Giant Bomb Bomb-All

Man, a return to Kerbal from the east coast crew. It's like an early Christmas. :love:

Apparently neither Vinny nor Abby saw this year's smash hit Get Out--would have provided the perfect answer to the "Abomination" situation.

Clearly, "Dan Ryckert" is an alien symbiote that's parasitically taken over Dave Langzone.

GBE Playdate: "Candy Corn Diabetes"

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

GBE Playdate: "Candy Corn Diabetes" :)

I haven't listened today yet but is that referencing this?

oilypenguin wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:

GBE Playdate: "Candy Corn Diabetes" :)

I haven't listened today yet but is that referencing this?

Na. It was just the result of them all spitballing names for an upcoming Halloween themed video series Abby is doing.

JARETH! JARETH! JARETH! JARETH! JARETH! JARETH!

Six Crazy Frights is great.

So I watched a few hours of their Destiny 2 raid yesterday...it was not exactly the best pitch for playing a Destiny 2 raid. I watched the first hour, then went off to do some work, and checked back what must've been three or four hours later, and they were still in the same sequence they were on when I had been watching earlier--managing some orbs and calling out the symbols and the rows indicating which triangles to shoot. From twitter, it looks like they did eventually get through that section. There's no way they finished the raid though, right? And for Destiny 2 players (I'm waiting for PC), is that actually what the raid is like to play, or were their struggles unusual? I never played one of the raids in original Destiny but had always wanted to...now I'm less sure of that.

I think they were largely underleveled? They let you in at 260 but from personal experience trying it under 280 is... not ideal.

I watched about half of the horror game thing Abby and Vinnie posted.

So one of the ongoing problems with GB videos is that they're real bad about spending a LONG time thinking they know how to do something, trying over and over, failing, and not realizing that they're not getting any indication that what they're doing is actually the right thing to do. So they spend forever getting frustrated that this isn't working, but not trying something else.

Because of that, I'm not super convinced that PT was the best game for them to do. From what I know about that game, you do the same thing over and over, watching for really subtle changes and hints about what to do next, with no clear goal. So what you get is a game where it's hard to tell if you're doing the right thing in general, and the video is a LOT of Abby running around in a circle alternately saying "I don't know what to do" and "Why isn't this working?"

Maybe it gets better later? I thought at one point that Vinnie had looked up a walkthrough and was trying to nudge her in the right direction, but then he didn't.

This one in particular relies on everyone to pull their weight, you generally have SOMETHING to do at all times. Destiny 1 raids generally had something to do for 1-3 people and everyone else was mostly on 'kill the weaker enemies' duty.

I pulled it up and skipped to about 20 minutes in and saw someone(not sure who was the main cam in the archive) standing on a capture point with next to no health and constantly shooting a big yellow bar enemy with their primary weapon...instead of switching to the shotgun or rocket launcher that was so full of ammo. Then they died and a bunch of others had already died so they wiped.

Just from that brief encounter and the way they were talking I could tell there was no way they were ready for the raid. Mentally, at least. It sounded like a lot of panic.

If you're even halfway decent at following directions and working with a team you can get through the raid pretty easily. It's about knowing YOUR role and just doing it. The section in particular requires 4 players standing on a platform and then switching out with 2 of the floaters to go refresh your protection against the dirty water(or whatever it is). So the best way is to split into 3, 2 on platform and 1 floater then work out the best way for the 3 of you to alternate platforms until you get it and everyone rushes back to the middle to dps down the lamps. There's like...a few phases of that and then you move on. But it does take coordination and learning what weapons to kill what people with. Big yellow guy pops up? Blast with heavy or else risk dying and taking up one of your teams precious 6 revives(worst part of the raid for sure).

Since you're going to be on PC I have to think you've played a shooter or two in your day so you'll honestly be pretty good.

I'm watching Jeff's stream of the raid, and yeah, he never pulls out his power weapon, ever. He's had full ammo on it for north of two hours at this point. It's silly.

Hah, I have definitely played many a shooter in my day, but I don't know that I have ever been any good at them (my Overwatch competitive ranking will verify this). Hopefully by the time I'm raiding in Destiny 2 it'll be with some GWJers who can tell me why I'm failing.

mrlogical wrote:

So I watched a few hours of their Destiny 2 raid yesterday...it was not exactly the best pitch for playing a Destiny 2 raid. I watched the first hour, then went off to do some work, and checked back what must've been three or four hours later, and they were still in the same sequence they were on when I had been watching earlier--managing some orbs and calling out the symbols and the rows indicating which triangles to shoot. From twitter, it looks like they did eventually get through that section. There's no way they finished the raid though, right? And for Destiny 2 players (I'm waiting for PC), is that actually what the raid is like to play, or were their struggles unusual? I never played one of the raids in original Destiny but had always wanted to...now I'm less sure of that.

