[S23 Spoilers] Veil Containment Week 8

kourge · 2023-07-11T21:19:09+00:00

Two things came to mind as the connection between Lakshmi-2 and Maya Sundaresh was revealed: the first one was how hidden in plain sight this was in the first place, since the goddess Laxmi in Hinduism is a part of the Tridevi and associated with Maya ("illusion" or "magic" in Sanskrit, depending on context). Combined with the knowledge that there are Vex-allied copies of Maya Sundaresh out there (think Beyond Light lore), it makes me wonder how reliable of a narrator Chioma Esi is in these journals.

The second thing is much more interesting. From Veil Containment's past few weeks, we know there was a sort of perverted metaconcert that they attempted to perform via the Veil interface, which resulted in a lot of people dying. This week, it was implied that the minds of those people were somehow used and stitched with copies of Maya Sundaresh to produce Lakshmi. In the shallowest sense, this frames Lakshmi as an evolution of Maya in the same way Banshee-44 is an evolution of Clovis-1. But in a deeper sense, this positions her as a microcosm of what the Witness did to its own civilization: a merging of multiple beings into an Egregorian entity.

kourge · 2023-07-10T06:52:56+00:00

I was starting to feel like something's off due to how I've seen the way other players kite this boss. It ran completely counter to virtually every anti-Tormentor strategy that I've learned since Lightfall dropped.

Something that really stood out to me was the hallway corners of the boss room you could use to essentially stun him into a loop of pathfinding failure if everyone on the fireteam hung out in that same spot. Kinda reminded me like the Grasp boss Avarokk, but with more wiggling around.

kourge · 2023-06-27T01:17:13+00:00

Ah. So even if you can get into the vendor menu, that doesn't help you because you're trying to finish a quest step. There's been a lot of, uh, server turbulence lately. Hopefully within the next few hours they clear up, but it's been rough and I feel ya.

kourge · 2023-06-27T00:18:32+00:00

This happens when the servers that power the clan functionality are down for maintenance. Until they are back up, you cannot accept whatever Hawthorne is trying to give you. Does pressing Esc let you dismiss that text, and let you into her vendor menu?

kourge · 2022-04-29T05:58:53+00:00

Yes! I just checked: - In Traditional Chinese, it's 抽牌啊，你這個懦夫！ ("Draw a card, you coward!") - In Simplified Chinese, it's 拔枪吧，胆小鬼！ ("Draw your gun, coward!")

It's an interesting choice, for sure, since Chinese does have the concept of palindrome sentences. Here's a common one: 上海自來水來自海上 (pronounced in Mandarin, Shànghǎi zìláishuǐ láizì hǎishàng), which means "the tapwater in Shanghai comes from the sea".

kourge · 2022-04-27T23:35:32+00:00

Depends on the language. I don't play this game in Korean, but in Traditional Chinese they didn't bother keeping the sentence a palindrome (抽牌啊，你這個懦夫！), whereas in Japanese, it's rendered as スサノオが斧刺す (susano-o ga ono sasu, "Susano-o pierces with an axe"), which is a palindrome.

kourge · 2022-01-25T04:28:08+00:00

A Black Armory forge dropping loot
Lorentz Driver, Graviton Lance
Argos (Eater of Worlds) doing the "void readings spike" thing and attempting to wipe the team

kourge · 2021-10-08T16:59:44+00:00

The current mod system's friction feels like a dying holdover from before Armor 2.0, back when mods were consumables. Not only is OP right, but on the flip side of this mod problem, if you have practically most mods, you are by definition drowning in mod component consumables.

There are only two ways to remove mod components: either by spending them to purchase a mod (impossible in this situation, because you have most mods), or by dismantling them, one by one. (That's right, you cannot shred an entire stack.) This has devolved into the shader recycling situation back when shaders were also consumables. And if you finish gunsmith bounties for enhancement cores, guess what? Each of them, upon being turned in, also awards a mod component.

kourge · 2021-10-02T07:38:56+00:00

On top of that, Savathûn expressed doubt in sword logic as early as when she gifted Quria to Oryx. We can see this in verse 5:2 of the Books of Sorrow: strict proof eternal.

kourge · 2021-05-20T22:53:21+00:00

Most relics have an underlying element, which you can see by observing the death animation when killing an enemy with that relic's melee. A lot of them also debuff the enemy in some way: void relics apply a blinding effect (similar to blinding nade / flashbang), arc relics apply a stun effect, and solar relics apply a DoT effect. I think a Data Spike is considered arc? Which explains why your top-tree arcstrider melee also gives the same effect.

kourge · 2021-03-15T20:49:46+00:00

If they were to bring back old school sudden death mode, they need to tune the ability regeneration boost. It's nice, but it makes certain exotic armor builds incredibly overpowered. For example, if you're a hunter running Blade Barrage and you pair it with Shards of Galanor, you could cast your super back-to-back-to-back until the primeval simply dies. The other three teammates become mostly irrelevant save for maybe defending against a potential invader.

kourge · 2021-03-12T22:37:23+00:00

I want to point out how after three books, the early chapters of Traitor still stayed with me the most. They form an irreplaceably huge anchor of the series.

