We May Not Be. But We Are. Fight On.

Michael Salvatori:

i played from the red war to arrivals entirely solo. yeah i was annoyed i couldn’t do the raids or dungeons solo but i understood why, and when i got especially frustrated by it you know what i did instead of complaining about how it’s not xyz game?

i played a different game.

First of all, it's just a very cool place and I would gladly expose my guardian to its obvious dangers just for the vibes.

There is no patrol vendor, you get your bounties and material trades by listening to one of those creepy statues whispering

Fucked up public events. There's a giant vex spire luring lost enemies in to be consumed by an overgrowth of plants. The ground is opening up to a ravine with perfectly even walls that is full of decaying things that are impossibly still alive and they're crawling out.

Unexpectedly few out of bounds barriers. Turns out you can cross that impossibly wide ravine, but there's just a flat expense beyond. How far out can you go? Try not to get lost, because your tracker is probably lying to you

Patrols that put an ally marker on your tracker and lead you into places you didn't even know existed, where the overgrowth is wild and never seems to stay still for long.

You can see figures on the horizon, distinctly familiar, but too far to identify

This is my studio’s first game, the game code is only like 5 years old and has the least amount of tech debt I’ve seen in my meager 4 years of AAA game dev. Destiny’s engine was branched off of Halo’s. There’s probably 20 year old code in there. The more old shit you have hanging around, the harder it is to create new stuff. If you don’t even care about the physical disk space all of the vaulted content’s geometry/textures/audio are taking up on your install of destiny, just keeping those destinations around is definitely eating up development time, and a LOT of it. With them out of the game, new content does not have to be developed with “not breaking the old stuff” in mind. You can try to make your systems as adaptable as you can, but that takes more time, and there’s no way to 100% future proof your work because there’s no way of knowing what amazing idea the game designers are going to come up with next. I shudder at the thought of how much had to change for weapon crafting. All this to say that the reason we have so much new content this year with a lot of fun and unique missions and quests and seasonal events is because of what was vaulted in beyond light and they need to keep vaulting stuff to keep up that pace.

For new and returning players (and anyone else who has no idea what the hell is going on)  

What stats and how many stats you want is confusing as hell.  Destiny does fuck all to explain things. But never fear this helpful and informative Tumblr post is here. Yes that’s right Tumblr, your number one source of life changing information and weird fandom ships is here to talk about Destiny 2 game mechanics. ______________________________________________________________

Stats: What are They? What do they do? How can they Help me?

Mobility: The height of your first jump - non-sprint movement speed - Hunter’s doge Charge time. High mobility is good for hunters, particularly if you play around using your doge often.  Everyone else can ignore this stat unless you are having issues with a jumping puzzle or speed running something.

Resilience: The Amount of Shield Health - Titian Barrier Charge time.  Having at least 50 resilience will save you from getting 1 or 2 shot in some pvp situations. Exotics and supers that grant you damage reduction scale off resilience. Resilience usefulness in pve situations for non-Titans is debatable.  

Recovery: Health regeneration - Warlock Rift Charge Time. Everyone benefits from recovery regardless of class or build. It is just that good and does not have diminishing returns. (Also proof that Bungie loves warlocks best)

Discipline: Grenade charge time Having at lest 30 is good, beyond that depends on how frequently you wanna blow stuff up with paracausal explosives.

Intelligence: Super charge time Max Intelligence can be worth it for high end content (grand master nightfalls, trials ect..) where getting your super a second or two faster matters. Intelligence experiences significant diminishing returns after 70.

Strength: Mele charge time 30 is a good starting point anything beyond that is a matter of how often you wanna do punchy things.

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More Stuff Destiny Doesn’t Tell You

- Destiny stats are calculated in steps of 10 to a maxim of 100. As far as the game is concerned having 32 of a stat is the same as having 38. You would have to increase the stat to 40 to see any change from 30. Stats over 100 are ignored.

- Every piece of gear (class items included) first mod slot can be slotted for +10 or +5 of any one of the six stats.

- Masterworking a piece of gear adds +2 to each stat (even on class items).

- All non-class item pieces have at lest 2 of each stat and the most any one piece of unmodified gear can have is of a stat is 30 (exotic armor aside, which occasionally plays by it’s own rules and I’m to lazy to get into that right now).

- All armor has an elemental type (arc, solar, void, and stasis) each type of gear and element of gear has access to different mods. It’s worth it to eventually have a full set for each element.