Learning a new raid encounter for the first time can be quite time consuming, but I wouldn't call their struggles representative of the normal experience. The most important thing to remember is that they decided to do the raid blind, meaning they wanted to figure everything out themselves. Blind raiding can be one of the most rewarding ways to experience that content, but not everyone enjoys repeatedly wiping to figure out the encounters. You need to have a group with the right mindset. It would have taken significantly less time if they decided to use the wide range of guides and tutorials for the encounter. Regardless, that encounter with the arrows probably took us 2 or 2.5 hours to get through the first time compared to the 4 or 5 it seemed to take them. My group managed to finish the entire raid in 90 minutes last night. Learning is the hard part.

The big problem with their attempt is something that is pretty common with Giant Bomb videos. I know people in this thread get annoyed when people call out the Giant Bomb crew for being bad at video games, but that's not exactly the problem here. The problem is that they are unwilling to do the bare minimum amount of research to improve their chances. Some activities require outside knowledge and coordination, and knowing some of the most basic information about your class abilities, teammates, and weapons can go a long way in easing the learning process and reducing frustration.

I only caught about 30 min of the stream, but there were a few big areas for improvement I noticed:

1) As mentioned already, they should have been unloading power ammo or supers in to the yellow centurions every time they spawned. They would have died much less often from doing so.

2) Several of them were unloading kinetic weapons into shielded centurions and then dying before they could finish them off. Energy and power weapons drop shields in a hurry. It takes ages with a kinetic weapon.

3) I'm not sure how many titans they had, but I know I saw at least 2 of them tossing fire hammers around. A single pulse grenade from a Striker titan does almost as much damage as that entire Sunbreaker super, so someone (probably Brad...) should have advised them to swap to Striker. One pulse grenade on a yellow centurion is enough to stun lock it and take him it to half health. Pulse grenades are completely broken right now, and striker titans can carry 2 at a time. If you want to argue that they should be able to play any class they want, fine. They can, and they did, but swapping all their titans to strikers would have completely trivialized all of the yellow enemies, caused significantly fewer wipes, and greatly reduced frustration overall.

Sounds not unlike my FFXI days, where whenever a new expansion came out, we dirty gaijin dealt with server issues and hung out for a day or two while we let the Japan players figure everything out and post what to do.

Dyni wrote:
mrlogical wrote:

So I watched a few hours of their Destiny 2 raid yesterday...it was not exactly the best pitch for playing a Destiny 2 raid. I watched the first hour, then went off to do some work, and checked back what must've been three or four hours later, and they were still in the same sequence they were on when I had been watching earlier--managing some orbs and calling out the symbols and the rows indicating which triangles to shoot. From twitter, it looks like they did eventually get through that section. There's no way they finished the raid though, right? And for Destiny 2 players (I'm waiting for PC), is that actually what the raid is like to play, or were their struggles unusual? I never played one of the raids in original Destiny but had always wanted to...now I'm less sure of that.

Learning a new raid encounter for the first time can be quite time consuming, but I wouldn't call their struggles representative of the normal experience. The most important thing to remember is that they decided to do the raid blind, meaning they wanted to figure everything out themselves. Blind raiding can be one of the most rewarding ways to experience that content, but not everyone enjoys repeatedly wiping to figure out the encounters. You need to have a group with the right mindset. It would have taken significantly less time if they decided to use the wide range of guides and tutorials for the encounter. Regardless, that encounter with the arrows probably took us 2 or 2.5 hours to get through the first time compared to the 4 or 5 it seemed to take them. My group managed to finish the entire raid in 90 minutes last night. Learning is the hard part.

The big problem with their attempt is something that is pretty common with Giant Bomb videos. I know people in this thread get annoyed when people call out the Giant Bomb crew for being bad at video games, but that's not exactly the problem here. The problem is that they are unwilling to do the bare minimum amount of research to improve their chances. Some activities require outside knowledge and coordination, and knowing some of the most basic information about your class abilities, teammates, and weapons can go a long way in easing the learning process and reducing frustration.

I only caught about 30 min of the stream, but there were a few big areas for improvement I noticed:

1) As mentioned already, they should have been unloading power ammo or supers in to the yellow centurions every time they spawned. They would have died much less often from doing so.

2) Several of them were unloading kinetic weapons into shielded centurions and then dying before they could finish them off. Energy and power weapons drop shields in a hurry. It takes ages with a kinetic weapon.

3) I'm not sure how many titans they had, but I know I saw at least 2 of them tossing fire hammers around. A single pulse grenade from a Striker titan does almost as much damage as that entire Sunbreaker super, so someone (probably Brad...) should have advised them to swap to Striker. One pulse grenade on a yellow centurion is enough to stun lock it and take him it to half health. Pulse grenades are completely broken right now, and striker titans can carry 2 at a time. If you want to argue that they should be able to play any class they want, fine. They can, and they did, but swapping all their titans to strikers would have completely trivialized all of the yellow enemies, caused significantly fewer wipes, and greatly reduced frustration overall.

