mean in general, how is the XBox One Destiny community.

If you played it when it came out it was a good playing game with no story, and some bad RNG that made end game gear a pain in the ass to get. So it was kind of a bitter sweet deal, fun to play (which is why i have 8 days worth of time in it) but everything else about it was kinda crap. But after playing the Taken King for a few days, without getting to the end game stuff yet, i would say its actually a good game from what i have played so far.

@nux: I'll add you when I get off work

The Taken King has an 85 on metacritic, with 56 positive reviews, 4 mixed reviews, and no negative reviews, so I'd say the mainstream media thinks it's a bit better than just alright.

@spaceinsomniac: oh that high? I never check metacritic for games I have no interest. Maybe it's just the way Jeff talks about it and every time I hear about Destiny it's something negative. So maybe my perception about the game was wrong.

I'd take what Jeff says with a grain of salt. He's sort of the resident cynic on the team. And despite the jokes he made during the QL about The Taken King still being about "hold square to deploy your Ghost," he clearly enjoyed it enough to take part in the Raid the other day. I don't think that's something you'd commit to if you didn't enjoy the game quite a bit (and yes, he probably feels some responsibility to the site to help put out content, but still).

Speaking only for myself, I think TKK makes Destiny the game it should have been (and Bungie largely promised) from the start. If it had released like this to begin with, the entire conversation surrounding the game would be different. However, for better or for worse, shipping it like they did last year allowed a pretty established narrative of disappointment to get entrenched around Destiny, which wasn't helped by Bungie's own overhyping and P.R. faux-paux with the pricing.

I've heard people from multiple sites remark that Destiny content draws an insane amount of traffic. At a certain point, that's going to lead to additional coverage, regardless of the qualitative narrative surrounding a game.

So I think I just beat the base game's story mode (killing the statues in the black garden and getting the wander's gun?) and I'm level 21. So my question is should I just complete the house of wolves and dark below expansions to keep leveling or am I going to be effectively ignoring those?

@lttibbles: yeah, you gotta be 25 for taken king, but I'd just go ahead and complete the first two expansions.

@anthonywalkens: There's a post in the the "Join the Wolves" thread that seems to suggest they're all full up, but otherwise I'd love to.

@clairvoyantvibrations:Here at GB like you said it's pretty PS4 focused, but the Destiny community on XOne is fine in general. Better so in larger places like Reddit. But I'd suggest finding a community you enjoy playing with for Destiny the most and picking a console to match if you have the option, that being said I'm sure your fine playing Destiny on either. Even here we have a few XOne guys and if you want we can direct you to those guys. I know some are starting to group up on the XOne clan under my Clan Lincoln Force NA Central. Hope this helps.

@soluzar: What you can still do, be it without the clan tag is join their group, which will allow you to chat with them and use the forum, you just won't get a clan tag, which isn't that big of a deal. You should also check into joining their PS4 community that Zevvion setup. That should help a lot in finding guys on to play games with at the time. And a lot of those guys are from Europe, including Zevvion himself.

Yeah, Jeff's take on Destiny is kind of funny right now as people on my friends list that have him on theirs say he is on Destiny pretty much Daily now after the Raid the other day. So his take on Destiny in the next few Bombcast's will be interesting to say the least.

@itwongo: @nux: I'm playing on 360 if you guys wanna add me (bakoomerang)

@bakoomerang: Sure, I'll add you the next time I'm on!

QUESTION: Is Destiny now more or less single player friendly now with the Taken King expansion?

@jonny_anonymous: I'd say it's definitely more single player friendly in a general sense than it has ever been, but it is still a Coop/Multiplayer focused game. Even with everything they have added to help bolster the enjoyment of playing solo, you will find the best experience of playing Destiny with a group of friends just like before. This is definitely my experience, but seems to also be the general consensus of the Destiny populace as well.

@hestilllives19: The problem is I don't know anybody that even owns a PS4 let alone Destiny.

@jonny_anonymous: I completely understand that, and I was in the same situation a little over a year ago. Most of my gaming buddies were, and still are, stuck on PS3. Then I jumped on these forums and met some of these awesome GBers. Now I have a core Raid squad and at least 20-30 other GBers I play with on a regular basis. A lot of the guys you see here play Destiny pretty regularly and specifically on PS4 actually. But outside of that, if your interested, there are a lot of resources currently for guys here at Giantbomb to group up to play Destiny on PS4 together. Pinned at the top of this forum here is the Giantbomb Destiny PS4 community that was setup recently which is a great resource to actively find other GBers playing Destiny. Another group, Cerberus Wolves, whose clan is full at the moment (all you won't have access to is the clan tag) but which you can join and use their wall and talk to other members, always allows people to join their group at Bungie.net so you can hook up with those guys. My clan, if you are in the Central US, is Lincoln Force NA Central. It's completely open and you could join right now if you wanted. All of these places have both experienced and newer players able to lend a hand and give advice when needed. While I wish Bungie would add their own Social tools from the website into Destiny itself, there are still options for players like you struggling to find groups if your interested. I hope this helps.

@hestilllives19: Unfortunately I'm from the UK. I haven't really played Destiny since sometime after House of Wolves came out and I haven't done any Raid or Strike that hasn't got matchmaking. Since most people will have Taken King by know I think I'll just have to wait till I get it before joining up with people and I'm not sure when that will be since Fallout 4 and ESO: Orsinium are both out soon. Thanks for the info though.

@jonny_anonymous: A lot of the guys in Cerberus Wolves are from the UK actually, including Zevvion himself so that shouldn't be an issue, probably a blessing, if you joined those guys. As far as being behind, just check into it when you jump in. Leveling goes pretty fast so you could be in the 290 range pretty quickly after getting back into Destiny, whenever that may be. I would just hit CW up whenever you decide to get back into Destiny, they will still be there.

Is there MMR/skill based matchmaking in Crucible? I feel like I really often get stuck on losing teams then auto-rebalanced into a new game where I'll lose even harder.

@grizzlybears: As far as I'm aware the Crucible Matchmaking algorithm they use puts preference on latency (distance between users) and matching parties with other parties. Other than that it's purely random and I think after a pretty quick search for those two criteria it just jumps to throwing you into the first match it can find for you. For good or bad.

Pretty much that. The only other thing it prioritizes I've noticed are maps. Very rarely will you play the same map twice in a row even if you've left crucible and come back to it. It's fairly random in probably the most fair way. If you are getting saddled with losers just try to grit out the match and how RNGesus gifts you some good shit for doing nothing.

I'm really nervous about nightfalls and as such haven't done a single one despite having a 294 light level. Are they brutally hard or just hard and is it something I really need to do with a group of people I know? I've done the sleeper simulant questline so I think I sort of know how it's going to be? I mean the 280 Saber strike for that was only really hard because of defending the warsat (so many fallen captains). Once I found a group who could get past that the rest was a breeze.
260 light level strikes are pretty easy now but the idea of having to do everything again if we die really makes me scared to try nightfalls.

As of right now, there isn't a reason to do a Nightfall strike beyond that initial quest, so you're kind of in luck.

To answer your question more directly, though--they're pretty tough. You'll definitely need a team. And some of the strikes, particularly the SABRE strike, are hard to the point of not worth attempting. It isn't just difficulty that makes the Nightfall so painful. The specific modifiers can significantly influence what you can be killed by and the ease with which you can be killed.

Honestly, at 294, your time is going to be better spent building a team to make a charge at the raid. There just isn't another reliable way to make your character more formidable otherwise.

