Month: October 2019

A new year, season, and expansion have arrived with Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, and it’s a very exciting time to be playing Bungie’s sci-fi loot-shooter-MMO. Shadowkeep brings with it a new story, an updated version of a classic destination, new gear to chase, tons of balance and economy changes, a completely revamped armor system, and much more.

And, of course, there’s a new raid launching soon–Garden of Salvation, which arrives Saturday, October 5. For some Destiny players, that’s the most important thing. And getting raid ready by powering up as high as possible this week is all that matters.

Jumping from 750, last season’s maximum power level, all the way to above 900 in just a few days to get ready for the raid might seem daunting. But thanks to the way power level currently works in Destiny 2, it’s actually incredibly easy to do. Things get a little bit more complicated once you pass 900, but it’s nothing you can’t manage with this handy guide. Here’s how to get as many powerful drops as possible to ensure you’re ready to tackle the Garden of Salvation on October 5.

The Soft Cap

Gaining over 150 power levels in a few days seems intense, given that each season used to raise the power cap by only 50 points. But what matters is actually the new “soft cap,” which is set at 900 power.

That means that any drops you get while playing Destiny 2, no matter their source, can potentially help to increase your power level all the way up to 900. That even includes the normally worthless blue items that come from completing public events, simply killing enemies, and dozens of other sources. There are exceptions to this–for example, if your overall power level is 800, but you have one slot with a high outlier number like 810, drops for that slot likely won’t help you until the rest of your slots catch up. But for the most part, you can simply play the game normally, completing the new story elements and exploring the Moon, and hit 900 with relative ease.

One important thing to note is that it’s best to save any potential powerful drops until after you hit 900. For example, you should wait until you hit 900 to pick up Hawthorne’s clan rewards, which are considered powerful drops. However, this doesn’t apply to prime engrams, whose levels are set the moment you pick them up or they arrive in your postmaster.

You want that world’s first clear, don’t you?

Of course, if you want to speed this up and hit 900 more quickly, you have some options. For veteran players, the best course is to simply spend some time trading in materials for vendor gear. If you have a surplus of items like Crucible or Vanguard tokens, or even destination materials like Dusklight Shards and Microphasic Datalattice, you can trade them in with their respective vendors and receive random loot in return. Vanguard and Crucible tokens are probably your best bet, since you might have several thousand of them, and they serve no other purposes in the game (unlike destination materials).

But even new players without a huge surplus of these materials can get to the soft cap of 900 without breaking a sweat, simply by farming public events on any destination, completing old story content (if you’re a New Light player), or doing other world activities (like killing the Trove Guardian knight on the Moon and looting the chest his death opens a path to).

How to Get Powerful Drops Above 900

Now that you’re 900 power, the easy part is over. Progressing above the soft cap is always a challenge in every new season of Destiny, but this time it’s thankfully not too bad.

First off: Make sure you’re actually 900 power, without the extra levels from your season artifact being factored in. To ensure this, you can hover over your power level in the character menu and see your power from gear and your power from the artifact laid out separately.

Throughout the power grind, you’ll be able to see “powerful” gear sources on the map and destinations director, and even more will appear to you once you hit 900. These specially named engrams are guaranteed to award you armor or guns that are above your current maximum possible level. They even have tiers now–Tier 1, Tier 2, etc.–to indicate exactly how much of a boost they’ll give you.

Even so, there’s bound to be some confusion around exactly where you can get powerful gear, because many old sources from the past year of Destiny 2 no longer count. For example, you can still play old raids to get legendary weapon and armor drops–and even new, Year 3 Armor 2.0 versions of old raid armor. But those drops will act the same as basic world drops, getting you up to the soft cap, but not helping to progress you beyond it.

There’s one major caveat to this: Thanks to changes in Shadowkeep, non-powerful drops can potentially still help you even after you pass the soft cap. That’s because normal, everyday drops now arrive at levels much closer to your current power, even after you get above 900. For example, if all your gear in every slot is 915 except your helmet, which is lagging behind at 905, a blue helmet that drops in a patrol zone or from a public event would still be helpful, because it might arrive at 912 or 914. It’s below your overall power level, but higher than your current helmet.

Lastly, in previous seasons, players who wanted to get raid ready as quickly as possible often used complicated processes to juggle gear between three characters. Basically, you get as much powerful gear as possible on one character, then transfer your highest guns to a second character, which then starts the whole process with a boost in power compared with the first character. Then you do all powerfuls again, which should get the second character higher than the first, and repeat with your third character–the one you intend to raid with.

Strictly speaking, this still works in Shadowkeep. However, it shouldn’t be necessary for Garden of Salvation, since the “contest” modifier that will be active for 24 hours starting from the raid’s launch time on Saturday will cap all players at a maximum level of 920 in the raid’s final encounter. If you’re going for a day one clear, getting above 920–which is extremely easy to do before Saturday–is completely pointless. So you might as well stop there.

Every Source for Powerful Gear

Since many existing sources of powerful gear–including old raids, Menagerie, and Black Armory forges–have been deprecated, where exactly should you start looking for high-level drops once you pass 900 power? So far we’ve discovered the following sources:

• Clan engrams: If you’re new to Destiny or simply haven’t joined a clan yet, go find one. Simply being in an active clan ensures you multiple powerful rewards per week. (The unofficial Destiny 2 PC LFG discord server is a great place to start looking for a clan.)

