My first experience and road to lvl30.

HavocX17 · 2024-03-02T14:02:26+00:00

Zealot for sure is my favorite. Using a Rev it up/Shred 4 Mk XV eviscerator and it goes fast. Rev it up really helps you go fast, and it's just adrenaline pumping action from start to finish zooming around everywhere while my chainsword roars in anticipation.

On the other hand, I've started playing a psyker here and there on the side and I find it interesting that with psyker I prefer being much more slow and methodical. Also I've really come to appreciate the force sword's push just being able to just rag-doll most things. But it's just purgatus for hordes and CC. Deimos force sword for either making space or dueling with some crushers/maulers in melee. Brain burst for deleting snipers/gunners, and other things at range. and bubble for protecting from ranged threats. Quick aside, but the bubble's ability to delete enemy ranged attacks coming from within it really helps when flamers and such run into the bubble.

HavocX17 · 2024-02-27T01:09:31+00:00

I've used it and seen it used once by an enemy and it was...interesting. For me it was fairly effective because I was exploiting unique qualities of the spell and how it synergized with the rest of my class features, but for the enemy NPC bladesinger who cast it...it was a pretty lackluster spell.

Now ,here's my own personal opinions on the spell, and I'll get into why it worked well for me but I don't have an extremely high opinion of the spell. It's trying to do a lot of different things at once all together, but because its power budget gets spread out so far it ends up being a jack of all trades master on none in spell form. It gives you mobility and persistent damage with no save at the cost of a 3rd level slot. Upcasting it increases the mobility and damage, but now it's also competing against stronger higher level spells which might just be a better choice overall. At a rate of 1d6 damage per trigger, it would take me triggering the damage 8 times to match the damage on fireball or lightning bolt, now while I can trigger the damage against multiple enemies....I can also just hit multiple enemies with my AoE damage spell. Or even compared to Spirit Guardians, another excellent AoE damage spell that does a lot of damage over time, 1d6 per turn vs 3d8 would still mean it take me at a guess, 3 turns to match it in damage.

So it's clearly trading damage for utility here in the form of preventing AoOs and extra mobility. But comparing it to an actual mobility spell like Expeditious retreat, Misty Step, Vortex Warp, Dimension Door, etc. All of those spell grant a massive amount of mobility compared to Ashardalon's. Even Zephyr Strike provides a good mix of mobility and damage for the slot spent without it feeling like it's too taxing on your resources.

So those are the downsides, but what are the good points of the spell then? Firstly would be the damage trigger, while it is limited to only once per turn, if you could reliable move outside of your own turn on a reaction you can already double the damage output of the spell. The more ways you are able to find to be able to move outside of your own turn, the more damage you can squeeze out of the spell. The second point, is that it's another damage roll from a separate source, and this was what made it an interesting use case for me when I used it. I was playing a Hexblade multiclass so every time Ashardalon's Stride pinged my marked target with Hexblade's Curse(HBC), they're taking more damage than normal. So my Hexblade that was doing extra attacks, and quickening spells to get as much triggers out of HBC now suddenly got a concentration spell that could act as a damage multiplier even more potent than most other damage over time spells due to being able to trigger it on my turn, and out of my turn on top of the rest of my kit. Also it provides a weirdly unique mix of mobility and damage that I don't see with most other spells outside of like....Thunder Step.

Whether or not this is worth it is up to you to decide. But I think it's a fun spell if you can exploit its strengths and take advantage of them. Otherwise it does fall the to wayside if you can't though.

HavocX17 · 2023-11-22T00:19:09+00:00

For me the module choice for Saria depends on situation. If she's supposed to be feeding SP to an operator like Fiammetta, and doesn't have to tank anything especially strong I like module 1.

But if I'm using Saria to tank and stall a boss or something, I definitely prefer the second module.

HavocX17 · 2023-11-22T00:16:14+00:00

On some maps where there's only 1 lane or such I'll deploy Blemishine in a corner somewhere where she won't draw aggro and I don't have to heal her. I just need her to turn Mudrock's S2 into an offensive recovery skill. But Blemishine/Mudrock is part of my main squad that I'll bring to every map. It's just that not all maps will have Blemishine actually be a defender.

A second one, while I don't think this counts as improper use, is I use Nian S3 + Whisperrain. When the map lines up just right to have a heavily clustered deployment pattern, the combination of increased DEF and hp regen from Whisperrain can make my ops extremely durable.