Please ignore the fact that I’m a cheep bastard and haven’t master worked a piece of stasis armor yet. (also to lazy to use photoshop to hide my shame)

- You can change the element of any piece of armor but it gets increasingly more expensive to do so the higher energy the armor piece is. Changing the elemental but reducing the energy capacity to 1 however only costs 1 upgrade mod. Choose wisely.

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What Armor Should I be Keeping, Master Working and Dismantling?

If you are like me you are a pack rat.  Vault space is limited cus Bungie might buff a weapon frame/type/whatever in the future so you need to save that gun you haven’t touched in over a year.  Only keeping the armor you actually need means you have more room for guns that you’ll probably never use. Here’s some pointers for deciding what you should and should not be saving.

- The first thing you should master work is one class item of each element (arc, solar, void, and stasis) this will give you access to most of the element specific mods and you won’t need to worry about replacing it with a better roll. I recommend using class items you think look neat (and save yourself some synthweave), and or raid armor (if you happen to raid a lot) so you can access to raid specific mods.

- Just because armor has a high amount of stats doesn’t mean it has the stats you want. Masterworking something that has a stat allotment that supports your play style is going to benefit you more than masterworking something that just has a lot of stats. That said, for all non-class item armor nothing under 55 total stats is worth master working.

A low effort meme in MY stat guide? It’s more likely than you think.

- Both recovery and intelligence mods cost more energy then the other mods. It is best practice to try and reach your desired level of those stats without using mods.

- Arc armor items have access to a mod called “powerful friends” which adds +20 mobility and “Radiant light” which adds +20 strength . These mods go in the 4th mod slot and stack with the +10/5 mobility mobs from the first slot. Having two (or more) pieces of armor with Powerful Friends or Radiant light does not stack.  But you can both Radiant Light and Powerful friends on two different pieces of gear and get the stat bonus for both. New players can buy these mods from Ada-1 (you know the nice sythweave exo lady is absolutely not still salty at the fact her mother was murdered by light bearers after the collapse) as they rotate through her daily mod offerings (Yah RNG!).

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Here’s the TLDR

Masterwork some class items first.

High recovery and or intelligence armor is most desirable.

Don’t bother masterworking armor below 55 stats.

If you want to sweat lord it get one of each element (solar, void, arc, stasis) for each armor slot

Strength and Mobility have additional stat boosting mods.

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How do I get the GOOD armor?

I’m not going to suggest sacrificing goats to the RNG gods because I haven’t seen any evidence they respond positively to animal sacrifice.  You are going to be at the mercy of Destiny’s RNG but there are a few things you can do to tip the odds in your favor (and you don’t even need murder any goats to do so). First lets talk about that RNG…

If you really want to fully understand how stats allotment on armor works you should read this reddit post. It’s got spread sheets, data mined information, helpful comments, and everything!  If you don’t care that much then all you really need to know is armor stats are calculated in two groups. Mobility, resilience and recovery is one group.  Intelligence, discipline and strength is the other group. If you force the game to give you a high amount of one stat chances are the other two stats in that group will be lower.

For example forcing the game to give you a high stat roll in recovery will mean you are probably going to get lower stats in mobility and resilience while intelligence, discipline and strength will not be effected by this because they are in a different stat group.

Currently in the game, there are seasonal activities that you can pick what stat you want to be higher. Obviously those will be replaced eventually  with new seasonal activities so I’m not going to do a huge write up on them. There is however some ghost mods that will influence what stat drops you get.

The ghost mod only allows you to boost one stat but it works rather well to tip the RNG in your favor.

More stats aren’t always better stats but high stat armor with desirable stats is the dream you and I are always chasing, because home ownership is beyond our grasp (am I right fellow millennials?).  Bungie feels that high stat armor is anything 55+, the community considers high stat armor anything that’s 60+. When I say this activity will reward you with high stat armor keep in mind I’m going off of Bungie’s definition (even though I don’t agree with it) and not the community’s (who are absolutely right).  

Places you can get high stat armor

Raids

Dungeons

Trials of Osiris

Iron Banner

Seasonal activities/engram focusing that say they give you high stat armor

Prime Engrams (because you didn’t have enough reasons for Rahool to disappoint you)

Probably something else I’m forgetting. Feel free to yell at me in the comments/reblogs.

So that’s it! This isn’t everything you need to know about armor and stats, but hopefully it’s enough to get you started and or bit less confused about the whole thing than you where before. But only a little bit.

It's actually a Hive tripped distress call and Sloane is ripping through them like Saint-14 did to the Vex.

I want to believe.

I want to believe Sloane is there, alive and well, going ham on the Hive, waiting for Titan to get out of the Darkness jail. Please. Our epic Titan mom must be safe.

Sloane, somewhere on Titan: