up to 11.9GB downloaded
that's right folks, only approx 20+ hours to go

Have you tried resetting your system to see if that helps the DL speed?

Ah, so pretty much like the rest of the game...

And what do I do with the guns I've field-tested? Toss them, keep them, does it matter in any way?

Dial up sucks.

I think I may have found the problem. Ice sent me a picture of his internet setup and said I could share it with you guys:

I've tried it all brother
I was tempted to bring my console over to my P's who aren't far away to DL using their connection

dial up was almost faster than this DSL plus it made those great sounds

So chase and I are Two manning Crota right now to get the ghosts. We're up to Ir Yut, and I kill her, but was unable to get out of the room. Ugh. Waiting out our cooldowns. I will make a save at Crota to make it easy to get the second ghost.

EDIT: Ir Yut goes down, both ghosts acquired. Passing save off as we speak.

EDIT 2: Crota is dead! Chase and I 2-manned the whole thing.

The more I play on 2.0, the more I hate it.

To me, the game is broken, and this patch made it far worse. They fixed absolutely nothing in Crucible. You will still get shotgunned from across the room and last worded from across the map. They did sort of fix auto rifles, but basically their solution to fixing Crucible was making EVERYFUCKINGTHING a 1 second kill. So yeah, their solution to fixing Crucible was to make it impossible to have actual firefights.

I've now played on all of the new maps, and they're basically paradise for campers. I don't like any of them. Instead of giving us more maps like shores of time, where strategy is involved, they make them all like The Cauldron, only far worse because of all the camper points.

New maps are all about close combat, which is what is broken the most. They have only 1 or 2 new maps that have even a slight amount of Range that isn't blocked by rocks, doors or crates.

But it doesn't stop there. Patrolling the planets has basically been rendered useless. Since you no longer need to patrol to do the patrol bounty, or even do patrol missions, why bother with them? You can just do missions, and usually get the bounties done faster.

And let's talk about how they decided to take away the Nightfall perk of an XP bonus because it "forced" people to play the game on tuesday. It didn't fucking force anyone to do anything! It was a choice. Their response to this: "we're going to up the XP in everything else to compensate."

Ummm THEN WHY THE FUCK ARE THE 5000XP BOUNTIES GONE? They've been replaced with 3000XP bounties. That's really a boost we're getting there, huh? Everything is becoming more of a grind than in the past. It's like they can't grasp the concept of doing things in the middle, it's one extreme or the other. I mean, they introduce Legendary Marks, which should be great, I mean they combine Crucible and Vanguard Marks into one. Makes Sense. But then they limit you to 200 total, when you had 1200 total in the past. Then they basically limit the ways you can acquire them, but tell you "hey, we're getting rid of the 100 mark per week limit, earn all you want!" But not mentioned is that the options for earning them are far less than the current marks.

If they wanted to ease the grind on players by combining things, why won't they combine our faction ranks on our characters?

And then there's the weapon changes that basically just tell you "stop using the old guns!" Nerfing virtually every old perk, with one of the worst being field scout. They killed the magazine boost from Field scout now, so if you have a Spear with it, you have a 3 shot magazine again. Congrats! It's not "hey, you're gonna love these new guns, you won't even worry about the old ones," it's "we're killing all your old guns, here's some new stuff that might be better."

What a horrible way to operate a game like this. If you want us to use the new guns, MAKE THEM FUCKING BETTER!

I can't imagine this shit being fixed before Tuesday. I can't imagine this shit ever being fixed.

Anyway, enough of that.

WARNING: Don't complete the subclass quests until tuesday. This also includes the Level 25 faction quests. If you complete them before Taken King releases, you may not get all the rewards you're entitled to. To be safe, just don't complete any of the quests.

I'm sure if there's enough of a public outrage, then they'll patch in something to make the year 1 weapons viable again. Just like when TDB first came out and everyone cried because the original raid items that everyone invested so much time collecting suddenly became irrelevant. I'll give Bungie props for one thing... After people bitch long enough, they end up making changes to give them what they want (for the most part).

I actually like the changes they made (IMO, Crucible has been a horrible shitty experience since Day 1 so I could care less about anything involved with that). As far as the PVE portion, I like that earning XP is how you level up. That "Light" nonsense being the only thing that mattered after you reached level 20 was kinda dumb in hindsight. Once you got certain gear, everyone was basically the same. This way opens up more options for player variety.

I like the kiosks in the tower for shaders and emblems. Did you notice they're actually shared across all characters? So if you got those highly sought after shaders from Dead Orbit, you only have to get it one time and all your characters can equip it when they visit the kiosk.

Combining the Hadrionic Essence, Plasteel plating, etc into one "armor part" is WAY better. I've honestly been wanting that since Day 1. When you run 3 different characters it'll come in very handy because there's always 1 class that has much more available than the others.

Same goes for the legendary marks. Regardless of how they're acquired, combining them is a much better system. Linking the faction gear to crucible marks never made sense. You earned the faction reputation in PVE, why did you have to do PVP to buy the gear?

I like the quest system. I like the 16 bounty slots. I like the huge vault space.

I don't know. I like a lot of what I've seen so far. After getting back into Destiny the last couple days, I'll probably pick up TTK (which I had no interest in after HoW). To each their own I guess.

Another dead ghost

I'm not saying everything is bad, and honestly I've talked about the good things for weeks, mainly because the good stuff is what Bungie talked about. The kiosks, vault space and blueprints are all welcome changes. The armor materials is a good move, as was creating Legendary Marks.

The problem with Marks is that they have been very shady about how many of these you can actually earn in a week, while at the same time they're touting that the 100 Mark limit is gone. If they made it so that it's not possible to earn 100 marks in a week because they cut the sources to earn them, how is it any different?

What is pissing me off is the deception about the whole thing, and you're partially caught in it thinking that XP Level is truly how you rank up. Light is still the determining factor of everything you do. All they did was change the way it was conveyed to us.

We got to 20 by XP once and then had to get the right pieces of armor to max out. That hasn't changed. Now it's just get to 40 by XP again, and then get even more different armor pieces AND weapons to max out your light. Getting to 40 doesn't allow you to do everything if your light level is 180. Just an example, if you try and do a higher difficulty on a mission right now, the only options are whatever level it is right now, and the second option says 240 Light required. The Level is not even listed, the light is. And we know the light levels go to at least 280.

Since the odds are that the raid gear will once again have a higher light level than the other items, how is any of it different? Everyone will still be trying to get the highest attack and defense levels on all their gear. Because 40 once again is just the unlocking point to wear the new top level gear.

The game works EXACTLY the same way it did before. All they did was change how its displayed to us, and added more light levels with less of a penalty for not being at the highest level. But, if there is a max level, don't you think that is what people will be trying to hit? 280 Everything?

It's possible there will be more varied pieces of armor at the max level like the weapons in that regard. But that has nothing to do with going back to XP, they could have easily done that in the past.

To me, they made the whole leveling system FAR more complicated, because now you're worrying about 10 items instead of 4 to get to max light level. Maybe being 279 isn't as bad as being Forever 29, but it would still suck to be right below the maximum level.

Yes, you're probably right that only certain pieces of gear will get you to the max light level and therefore everyone will eventually look the same (I hope that's not the case, but who knows for sure). But the difference is this time it seems you don't have to be at the MAXIMUM light level to be truly competitive. Since everything counts towards your light level now (weapons, ghosts, class specific marks, etc), there is a lot of wiggle room for mixing it up. As of today, the max light appears to be 170. Some people, like yourself, are probably at the max with all your characters. I don't have any gear or upgrade materials from HoW, so its impossible for me to get that high at the moment... but my light level is still in the 165 range with my older "un-upgraded" stuff. If we were to do a raid or nightfall together this week, will your characters be that much better than mine? I doubt it. It's certainly much different then a level 32 vs a level 34 when there was a 50% difference in the effectiveness during higher level activities. Sure you might be dealing a tad bit more damage with your current setup, but I think the differences will be negligible.

Here's another way to look at it... if we were to do a level 35 PoE today, would I be at a major disadvantage? My gear is exactly the same as it was when I last played 5 months ago. If this patch didn't come out on Tuesday, I'd still be 32. Same exact gear equipped. If we attempted it on Monday (pre-patch) I wouldn't have stood a chance since I'd be handicapped by 75%. I think it would play a lot different if we tried it now.