• Challenges: Once you hit 900, you’ll start to see icons over NPCs in various places, and on the destinations director itself. These icons give you objectives like “Complete 8 Vanguard bounties and speak to Zavala” or “Complete four Crucible matches,” and they generally reward Tier 1 powerful gear. These are found all over the place, and will generally be your main source of powerfuls above 900. And there are several new challenges on the Moon, including the Nightmare Hunts and a heroic version of Shadowkeep’s opening story mission.

• Bungie rewards: Bungie will actually give you one free powerful engram, sent directly to the postmaster on the platform of your choosing, simply for signing up for emails. Check the Bungie rewards page to claim yours.

• Ritual weapons: In Season 8 (the current season), pinnacle weapons have been replaced by “ritual” weapons. You can pick up the quests to attain them from Zavala, Shaxx, and the Drifter in the Tower. Obtaining them is a grind, but might be worth it if you need more powerful rewards.

• New exotic quests: Shadowkeep introduces new Exotic weapon quests, some of which we likely haven’t even discovered yet. For now, in these early days, you can start with the quest to obtain the Exotic rocket launcher Deathbringer, which will unlock through Eris Morn after you finish the campaign missions on the Moon.

• Glory rank-ups: Destiny 2’s old competitive playlist has been replaced with a 3v3 survival mode that awards Glory points. Earning a new glory rank awards a powerful drop, so it’s definitely worth jumping into the survival playlist as soon as possible.

If we missed any powerful reward sources, let us know in the comments below, and we’ll keep updating this guide as more info emerges. For now, have fun grinding, Guardians, and good luck in the Black Garden come October 5.

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Stephen King has written a wide variety of horror stories over the decades, and family lies at the heart of many. From the relationship between Carrie and her mom to the characters torn apart by grief in Pet Sematary or the Losers’ Club in It, King remains fascinated by the way family units deal with terrifying threats, whether external or internal. King himself is a family man whose sons–Joe Hill and Owen King–are writers themselves. In the Tall Grass was his second collaboration with Joe; published in two parts in Esquire magazine in 2012, it once again deals with dads, moms, and siblings in a fight for survival against supernatural forces. It’s also the latest King story to be adapted to the screen, and the movie version hits Netflix this week.

In the Tall Grass has a simple premise. A young, pregnant woman named Becky (Laysla De Oliveira) and her brother Cal (Avery Whitted) are passing through rural Kansas on their way to San Diego. While taking a break by the side of a huge field, they hear a boy crying for help, claiming to be lost in the tall grass. Becky and Cal enter the field and find themselves separated and also lost, unable to find a way out. Soon they realise that there are others in the grass with them, and that strange things are happening.

This is a great set-up for a spooky yarn, and it’s easy to see why writer/director Vincenzo Natali was drawn to it. Natali made his directing debut with a classic of claustrophobic scares–the 1997 sci-fi favorite Cube–and the first 20 minutes of In the Tall Grass are suspenseful, scary, and stylishly shot. Once we move into the field, the camera stays close on the characters, letting the grass surround them and creating a sense of increasing unease. Natali crosscuts between Becky, Cal, and Tobin (Will Buie Jr.), the young boy, and uses sound to increase the disorientation as their voices move, seemingly impossibly, around the field. We feel real fear for their situation, which is increased by the fact that Becky is visibly pregnant. Daylight horror is a difficult thing to pull off, and for a while, Natali does so masterfully.

But what makes the first section so effective–the claustrophobic supernatural mystery of being trapped in a field that seems to have its own rules of time and space–ultimately becomes an issue as more characters and subplots are introduced. We meet Tobin’s parents Ross (Patrick Wilson) and Natalie (Rachel Wilson, no relation), who have been trapped in the grass for some time. Ross, in particular, seems remarkably unconcerned by the situation, and as the film continues, it becomes clear that the threat isn’t just the fact they cannot leave the field. Patrick Wilson uses his natural charm to win the audience’s sympathy, then shows a darker side that we don’t see very often from the actor.

Unfortunately, nothing else that the movie offers is very interesting, and it quickly stops being scary. Some intriguing initial ideas, such as the time loops that seem to exist within the grass, are largely abandoned for repetitive and formulaic scenes of the characters being chased round the field by one of the group who has gone bad. Becky is the only character given any particular depth or backstory, but the only thing the arrival of her ex-boyfriend at the midway point accomplishes is providing yet another unsympathetic potential victim. Explanations of the field’s supernatural power, which seems to derive from a huge rock, are frustratingly vague, and hints at some wider Lovecraftian mythology are underdeveloped. Mystery and ambiguity can be a powerful weapon for horror filmmakers, but here these elements just comes across as poorly explained rather than deliberately abstract.

There are a lot of Stephen King movies and shows around at the moment, and the huge success of It: Chapter 2 has ensured that this situation won’t be changing any time soon. In the Tall Grass is hardly the worst of recent adaptations, especially when compared to the woeful Dark Tower movie or the mercifully short-lived TV version of The Mist. But it’s yet further proof that not everything the great man writes–or co-writes–necessarily works on the screen. In the Tall Grass might provide a few chills for undemanding fans gorging on horror movies throughout October, but will be quickly forgotten as the next dozen King adaptations roll around.

Reviewed at Fantastic Fest 2019.

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