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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Forerunner

A new chapter for an old legend.

Type: Sidearm

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand

Perk: Full Stop - Oversized Sidearm with extended-range, heavy-caliber rounds. Fires full auto with increased rate of fire. Deals increased precision damage to unshielded targets.

Trait: Pace Yourself - Tapping the trigger gives this weapon less recoil and improves accuracy.

Masterworked Trait: The Rock - For several seconds after a final blow, alt-fire to consume part of your ammo reserves, converting your next thrown grenade into a fragmentation grenade.

Ornaments: Braytech M6, Gilded Honors, Calefactor

Origin & Description: In 2001, a little studio named Bungie introduced the world to the new millennium of videogames with three simple words: Halo: Combat Evolved. It's pointless for me to talk about Halo because if you're here reading a guide to the minutiae of imaginary videogame guns then you have, at minimum, heard of the game that launched the modern FPS, Bungie's fortunes, and the golden age of couch co-op.

In 2021 Bungie planned to celebrate the studio's 30th anniversary with a Destiny event, including weapons and armor referencing their many hits over the years. Naturally they planned a good chunk of Halo content. Problem is, Bungie no longer owns the Halo IP. Microsoft acquired the studio in 2000 so Halo could be a launch exclusive for their entry into the console market; possibly one of the smartest moves ever made in gaming, since Halo essentially sold the Xbox. Over the next several years the series grew into such a flagship franchise for Microsoft that when Bungie parted ways with Microsoft in 2007, the Halo IP stayed behind. From Bungie's perspective that was fine since a) they'd made just about all the Halo games they wanted to and b) they were in the middle of spooling up an interesting new IP named Destiny.

But now Bungie's designers have a hilarious problem: their 30th anniversary content needs to reference the enormous franchise that made Bungie famous, but without ever directly naming it. That's how we got Forerunner, a sidearm that's a dead ringer for the original Halo's legendarily effective magnum pistol. Its name has a double meaning: the Forerunners are the ancient race that constructed the eponymous Halo Arrays where the first game takes place, and Halo was the literal forerunner of Destiny. Its masterwork perk even lets you convert a chunk of Special ammo into an old-school Halo frag grenade after a kill. Its perk symbol shows a stylized eagle clutching lightning bolts in its talons with a central seven-lined symbol familiar to Bungie fans, known as "the Seventh Column." Much like how a football team's supporters may be referred to as "the twelfth man" on the field supporting the eleven actual players, Bungie's community is called "the Seventh Column" supporting the company. The wide-winged eagle evokes the insignia of Halo's UNSC, while the lightning it holds refers to Bungie's own insignia of a raised fist clutching a lightning bolt.

Forerunner's pull quote and lore tab pay tribute to Halo's role both in building Bungie and in influencing the design of Destiny. Banshee comments on the weapon that, "it's like they were making a hand cannon but didn't know it yet," and that the weapon must have been for "a Titan, maybe...and a big one, too." He concludes that the weapon "had fired its last round. What a last round it must have been," maybe referring to the last Bungie-made Halo game, the critically-acclaimed Halo: Reach. The gunsmith resolves to rebuild the weapon for Guardian use, creating "an homage, an offering to the creators of the original relic. A legacy." All in all it's a sweet tribute to the Halo franchise from devs who have moved on but still remember and cherish its triumphs.

At the Legendary rarity tier Halo's well-represented by the BxR-55 Battler, the original Halo 2 battle rifle famous for the B-X-right trigger button combo that could one-shot an opponent in PvP; Retraced Path, a Covenant Focus Rifle; and the iconic double-pointed energy sword broken into two blades, Half-Truths and The Other Half. The rest of the anniversary weapons celebrated Bungie's older games with Marathon’s Wastelander M5 shotgun, Pathways into Darkness’ M79 Grenade Launcher reskinned as Pardon Our Dust, and Myth’s Balrung claymore as the Vortex-frame sword Hero of Ages - plus updated D1 favorites Eyasluna, 1000-Yard Stare, and Matador 64. There are also armor ornaments, ships, sparrows, and oh yeah a multiversal game show hosted by Xûr and a horse made of stars. All in all it's a great party.

I've only played one Halo game all the way through, and it was the black sheep outlier Halo: ODST, so I can't tell you how much Forerunner mimics the original magnum. I can tell you that this version is a lot of fun. Unlike most sidearms it hits hard and has a generous range, and its Special ammo cost is a small price to play for the solid crack of impact when you hit. The masterworked ability to crunch a grenade out of Special ammo is not a trivial bonus, either. You do pay for that range; I mostly use it in tap-tap-tap mode because while it can fire full-auto, that mode already sits at the exceptionally slow (for a sidearm) fire rate of 200 RPM, and has such a kick that it'll only stay on target for one or two rounds. But it's still a roaring good weapon, and if it was as fun to play in Halo as it is in Destiny, I understand why people kept using it even as they picked up fancier guns - just as memory returns to the classics. Here's to thirty more years!

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Forerunner #Halo #Halo pistol #bungie 30th anniversary #bang bang bang bang!#combat has evolved #I spent a while on that gif please appreciate that gif #also I was watching old Halo trailers and like #Bungie? has been Bungie for a very long time #they've just always been Like That #one day I should play Marathon #chill with Durandal #man people think Rasputin's rough they have no idea #we could've gotten Durandal #(I love Durandal anyway. What a lunatic.)#Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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destiny-compendium-exoticarum · 3 years ago

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I love Destiny lore. It's a game with wonderful and wonderfully complex lore, and I want to share some of it with you. To do that I have created the Compendium Armarum Exoticarum, the index of Destiny's exotic weapons. You don’t need to know anything about the game to appreciate these posts. You just need to know that these weapons have cool names and cool space powers and I want to tell you all about some neat future scifi space wizard gadgets and their stories.

Destiny items have five rarity tiers: common, uncommon, rare, legendary, and exotic. Exotic weapons and armor are super rare and far more unusual than other equipment. These are the weird ones, the gimmicks and game-breakers - guns that shoot black holes, vests that turn you invisible, swords that slice through spacetime. A character can only equip one exotic weapon and one piece of exotic armor at a time, so character loadouts are often built around the choice of exotics. Many exotics also have deep story connections or are rewards for lengthy questlines. So, because of their importance, they get the most attention from Bungie’s artists & writers. Each has a unique appearance & aesthetic, often with animations and particle effects, and about a page’s worth of unique associated lore - plus the best names.

Compendium Armarum

* I’ve elided the trait if it’s a standard one that also appears on legendary weapons, like Outlaw or Dragonfly.

** Names in parentheses are exotics previewed but not yet released in-game.

#Destiny 2 #Compendium Exoticarum #testing out this sideblog thing #we'll see how it goes

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Hawkmoon

Stalk thy prey and let loose thy talons upon the Darkness.

Type: Handcannon

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand

Perk: Paracausal Shot - Final blows and precision hits with Hawkmoon grant stacks of Paracausal Charge. The final round in the magazine deals bonus damage based on the number of stacks. Stowing Hawkmoon on the final round removes this bonus.

Trait: Transformative - Future drops of this weapon will have random rolls.

Ornaments: On Ashen Wings, Feeling Lucky, Austroraptor

Origin & Description: Darkness likes to talk. Or at least its suspected avatar, this Entity, the Voice in the Darkness that attends the Pyramid Fleet, likes to talk. It has to borrow shapes to do it - our Ghost's voice, our own form - but given any chance it'll coax, cajole, bargain, tempt, and generally refuse to shut up. The Traveler, on the other hand, believes that the best voices never let themselves be heard at all, which sounds very profound but from a results standpoint it could stand to talk a little louder.

When the Traveler first arrived it didn't explicitly announce itself. Instead a few people discovered they had a special sympathy with it, communing with it in lucid dreams. They received emotions, impressions, and images they then proclaimed to others - like a prophet except if god only talked in charades. These individuals acted as what Guardians would later call the Speaker to the Traveler. More generally the Traveler influenced the intellectual development of humanity like the Darkness antenna in the K1 Anomaly, inspiring leaps of genius and understanding. But it can speak to an individual if it focuses hard and hopes that individual understands the vision they receive. When it does do so it uses a common set of images for itself, among them a wolf, a star, a gardener, and a wandering bird, while Darkness appears as a tidal wave, a bitterness, a whirlwind, and a knife. We get "wandering bird" for the opening of Destiny 2's Red War campaign, where your Guardian, newly-Lightless and fleeing the Red Legion's conquest of the City, follows a spectral, glowing hawk.* They stumble through the wilderness to reach first Suraya Hawthorne, then the Shard of the Traveler (one of many pieces cracked off it during Darkness' first assault), where we reclaim enough of its relic Light to get back into the war.

* Canonically the Red War took at least three months, so since we don't know where the Last City is, that metaphorical soaring hawk might have abstracted a multi-week hike by our Guardian to the Shard's location in old Europe.

Fast forward to Year 4 of Destiny 2, and the Traveler's pulled itself back together (literally). While not anywhere near its old power levels, it's awake once more and fighting through its hangover to get things into a semblance of order. And after waking up, it's decided to talk to Crow. Why Crow? Well, the Traveler maybe likes birds, and it definitely likes redemption stories, or at least "casting off your old self to make a new life" stories, and it probably feels like Crow could use a friend (correct). Now that the poor guy is trying to reckon with how Guardians all seem to hate him but he also has no past life to go back to so what should he even do, the Traveler has dusted off the avian metaphors to cheer him up. Crow dreams of soaring over multiple locations as a bird, and when we visit those locations we find golden paracausal feathers of Light that lead to our old glowing bird-buddy.

The hawk leads us in a sort-of-haunted pilgrimage through the EDZ in the Harbinger mission, ending at a minor shard of the Traveler with an effigy of Hawkmoon at its base - it looks like the old Hawkmoon, but it's actually made from the freaky electroweak matter that comprises the Traveler's outer shell. We charge it up with Light through various quest activities, then fight our way back through Savathun's Taken (who are of course after any source of Light) to bring the "completed" gun back to the little shard and have it turn it into a real working Hawkmoon. Along the way Crow works through his baggage and ultimately concludes that it doesn't matter who he used to be, he's a Lightbearer now. Just in time for Season of the Lost to bring him face to face with his erstwhile sister, y'know, the Queen of the Reef. So I'm sure he'll be fine!

The original D1 Hawkmoon wasn't much of anything lorewise - a useful, lovely weapon, but one with a literal one-sentence-long Grimoire card - probably because it was a Playstation-exclusive weapon for the first year after launch. It had two overlapping damage buffs, Holding Aces and Luck in the Chamber, which would pick two or one rounds respectively out of its 13-round magazine and give them significant bonus damage. If you were extremely lucky the bonuses could even overlap on one round, making it hit absurdly hard - a one-hit kill on a full-health Guardian in PvP. That made it a real killer in D1 Crucible, though to be fair handcannons in general were OP AF there (some things never change).

In D2 Bungie wanted less randomness and more rewarding of skill, so instead the weapon accumulates stacks of Paracausal Charge on kills or precision hits. That charge is always expended on the last round in the 7-round magazine (10 with catalyst, also found in the Harbinger mission). More stacks of Paracausal Charge, more damage. Complete the catalyst and Paracausal Charge will also help out your reload speed, handling, and range. That final charged round gets fired with a hawk's-cry sound effect and a glowing pulse along the engraved feathers of the barrel; and, if you've stacked up a full magazine's worth of Paracausal Charge, quite a bit of damage. Accumulating charge on precision hits as well as kills makes it surprisingly useful for bosses who stand still; like Polaris Lance you can find a good spot and just empty Hawkmoon rounds into the crit spot with regular bursts of bonus damage.

If the Traveler got to design the base appearance of shining silver with engraved feathers, Darkness got to design the ornament On Ashen Wings. I would have shelled out for it if I used Hawkmoon enough to justify it, but, y'know. Handcannons. Feeling Lucky gives it a realistic magnum look (I think? I'm assuming here. I don't pay a lot of attention to real guns.) Austroraptor is also more realistic but Cooler because it comes with a laser pointer and a weird hooked claw on the pommel resembling that of its namesake, the rather nasty dinosaur genus Austroraptor. Never forget that birds are tiny dinosaurs, you guys. Never forget.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Hawkmoon #Crow #Harbinger #magical glowing hawks made of Light #handcannons again #Crow Makes A Friend #a magical friend!#poor Traveler #but get up tho we got shit to do #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 2 years ago

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Destiny 2 Compendium Exoticarum October 2022 Patch Notes

New game content:

added Witch Queen ornaments Dragonbone (Deathbringer) and The Logic (Lament)

added Guardian Games ornament Clast of its Own (Vex Mythoclast)

added Season of the Haunted ornaments Corporate Sponsorship (Sweet Business), Dream of the Sky (Traveler's Chosen), Electromagnetic Execution (Arbalest), Gilded Honors (Forerunner), Golden Days (No Time To Explain), Snakebite (The Huckleberry), Splendid Vidua (Witherhoard), Springtime Scales (Ager's Scepter), and Sunrise Saber (Black Talon)

added Season of Plunder ornaments Felsic Pyroclasm (Prometheus Lens), Honor of the Empress (Skyburner's Oath), Pseudoscience (Wavesplitter), Theoretical Endothermics (Coldheart)

Game changes:

updated Sweet Business for the removal of Primary ammo bricks

updated for some exotic changes from the big S17 sandbox update

the base trace rifles have gotten perks beyond "is a trace rifle" appropriate to their element's 3.0 overhauls

Coldheart now generates periodic Ionic Traces

Prometheus Lens now applies Scorch stacks

Wavesplitter now suppresses targets in orb-pickup overcharge mode(!)

Xenophage's fire rate nerf got partly reverted (100 RPM from 90)

Skyburners' Oath has been overhauled for aerial combat

someone must love this exotic very much to rebuild it after so long and I'm so proud of them

Graviton Lance's masterwork perk has changed from Hidden Hand to Vorpal/Turnabout

the Leviathan's Breath catalyst has had Archer's Tempo this whole time and I just never noticed it

anyway Archer's Tempo now affects it more and the damage split between impact and explosion has been tuned

added Jotunn catalyst

updated for some Season 18 sandbox changes

Wish-Ender now has intrinsic Anti-Barrier

Le Monarque and Thunderlord now have intrinsic Overload

Malfeasance's detonations now have intrinsic Unstoppable

Upgrades:

added a bitchin' new splash image for Lord of Wolves that came out with an August TWAB

made a new title for Prometheus Lens incorporating the Prismatic Inferno emblem

Fixes:

edited Forerunner's entry to better explain its masterwork perk (can conjure a grenade out of Special Ammo basically)

#Destiny 2 #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #patch notes #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Eyes of Tomorrow

"I want to see it all, unhindered, and know it's mine to take." —Clovis Bray

Type: Rocket Launcher

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Arc | Solar | Void

Perk: Eyes on All - This weapon is capable of tracking and firing at multiple targets simultaneously.

Trait: Adaptive Ordnance - Killing four or more combatants in a single volley increases the damage of the next volley.

Ornaments: Yesterday's Augur, Cyberoptics, Tyrant's Vision

Origin & Description: (Listen I have done my UTMOST for literal months to make this a short entry and I just can't. I have written and re-written and there's too much to cover. It's gonna be maybe the longest in the Compendium. So it's the first entry where I'm putting the latter part behind a cut. Sorry about that.)

Anyways I HATE IT. IT'S COVERED IN EYES AND I. HATE. IT. And that's only like ten percent because Eyes still hasn't dropped for me and thirty percent because Gambit invaders keep slaughtering my team with its obnoxiously effective six-rocket salvo. But that is part of it! Because Eyes of Tomorrow is hateable on so many levels. But for a lore nerd like me, the first and…thickest…? layer on which to hate this rocket launcher is the man who ordered its construction: Clovis Bray I.

At the dawn of the Golden Age Clovis Bray and his eponymous corporation, aka Braytech, played a key role in colonizing the newly-opened solar system. Ruined CB facilities and remnant tech are frequent targets for salvage and sometimes catalyze events like the rediscovery of SIVA or the reactivation of Rasputin's Hellas Basin complex. Yet despite his company's pervasive presence, Clovis Bray himself remained a distant, undefined character. We knew a bit about his son, Clovis Bray II (because of course he named his son after himself), and a lot more about his grandchildren Wilhelmina "Willa" Bray, Elisabeth "Elsie" Bray, Anastasia "Ana" Bray, and Alton "Alton" Bray (the boring one). Then in Beyond Light we plunged headlong into one of Clovis Bray Sr.'s greatest accomplishments and darkest crimes: the construction of the Deep Stone Crypt and creation of the neohuman androids known as Exos. And, uh…turns out it's a good thing we hadn't met him before, because he is a terrible person. One of the most brilliant, most consequential, and most horrific individuals of the Golden Age, Clovis Bray aimed for nothing less than becoming the immortal god-emperor of interstellar humanity, and any means necessary to achieve that end were okay by him - required, even.

You absolutely should read his personal journal, released with the Beyond Light Collector's Edition, plus the ending. But to summarize: Clovis was obsessed with legacy both intellectual and genetic. Like Oryx and Touch of Malice, Clovis sought immortality not through prolonging his own life, but through writing himself into the fabric of human thought and genes so profoundly that it would eventually, inevitably, keep coughing up new Clovis Brays. And he couldn't leave the transmission of his ideas to his children, since they might "mutate" his ideas, passing on some "faulty" copy of himself. No, it had to come directly from him.

But Clovis was being let down by the same biology he obsessed over. Even during the Golden Age the human lifespan could only be prolonged so much. By the time his journal begins Clovis has less a body and more a loose sack of pig-grown organs bathed in synthetic blood, and he wanted to ditch it as soon as possible. But though Golden Age scientists could take complete neural snapshots of living humans, they couldn't yet successfully upload those scans into new bodies. Attempts to do so started off well but degenerated, the minds becoming "rigid" and losing interiority. The uploaded mind descended into looping, repetitive thoughts and actions ending in complete neuron death.

Clovis knew the dangers firsthand because he'd inflicted it on his own son. Turns out all the genetic tinkering he did on Clovis II to give him lots of "advantageous" traits and benefits also gave him fatal familial insomnia. Whoops! And shortly after Clovis II's birth his wife Lusia wised up and dumped his ass, so Clovis I had no backups for his priceless bundle of legacy genes. So once Clovis II's condition kicked in and the standard cures failed, Clovis attempted to upload his son's mind into a prototype Exo body. For a little while it even seemed to work, but Clovis II's mind disintegrated the same way the others had until the body tore itself apart on the table, synthetic muscles writhing in long self-destructive spasms as his children watched him die. Yeah. There's a reason most of the Brays don't talk to Clovis.

That clearly wouldn't do, and Clovis had no intention of trusting his precious god-emperor brain to a stored scan to wait till others solved the problem. He had to crack the synthetic upload before his meat-sack finally gave out. But he'd also found a new angle to exploit: the K1 Anomaly on the Moon. The Anomaly had promised the scientists that listened to its whispers genius and power beyond their comprehension, and it happily promised Clovis that if he went to Europa, he would find all he sought and more. So he did, dragging along his poor granddaughter Elsie Bray, who never did anything to deserve this. Clovis had considered various approaches to rope all three of his granddaughters into the project (even he thought Alton was boring) but Elsie was the only one he could get his claws into. He'd figured out Elsie had inherited her father's fatal familial insomnia, and while she wanted less than nothing to do with her demented grandfather, the Exo project also looked like her only chance of survival. So she agreed to come along in exchange for Clovis keeping her diagnosis from the rest of the family, hoping she could at least limit the damage Clovis could cause.

On Europa Clovis hewed out of the ancient ice another veiled statue like the ones we found in the pyramid ship and the Black Garden. Digging up an immense, shrouded, whispering, gently moving black statue that even a glacier doesn't want to go near might cause a sane person to yell "nope!" all the way back up to orbit, so Clovis had to hide it from Noted Sane Person Elsie Bray, but he was happy to make friends with "Clarity," as he called it. He beseeched it for the answers he was promised, and it gave them to him - though not directly, because just in case this endeavor weren't fucked up enough already, let's drag the Vex into it! Clarity showed him a Vex gate that he duly built and opened to a Vex forgeworld, a massive early-universe star stoked into a nuclear furnace for heavy elements. It took some noodling around, but he figured out Clarity hadn't sent him there to theorize about rotational mixing in Pop III hypergiants. It sent him for the milk.

Spurred by Darkness, Clovis had begun to theorize that uploaded minds collapsed because they were too perfect. A regular human meat-brain has to do its thinking via messy, mistake-prone biological processes hacked together by random evolution. They have to constantly correct and filter out thousands of small errors. Exo brains didn't have those biological failings. Clovis theorized that without that noise the brain's own error corrections slowly crystallized the uploaded minds into nonfunctionality (for the record, a cool narrative take, but in no way actual neuroscience.) Vex radiolaria, or "Vex milk," the liquid suspension that serves as their preferred substrate, pooled in great quantities on the forgeworld. Radiolaria already comes with some strange properties, and when exposed to Clarity's withering influence it underwent a kind of denaturing: the Vex patterns "died" and the receptive radiolaria instead picked up some of Darkness' own attributes. Clovis believed this transformed fluid - his alkahest, the alchemical purifier - introduced into an Exo mind would seed random noise and provide the balancing influence that created a stable, viable synthetic brain.

And fortunately/unfortunately, Clovis was right. In the Destiny universe, life can't exist without both Darkness and Light. Light might be the instigator of life, the sower, but without Darkness, the reaper, the eternal arms race of predator and prey, that life either drowns in its own cancerous mutations or stagnates in perfect stability like the Exos did. So in the end it isn't much of a surprise that the alkahest of the exomind turned out to be a dose of Darkness. Clovis named the place where the alkahest flowed after its mythical counterpart, the Philosopher's Stone, and after a place where the dead came to be reborn: a Deep Stone Crypt.

Is it ironic that a man obsessed with unaltered legacy discovered immortality required forcing errors? Yes! Is this an irony Clovis I appreciated? Absolutely not. He was too busy experimenting on his fun new toys. It took a few more revisions to stabilize the Exos - adding false biological processes to stave off Dissociative Exomind Rejection, for instance - but then he got down to planning how to convert the entire human race to Exos forever indebted to him for their digital immortality. That meant first of all he needed more Vex, and who better to get those Vex than his new Exos! With their durable synthetic bodies and backup-able minds, they made perfect soldiers, especially since he could just reset their memories if they started asking awkward questions - or if they got infected by Vex-borne weaponized thoughts, which they did. All those ancestral dreams that plague the Exos of violent conflict, of barely-remembered warfare? They're real. All those glimpses of alien skies? They were there. And that Long Slow Whisper? It's the tiny fragment of Darkness speaking to each Exo. Clovis did all of it. They were just normal people who got scanned to escape incurable disease, or debt, or simple mortality; and Clovis made them war machines, the same way he tried to make Rasputin a war machine, the same way he wanted humanity to be nothing more than an extension of himself.

So Clovis kept the gate open. And somehow this dumb fucking genius didn't realize that if you can reach the Vex, the Vex can reach you*. It didn't take long for the Europa colony to detect infectious Vex patterns growing in the ice beneath them to go with the equally-twisting patterns seeded in their own minds, and to realize that the invasion had already begun. Elsie hopped bodies to better combat what she rightly viewed as a civilization-ending threat and, after settling in to her new digs, began performing "psychosurgery" to get the Vex out of the brains of infected personnel, all still without knowing about Clarity. But then she had a dream.

*To be fair, Crota made the same mistake, but also to be fair, Crota wasn't the brightest bulb in the Hive's hellish chandelier.

Clovis gave the Exos their ancestral memories of war, their dim recollections of another life, their draw to a place where they were "born." But he didn't give them the tower. All Exos share a persistent dream of walking through a field towards a distant tower. Sometimes the walk is peaceful. Sometimes it's a violent slaughter, killing their way through crowds of every person they've ever known. It's not a memory of Darkness; in fact it's more associated with Light. But Elsie had it, and then Clovis made the dire mistake of mentioning around her that others had had it too. That put Elsie's hackles up. What had he seeded in the Exo mind? What influence, exactly, had her grandfather invoked in pursuit of immortality? What bargain had he made? Had he left some lurking timebomb in them, committed some monstrous hidden crime? She wouldn't put anything past him.

Elsie Bray doesn't fuck around. The instant she realized something was fishy she burned back to the rest of the system too fast for Clovis to intercept her. She went to an institute for study of the Traveler and, with Willa's help, secured a "topological thought," a mote of paracausality, swiftly engineered into a weapon she could use to wipe out the Vex forgeworld and thus Clovis' supply of radiolaria. She messaged her grandfather, telling him that she was coming back to search the Crypt and if she found something she didn't like - such as an immense shrouded whispering black statue that even a glacier wouldn’t go near - she'd press the button.

Unfortunately Clovis managed to press the button first. A maser strike from orbit burnt Elsie-1 into a scorchmark on the ice before she could make it to the Vex gate. Clovis went into a spiral of denial and convinced himself it was okay, it was okay, he'd just rebuild her! Right! This was fine!! He hadn’t murdered his own granddaughter!! Everything was fine!!! He rebuilt Elsie's own frame and recopied her stored scan into it, blocking access to inconvenient memories, and sent her straight back into the fight. That second Exo is almost certainly the one we know as Elsie. So why mention the first one? Well, I have a hunch that somewhere out there in the story-space of Destiny, Elsie-1 might still be knocking around...

Either way, Elsie-2 also urged Clovis to close the damn gate already so they'd have a chance to stem the corruption before it, y’know, wiped out the solar system. Clovis countered with the "solution" of "decoy the Vex into attacking another planet and while Rasputin holds them off I’ll convert all of humanity to Exos." Somehow that didn't go over well. Elsie-2 had reached Done With Clovis’ Bullshit status in record time and might have gone the way of her previous incarnation if Clovis hadn’t then been disabled by another of his chickens coming home to roost. And that chicken brought the good drugs. Clovis started tripping on bespoke homemade hallucinogens cooked up by his own cells rearranged by a parasitic Vex pattern that had hitched a ride on the datalink with Clovis' assistant frame and into Clovis himself. For weeks he'd been holding conversations with a project scientist who never existed while the pattern salted itself through him in "a mess of tiny lenses growing in my deepest flesh." Now it at last revealed itself and demanded its goal: Clarity Control, "the garden's seed."

Clovis chose instead to ditch his poisoned body ahead of schedule, uploading himself and hopefully leaving the Vex construct trapped in his discarded tissue. The scan would copy him twice: one Clovis set as an AI to watch over the Crypt, the other uploaded into the custom synthetic body of his assistant. Immortality at last; he had it all. Of course it turns out that second upload told his original self to take a long walk off a short pier and then deliberately rid himself of the legacy Clovis had bent all his energies to preserving, but the AI settled happily into lording it over the Crypt...for the short time that it got to, since Elsie's second task after repelling the Vex invasion was to deactivate the AI and seal up the Crypt. Afterwards it may have passed into Rasputin's care; we know he had access and most Exos feel a distant link to the Warmind. But Rasputin knew what it was like to have Clovis Bray try to make you into a war machine, and kept AI-Clovis well-sequestered.

So the decades passed. Darkness came. The Golden Age collapsed. Rasputin dissolved himself into hidden fragments. The Exos survived, mostly. Some didn't, but woke again to find a hovering Ghosts welcoming them back. Alone among Guardians the Exos always remembered their name and number in their second life, etched as it was into their hardware. Centuries went by. No new Exos were being made, but by the same token they didn't suffer the privations that killed most humans during the Dark Ages, and so a significant fraction survived into the City Age. And the Crypt remained silent, hidden beneath the ancient ice.

Until Eramis, Kell of Darkness, came to Europa. Hunting through the ruins of the Europa colony, House Salvation found the trail of Bray Exoscience and followed it back to the Crypt itself. How could the resource-starved eliksni resist the chance to trade delicate flesh bodies for machined endurance? It was SIVA, but better; no splicing needed, no danger of nanite runaway. Synthetic immortality. All the machinery already in place, needing only to be adapted for the eliksni brain and body. And the eliksni specialize in adaptation.

Eramis dispatched her lieutenant Atraks to get the Crypt up and running while she hunted down Variks before he could warn the Guardians about House Salvation's plans. When Atraks reactivated the Crypt, she woke up AI-Clovis as well. Thus begins the Deep Stone Crypt raid, which is half stopping Atraks from building new Exos and half stopping AI-Clovis from blowing Europa to kingdom come mostly because he wants to. By the time we got there Atraks' team, amazingly enough, had successfully transferred not only her but also one of Eramis' oldest friends, Taniks (yes, that Taniks), into eliksni-form Exo bodies. We defeat Atraks-1 and Taniks-1 with brief interruptions for AI-Clovis to talk shit and do his utmost to incinerate everyone with nuclear fire before we crash his stupid space station right into his stupid Crypt. Sadly that didn't shut him up; he hooked in to a giant Exo-type head deep in the Braytech research complex where he's still muttering to himself. Elsie and Ana Bray turned up once to tell him they were taking his Stasis research (of course he was doing highly dangerous Stasis research) and he could fuck off, but otherwise he just sits there on his lonesome, presumably catching up on a couple millennia of current events. I'd like to drop-kick his big dumb head into one of Europa's many chasms, but so far the game hasn't allowed it. So far.

If AI-Clovis is going to make us ride a plummeting space station out of orbit while defusing his homemade nuke (yeah, that happens), the least he can do is cough up a nice weapon afterwards. Eyes of Tomorrow, the raid weapon of the Deep Stone Crypt, is a piece of heavy ordnance developed at the DSC to fight the invading Vex, since Clovis seems to have shared the Guardian belief that if a gun didn't solve your problems, you needed more gun. Eyes' tracking could lock on to up to four targets, but they were having trouble with the person holding it getting, y'know, murdered by the Vex. Hence Clovis insisted on a multirocket salvo so his cannon fodder could get all four rockets off before dying. Like Deathbringer, each shot from Eyes lauches multiple projectiles; unlike Deathbringer, whose orbs track towards whatever's closest, you can select its four targets beforehand. Nail all four targets and your next volley will deal even more damage, so in theory one can lock on to four red- or orange-bar ads, take them out in one salvo, then aim the boosted second shot at the yellow-bar they were protecting. It's not quite as dogged in pursuit as Truth, but it's still smart enough to turn a corner and hand-deliver a nasty surprise to people who thought they were in cover. But I still hate it, and still images don't convey the fact that all those little green electronic eyes on the front are constantly moving, googling around and looking at things, and it is the worst. I wish I could paste googly eyes over top of them, but that would probably ruin the homing or something. Leave it to Clovis to make even a sweet tracking-volley rocket launcher upsetting.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Ager’s Scepter

"One day, you will mold the world to your liking, dear brother, as I always have." --Queen Mara Sov

Type: Trace Rifle

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand

Perk: Ager's Call - Final blows with this weapon generate a slowing burst around the defeated target.

Trait: Rega's Refrain - Stasis final blows transfer ammo to this weapon's magazine from reserves.

Masterworked Trait: Will Given Form - Hold reload to drain Super energy, overflowing the magazine and empowering the beam with bonus damage and the ability to slow and freeze targets until the magazine or Super energy runs out, or the weapon is stowed. Can only be activated when Super energy is full.

Ornaments: Symbol of Rule, Springtime Scales, Cold Cheer

Origin & Description: I'm not going to try to summarize the complex relationship between Mara and Uldren Sov, and between Mara and the resurrected Crow, because we'd be here another three months while I typed and retyped a seven-page-long entry. Not least because in the recent Season of the Lost Mara's lines are so mismatched between activities that she sounds like three different people, none of whom are on speaking terms. Destiny's writers need to get together and play rock-paper-scissors or whatever to finally decide if the Queen of the Reef is a predatory manipulator, vainglorious false prophet heading for a fall, lonely visionary isolated by the weight of centuries-long schemes, ruler projecting a façade of unanswerable power and secret knowledge to hide the misfit teenager forever frozen beneath, or whatever arcane combination of all of them a person becomes over a 20,000-year lifespan. Suffice to say that Mara and Uldren are fraternal twins, that their relationship was complicated and unhealthy, that Uldren constantly got the short end of the stick, and that the same writers still can't seem to decide how she feels about Crow.

I'd like to buy the lore for Ager's Scepter because it's cool lore, but it's just too incompatible with previous lore for me to believe it came about for any other reason than "we're making a Stasis trace rifle to go with the other three and the quest needs to tie into the season plot." Ager's Scepter itself belongs to the Awoken and was stored in one of their relic/treasure vaults, Dozmary Vault*, for safekeeping. It should belong to Uldren, but Mara won't let him have it. According to the (very) thinly-veiled allegorical story told by Mara, when both Mara and Uldren (sorry, "Rega" and "Ager") told their mother Osana that they were set on leaving the Distributary, she gave them two gifts to protect them: a crown for Mara and a scepter for Uldren. Mara casually informs us that she "has the crown" - no further info on what it actually is or what it does, which makes me think it was just made up for this story - and also the scepter. She wouldn't let Uldren have because she thought he "wasn't ready for it" and would get himself into trouble - a running theme with Mara, who seems eternally convinced Uldren's failed to live up to some standard known only to her and which poor Uldren chased in vain for most of his life. She tells us, at least, that Uldren would have used the Scepter to make useful and important pathways through the Ascendant Realm and also gotten himself killed. So instead she gave him something "safe" to do and then of course Uldren got killed anyway, but maybe that was necessary for Oryx's fall? It's unclear. Either way it was a dick move, Mara. Seriously. Dick move.

* According to local legend, the Lady of the Lake gave Excalibur to King Arthur at Dozmary Pool in Southern England. Bungie's fascination with legendary swords continues.

Anyway by "scepter" Osana apparently meant "trace rifle," which, I didn't know she was a weaponsmith, but over 20,000 years you pick up a lot of hobbies. Osana built the scepter centered on an "obsidian feather," presumably the Stasis crystal at the core of the weapon, and it fires a beam of Stasis energy that damages and slows targets, freezing them with enough dwell time. Final blows generate an AoE burst of further slowing energy, hindering and potentially freezing enemies around them as well. That all seems to be a side effect, though. Since Uldren served as a scout and pathfinder, Osana built the Scepter to bore through dimensions, similar to how the Blind Well focuses paracausal energy to pierce the Ascendant Realm. Given that Uldren sans Scepter managed to sneak in to e.g. the Black Garden, it's a safe bet that with the Scepter he'd be more or less impossible to keep out of your stuff. Mara feared Uldren would use it to "open doors and challenge foes best left alone," but for us its world-rending properties manifest as destroying specific glittery-purple rocks in Ascendant Realm missions. I don't see how Uldren could have gotten himself into trouble by cutting through small chunks of ascendant rock, but hey, I'm not Queen of the Reef.

The masterwork trait for Ager's Scepter is a real oddball. Most masterwork traits improve or simplify the weapon's existing abilities, like how Trinity Ghoul's Forked Lightning changes its buff trigger from any precision kill to any Arc kill. Will Given Form, on the other hand, adds an entirely new ability: if your Super is full, you can infuse that energy into this weapon to overflow the magazine and give it bonus damage and freezy range as long as the energy lasts. There are a decent number of combat situations where your Super's full but not useful at the moment, and dumping it into a quick Ager's Scepter rampage instead can get a lot done. Since the empowered beam also does solid damage to bosses (and triggers Focusing Lens, an on-again off-again seasonal artifact mod that buffs Light damage against Stasis-marked targets), Guardians running support Supers like Stormtrance that aren't useful in damage phase can use Ager's Scepter to get some value out of that energy, especially against bosses like Atheon whose damage phases come with buffs to Super regen rate.

Now that what was once Uldren's body is occupied by an adorably puzzled Guardian, what's a Queen of the Reef to do? Mara still seems to sense part of the same paracausal connection she and her brother always shared in Crow - enough at least to pull her attention from the Ascendant Realm - but how that translates into actual interactions, well. Sometimes she seems happy her brother's back in any form at all, sometimes she's mad we "got to him" first and now he won't listen to her like he used to, sometimes she's almost offended the Traveler dared interfere with him. Me, I tried to bring him the Scepter once I had it because by rights it's his, but he had a lot of other stuff on his mind. Like threading an extremely awkward needle as if he were playing an IRL version of that party game where everyone has a post-it note on their forehead saying who they are and they have to guess who it was from other people's reactions. I say "was" because remember Savathun? Yeah, she's here too - she was masquerading as Osiris, which, I'm going to kill her just for how much she hurt Saint - and she wants to throw Mara off her game as much as possible, so naturally she screwed with Crow's head until Crow asked her to tell him about his past life. Now Crow's off working through a lot of Heavy Emotional Shit (he'll be okay, he just needs some space), Mara's upset and distracted, and Savathun's laughing her ass off. Oy. Her comeuppance can't come soon enough.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Ager’s Scepter #Season of the Lost #Crow #Mara Sov #Uldren Sov #heheh Mara acknowledged that Uldren was kind of already a Guardian in terms of doing dumb shit #sorry lady he was already doomed #I have complex thoughts about Mara being so terrified of losing people she cares about that she ends up destroying them #because she fundamentally doesn’t believe she’s worthy of love #but: another time #cute bird cutscenes though!#birb frand #this is a fun gun though don’t let the Complex Emotional Baggage get you down #fun and useful!#especially if you have glittery purple rocks.#Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Gjallarhorn

“If there is beauty in destruction, why not also in its delivery?” --Feisel Crux

Type: Rocket Launcher

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Arc | Solar | Void

Perk: Wolfpack Rounds - Rounds fired from this weapon split into tracking cluster missiles upon detonation.

Trait: Pack Hunter - Gain increased handling and reload speed when standing near allies. Firing this weapon also grants Wolfpack Rounds to nearby allies wielding non-Exotic Rocket Launchers.

Masterworked Trait: More Wolves - Increases magazine size. Final blows with Wolfpack Rounds spawn a faster, more powerful missile at the target's location.

Ornaments: GJNKR, Hraesveglur, Gjallarfoam

Origin & Description:

Give me a G!

Give me a J!

Give me a YELLHORN!

What's that spell?

PARTY TIME.

Talk to any D1 vet long enough and the name Gjallarhorn (pronounced like "gallon") - or "Gjally," or "G-horn" - will come up, often with a fond sigh. Gjallarhorn is one of the most cherished weapons in the Destiny franchise and Bungie announced its return in their 30th anniversary celebration with due pomp and circumstance. And who can blame the Destiny community for falling in love with a rocket launcher whose explosions are filled with smaller, angrier explosions? It doesn't hurt that Gjallarhorn was built to be an exquisite object. Its elegant chassis of ivory, gold, and polished wood gleams with sculpted ornamentation of wolves and wings. From the braided leather foregrip to the delicate reliefs of leaves and vines, no detail of Gjallarhorn is too small to be made beautiful. When fired its Wolfpack rounds explode on impact into a symphony of swarming cluster missiles that lift an entire arena's worth of enemies into the air with the sheer force of their detonation. There's a reason its Rise of Iron acquisition quest was named Beauty in Destruction.

Both in- and out-of-game designers intended Gjallarhorn to be a statement piece, a trophy, a weapon that marked out its bearer as a warrior of skill and achievement. Weapon designer Mark Van Haitsma, maker of so many fine Destiny exotics that I had to add extra words in here, famously added one sculpted wolf per day he worked on the Gjallarhorn; as a result it possesses the highest WPG - that's "wolves per gun"* - of any Destiny weapon. Art lead Tom Doyle described G-horn as "Hulk Hogan's belt in weaponized form," and Mark drew inspiration from the parade armor of knights and gladiators. In-universe Gjallarhorn was forged by Feizel Crux of the Crux/Lomar foundry, makers of fine rocket launchers. Crux used the armor of Guardians fallen at the Battle of Twilight Gap to build a weapon meant to be wielded by the survivors of said battle, a functional memorial to those who were lost. Its very existence celebrates the City's victory.

* Sixteen!

Gjallarhorn's long and storied history - which may rightly be termed "epic" as its namesake, the horn Heimdall will sound to call the gods to Ragnarok, appears in the Norse Edda - begins before the launch of Destiny itself. It was featured in August 2013 in one of Bungie's pre-game hype series of "Destiny Drawing Board" posts previewing game weapons that spoke to Destiny's worldbuilding and aesthetic, and a Titan wielded one in the game's live-action trailer. The weapon itself then launched with Destiny 1, but most players could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, because it was near-impossible to come by for most of Year 1. The very low drop rate of exotics combined with a long string of bad luck that had Xûr stock it the second week after launch and then NEVER AGAIN until just before Year 2 kept it out of most Guardians' vaults. When the Nine finally coughed up the goods, anyone interested in high-level content swarmed to buy it since it had by then become de facto necessary for raiding. New players were effectively locked out of endgame activities till they could get one. LFG raids would include the line "Ghorn reqd" and kick players who didn't bring it for boss damage phases, and it dominated the DPS meta much as Whisper did in 2018. Many raid encounters simply weren't interesting anymore - stack 6 Gjallarhorns and nothing could stand against you.

So when Bungie announced that Gjallarhorn was finally returning in D2 as part of the 30th Anniversary event in 2021, many vets turned to wondering what tuning they must have done to keep G-horn from gating off raids to new players. Since Gjallarhorn was specifically part of the 30th Anniversary pack, a paid DLC, the situation could be even worse this time - new players would have to shell out for this specific piece of content. We needn't have worried. Bungie dodged the problem in an elegant way: D2 Gjallarhorn retains the famous Wolfpack Rounds but adds the brilliant trait Pack Hunter*, which turns the Gjallarhorn problem neatly on its head. When one player fires Gjallarhorn, Pack Hunter causes nearby allies carrying non-Exotic rocket launchers to also get Wolfpack Rounds. That one trait changes Gjallarhorn from a barrier to entry for high-level content into one of the best choices for teaching new Guardians to raid, since it's relatively easy for even a new player to acquire a solid Legendary-tier rocket launcher. One experienced Guardian firing a Gjallarhorn in the middle of a pack of new players lets everyone then fire off their own rocket launchers with the same high-damage cluster missiles. Instead of stacking three or six Gjallarhorns for damage it actually becomes more useful in combos, adding Wolfpack Rounds to rocket launchers with other useful perks like Vorpal Weapon or Chain Reaction.

* Whose icon is literally Three Wolf Moon.

Part of the reason Gjallarhorn isn't causing problems anymore might be because they Nerfed it straight out of the box: they're building a Nerf Gjallarhorn. No, seriously. It's amazing. The Nerf blaster is a full-scale G-horn replica more than four feet long, with all the detailing of the original recast in molded plastic, and somehow it has Wolfpack Rounds. Nerf actually developed a new kind of Nerf ammo, the Mega shell, just for their version of Gjallarhorn; you fire the shell and the shell then fires three more darts. Yeah. There was actual innovation put into this piece. It even reloads the same way as the in-game weapon. It's stunning and hilarious and I can't wait to spend way too much money on it.

For your in-game dress-up needs, since Gjally returned as part of Bungie's 30th Anniversary celebration, it came with the ornament GJNKR to make it look like OG Halo's SPNKR rocket launcher. Xûr also brought along the ornament Hraesveglur which changes the wolves to eagles and redoes the detailing appropriately, adding eagle talons grasping the front of the barrel and curling winds replacing leaves and vines. It's almost an aeronautical look, resembling early bare-metal aircraft like the famous DC-3 in both color and aesthetic.

The masterwork trait More Wolves adds, well, more metaphorical wolves (because Three Wolf Moon can only be improved by More Wolves) by putting two rounds in the tube (two rounds!!) and oh yeah even more explosions because now the explosions created by the first explosion can also generate their own, third, explosion. Explosions filled with explosions filled with explosions! The Destiny playerbase tends to get grouchy, especially when anything changes, and it's been asking for Gjallarhorn back pretty much since D2 launched. Now that I've played with it, I get it. It's a marvelous weapon. Some people say that when you dress well, you feel good; for a Guardian, when you bring a stylish weapon, you feel on top of the world. I worked overtime grinding vendor rank to get to the Hraesveglur ornament purely for the look. When you fire Gjallarhorn, you feel like you're making a statement, and anyone nearby had better listen up. And for once even the crotchety old players seem happy with this particular addition: Gjallarhorn's back, it's not causing problems in the meta, and it's just as big, shiny, and wolf-y as before.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Gjallarhorn #G-horn's baaaaack!#the YELLHORN #Bungie 30th Anniversary #GJNKR #Hraesveglur #is how they spelled it for some reason #explosions in explosions in explosions #it's explosions all the way down #I can't believe the icon is goddamn Three Wolf Moon #what a beautiful weapon #this one in particular look at this one #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Duality

"The question becomes whether or not to fire, not where to aim." —Osiris

Type: Shotgun

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Arc | Solar | Void

Perk: Compression Chamber - Fires a pellet spread in hip-fire or a single high-damage slug while aiming.

Trait: On Black Wings - Pellet final blows grant a stacking precision damage and reload speed buff. Precision hits with slugs extend the duration.

Ornaments: Antiquity, Binary Function

Origin & Description: Duality as a weapon doesn't quite know its own aesthetic. With a pull quote from Osiris that seems unrelated, a lore tab about hunting eliksni corrupted by Hive war god Xivu Arath, and a shotgun design that looks polished but doesn't really add up, it feels like an exotic that either got released too early or changed at the last minute. Also when you load Duality you load it with 8 shells at once, which begs a few questions. You break it open - it's a break-action, which I think is unique in Destiny - then slam in a single prepacked cluster of eight shells like a big pack of AA batteries. In fact maybe they are AA batteries and that's why the firing chamber has this orange-red glow like LEDs pretending to be a fireplace behind an odd lattice pattern.

Overall Duality's as confused as the person it belongs to: Crow, The Lightbearer Formerly Known As Uldren Sov. Given where Crow's been for the last several months I'd expect a Tangled Shore kitbash, not the Wild-West-by-way-of-elves look Duality seems to be gesturing at. Maybe Crow just has that innate Awoken sense of style; the petal-layered underbarrel does resemble the Dreaming City shotgun Retold Tale. I have no idea why the firing chamber looks like it's pretending to be a brick oven (is it supposed to be feathers?) nor why there's a wire pulled taut along the length of the barrel. I'm sure it serves some important purpose understood by people who are good with shotguns (i.e. not me.)

The glowing firing chamber looks cool but does little other than give it Solar damage; in terms of playstyle Duality's doubled nature is another entry in the archetype of "does one thing in hip-fire mode and another in aim-down-sights mode," subtype "and the two things synergize." Its two modes aren't as tightly-coupled as Symmetry, but like the names, they're related. In Duality's case the hip-fire mode shoots a wide cone of pellets that grant stacks of the On Black Wings buff on kills, which then charge up the precision single-slug shots you fire in aim-down-sights mode. That combo encourages you to knock down red-bars with hip-fire shots, then aim down sights to target a larger enemy with the increased damage. Landing precision hits - not kills - in ADS mode extends the buff's duration, so you really want to be hitting that crit spot. That means that, like the handful of single-slug Legendary shotguns, Duality wants you to either be stupidly good with shotguns or get within spitting distance of a nontrivial foe, neither of which are my forte. Some people can go sliding right up in there with a shottie, but those people are not me*.

*They're usually the people killing me. In Crucible. With shotguns.

So anyway enough about this boring shotgun. What's up with Crow? Ever since his resurrection he's been hiding out, mostly because any Guardian who catches sight of him tends to try to kill him and he doesn't know why. Uldren already had a lot of sympathy for the eliksni and Crow's outcast status only amplified it, so when he heard about eliksni being driven mad and transformed into Wrathborn on the Tangled Shore, he headed out there to see if he could help. One of Spider's people picked him up; Spider of course recognized him immediately, thought this was hilarious, and decided Crow was going to be his pet Lightbearer. He enforced the "offer" to work for him by catching and loading Crow's Ghost, Glint (née Pulled Pork), with a little insurance in the form of explosives inside his shell.

That's where we run into him when he spears a Hive Knight to keep Osiris from getting his fool head bashed in. We dance the awkward dance of knowing who he is and not mentioning it because he asks us not to ("he must have been a bad person," Crow's concluded), and long story short we fight the Wrathborn with his help, win Crow's freedom with a little clever wording and, well, then it gets kinda messy but more about that in Hawkmoon. The good news is this hapless idiot is no longer getting murdered and/or exploited by jerks on a daily basis and Saint-14 and Osiris the bird husbands have adopted him as their bird son, which is as it should be.

Crow lent us Duality as the seasonal weapon for Season of the Hunt in order to help chase the Wrathborn in said hunts, but while it's got some use in Crucible there are just more exciting shotguns out there, and once I completed its catalyst I visited Crow to give it back. But I still have questions, like, is Ghost back there preloading sets of eight shells? Where do the armatures they're packed into come from? Why the heck does it have that wire? I guess Destiny still has to keep a few mysteries from us.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Duality #Season of the Hunt #Crow #another exotic shotgun I'll never use #I own a lot of shotguns for someone who doesn't use shotguns #okay it's not that cool but that's the tag so #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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No Time to Explain

A single word etched onto the inside of the weapon's casing: Now.

Type: Pulse Rifle

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand

Perk: Rewind Again - Precision shots and shots against combatants slowed or frozen by Stasis will return to the magazine.

Trait: Time-Slip - At 10 stacks of Rewind Again, a small portal will open, shooting bullets from an alternate timeline version of this weapon. Precision hits extend the portal's duration.

Masterworked Trait: Blast from the Side - Projectiles from the time portal shoot more frequently.

Ornaments: Frozen in Time, Golden Days, Chronos Exegesis

Origin & Description: What do you think Guardians would do if they discovered how to manipulate timelines? If you said, "Make a gun out of it," congratulations! you've read too many of these entries. The real physics must be fiendishly complex, but in Guardian math it goes, "I have one gun, but what if...two gun." Thus No Time To Explain is a pulse rifle that, in order to increase its rate of fire, casually punches through the multiverse and snags another version of itself from an alternate timeline where it's also firing, piping those rounds through a small portal-friend who hovers around spitting bullets at your targets like the Arc-Buddy from a Warlock Rift. I feel like there might be a less dimension-ripping way to double your fire rate, but hey, I'm not Elsie Bray.

Speaking of Elisabeth "Elsie" Bray, this is her weapon, except not, except now it is. D1's No Time To Explain was an exotic retooling of the Legendary weapon The Stranger's Rifle made by, of all people, Praedyth. Yeah, the warlock held captive in the Vault of Glass. From his vantage point in the Vault, which stands outside normal spacetime, Praedyth could see Elsie stepping from time to time - and the Pyramid ships advancing on us. Knowing Guardians pay attention to their gear above all else, he fashioned the first No Time To Explain and, just before he set it adrift in the timestream to make its way back to us, etched a warning inside its casing: "Soon."

Elsie Bray has a hard life cleaning up other people's messes, and the name of this gun comes from her days serving as "the Exo Stranger,"* holding together the patchwork storyline of base Destiny 1 with both hands. She got stuck playing tour guide because of whatever time shenanigans incidentally created Worldline Zero, since at least getting locked into a Groundhog-Day loop of the darkest timeline also lets her teleport in at important moments to aim the player at the next objective. When both players and characters demanded an explanation, or at least narrative consistency, she famously replied, "I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain," and hence this weapon was named.

*We didn't find out Elsie was the Exo Stranger until D2's Warmind DLC, but since her D1 outfit and this weapon's perk symbol use the same split-circle Bray emblem worn by Ana Bray and Banshee, she was likely always a Bray.

In Beyond Light Elsie's back (from outer space!) and she comes bearing gifts, with plenty of time to explain, and inside her rifle's casing is written only: "Now."

Turns out there's a bleak future in our...future, a grim potential outcome in which the Guardians - including Elsie's sister Ana, whom she desperately attempts to save, every time, and loses, every time - fall to Darkness. Her efforts as the Exo Stranger directing us to slay the Black Heart were part of her latest attempt, but so far we're still on track to destruction. To help us avert it, she brought us two things. The first is the D2 version of this gun, but its penchant for time manipulation isn't the lead item. In fact it's barely a footnote compared to the second thing: Stasis, the first Darkness-empowered subclass.

See, in her playthroughs of the bad ending Elsie always sees Guardians lured in by the paracausal power of Darkness manipulation, a shadowed mirror of the abilities granted by the Light, and slowly corrupted by their influence. All her attempts to stand between Guardians and a new paracausal toy have, predictably, failed. So this time she's decided that if she can't keep Guardians from using Darkness she'll introduce it to us up front instead so that we learn how to control it instead of letting it control us. In other words she's the Cool Mom of Darkness Powers: she'd rather we try it at home first to make sure we're being safe, except it's not so much "safe" as "not wholly corrupted by Darkness' own avatar and bent into instruments of its will." I don't know what type of Cool Parent that calls for. But Elsie's trying!

When, during the events of Beyond Light, we first encounter wielders of Darkness - eliksni of House Salvation on Europa learning to use Dark Splinters - Elsie intervenes to tell us what that power is and how we can learn to use it ourselves before we try to work it out on our own. She confirms an old lore theory: that though the Traveler and the Pyramids (or "the Entity," or "the Voice," or even "the Veil" - we haven't settled on a name) function as avatars of their respective powers, both Darkness and Light exist ambiently as universal, amoral forces. That ambient paracausal power can be harnessed by anyone through training and intermediaries like the Splicer Gauntlet or the Splinters; harnessed by anyone, not just Guardians, though we have a head start. A substantial head start, since it only takes the story campaign of Beyond Light for us to work out the basics of our new powers and start shredding face with them.

Stasis is the first Darkness-based subclass of Destiny (players anticipate it won't be the last, but Bungie hasn't confirmed.) Its three iterations, Behemoth (Titan), Revenant (Hunter), and Shadebinder (Warlock), are ice-themed, maybe a deliberate inversion of the fiery Light-based Solar subclass. Its three keywords/action verbs are Slow, Freeze, and Shatter. Despite the chilly aesthetic and us first encountering it on the frozen moon Europa, Stasis itself is less "frosty cold" and more "cosmic ice." It invokes a primordial stillness, energetic motion quieting into an underlying universal structure typified by a distorted, gridlike pattern that appears when Stasis crystals form.

Mechanically Stasis is less about direct damage and more about battlefield control. The abilities and grenades don't pack much of a direct punch, but they slow, freeze, and block enemies, locking them in place and silencing their own abilities. Some Stasis abilities create Stasis crystals, large blocks of paracausal ice, which can incapacitate enemies, create temporary barriers, and even build platforms to let Guardians jump, crouch, and worm their way even further out of bounds. Stasis crystals can then be shattered in a number of ways, dealing sharp AoE damage as the shrapnel takes out whatever's nearby. Because it doesn't do much direct damage, Stasis is built for combos, especially weapon combos, and has many knock-on mechanics built around freezing and shattering enemies. It's also a hell of a lot of fun, for the record. If Darkness has this caliber of stuff on tap, no wonder all those Guardians fell for it.

Stasis also comes with a new system for subclass trees, by which I mean "not subclass trees." Light subclasses have three trees, each with its own twist on the Super plus benefits based around an expected playstyle; for example the Solar Warlock tree "Attunement of Sky," meant for aerial play, comes with a special mid-air dodge and the ability to hover while aiming down sights. Stasis on the other hand debuted the new system, Aspects and Fragments. Instead of three preset ability trees, players equip 2 Aspects and some number of Fragments from a pool of options. Aspects are class-specific and have a significant effect on your gameplay, while Fragments are class-agnostic and let you mix and match minor benefits. You pick up new Aspects and Fragments via research questlines from Elsie as together you work out new ways to wield Darkness (and get some good lore tidbits in the process.)

This experimental new system has been a hit with both players and devs - players because it allows more fine-tuning, and devs because it greatly expands the creative space for unusual non-Super powers like the Shadebinder's Bleak Watcher turret-creation ability. Following on this success Bungie announced in Fall 2021 that instead of designing new Darkness subclasses they'll be overhauling the Light subclasses to use the same system with brand-new abilities. Void is up first, dropping with Witch Queen in February, and personally I'm very much looking forward to the Warlock ability that lets you create a tiny black hole to be your friend :D. So really Elsie, how bad can this timeline be?

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #No Time to Explain #Elsie Bray #Stasis #the Exo Stranger #Darkness subclasses #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Pondering different formats/hosting platforms for the Destiny exotic weapons Compendium. The entries are based around Tumblr’s image-set format, but the platform itself really isn’t suited for hosting a reference compendium. Reblogging preserves the original post, so changes I make upstream like changing images, correcting text, or just adding the new entries don’t propagate out to the versions other people are most likely to see. People outside Tumblr are wary of linking to it since Tumblr doesn’t exactly have the best reputation for accuracy - it’s a platform known for transformative fanworks, not references - and I have no way of knowing if they do. Anyone looking for it may also end up on my regular feed, which may be uninteresting or off-putting to them.

I’ve thought about going to a Wordpress-type blog since it’s the closest format I can think of to Tumblr’s image-set posts, but I don’t want to deal with actually bending the layout into what I want. Building my own website would let me promote it more - I’m not in it for the fame and/or non-existent ad revenue, but it’s enough work that I want people to see it - but I barely have enough time to keep up the Compendium itself, let alone build a new site with new CSS layouts etc. There are wiki-hosting sites but wiki entries are primarily text and I think the graphics are a large part of the appeal (and the work) for a Compendium entry. Wikis also have an air of being objective references while Compendium entries have a fair dose of my own experiences and opinions.

I don’t know. Pros and cons. Anyone have any thoughts?

#Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #words about words

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Ticuu’s Divination

Three points, pushed through forever.

Type: Combat Bow

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Arc | Solar | Void

Perk: Sacred Flame - Hipfiring this weapon fires multiple tracking projectiles. Targets marked by these projectiles explode upon death, or when struck by another Sacred Flame's explosion.

Trait: Causality Arrows - Arrows fired while aiming down sights cause Sacred Flames to instantly detonate.

Masterworked Trait: Causality Quiver - Perfectly-drawn arrows that detonate Sacred Flame increase arrow damage. Striking targets unaffected by Sacred Flame instead refreshes Causality Quiver's duration.

Ornaments: Hasta Solari, Ferromancer, Solar Astrolabe

Origin & Description: Combining the best traits of Le Monarque and Graviton Lance, Ticuu's has my name written alllllll over it. And also Ticuu's name, because Ticuu was a person. A Cabal psion Flayer, to be specific, who with typical psion inscrutability decided that if he was going to make a bow, he was going to make the most confusing bow possible. It almost certainly cost Ticuu his life, or worse, his existence, to arm this bow; but once it was armed, it never needed to be reloaded. The three arrows inside this bow are not quite real arrows; or maybe they are real, but they're the same three real arrows looped over and over again through time. You don't need any more than three, because the bow doesn't fire them. Instead it fetches a future in which the targets have arrows in them. Or Ticuu fetches that future. Or he already had it, pinned into the bow by the three points in his mind harmonized across time's empty wheel. Consider the name: divination. There are many words for attempting to predict the future, but "divination" in particular evokes the examination of signs and symbols to discern what's already been fated to happen. You didn't choose to put arrows in those targets. They already had arrows in them, in the future, and this bow just fetched that future into the now. Yeah. Psions have an odd relationship to time.

And an odd relationship with the Cabal. The Cabal Empire uses the term "Cabal" to refer to both the empire and its main species, the seven-foot-tall exosuited space rhinos we so often dispatch. While the empire had a number of "client species," annexed races that lived under Cabal "protection," the psions are the most directly subjugated - likely an early conquest by Cabal military seeking to weaponize their abilities. Psions exhibit unique mental powers that function outside the common paracausality-fueled abilities known to Guardians, Hive, eliksni, etc. The Cabal keep the psions "indentured," at best skilled specialists with little hope of advancement, at worst outright slaves, in order to make use of said powers. Within the military psions function as engineers, pilots, and long-range fighters; many serve on the more intellectual side of combat operations, working as after-action analysts and intelligence experts.

A select few are "allowed" to grow into their full adult state, known as a Psion Flayer, though it isn't clear what missing element lets them do so. One theory says they need pure accumulation of knowledge, which might explain why a group tried tapping Rasputin nodes to enable the transformation.* Emperor Calus had a number of psions loyal to his cause, as he seemed to have been the most charitable towards their race - even claiming he would have freed them had he not been deposed - but it was his daughter Empress Caiatl who finally declared all psions free and equal citizens after Xivu Arath's attack, offering them the choice to stay and fight or leave the Cabal fleet. Surprisingly some did elect to continue fighting for the Empress, though the splinter sect that remembered the attempts at the Sundial and with the Almighty expressed their displeasure by attempting to assassinate Zavala (don't worry, he's fine).

*It worked, though Ana opined, "they're just gonna make [Rasputin] mad," so those Flayers might not have lived too long even if we hadn't intervened.

Even in their deliberately weakened state psions are capable of telepathy, telekinesis, and a harmony of minds known as "metaconcert" that allows several psions to pool their mental abilities to solve problems and create shared realities. Psion Flayers wield far more dramatic powers, calling down fire and lightning, freezing combatants in place or teleporting them around at will. A detachment of Psion Flayers assigned to the forward Cabal forces on Mars successfully lowered the small moon Phobos into a physically-unstable orbit around the planet, maintaining a dangerously-low altitude in order to use it as a staging base. One Psion Flayer, Otzot, constructed - or reconstructed - the clairvoyant OXA machine that could view both past and future, though it dispensed that information in maddeningly vague ways. Psions themselves have a complex social structure that included a domination early in their history by a small group of powerful individuals known as "God-Thoughts" who imposed their command on the rest of society by pure mental might; certain schools of religious thought are still considered verboten among them. They have a powerful sense of the community over the individual and a shared reverence for ancestors, implying that their spirits are still present - which, given the odd psion relationship with time, might literally be true.

Whenever I'm called upon to explain Ticuu's Divination to new players, I describe it as "mark for deletion." The tracking hip-fire arrows tag enemies to be deleted, and the ADS ones delete them. Simple. Less simply, Ticuu's is another exotic that has different behavior in hip-fire vs. ADS mode. In hip-fire mode Ticuu's will put up tracking markers on the first three enemies it picks up. Firing it in that mode - you don't have to draw the bow all the way, just pluck the string - sends marker arrows to seek those three targets and tag them with Sacred Flame. You can have more than three marked targets up at a time, limited by the timer on Sacred Flame. Tagged targets don't take burn damage but do show a visual flame effect. That part's important for the next step: switch to ADS mode, draw the bow properly this time, and precision-hit one of the marked targets. Nailing a Sacred Flame aura with an ADS-drawn arrow causes that aura to detonate - and if that detonation nicks another Sacred Flame aura, it'll go off as well. It's like a little homebrew Graviton Lance chain reaction, but only through the targets you've marked.

The catalyst adds a more complicated firing pattern that makes it more useful for heavy single targets: precision hits on a Sacred Flame target give stacks of Causality Quiver, which increases arrow damage. Sending out the marking arrows instead refreshes the timer on the Causality Quiver buff. So you can mark a heavy target with Sacred Flame, detonate it with a precision hit to gain a damage buff, then mark it again to refresh the timer. It requires more thought to pull off but expands the bow's range nicely. And yes, precision arrows will detonate Sacred Flame auras laid down by a teammate, so you can have one player doing nothing but marking targets and a second doing nothing but detonating them when they reach critical mass - or two people marking targets and a third killing them with a different weapon, since Sacred Flame will also detonate if the enemy just dies.

With the addition of Ticuu's Divination in Season 13 (the seasonal exotic of Season of the Chosen, to go with the Cabal theme) we now have crowd control bows in all Light elements: Ticuu's for Solar, Trinity Ghoul for Arc, and Le Monarque for Void. We don't have a Stasis bow yet, but I'm sure they're working on it; if it follows the current pattern for Stasis exotics it'll be in the kinetic slot rather than energy, a welcome addition that would double the number of exotic kinetic bows. In the meantime I'll be out here marking some fools to get deleted.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Ticuu's Divination #Season of the Chosen #psions #psion flayers #Empress Caiatl #Mark For Deletion #all hail the crowd-control bow #seriously it is a lot of fun though #thanks Ticuu!#if you had to die at least you died for a cool bow #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Salvation’s Grip

“I respect what I cannot steal from and you cannot take from the dark.” --Excerpt from an old eliksni salvage manifest

Type: Grenade Launcher

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand

Perk: Cryocannon - Hold to charge, release to fire. This weapon’s projectiles create Stasis crystals and freeze nearby targets.

Trait: Flash Freeze - Charging this weapon increases the freeze radius and amount of Stasis crystals created.

Ornaments: Unyielding Grasp

Origin & Description: You can only push someone so far before they snap. Guardians can only beat the shit out of the eliksni so much before they go fucking feral on us. And there's only so many invisible walls you can watch players circumvent because your community has "escape the level map" on their default to-do list before even Bungie has to throw up their hands and say, "fuck it, you're going to get out of bounds anyway. Make platforms wherever you want. We don't care. In fact we'll give you a gun that can shoot platforms. That's how much we don't care! Fine. Fine! Whatever!! Have fun, you fucking lunatics!!!" and run away to go live in the woods. Or on an ice moon, as it turns out.

Eramis the Shipstealer, newly-minted Kell of the eliksni House of Devils, has had it up to here. First she had to watch as the eliksni homeworld, Riis, was devastated by Darkness as the Traveler fled their skies. She stood against the Pyramid ships, losing two of her four eyes for her trouble, and barely escaped alongside her mate Athrys. Then the Devils took the heaviest losses in the Battle of Twilight Gap, serving as the front-line troops who assaulted the City walls, driven back despite Eramis herself mounting heroic charges that put many Guardians permanently in the ground. Then she got caught and imprisoned in the Awoken Prison of Elders, where she ruled the prison's combat arena* by day and brooded over the future by night. Between matches she bonded with cell neighbor Praksis, full of ideas for new technology to snare the Traveler and make it give them its Light. Eramis chided him for that. Reliance was a great weakness, she said. When the Great Machine departed the eliksni were weaker than when it had arrived.

* Why does an Awoken prison have a combat arena? The real reason is to justify the D1 PvE horde mode of the same name, but the game itself has yet to explain why the otherwise-enlightened Awoken have, y'know, organized prison fights.

Eramis and Praksis busted out in the prison break that also cost Cayde-6 his life, and she got to work right away. She rallied the Devils' remnants, proclaimed herself Kell, and led them in a daring daylight raid on the City itself to steal a sample of active SIVA. But the mission failed and her dreams of resurrecting the Devils seemed finished. Then she came to a decision: if the House of Devils was so weak, then it should die. Whatever the Houses were doing, it wasn't working. There had to be a new way - had to, or the eliksni would stagnate and die in this endless, useless crusade. She started to dream of the Hive beneath the festering moon of Earth and finally went there herself, hacking her way through Hive catacombs until she came to the secret they venerated: the Pyramid ship, the black knife-edge Eramis recognized from the day the Whirlwind had swept away Riis.

This time, the shape speaks to her. It says: the destruction of your world was a lesson in dependence. You depended on the Traveler and it made you weak. You followed it across the stars, asking it to make you whole again, and it left you ruined and abandoned. Stop waiting, it says. No one is coming for you. You must be your own salvation.

It gave her one last vision of wind-whipped snow. Eramis didn't need to be told twice. She followed that vision to Jupiter's frozen moon Europa, a place no one else bothered with. Eramis' forces dug into the ice and struck gold: an abandoned Golden Age human colony. It provided shelter, camouflage, and plenty of salvage to get the ball rolling. Underneath the ice the bulbous rounded shapes of the first true eliksni buildings in centuries took shape. Above the city Eramis raised the white-blue banner of House Salvation. Variks the Loyal followed her call for the scattered eliksni to come home to the city, now named Riis-Reborn. He was skeptical of Eramis' professed disdain for the old House of Devils, and her lieutenants were skeptical of the scribe they called traitor, but Eramis knew Variks had the ear of the Reef eliksni. Variks spread Eramis' call across the system: if you tire of war, of the Spider's yoke, of scrounging for your next meal, come to Europa. Start again.

But Eramis wanted more than a new home. The name of House Salvation was a promise, and she meant to fulfill it. When one ship of the Black Fleet appeared on Europa, Eramis was there to greet it. She boarded the ship, heard its whispers, and chose "strength" - to become the Kell of Darkness, gaining the paracausal abilities of Stasis. She emerged with an icy ruff of Stasis crystals framing her head and holding a Dark Splinter, a physical fragment that helps mediate a connection to Darkness. Praksis studied the Splinter while Eramis drew additional fragments from the Cruxes of Darkness that had begun to appear across Europa, granting them to her lieutenants.

Eramis reveled in her newfound powers, promising her people their revenge on the Great Machine and the Guardians who hunted them. Variks, on the other hand, was terrified. There was turning away from the Great Machine, and then there was embracing the very force that had destroyed their homeworld. He stole a handful of Splinters and fled Riis-Reborn for a comms station on the Europan surface, broadcasting a warning to anyone who would listen that Eramis had tapped into something very dangerous indeed. Thus begins Beyond Light, our acquisition of Stasis and takedown of House Salvation.

After the final battle with Eramis - during which the Kell of Darkness is finally consumed by her own power - we got to poke around House Salvation's inner works, including Praksis' experiments with the Splinters. One of those turned out to be a prototype grenade launcher (IDK what it is with eliksni and grenade launchers) built around Stasis energy, hence its name: the icy clasp of House Salvation stilling its enemies. You pick up Salvation's Grip right after the end of the story campaign in order to begin a second story quest with Elsie, using SG's Stasis-powered explosives to shatter the small black Entropic Shards scattered around Europan patrol zones.

Salvation's Grip is the pathfinder exotic for Stasis and basically works like that subclass' Glacier grenades: lob one one of its projectiles at an enemy or solid surface and it'll burst against it to flash-freeze into a thicket of tall Stasis crystals. Chuck it at the floor to put a wall between you and various unpleasantness, at an enemy to freeze them within a cluster of crystals, or against a vertical surface to create, you guessed it, a brand-new temporary platform of horizontal crystals. It also has a "hold to charge" option, increasing the freeze radius and number of crystals created. Introducing an exotic for a brand-new element and gameplay mechanic has to be a dicey proposition, and thus other than its elemental effects Salvation's Grip plays it safe with a simple perk and straightforward gameplay; it even projects a target to show where the fired grenade will land. It also sticks remarkably close to the actual Glacier grenade's behavior. Maybe to let players fool around with Stasis without equipping the subclass itself?

Despite being a prototype Salvation's Grip looks much more trim than other eliksni weapons we've picked up. Possibly because it was made using salvage from the Europan Braytech facilities, which look like a cross between a 50s pulp scifi cover and an issue of Architectural Digest. The Unyielding Grasp ornament further tidies it up with jade plating and red cord ornamentation, not unlike Malfeasance's Red String of Fate.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Salvation's Grip #House Salvation #Beyond Light #Eramis #Kell of Darkness #let's talk about Eramis' cool crystal ruff though #how rad is that thing #and Eramis' whole crownlike headpiece #so cool!#so cool.#Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Lorentz Driver

“Weapon system no longer explodes when trigger is pulled.” --Prototype 7.2.1 Revision Notes

Type: Linear Fusion Rifle

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Arc | Solar | Void

Perk: Lagrangian Sight - This weapon marks targets with an automated targeting system. Final blows on marked targets generate a telemetry pattern. Picking up telemetry patterns grants bonus ability energy. Collecting 3 telemetry patterns without dying grants this weapon bonus damage for a long duration.

Trait: EM Anomaly - A precision final blow with this weapon creates an implosion that pulls in nearby targets and damages them with an additional detonation.

Masterworked Trait: Jump Driver - Lorentz Driver gains an enhanced radar. Additionally, while this weapon has 3 telemetry patterns, EM Anomaly detonations no longer require a precision final blow.

Ornaments: Stable Prototype, Open Hands

Origin & Description: There isn't much to say about Lorentz Driver lorewise, which is good because I want to talk about railguns. Lorentz Driver itself is an energy-slot linear fusion rifle serving as seasonal exotic of Season of the Lost, which had a welcome focus on fusion and linear fusion rifles (including the long-overdue buffs for Sleeper). It has two cool little gimmicks: one, its targeting system will randomly pick a nearby enemy that you can kill to drop a little dangly bit and when you pick up the dangly bit it actually shows up on your weapon hanging underneath the barrel like a keychain. Collect three keychains and you win 30 seconds of increased damage and, when masterworked, extra implosions. Those are the second cool gimmick: precision final blows create a floating Void orb that pulls in nearby enemies before detonating. These AoE effects make it surprisingly useful in crowds for a weapon archetype that's usually high-precision single-target.

While "lorentz driver" isn't a phrase most physicists would use, it's a technically correct name for what scifi calls a railgun: a pair of parallel rods or rails, electrically charged, with a conducting projectile laid across them that is then accelerated thanks to the Lorentz force, a fun interaction of electricity and magnetism. If an electrically-charged particle moves around within a magnetic field, it experiences a force - the Lorentz force - perpendicular to its direction of travel.* It gets shoved sideways, in other words. In a railgun the conducting projectile is the charged particle; the loop of current formed by the charged rails generates a magnetic field at right angles to the direction of the rails. Any tiny motion of the projectile thus causes a Lorentz force that ends up pushing it along the rails, causing the projectile to move faster and create a larger force, which pushes it faster, and so on until you end up spitting a titanium slug at supersonic speed.

* The Lorentz force is also what bends particle tracks in cloud and bubble chambers into circles. Physicists identify particle tracks by using magnetic fields of known strength and measuring the radius of the circle the tracks are bent into to solve for the particle's mass-energy.

Railguns face a lot of practical challenges: the power requirements are enormous and the heat of friction rapidly shreds the rails themselves. But in scifi fantasy wonderland we can handwave all those problems away and use railguns as a staple of futuristic heavy artillery. While the archetype name "fusion rifle" makes sense in a scifi-plasma-energy-rifle way, the name "linear fusion rifle" is a little harder to parse, and for lack of any clearer interpretation most players assume that means "railgun." Unlike cluster-firing fusion rifles, LFRs fire a single, high-precision, very-high-powered bolt, so they fit the concept. Anyway...what was I talking about? Oh right, Lorentz Driver. I don't know what to do with this gun in a meta sense, but it's not bad. It feels good on the trigger, the implosions are useful, and while its targeting system could be a little less random about picking its target, collecting the little dangly keychains isn't too hard and once you have the catalyst done it means you can cover the field in imploding purple orbs. Plus the dangly keychains appear on the rail under the barrel as you pick them up. I shouldn't be as charmed by that as I am, but I really am. Get yourself a railgun, get out there, and shoot some keychains out of your enemies.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Lorentz Driver #railguns!#and particle physics #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Cryosthesia 77K

There are things colder than cold.

Type: Sidearm

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand

Perk: LN2 Burst - Swap firing mode after a final blow to enable a Charged Shot.

Trait: Liquid Cooling - Direct hits by a Charged Shot instantly freeze the target. Indirect hits freeze combatants and slow enemy Guardians.

Masterworked Trait: Cold Efficiency - Shattering a frozen target refills this weapon's magazine from reserves.

Ornaments: Deletion Protocol

Origin & Description: The name Cryosthesia, as my spellcheck keeps reminding me, is not a real word. "Cryo-" means "cold" and the "-sthesia" suffix means sensation or perception, as in "anesthesia" ("no sensation") or "synesthesia" ("same sensation"), so "cryosthesia" is "the feeling of being cold." This pistol certainly delivers that, since the 'K' in Cryosthesia's name doesn't mean "thousand", it means "Kelvin", as in "liquid nitrogen boils at 77 Kelvin and I'm about to make that your problem." A gun that shoots liquid nitrogen is weird, but not implausible; inert, plentiful, and subliming harmlessly into the atmosphere, liquid nitrogen is a common real-world cryogen found tanked up in big metal "LN2" dewars in nearly any scientific lab. Cryosthesia, on the other hand, is not liquid-nitrogen cold but cosmic-ice existential Stasis cold. Touching something that's 77 Kelvin (that's a balmy -196 degrees Celsius, by the way, or -321 degrees Fahrenheit in freedom units) can't be a great experience, but getting hit with a Stasis blast probably feels much, much colder, at least in your soul.

Liquid nitrogen also makes excellent ice cream, and Cryosthesia makes excellent popsicles out of annoying enemies. Like the Stasis subclass it specializes in crowd control and in action it's the weapon equivalent of yelling "hang on a minute!" Putting down one red-bar enemy charges up a Stasis blast you can fire to tell another nearby enemy to wait its goddamn turn. I like to use it against the standard Vex formation of 2-3 Goblins and their Minotaur babysitter: knock out a gobbo, freeze the Minotaur before it can use its melee to hammer me straight down into the ground like a tent peg, then take out the rest of the gobbos and ready something nastier to deal with the big guy as it thaws. Once you've completed the catalyst - it's the seasonal weapon of Season of the Splicer, so you'll get it from Banshee - you can switch to a more one-two punch style of using Cryosthesia to freeze a target and another method to shatter it, thus refilling Cryosthesia's magazine. It comes with the usual sidearm traits of quick fire rate and high but very short-range damage, so you could do a lot worse when you're swarmed.

Cryosthesia comes to us as a token of goodwill from the eliksni Misraaks, Kell of House Light, as part of negotiating the current uneasy-yet-still-holding alliance between the City and House Light. We've talked before many times about the fracture of eliksni society and the desperate ends to which it's driven its leaders - trying to reconstruct old Houses, embracing Dark powers, or abandoning any pretense of the old ways altogether - but Misraaks pursues the elusive dream of an eliksni-human alliance. He's allied with Variks and knew of Riis-Reborn, but instead of rebuilding a separate society he seeks to "redeem" the eliksni in the eyes of the Traveler. Step one in his plan is to gain access to the Traveler and entry into the Last City via a tactic no House has yet tried: asking nicely.

And he got it, or at least the start of it, because at the start of Season of the Splicer the Last City got into trouble. Again. This time it was Savathun - or at least Quria, her subjugated Taken-Vex Mind - and rather than hucking a sunkiller at us, they took the sun away. Anyone else sensing a sun theme? Anyway, after practicing on the Dreaming City Quria cursed the Last City too, this time with eternal night. Unlike the Dreaming City, time chugged along just fine and people could leave and re-enter the City; instead the smothering simulated blanket of darkness drained electricity, fouled everyone's sleep, and seemed to heighten existing tensions and anxieties. In fact it seemed to be more about sowing discord than actually imperiling the City, which would fit Savathun's MO. As with the previous Last City threat, Rasputin's the obvious solution, but as much as I desperately want an epic Rasputin-Quria kaiju battle (sun AI! fighter of the night AI!) Red's still out of commission. So we needed another way to outfox that rare Vex threat that can't be punched in the face. Enter Misraaks.

Misraaks, it turns out, is one of the last practitioners of the eliksni discipline called Sacred Splicing - manipulating traces of ambient paracausality to affect machinery, in particular the Vex. Eliksni religion often gets simplified to "worshipping machinery," but this season gives us some much-needed insight from their perspective. Their name for the Traveler, "The Great Machine," might seem reductive or insulting to humans, but to eliksni it's one of reverence. A machine - a made thing - is an expression of the combined will and spirit of its makers. Machines aren't sacred in and of themselves, but as vessels for the united spirit and effort of many eliksni contributing to the collective good. A ketch means everything to its crew - air, food, shelter, livelihood - and it takes all of the crew's efforts to keep it going; the ketch itself, then, becomes the vessel for its crew's desire to support their comrades and improve their mutual welfare. Eido, Misraaks' adoptive daughter (yes, she's named for Sjur Eido, and yes, we stole her rocket launcher) and Scribe of House Light, talks about how eliksni sometimes built piecemeal representations of the Traveler with every passing House contributing a panel to the sculpture - symbolizing how, even though the Houses embodied different philosophies, they were united in building the civilization enabled by the Great Machine. In that sense then the "Great Machine" is the expression of a far larger will - the will of the universe, or at least of the Light, which is really a more accurate way of looking at it than the human version.

As part of this philosophy linking will and machinery, eliksni "Sacred Splicers" developed the ability to directly manipulate machinery by drawing on faint traces of Light. They're especially talented at messing with Vex and the Vex network, and without either a lynchpin Mind to punch or a grouchy bastard AI to sic on Quria, their ability to unravel a simulation from the inside was the next best bet. So in return for sheltering the endangered House Light within the City walls - and letting the devs repurpose the excellent Botza District map from the final two encounters of Scourge - Misraaks has guided Guardians in their first fumbling attempts at splicing through Quria's curse. And while subtlety and diligent practice aren't Guardians' strong suits, we can pour in far more power - enough to kick down the door and storm the Vex network in a violent high-budget Hackers remake.

And that's pretty much where we're at at the moment: hacking (heh) our way through an excellent Vex remake of Tron, hunting for Quria somewhere within, while outside different City factions argue and rage about letting the species that's been their primary threat for the last thousand years inside the walls. We found what claimed to be Quria, but I don't believe that thing was the real Mind for a second. I'm as sure that that wasn't Quria as I'm sure that Osiris is currently not Osiris, which by the way is a thing, but that's a bigger problem that will probably come to a head in the next couple weeks and I'm betting remain a problem till the beginning of 2022, when the Witch Queen expansion finally drops. In the meantime though: don your best neon, strap on your powerglove, load your sidearm, and come do battle in CYBERSPACE.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Cryosthesia 77K #Season of the Splicer #Misraaks #Eido #TRON SEASON TRON SEASON TRON SEASON #bungo devs like #'it's been a hard year'#'treat yourself'#treat yourself to Tron #this season's ritual weapon is a Hackers movie reference like it doesn't get much better #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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DCE February Patch Notes

Destiny 2 Compendium Exoticarum February 2022 Patch Notes

New game content:

added Beyond Light exotic Salvation's Grip

added Deep Stone Crypt raid exotic Eyes of Tomorrow

it's super long

don't judge me

something something "didn't have time to write a short letter so wrote a long one instead"

added Season of the Hunt exotics Duality and Hawkmoon

added Season of the Lost exotics Lorentz Driver and Ager's Scepter

added 30th Anniversary exotics Forerunner and Gjallarhorn

added Season of the Splicer ornament Roar of the Wyrm (Whisper of the Worm)

it's late because I had to find someone with a very wide monitor to take a screenshot that wasn't cut off at the end. bungo y u make long exotics.

added Dawning ornaments Cheerspreader (Riskrunner) and Compliance (Anarchy)

added 30th Anniversary ornaments Cedar and Ash (Witherhoard), Dead Man's Revenge (Dead Man's Tale), The Pink Mist (Malfeasance), Poison Wings Spread (Le Monarque), Spark from Bone (Trinity Ghoul), Stagecoach (The Last Word), and You Think You're Big Time? (Xenophage)

updated Cryosthesia 77K for mechanics changes

updated Arbalest to add intrinsic barrier-piercing

Arbalest also got a catalyst, but it just adds the standard trait Genesis

New lore:

updated Vex Mythoclast because I FINALLY GOT IT

it's rad you guys you should get this gun

added a couple new Caiatl images to Heir Apparent

that whole entry needs an overhaul

Fixes:

added the missing Tertiary Objective ornament to Trinity Ghoul, not that anyone notices that ornament anyway

rewrote the last part of Whisper's text and added a gif of the view through the Vault gate

*falls over face-first into couch* AND THAT'S ALL Y'ALL GET TILL WITCH QUEEN

#Destiny 2 #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #patch notes #time for a nap #and then updating all the footer links ughhhhh #but right now nap #this is the wager of existence

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sundayswiththeilluminati · 3 years ago

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Dead Man’s Tale

“Long, short, they all end the same way.” --Katabasis

Type: Scout Rifle

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand

Perk: Cranial Spike - Chaining precision hits grants bonus damage and quickens reload speed.