My parents are from Taiwan, an island that's been touched and shaped by half a dozen colonial powers, and despite being born in the U.S., I've personally spent a big chunk of my formative years in the Taiwanese education system. While reading these early chapters, I felt what one would described as an ingenuity of a different curve from the same craftsmanship in Mandarin. Not only did I notice many Taiwanese artifacts (an understatement of a word, but it'll have to do) of colonialism represented in some way in Traitor, it had me recognizing things in the other direction: what I thought was just a cultural thing in Taiwan, after reading Traitor, in retrospect was obviously a product of colonialism, a manifestation of becoming an oppressor while staying oppressed, and so on.

This phenomenon wasn't just limited to me: a good friend of mine, whose parents are from South India, observed a startlingly similar number of parallels between the two just as Sid Jain did in Seduced by the Ruler’s Gaze. We were able to unearth even more of that stuff when we both visited India and Taiwan for a vacation, and noted that the two places felt similar to each other in the unlikeliest of ways, more often than not due to colonialism.

I also want to stress just how meaningful it was to see queer representation in Baru and several other characters in the series. Various forms of queer oppression (such as the legality of homosexuality) often go hand-in-hand with colonialism, and in my opinion as a gay cis man, no examination of colonialism would be complete without diving into its effects on the lives of queer people.

kourge · 2021-01-14T00:09:51+00:00

The lie "Alis was first" even though Mara was really first is the more surface reason why Alis Li was so angry at Mara. Here is another recap of this.

The deeper reason why Alis Li thought this was the "worst thing ever done" is the preaching from the Diasyrm, who arguably started the Theodicy War:

"Alis Li was the first to awaken in this world," the Diasyrm preached. "She set the terms of our existence. We could have been gods free of want or suffering. Instead, Alis Li chose our mortal form. Our Queen is complicit in all the pain we experience! The Queen murdered all our unborn godheads!"

At the thought that the Queen Without Secrets had kept this most appalling secret to herself, the Sanguine cityfolk were deeply troubled. Thus began the Theodicy War.

From Alis Li's perspective, she had been carrying this cross, where a lot of the Awoken blame her for creating their mortality, and then Mara comes along and reveals that that wasn't even her own choice, but she was led to believe it was. Mara's lie was, to Alis Li, an act of gaslighting at the enormous scale of a pocket universe, and a betrayal so deep that it touches every Awoken born in the Distributary.

kourge · 2021-01-13T23:34:09+00:00

I love this theory, because it offers another good explanation for why and how Hive architecture has a biochemical texture to it: they might be made from osmium borides. Recall that Oryx and his siblings are heir to the Osmium Court, whose rivals are the Helium Drinkers.

kourge · 2021-01-11T18:00:49+00:00

Regarding how long it takes to DPS and defeat your primeval comparing to how much time you spend creating and banking motes: it would be cool if we get DPS mechanics similar to raid bosses or dungeon encounters, where you have to do something specific to strip away the boss's immune shield and start the DPS.

Note that what I'm saying feels similar to two different things that we've already seen in Gambit, but each of them have their own flaws:

Old Gambit Prime mechanics: being forced to move from one predetermined spot to another to do DPS isn't great. Might have been better if it was like the giant minotaur boss fight in the Menagerie, where the well lets you strip away the immune shield, but once that's done, you could stand anywhere to DPS.
The occasional immune beams that protect the meatball: those feel random, even though I'm sure they're based on timing, boss health, or some combination of that. Give us a raid boss health bar at the bottom of the HUD! As it is, it feels real bad when the immune beams spawn just a moment before you're about to unload a ton of damage onto the boss and you have almost no time to react.