@strangestories: I'd say a lot of what historyinrust is saying is true. Specifically the last two weeks have been particularly brutal Nightfalls. Since launch, last week was the first week I hadn't done all of my available Nightfalls in a given week, which says a lot about how both painful and unrewarding they have become since The Taken King compared to their previous incantations. This week's boss fight has a particularly nasty set of modifiers in Arc Burn, Match Game, and Exposure in that last room. These would have been non issues a month ago when you were able to immediately revive teammates, but now since all deaths have a 30 second timer, it almost requires at least one player to be running a Sunsinger Warlock in case things hit the fan. Although now you have a checkpoint at the boss fight, I'd almost rather be booted to orbit if we failed and be able to revive my teammates (the change they made for Taken King).

Now, all that said. The rewards aren't quite as bad as history made them out to be. You have a high chance of an Exotic drop, but you might also end up with a Legendary, Antiquated Rune, or 11-13 Strange Coins. But you also get drops just like it was a Heroic strike on top of that. But like historyinrust stated, make sure you finish the questline for strikes before this, because that will net you a 300 Legendary special weapon, shotgun or fusion rifle. Just make sure you go into one with a solid fireteam that you have played with and feel comfortable with. Good luck.

Edit: After I posted this, I saw Luke Smith just posted something about Nightfall rewards early this morning. "Nightfall Rewards can be underwhelming. Runes/low # of coins/no reputation burst/weak legendaries all feel like losing. We're gonna fix it" So there is a glimmer of hope for the rewards to get better.

@historyinrust: @hestilllives19: Good to know! I watched a video of someone doing this week's and it just seems really frustrating in a way that's not fun. It has a lot to do with the modifiers combined with that specific strike. If one of the nightfalls is Cerberus Vae III (the one with those rocket launcher cabal vehicles) I might try it because that's one of the few where you can actually hang back and take your time. The reward for doing the nightfall isn't really that appealing to me because I have a 296 Invective and a 295 1000-Yard Stare. I'd probably just use it to infuse one of those unless there's something particularly amazing about them.

The game is actually keeping track of skill in the form of "combat rating." They used to surface it on Bungie.net, but don't anymore. Combat rating (as far as the community understands it) is used primarily to balance teams. When the game assembles its twelve players, it tries to distribute the teams in a way to make the total combat rating on each team as close as possible. As a hypothetical example, if a 2v2 game was assembled with the combat ratings of each player being 100, 75, 75, and 50, the game would put the two 75s on the same team and the 100 and the 50 together, resulting in each team having a combined combat rating of 150.

If you've ever wondered why it seems like good players are always complaining that their teammates are terrible, it's this system. The better you are, the more likely the weakest players in the server will be on your team due to the way the game tries to even competition. In my experience, however, the result is usually a team of average players winning over a team of bad players being carried by one really good player.

For sure. This sounds like the most reasonable plan.

If you aren't 300, the exotics you'll receive from drops will roll at 280/290 Attack values unless you store them away and decrypt them once you're a higher level. If Bungie significantly revamps the rewards in the near future (perhaps reinstituting a weekly XP buff or Mark buff), then the Nightfall would be more worthwhile. Otherwise there are other, easier, more enjoyable and more efficient ways to get any of the rewards a Nightfall offers.

Seems like they're hearing the complaints about the current state of nightfalls and they're looking to address them.

I couldn't help it, I've just bought Taken King :)

@jonny_anonymous: Good luck.

What they need, aside from better odds to get good loot is more new exotics in the loot table. Unless I'm mistaken there is a grand total of 4 (3 on xbox) new exotic weapons you get as drops. One of them is being sold by xur right now. Xur has already sold all the good new exotic armor aside from the graviton.

In shifting their focus toward exotic questlines they gutted the nighfall loot table. The odds you get something exciting (Supercell, jade rabbit or graviton) are extremly low. People have been glitching the game to get at some of the additional cool exotic loot that is just locked until Bungie decides to flip a switch and release it. That stuff seems super interesting and I hope when they say they say they are fixing nightfall drops they intend to put these exotics into the new loot table.

Other than selling them to the Speaker are Ascendant Energy and Shards used for anything?

@jonny_anonymous: Only if you REALLY want to upgrade early year 1 Legendaries. That was their original purpose, but it's not necessary anymore.