You know, that's kind of my point. You're not really a 34 right now. Sure, it says you are, but since your gear I would assume is not near that level (170), I'm not sure how you would do. Bungie has said it's Light and the attack and defense stats on your gear that determine your damage output and health. A 32 with a higher light level than you would be better prepared for Skolas.

Directly from the patch notes:
Notice that your XP level is not mentioned at all in this regard. XP is merely the way you unlock higher level gear, and no longer actually makes you more powerful.

You sure it isn't really this?

Until someone does experiments with the same weapons/gear at different overall light levels, I'll guess we'll never know for sure how much of a handicap it really is. I highly doubt it's going to be as drastic as the 25-50-75-100% numbers as before.

My warlock is currently at 166 overall, I can't fathom that the damage numbers are drastically different than you at 170. If there truly is a major difference, then that's ridiculous. My Fatebringer, Gjallarhorn, Ice Breaker, etc are all listed at 170. My exotic gear is 170 also. The only thing that is 160 is my raid gear which is still equipped. Do you honestly think I'm ill-prepared because my helmet, gloves, and boots are not the same as yours?

I think the reason for the changes is to eliminate the "Level 34 w/Gjallarhorn" only mentality. People can still be competitive without having all the same exact crap equipped.

EDIT: Are you also saying that player level plays no factor whatsoever? As in, if I'm 3 levels below the required level, there is no 75% penalty like before? Was that part of the notes? I find it hard to believe a 32 would have an easier time with Skolas like you claim. If so, then their whole system is fucked.

At 166, you'd probably be OK. I'm not saying you personally would be ill prepared, I'm saying the game itself would handicap you for it. I guess you got an Etheric Light from somewhere to get your Fatebringer up to the max. I think without that, it would be 150. If your average was there, 150ish, then it could be a issue. But even at 170, we're technically going in underpowered. But again, we just don't know.

My point was to say that the XP level is not part of it.

Oh, and there's another dead ghost in the abyss. This one is a real bitch to get during the raid, but since there's a mission that takes you there, it's possible that this ghost could be easy to grab.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bSn6sixqNVk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I just grabbed it, and basically it's on the last pillar as you're going into the light at the end. Hard to grab since if you step too far you trigger the end of the stage and get pulled to the next part. I got it, but it was rough!

I am at max everything and only have 167 light with the new ghost shell. I am assuming I need to find new class armor as the crap I have only has 140 defense. I like how they make the new quest reward give you the same class armor just with more defense... wtf? Just upgrade all our existing crap if the reward is the exact same damn item!

Everyone needs to remember to buy the new ghost shell as the added defense increases your light. I think I was at 150 something before I bought the damn thing. A level 32 weekly heroic enemy killed me and the death screen said they recommended 160 light level. I also used to take new guns to level them but now I am handicapping my light level by doing so now.

I did Crota normal and hard yesterday and I completely forgot about the ghosts... damn

I probably got an etheric light or 2 the first couple days HoW was out. I don't remember. I finished a 28 and 32 PoE and realized I fucking HATE arena horde mode shit like that. HoW ranks right up there with Borderlands' Moxxi DLC as my most disappointing add-ons of all time. I needed a break from my PS4 anyway. But I still really enjoyed playing Destiny itself, and the 2.0 update has definitely rejuvenated my interest in the game.

^ wow all that math above makes my head hurt .... I don't like math in my videogames

anyhooo ..... our galactic nightmare is almost over
as of this morning I had approx 1GB of the patch remaining with 93 minutes left

if all goes as planned, and my router/modem hasn't blown up due to the work it has been putting in, I will be on tonight

POE isn't very good, but it's FAR better than Moxxi. Man was that brutal.

It's been so long since you played. Will you still remember how?

Who are we even talking about? I vaguely remember some guy that used to try and kill his teammates by pushing them off of a cliff and/or blowing up tanks in Winters Run as his teammates unsuspectingly ran past them. Is this the person you speak of?

< forgotten already just like Dinklebot

critical to capture A first on SoT