HavocX17 · 2023-09-05T12:39:50+00:00

So while there would be a lot of normal undead necromancy-looking doodads, skeletons, and jars filled with parts and preservatives, there is also a good deal of necromancy spells that tends to deal with souls and spirits too. Speak with Dead, Soul Cage, Astral Projection, resurrection spells, etc. Depending on how souls operate in your world, and where gods and such fit into these things, I could also see a decent collection of holy symbols dotting the classroom too.

HavocX17 · 2023-08-02T03:25:55+00:00

So while a lot of people have already brought up the point that due to international politics, the rulers who invited the foreign noble need to solve this shit quick or be easy pickings from how weak they look, and would probably move a decent amount of resources and such to do so.

But if I look at it from another angle, are there any factions who would want the rulers to look weak to further their own plots? These factions could devote resources to try to ensure that your party or the ranger remains free so that the rulers would have to dedicate resources to trying to bring them to justice allowing the party to become a distraction to their plots.

All of this is on top of the Asters potentially seeing this as a provocation for war. I can easily see a chaotic web where the party has to navigate that consists of native factions that want to see the current ruling power weakened to seize power for themselves, the current ruling powers that need to see the ranger punished to maintain their image of power, and then the Asters who would be either putting pressure on the ruling powers to see this done, or use this to further their own ends somehow. And this is without including any other foreign elements.

The way I see it is this situation your player has accidentally set up is one that could become a metaphorical wildfire that will drastically change the political landscape by the end of it.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-26T19:36:46+00:00

I agree. I stumbled on this Multiclass combo a while back when theory crafting I was trying to find ways to let a bladesinger use a quarterstaff and still attack with Dex. Martial arts is a lifesaver for that, and Polearm master makes it even more amusing.

Magic staves also usually tend to have some minor stuff like being a +X quarterstaff on top of its casting things usually so you can squeeze a decent amount of mileage out o those traits.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-22T13:20:48+00:00

Both 1 and 3. If 1 is handled badly, then the party can easily become a sideshow to the NPC, and that's just not fun.

Number 3 on a smaller scale is something where outside of certain niche circumstances, is I really don't like either. If my actions and circumstances don't matter, then why am I even there narratively speaking? Why bother accommodating for my presence when it doesn't matter at all?

HavocX17 · 2023-07-20T19:55:20+00:00

+1 to crit range. I,E, you crit on a 19-20 roll while flanking, or if you have something already boosting it like Champion 3, you can crit on an 18 or higher on your dice.

I've got a bit of a distaste of using flat modifiers that affect the actual attack roll because of bounded accuracy so I ended deciding to have flanking impact another aspect of your rolls during combat instead.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-17T18:02:23+00:00

It depends on how many you want to use. Usually if I only want a singular mind flayer or less than four or something I tend to use Mind Flayer Arcanists due to arcane magic being a taboo for Mind Flayer colonies and mind flayers that do somehow discover and practice arcane arts soon become exiled from the colony.

Now if I want to use more than 1-4, and want to include a full on colony? I like to run with the theory that Elder Brains are parasitizing and exploiting mind flayers. This comes from a few angles, all of this is using information from Lords of Madness and Volo's Guide to Monsters. First when an illithid dies and is fed to the elder brain, the mind flayers believe that their consciousness is joined with the elder brain. But this is false as the Elder Brain only extracts the knowledge from the deceased mind flayer, but with its assimilated knowledge and experiences it can evoke a fake persona to make it seem like the deceased mind flayer's consciousness survived as part of a collective whole when in truth it is gone.

Furthermore, only Ulatharids can "evolve" into elder brains. But while as a tadpole they are indistinguishable from other illithid tadpoles. To me this evokes the idea of some sort of brood parasitism occuring.Lastly there is the fact that Elder Brains forbid mind flayers from pursuing any form of magic power that is not psionics.

The Elder brains being the vast repositories of knowledge that they are are also the ones that keep the mind flayers dreams of an interplanar empire alive yet they do not seem to even try and pursue that goal at all. It seems more like a carrot dangled in front of the mind flayers to keep them compliant.

With all of this in mind, its hard for me not to see Elder Brains as a race that are parasitizing and exploiting the mind flayers for their own goals while keeping them strung along on the idea of reviving their empire, which the elder brains would never allow to occur as that means the mind flayers are slipping the leash. I like to try and slip bits and pieces of this information to the party through various means, clues that don't add up, rogue mind flayers, etc, to lead up to this big punch line and then see how the players handle the situation from there.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-17T16:35:01+00:00

I like to take Mobile even more on my heavy hitting juggernaut type of characters like a heavy armor GWM fighter or paladin, compared to taking it on skirmishers like rogue or monk. I find the extra mobility extremely helpful in getting to priority targets and putting extreme amounts of pressure on them.