I think in this specific instance it is 100% their inexperience with raiding as a whole, and also raiding in Destiny.

From side conversations they had during podcasts, on twitter, and during the raid stream I think there was something like 20 raid clears in all of video game history on that team. I know Brad has done most of the D1 raids, Jeff has done 2-3, and Abby did Vault of Glass last week. Outside of that Dan, Alex, and Ben had never done a Destiny raid and it sounded like they had never raided period, or at least in a very very long time.

Add to this a pretty low amount of Destiny Time (Dan and Alex bounced off the first one pretty hard, Ben and Abby just started Destiny 1 a few months ago, Jeff and Brad haven't played for a long time), not a ton of time in Destiny 2 (most of them have barely gotten to 270 which is maybe 30 hours of playtime), and sub-optimal builds, which is probably very much related to the lack of experience.

I was about to lose my mind watching Brad's stream because he was purposefully switching away from his Solar Shotgun to take down the Solar shields of the Centurions with his void damage energy weapon.

Overall, I would say them just doubling your time (I assume you were playing with the same people you raided in D1 with) is them doing a pretty good job since they were going in 90% blind, with Brad to make sure they were not completely going off track.

Kamakazi010654 wrote:

Overall, I would say them just doubling your time (I assume you were playing with the same people you raided in D1 with) is them doing a pretty good job since they were going in 90% blind, with Brad to make sure they were not completely going off track.

That's totally fair. Like I said, I only watched maybe 30 minutes of it before posting, but the first two improvements I mentioned are very basic game mechanics that aren't raid specific. It looked like Brad was monitoring chat. I would imagine that stuff was probably mentioned several times as easy ways to reduce unneeded deaths, but I didn't see him mention anything of the sort. Those deaths, the ones that happen before you even get to the stuff you need to figure out, are the ones that can quickly demoralize a raid group and add hours to a first encounter clear.

Also, that encounter is weird as sh*t to figure out the first time. The mechanics are completely opposite of what you would think they should be based on every video game ever. It was pretty cool to hear Jeff casually toss out the correct approach as something to try once they sussed out that red in a video game never means "good job".

They're gonna keep going.

I think it's going to replace UPF.

BOO-URNS.

Also--somehow, Jeff and Ben's call-in show is actually a pretty good listen. I wish they did video for it like the Bombcast.

Upf is garbage these days anyways

Giant Bomb crew wrote:

"Axis!"

"Sun!"

"Goblet!"

"Dog!"

Old-man me: What the hell are they talking about?

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/tJ8smuY.jpg)

Oh my god they are on hour 9 of today's raid.

As someone who has never raided... this looks just so frustrating.

I've been watching for roughly 2 hours.

As someone who's never done a Raid, WoW or otherwise, it's been enough to turn me off to the concept for a lifetime. :p

Are they going in blind, I never caught if that was the case or not. It took the first team 6 hours to finish the raid on launch. Blind it took us about 6 hours to do Vault of Glass on hard mode blind. But having a guide and just executing on it...shouldn't take more than 2 or 3. Unless, you know, you're giant bomb.

Everyone but Brad hasn't touched the raid yet. Brad did it once with his buddies. They're mostly trying to do it without Brad just telling them what to do. I'm only a little way into day 2, so I don't know if they stick to that. They're also not experienced raiders, or even experienced Destiny players. This is probably pretty close to what it'd be like if I tried to run this thing.

Iridium884 wrote:

Oh my god they are on hour 9 of today's raid.

As someone who has never raided... this looks just so frustrating.

While there's a good chance you'd feel that way about all of the previous Destiny raids, this one in particular really earns that view. Bungie went out of their way to cater to a more casual audience in every single aspect of Destiny 2... and then there's the raid. This is the most mechanically complex one yet, and it is needlessly punishing and unrewarding in ways that the previous raids were not. It may look pretty, but I think Leviathan is easily the worst raid they've created.

I still haven't watched much of their experience, but I would not be surprised if blind-raiding Leviathan soured several of them on the concept of raiding entirely. I seriously have no idea what Bungie was thinking in releasing this as the first raid.

Over the past week, I've watched a group of people, of which I only actually like two, play at least 12 hours of a game that I think is terrible. Something is wrong with me.

Are the two Jeff and Abby?

I watched all of Part 1 and 5 hours of Part 2. I tuned in just in time to watch the last 5 minutes of them successfully complete the raid. It looks terrible.

I've been in enough failed raids with knowledgeable, organized people that I know to steer clear of GB's Destiny stuff.

Vector wrote:

Are the two Jeff and Abby?

They are!