Xûr’s Inventory
Xûr this week is located in the back of the club below the tower hangar. He brought almost the same bag of goodies he had on Dec 18th 2015. The only item that has changed is instead of a weapon to sell this week, he brought a helm engram.
Let’s start off with “An Insurmountable Skullfort”. Titan helmet which grants an additional melee charge, bonus super energy (dependent upon sub perk selected), and bonus melee energy when picking up an Orb. This week’s stat roll on it isn’t amazing but does have Intellect and Strength. This roll will help generate your super even faster in PvE and reduce the cooldown’s of your double melee. I personally wouldn’t recommend this helmet for PvP use since there are others available which have better sub perks to fit that fighting role.
Overall Opinion: Buy for PvE use if you like punching minions and don’t already have it. Going to cost you 13 Strange Coins if you do want it.
Next up we have the “Achlyophage Symbiote,” a Golden Gun Hunter helmet that allows the Golden Gun to have an additional shot. This helmet can be used in either PvP or PvE equally and has a good Intellect stat roll this week. Ultimately this head gear was a game changer in year one, but gameplay has changed dramatically since The Taken King’s release. With the introduction of the Nightstalker subclass being the most useful class in PvE, makes this helmet and Gunslingers pointless for PvE. While PvP does have some promise and can potentially be useful giving you an extra Golden Gun bullet (at the cost of having less time to shoot). Personally I have found having “Young Ahamkara’s Spine” supplying myself with an extra-long lasting tripmine grenade has been more useful in PvP.
Overall Opinion: Don’t bother for PvE and save your 13 strange coins for something else. For PvP this is a must buy if you like using the Gunslinger subclass and don’t have an exotic to use (Young Ahamkara’s Spine, Crest of Alpha Lupi, ect”¦).
For the Warlock class this week, his inventory consists of the “Heart of the Praxic Fire”. This is one of the best chests in the game for Sunsinger Warlocks in both PvE and PvP content. Sunsingers are still used heavily in PvE content to allow a self-revive (helpful in hard modes). While in PvP they are used often during Trials of Osiris to turn the tides of a match. This chest piece will reduce all the cooldowns for the Warlock drastically. If you have stacked some discipline, you pretty much have the ability to toss grenade after grenade at your enemies. In addition, if you turn on Touch of Flame and Viking Funeral, you will have your foe’s running for safety. I am not too fond of the secondary rolls since they consist of Hand Cannon and Fusion Rifle ammo. Not to worry though since they can be rerolled with the help of some “Glass Needles” into more preferable ammo. If you do decide to reroll, watch the stats since those will change as well. The last perk of this armor allows you to either receive less solar damage or increase your armor is using a solar subclass. The stat rolls on this armor this week are not the strongest as I would prefer a higher discipline stat but, like stated before, this can be rerolled.
Overall Opinion: If you do not have this armor and play the Sunsinger, I advise you to spend the 13 Strange Coins and pick this up today!
Now this week’s extra item being sold is an exotic helmet engram being sold for 19 Strange Coins. The tricky thing Xûr is doing this week is he is also selling a legacy exotic helm engram for 29 Strange Coins. Be careful of Xûr’s trap that he has waiting for you down in the club at the tower!
Xûr is also selling the legacy engram for all the grimoire hunters out there who have yet to collect all the year 1 exotics. If you want to try your luck to complete your special weapons engrams grimoire then it will cost you 31 strange coins per engram.
As always Xûr is selling two Sparrow drives including the Plasma Drive (Blue trail) and Void Drive (Purple trail). Each will cost you 23 strange coins. If you are low on Heavy ammo synthesis, three of them will cost you one strange coin. The two other consumables you can purchase from Xûr every week are the “Three of Coins” at 5 for the cost of 7 strange coins and the Glass Needles at 3 for the cost of 3 strange coins, 3 motes of light, and 1 exotic shard. Trials of Osiris
Trials of Osiris is a weekly challenge/tournament that puts teams of three up against other teams of three to fight in elimination style tournament gameplay. Objective is to wipe out the other team which gives you one winning round. You must win five rounds total to win the match. This crucible gameplay is built solely upon teamwork and communication.
The Trials of Osiris map this week is The Asylum. This map can, at times, be very fast paced if both teams rush the center. My team tried this several times which worked on teams who were not expecting it. Areas to be careful of on this map are the top center which has a lot of open areas to get picked off by snipers both via the tunnel and lower areas below the railings. In this map, both Shotgun and Sniper rifles can be highly effective; there’s close corners near the center of the map while outside and looking through the walkways providing great sniping lanes. Trials overall is an extreme test on your fire team’s communication skills. The more your team communicates, the better opportunity your teammates have to adjust to the new information. Big foot stomper for trials is to get revives when you can or are close to down teammates. This is due to the over shields you get for being revived as well as reviving an ally. Revives can quickly turn the battle in your favor if done properly. On the other side of this, if you get an enemy down make sure you keep at least one guy guarding to ensure they don’t get revived easily.
To get started in trials you will have to form a fire team of three Guardians and all have picked up a “Trials Passage” from Brother Vance in the Reef. Additionally, you can talk to Brother Vance and pick up the six bounties that can be completed while doing trials. I strongly advise on doing this since, even if you don’t think you will ever make it to the Lighthouse, you can still get some great loot from turning these bounties in. The ultimate goal of Trials of Osiris is to go nine wins and zero losses, which gives you access to “The Lighthouse”. Upon doing so, you get to open a chest that gives you a primary weapon, emblem, and a chance at exotic gear as well. Some of these weapons you can get with the right stat roll on them are extremely powerful in PvP, which is why everyone tries to go flawless every week.
Destiny Weekly News Roll-Up
This past week Bungie released a ViDoc that they put together about the Sounds of Destiny. This video had some really great insight into how crazy the Destiny Universe can be when it comes to making all the sounds that engulf us while on our journey as Guardians. They gave background on how they made some of their characters come to life as well as the enemies that we constantly are up against. Ever wonder where the vex noises come from? What about the energy/cloaking shield sounds that makes us start watching our backs? It’s all in the ViDoc, with some great features of how challenging it was to make sure everything was balanced throughout the gameplay. Some of it up until now seemed so seamless to me. However, I can see where when I hear specific sounds it will change the gameplay style to handle that situation ahead of my Guardian.
For all you PvP Guardians out there, on Monday (14 March) there will be a Bungie Bounty out on Clan Resolute during Rift matches. This bounty will be active from 11 a.m. till 1 p.m. PST on the PlayStation 4. This will also be broadcasted on Twitch for you to watch or to try to get matchmaking with them. Cool thing about this bounty is if you beat the Bungie team then you will be rewarded with an in game emblem that will be available to you after the streaming has been completed.
Overall, looks like some interesting stuff was pushed out to educate the community this week. If you love this game and want to learn more about it, please take the time to do so. I know most of the community is still in an uproar about lack of content info, but please have an open mind to understand that they will release news when things are finalized. The design teams are working towards getting us this content but will release information once it has been hard set in concrete. I hope you enjoy the info, and I will return next week with more Destiny news. Hopefully, I will be back with some insights into some PvE content release dates, but we will see what Bungie decides to share with us next week.
-ShadowAssault86