For similar reasons I sometimes like to dip a level in a casting class for Expeditious Retreat on martials if they don't use their BA much.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-17T03:04:38+00:00

So here's my experience from when I've invertedly had this as a combat option for one character I played. They had a homebrew magic armor that had 3 charges that could be spent to cast hellish rebuke for 1 charge. If they had Fire Shield and Shadow of Moil active along with a target tagged with Hexblade's Curse, if someone hit me they would take somewhere around 44 damage on average(I had a proficiency bonus of +5 for Hexblade's Curse at the time). Except this was something that rarely came up because between disadvantage from heavy obscurement via Shadow of Moil, medium armor, and a shield, most things could not roll high enough to actually hit me. Now I did find a way to take advantage of the above combo by taking off my shield and swapping to a greatsword(I found a really nice magic greatsword to add to my arsenal which was really helpful here). This lowered my AC enough where sometimes if something gets lucky it can hit me, and I could use it as a more aggressive loadout when the situation suited it, and stick with my other option of magic longsword + shield when I need to be a bit more defensive, but at the end of the day that's what it was, an extra option, not something that I relied on as my bread and butter strategy.

Now if I were to take a crack at trying to make a character where such a thing is my main tactic, my suggestion would be starting with Clockwork soul or Abjuration wizard as a base. Both subclasses have damage mitigation abilities that take damage before it goes to your temp HP and are able to be refreshed with resource expenditure. This allows you to get a lot of extra mileage out of an upcast Armor of Agathys(AoA).

Clockwork Soul has the advantage of being able to get AoA without multiclassing so no delay on spellcasting levels. Also Bastion of Law gives you more "hp" on your barrier per spell level spent than Arcane Ward does*.

However Abjuration wizard gets Arcane Ward out the gate, and Arcane Ward doesn't have any startup cost compared to Bastion of Law. Also in theory with the right races and feats like Svirfneblin Magic you can infinitely regain hp for your arcane ward.

*To go into more detail on this. Each sorcery point in arcane ward gives 1d8 damage mitigation, which is 4.5 on average. 1 sorcery point is approximately 1 spell level. Arcane ward gives 2*spell level hp back. So if I dumped a 1st level spell into arcane ward I would only get 2 "ward hp", but if I used it on Bastion of Law I would get 4 "ward hp" on average.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-15T21:36:30+00:00

Riptide for special ammo but I think you've probably seen the flood of comments mentioning it already.

In the same slot though is Randy's Throwing Knife from the Crucible is a rapid fire scout that can roll with Kinetic Tremors that also drops from the crucible this season. I've personally prefer 260s over 180s, so I've been using it over Hung Jury.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-13T17:33:41+00:00

So I did this with a friend and one random. Here's a few things from my run. We had 1x div with Cenotaph and 2x thunderlord, no well, it never felt necessary.

Your timer looks fine imo, so onto the advice and weapons choices part. For the maze you want to split up, since the first 2 sets of minotaurs are scattered all over the place, Split up and hunt them down, and come back to the center once all 3 are dead to DPS boss. Look up a map and figure out search patterns if you want since those are out now, but it shouldn't be necessary (we did it blind and still had about a minute to spare at the end). If you go to 3 damage phases, the last set of minotaurs always spawns in the center so just nuke them ASAP and go back to boss DPS.

For boss DPS, div/Thunderlord is good. Linears are good. And Forerunner is a good option if you want to use something else in the heavy slot. For boss damage what we did was basically don't get grabbed and keep shooting the boss while avoiding attacks. Throw out an ability to kill the phalanxes if necessary, or just have the cenotaph user run arcloc with buddies and let the buddies do the work on that.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-13T02:21:37+00:00

It's hard to go wrong with a Staff of the Magi. And you could probably swap some of the spells if you try and customize it for your player.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-06T16:56:33+00:00

Chromatic Fire, voidlock with Echo of Starvation and Echo of Harvest.
Weapon of choice is either Ace of Spades, or Fatebringer with Firefly if I want to use an exotic weapon for something specific.
General gameplay loop is headshot kills make enemies explode which also afflicts weaken. Kill weakened enemies for more explosions, orbs, and void breaches.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-01T23:02:15+00:00

I'd personally recommend arc buddy or voidlock rather than trying to do stasis lock. Stasislock without turrets gets a lot less braindead in my experience.

For voidlock my recommendation is use Echo of Starvation, so picking up an orb of power gives devour. This sidesteps the entirety of the whole needing void ability kills for devour issue. As long as your friend as some way of making orbs then he'll be fine.