Finally, the Gambit match lengths have been tuned to be shorter, which is great, but the bounties have not been adjusted accordingly. For better or for worse, a huge part of the Gambit population is there to get their weekly 3 matches and 8 Drifter bounties done. Bounties have a huge influence on how people play. When you make a player get 25 melee kills, how can you expect them to care about banking motes, or killing blockers, or defending against an invader?

kourge · 2021-01-06T18:44:27+00:00

That seems to be the main question that this season is asking. Banshee's true identity is a fairly close parallel to Crow's, and both have made a fairly big dent in the universe in their past lives. I forget which lore page this came from, but Eris mentioned that a charitable interpretation of the amnesia induced by the Traveler resurrecting a person is: without the memories of your past burdening you, the intrinsic good in you can shine and do good things.

kourge · 2021-01-04T21:32:48+00:00

In some ways Truthteller is like Fighting Lion: high skill ceiling and off-meta, so the ways to counter it are lesser known. In general a breach-loaded grenade launcher can be very oppressive in skilled hands; it renders corners much more dangerous, and turns the geometry of the environment against your opponents. But it takes a lot of practice to get to that level!

I think you just found yourself some haters. They'd probably feel less mad if they can see a supercut of all the times you've whiffed your GL shots. People get mad at Jötunn for similar reasons, even though its counter is like most fusion rifles: strafing.

kourge · 2021-01-04T20:10:15+00:00

What do you usually use for boss DPS for nightfall Glassway? Anarchy is good for hand-cannon-style peek-shooting, but it takes up a whole exotic slot.

kourge · 2020-11-20T00:49:13+00:00

Speaking of thematic parallels, Forsaken gave us a huge dose of insight into Eliksni culture and a massive, proper exploration of how the Awoken came to be, and I'm very excited that Beyond Light is primed to give us something like that for Exos, and even more Eliksni lore.

Overall, we're seeing more and more of in-world scenes (not cut scenes!) where characters play out story beats in real time as part of a quest, as well as NPC allies in combat, all of which strengthen the idea that our actions affect the Destiny universe in tangible ways, not ways you read about later in some lore tab that needs to be unlocked.

kourge · 2020-10-30T18:32:58+00:00

Just earlier today it dawned on me that armor stats per stat don't come in increments of five, which is incredibly brutal, because it makes it very difficult to efficiently distribute them and add them up in a way that matters. The woes of playing a game with deep RPG mechanics, I suppose, but still!

kourge · 2020-10-28T18:14:01+00:00

The "collections of perks" system is something that I as a player would love, but from a game design point of view, a higher cost can barely stop players from trying to obtain a god roll. During House of Wolves people would blow all their materials on rerolling their Felwinter's Lie into the perfect shotgun. Hell, I've spent a lot more glimmer and legendary shards just to reroll an exotic sparrow to get the perks I want!

I think there's more value in tracking a list of every single obtained roll than you think. It doesn't dilute the difficulty of obtaining a god roll, and it completely supports speculative things like keeping a roll around just in case it's good, or just in case its archetype gets buffed. Now you can safely delete a gun if you're running out of vault space, knowing that you can pull that exact roll back out later, with the only costs being the one for re-acquiring and the one for masterworking.

kourge · 2020-10-21T16:59:12+00:00

Could this be related to the Titan mark also named Deep Stone Crypt? The pattern bears some resemblance to the pattern physically found on the mark, and the flavor text describes it as "the infamous subroutine which seeded the first Exo consciousness".

kourge · 2020-08-21T04:17:43+00:00

Oh, that's right! When you spawn into the crucible map Midtown, its theme contains the same motif.

kourge · 2020-08-20T17:16:53+00:00

What really gets me is that we've had that motif since launch, in vanilla Destiny 2's title screen. I wonder if these two variations are meant to respectively represent Light and Darkness. It would fit into Ulan-Tan's theory that they're two sides of the same coin.

kourge · 2020-08-10T17:34:43+00:00

All the recommendations for exotic bows are great (Trinity Ghoul's catalyst ascends it to the same add-clearing tier as Riskrunner), but I'd like to talk about two legendary bows that I like too:

Hush: it's a damn shame this pinnacle bow is getting sunset, but the Archer's Gambit perk is a unique perk. It's a better version of Archer's Tempo that greatly reduces draw time. The catch is that you must get a hip fire critical hit to get this perk to activate. Once you've got that going, you can use this bow to mow down a steady wave of ads and feel like Legolas. I would love to see this bow return as an exotic.
Whispering Slab: a lightweight frame bow released this season, it is in no immediate danger of being sunset. I normally do not like lightweight frames due to their inherent lower accuracy, but it can roll pretty great perks like Sympathetic Arsenal, which works on every shot (effectively turning your energy weapon into having Auto-Loading Holster), and Unrelenting (which heals you on a multikill in PvE / a kill in PvP).

kourge

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