Trait: Transformative - Future drops of this weapon will have random rolls.

Masterworked Trait: Dark-Forged Trigger - Removes hipfire penalties.

Ornaments: Burial Wrap, Remembrance, Dead Man's Revenge, Noble Burden

Origin & Description: Katabasis: the descent. Katabasis is the going-down, the journey to the underworld, the fall from paradise into cruel reality. Katabasis is the dead man, and he's got one hell of a tale.

Guardians don't have to listen to the Vanguard. In fact a lot of them don't. One of the ones who didn't was the Hunter Katabasis and his Ghost Gilgamesh. Disillusioned when the Traveler stood by as the City burned during the Red War, the pair listened when Emperor Calus offered glory and riches to Guardians who might rally to his banner. Hey, remember Calus? The hedonistic Cabal ex-Emperor madman lounging aboard his prison-turned-pleasure barge Leviathan, indulging in delirious celebration of the end coming on the points of the knife-edged fleet he saw at our galaxy's edge? Remember how he proclaimed himself the Darkness' herald, prophet of the world's doom? How's he doing now that that end has literally arrived? Darkness is here, the Pyramids hang in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't, and Calus and Leviathan disappeared along with the four worlds Darkness swallowed up. And now that we know what he was up to just after said worlds were swallowed, I hope that motherfucker stays gone.

When "the end is nigh" became "now," Calus at first waited for Darkness to present itself before him, as it must surely do for its most faithful herald…but it didn't. No matter, he decided. This must be a test of his might. He went about figuring out how to speak with it, which meant figuring out who to try speaking with in the first place. While the Traveler seems to represent a singular avatar/representation of Light, the Pyramids are some kind of group manifestation of Darkness and have no individual representative that we know of (though we did meet something face-to-borrowed-face in the Black Garden). Darkness whispers to many, including us, but as far as we know only three entities have ever faced it directly, and of those three only Oryx truly conversed with it through the vessel of an unborn ogre. Calus, like Oryx before him, would need to create a proxy for the Dark.

He selected as the medium for this conversation the Scorn, since the Dark-tainted Ether coursing through those reanimated husks made them receptive to its words while their own rotted minds left them an empty vessel for its influence. Cabal Psions have powerful mental abilities of metaconcert and communion that he commanded them to use to fuse Scorn into a hivemind strong enough to make a connection. Then he planned to use the Crown of Sorrow, a captured Hive artifact that linked the wearer's thoughts to others (an artifact he decided to test, by the way, by cloning a new random Cabal and then plunking the Crown on its head, creating a big mess we had to clean up in the Crown of Sorrow raid.) The Psions would link up the Scorn hivemind, Calus would wear the Crown, and he'd use the Scorn as his phone line to make a collect call to 1-800-DARKNES.

Not being completely stupid, Calus isolated these experiments on the stolen Legion carrier Glykon (named for a minor Roman snake god whom the ancient Greek satirist Lucian claimed was a con), parked above the yawning abyss that used to be Mars. He moved in the Psion scientist Qinziq, the Guardian Katabasis*, and a bunch of bizarre equipment, and set them to work. Now space-Rome wasn't built in a space-day, and dead corrupted hivemind consciousnesses take time and work (disgusting, disgusting work) to assemble. Katabasis spent weeks trapping and herding Scorn onto transports back to Glykon, where they were caged and subjected to some pretty horrible experiments, even for creatures that are basically zombie husks.

*In one of my favorite environmental details ever, when you find Katabasis' abandoned jumpship in Glykon's hangar, it's the real in-game model of The Emperor's Chosen. It's a player-obtainable ship that comes from running a lot of Calus' seasonal Menagerie activity; in other words, it's the ship of someone who's spent quite a bit of time aboard Leviathan.

Qinziq drowned the ever-reanimating Scorn in their Dark Ether to strengthen their link to Darkness and figured out how to slot someone else in the place where the Barons had once commanded them. When she thought she had enough hooked up, she signaled Calus. Glykon hovered above the edge of the Mars anomaly as Calus came aboard in a gilded procession bearing the Crown. Psions forced the Scorn into metaconcert, then subsumed them into the Crown. Even Katabasis was summoned to witness the attempt so that his Light might additionally entice the Dark to them. Calus donned the Crown. And Glykon dove.

And failed. Calus' plan worked in that through the Crown he yoked the Scorn's prepared minds and inhabited their senses the same way he's been dividing his consciousness across his robot proxies, but even though they reached the very edge of the Mars anomaly, Calus' words fell into nothing. Darkness didn't see him back. Furious, Calus tore apart the failed Scorn himself; but then he thought he detected something else, something different from the Pyramids' attention: an Observer. An Entity. A Voice of Darkness that embodied it the same way the Traveler embodied Light*. That tantalizing glimpse motivated him to keep trying, to everyone else's regret. Glykon hadn't entered the anomaly, but the attempt had changed it. The Scorn went into a perpetual frenzy, breaking loose again and again to kill whatever they found. Strange fungus began to infest the ship, its slender, flower-like spore stalks resembling the Sarcophilus ("flesh-lover") fungus that grows aboard the Drifter's Derelict crossed with the psychoactive Royal Nectar plants from Leviathan. Cabal ensnared by it fell into comatose eternity, their minds swallowed up. Still Calus hammered on.

*If Calus is right about Darkness having an avatar like the Traveler, we need to revise a lot of what we thought we knew about it.

The whole build-a-Scorn-hivemind-to-channel-Darkness plan is one of those projects where the only prospect worse than failing is succeeding, and eventually Calus succeeded. After many more failed attempts he donned the crown, Glykon dove, and this time it finally pierced the anomaly's barrier. Space warped around them, the Scorn amalgamated into a single Locus of Communion, Calus gazed once again upon the Darkness, and the ship hurtled through into…Nothing. Nothing at all.

And Calus was gone. Glykon, unfortunately, wasn't. The emperor in whatever apotheosis had swallowed him had left the carrier behind in absolute Nothing. The Scorn tore loose and rampaged through the ship, whose crew had no way to escape, to signal for help, even to go outside. Katabasis himself sent distress signals pleading for rescue, offering his prize rifle to any Guardian who'd brave the Scorn to find him and his Ghost, but no one received them. Gravity waves pulsed through the Nothing, rearranging the ship's geometry in impossible ways and reanimating any Scorn that hadn't been incinerated. The crew fought back, tried their best to cut the connection and return Glykon to normal space, but one by one they fell until only Katabasis and Gilgamesh were left. Katabasis asked Gilgamesh not to revive him immediately after his next death, to wait instead until they found rescue, because not even a Guardian's Light can take that eternal onslaught…or a Guardian's Ghost. But no sooner had Katabasis died again than Gilgamesh revived him, telling him he was done. Had been done for a long time. He had lost faith in the Light during the Red War, had tried to steer a path through the Dark, and now he just wanted it to end. He tormented Katabasis - reviving him just to let him starve to death or be torn to pieces, over and over again - until his Guardian had no choice but to kill him. Katabasis left one final message for whoever found his corpse telling of the Glykon's fate and…well…when we find him, we find him strung up on the Glykon's bridge, pierced through and through with the Dark-drinking fungus like a hideous marionette. Safe to say it wasn't a pleasant end.

But for us, it was just the beginning! Specifically the beginning of Season of the Chosen's Presage mission, aka "Goin' to Spookytown," and I'm pretty sure it exists because someone said "pfff bungie can't do horror anymore" and some dev rolled up their sleeves and went "fucking watch me." It's not hard to detect the hand of those who cooked up Halo's disgusting Gravemind at work in the fungus-rotted labyrinth of corridors and corpses you venture through aboard the newly-returned Glykon. Presage has simple puzzles based around barriers that can only be traversed after touching spores released by rupturing clumps of glowing nodules - the resemblance to Leviathan's spore mechanics is not a coincidence - that grant a buff called "Egregore Link." To save you a Google search, "egregore" in Western occultism means a non-physical entity or psychic manifestation created by a group that shares a common motivation. By inhaling the spores you gain a temporary sympathy with the fungus, which has itself melded with the Scorn hivemind, and it thinks you're part of the club just long enough to let you through a gross doorway. Traverse enough gross doorways and your reward is a showdown with the Locus of Communion, a ragged facsimile of a Scorned Baron, and finally the corpse of Katabasis strung up on the bridge with his promised rifle tangled in the hyphae below him. Personally I wouldn't want to touch a gun that's been encased in that unholy gunk, but it is a nice gun, and as we've established, Guardians will do just about anything for a nice gun.

Or in this case, multiple nice guns. Dead Man's Tale is one of two exotics that seem to have been designed as part of a new direction in gameplay loops that Bungie was experimenting with during Year 3. Starting around Shadowkeep Bungie announced they were beginning "sunsetting" of weapons and armor, imposing a max power cap on items that would eventually cause them to cycle out of use. The details of why weapon sunsetting was conceived, what it was supposed to do, and what it ended up doing, are interesting but would fill a whole other entry. Suffice to say that while they made this choice for well-motivated reasons, it turned out to be unpopular and cause its own set of problems and was reverted at the beginning of Year 4. In the meantime Bungie tried out incentivizing players to grind for exotic weapons the way they did legendary ones, since exotic weapons had no power cap. Dead Man's Tale and the handcannon Hawkmoon were both released as weekly rewards from individual, special missions (Presage and Harbinger), and while every version of them had the same intrinsic exotic perk, the rest of their attributes (barrel type, magazine, and two regular legendary perks) were random. Players could therefore play each mission up to three times a week to get three different drops. Therefore, while every drop of Dead Man's Tale comes with the vicious Cranial Spike perk, they're otherwise different.

Cranial Spike is kind of all you need, though. It's a simple perk: each precision hit increases damage and reload speed, up to five stacks. Dead Man's Tale is a Kinetic Scout Rifle, giving it long range, high precision damage, and a slow firing rate. It's also another of Tex Mechanica's Cowboy Aesthetic guns, this time based on a bolt-action rifle and complete with little spinny animation when drawing or reloading it (and an upsettingly realistic firing sound). Reloading it two rounds at a time makes it take unusually long to finish, but it also means that it can be interrupted and fired mid-reload, a benefit Destiny generally reserves for shotguns. Its two ornaments, Burial Wrap and Remembrance, tone down the yee-haw: in the case of Burial Wrap, by wrapping it in quilted blue cloth (possibly Katabasis' cloak?); in the case of Remembrance, by replacing the wood furniture with stunning scrimshaw ivory carvings of, oddly enough, Riven of a Thousand Voices. I'm not sure why they chose Riven, but it makes for a gorgeous piece. Its catalyst removes the hipfire penalties aka firing without aiming down sights becomes as accurate as aiming, which makes it a monster in some PvP activities. It's not utterly dominant, but it can put down some serious hurt. Not enough to save Katabasis, though. Maybe I'll bring it along when we finally figure out where Calus is hiding...

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #Dead Man's Tale #Katabasis #Presage #Gilgamesh #happy Witch Queen preview day!!#I'm so fucking hype for all that cool shit they dropped!#mad mad hype #anyways Presage is terrifying #go play it if you haven't #it's an amazing mission and this gun is legit fun #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #Destiny #this is the wager of existence

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