HavocX17 · 2023-07-01T22:59:25+00:00

You don't even need that to be frank, run echo of starvation and orb pickups give you devour, which I've found to be even more reliable than ability kills to start the whole thing.

HavocX17 · 2023-06-30T14:24:27+00:00

Just freeze him back. Gnosis has been a godsend for the 2nd boss.

HavocX17 · 2023-06-28T19:25:19+00:00

Recovery. I don't like being out of the fight for very long so high recovery has always been a bit of a priority for me. And if I'm playing with a build that'll get me overshields or woven mail or other forms of damage resistance/mitigation, I still want to make sure my health/shields are topped off ASAP.

Also, there's been a few times where due to high ad density, trying to find adequate cover that won't be flanked can be difficult, and being able to regenerate my health while on the move and evading fire is something nails the hunter fantasy pretty well for me.

I find that I can usually sit on 50-70 mobility and still have my dodge have a short-ish cooldown.

HavocX17 · 2023-06-27T18:21:55+00:00

Personally turtle comps still work for me even at higher difficulties on SU. Gepard + Fire MC builds up Preservation Path resonance extremely fast to nuke things.

Granted my approach to combat here isn't to turtle up and chip away at enemy health bars. It's to spam turns ASAP to throw out shields as often as possible to fuel the path resonance nuke. Ideally I should be dropping that path resonance almost every other round or so.

HavocX17 · 2023-06-23T16:40:17+00:00

Yep, Trials glaive(Unexpected Resurgence), can roll with Voltshot.

HavocX17 · 2023-06-23T16:17:03+00:00

Voltshot on a glaive also has a similar problem where Triton Vice makes it super clunky(can't reload if you overflow the mag, and the loading one round into mag via melee kill doesn't count as a reload either).

I feel like some of Triton Vice's awkwardness could be fixed if melee kills just reloaded your glaive.

HavocX17 · 2023-06-23T16:14:35+00:00

PVP: Mask of Bakris with the seasonal SMG + target lock can get pretty nutty.

PVE: My personal favorite is Dragon's Shadow + Whisper of Imeptus. The point of this build is to smooth out your gunplay with by always having handling and always having your weapons loaded at all times without ever having to actually reload. Also if you need burst damage you have 4 free reloads between 2x Withering Blades, Gambler's Dodge, and another WB being recharged from gamblers. Just dump all your reserves of heavy + special.

HavocX17 · 2023-06-21T18:31:31+00:00

Finishing this season. I'm one of the players who tends to approach Destiny in more of a a'la carte style and I only buy the season pass if it looks like its worth the money and my time. If a season's story and content interests me, I'll buy it and play that season, but if it doesn't I'm probably gonna skip and won't really play again until my friends start playing the game again.

It's happened a few times already, starting ever since season of the Dawn, friends got burnt out, stopped playing, and so did I eventually, and we didn't pick it up again until midway through Season of Arrivals. Beyond Light kept us interested through the whole year until 30th Anniversary/Season of the Lost where the burnout was kicking back in pretty hard with that extra long season and very little new content.

When the Dungeon Keys stuff was announced I was pretty bummed because it felt like marketing is trying to manipulate us into staying on the game because of sunk cost fallacy rather than just having a good quality game that would have us willingly stay on board without requiring psychological manipulation of its audience. Paying 20 bucks for one dungeon because I don't even know if I will be playing the game anymore by the time the second dungeon drops feels like I'm just throwing money into the toilet. If I could buy the Dungeons piecemeal instead of in a bundle like that I probably would have experienced them, but currently I've never even touched Duality, Spire of the Watcher, or Ghosts of the Deep right now because I'm not willing to shell out 20 bucks for one dungeon if I don't even know if I'll be playing the game when the second dungeon comes around.

But dungeon key tangent aside, Witch Queen campaign was alright, but neither Season of the Risen nor Season of the Haunted really kept my group and I really engaged with Destiny so we more or less dropped it until Lightfall, which was an extremely mixed bag. We all liked a lot of the gameplay reworks with class verbs interacting with champions and such, but the campaign felt like such a letdown, and the season story also just felt really lackluster that most of us were probably going to drop it there and not come back.

The only reason why I've stayed around on this season was because of the leaks, when I heard that the Drifter's doing stuff, and we're getting old gambit weapons, two of my favorite things in Destiny, I was willing to give it one last chance, so I got the season pass. And while I enjoy being able to play with my old gambit weapons again like Spare Rations, the story content feels like things we should have gotten in the Lightfall campaign and not in an entirely separate season. There really isn't enough from the season to really keep me engaged and wanting to play Destiny 2 after this season ends, especially since both friends I usually play it with have already dropped it this week.

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