The Destiny Checklist for Signifigant Others

Summary -

This reference is designed for the Destiny widow or widower to be able to figure out how long a game is actualy going to take because we all know that "5 more minutes" is a lie most of the time. 

Just look for the name of the activity that your Destiny addict has mentioned, and you can find a rough time estimate, assuming they do it on the first try.

Read the fluf if you like too.

Introduction -

Hello person who would like to know about their significant other's video game addiction de jure.  You can finally decipher what your significant other is doing, and the list will be broken down in parts from smallest to largest time sink and how many buddies he's likely to be playing with.

Please be aware, your significant other, if truly bitten by the Destiny bug, may have multiple characters, and may be repeating the activities below.

For those who don't know what Destiny is, it is another game where the player shoots things.  It also has an insidious slot machine type system built into it to keep the die-hards coming back for more.  It's online only, so with some small exceptions, there is no "save point" that can be used in the middle of an activity.   

There are daily and weekly activities that can be done to earn random rewards the first time they are completed within their window.  The game is designed to get less rewarding if it is over played, but the amount of activities available mean that it could literally be played as a close to full time job before one starts hitting the diminishing returns.

In Destiny, the clothes make the man, - literally - what the virtual doll wears determines how effective it is.  So finding the best clothes (armor) is a strong motivation in the game, as is finding the best guns...  so feel free to point out that your partner is effectively playing dress-up with a virtual doll.

Of course, most of the activities *could* award clothes and guns, could also award some mere Destiny dollar. 

And if the random rewards weren't enough create an addiction, most of the things one can win require that they be used before they become as cool as they could be...   So winning a cool toy randomly is only half the battle - the other half being using it until it becomes cool.

Lastly, because there wasn't enough already, there are more types of in-game money than there was in Europe before the E.U.   As Destiny Economics 101 would bore most to tears, just assume that there is some sort of "money" reward for the activities mentioned, thou' one or two are mentioned specifically out of necessity.

Why tell you, the poor Destiny widow or widower? So you can know what motivates your significant other, and therefor more effectively bargain for favors, and so you know whether "Just 5 more minutes babe!" is the truth or pure lies.

Who are they playing with?

Destiny can be played by one's self or in a team, and against the computer or other players.  The more interesting play activities generally require a team thou'.   You'll have to ask them if they are goofing off by themselves or geeking out with buddies.

Matchmaking vs. Non-matchmaking activities

Destiny is designed to be a social game in many respects, and the game will provide a team at random for some of the easier content.

The more difficult content, the stuff that requires communication and teamwork for success, the game actually does not provide a team.  The assumption is that a group of random people who presumably can't talk to each other wouldn't be able to complete those activities.  There are websites dedicated to finding a team for the game as well.

What this means is that if you ask your significant other to quit certain activities, particularly those that require a good team, you're impacting not only their fun, but the fun of either random strangers or their friends.  Yes, this is a blatant attempt to ask you to consider that request for "5 more minutes". 

Granted, if your significant other over committed their time, they need to own that, and on the flip side your consideration for your partner's play buddies when considering asking them to quit in the middle of a group activity is a sign of awesomeness

The Destiny Week & Reward Resets

As mentioned, Destiny has activities that only reward once a day or week. The daily reset is currently set at 4:00 a.m. CST, with the weekly reset being concurrent with the Tuesday morning reset.

There are two significant events in the Destiny Week:

1. The Weekly Reset - this is when all of the weekly activities "reset" so that they will give out their rewards upon completion and any Raid savepoints, discussed below, are cleared and the player must start a fresh run. 
2. The arrival of the special vendor Xur, Agent of the Nine - Xur arrives on the Friday morning reset and leaves on Sunday morning's reset.

A note about Xur, he's Destiny's equivalent of Santa in some ways, and if out of town your partner may task you with logging on to buy something from him. 

Just what the hell they're doing in the Story:

Infinite Events: 

These events can be done repeatedly for a minor reward.

• Patrol (<5 minutes - 10 minutes):

Patrol is Destiny's easy mode for mindless fun.  It's also the least time intensive, so kick them off of the game without a twinge of guilt if you need to.

• Strike (15 - 40 minutes):

A strike is an extended story mission that is played with two other people.  If one doesn't have friends, the game provides them with two battle buddies to do the event.

• Glimmer Farming (10 minutes):

Glimmer is a type of money that can be earned in the game, and has a relatively low amount that can be held at any one time, making it easy to go broke. 

Due to game mechanics, playing just to get this "money" is done in ten minute increments, and generally takes an hour of dedicated effort to reach the maximum.

Daily Events:

These activities have their rewards reset each day, thus giving every day the potential to play more while feeling like one is accomplishing something.   

• Public Events (5 minutes to complete + up to 10 or so minutes of waiting):

These are random little extra missions which randomly occur while wandering around on patrol.

There are websites that have pretty accurate timers for when and where public events will occur, but they are not exact.  Players hunt public events because the first reward of the day can be saved up for future use. 

• Bounties (<5 minutes - half an hour): 

Bounties are short, mostly easy, tasks that can be done for minor rewards. There are around 15 per available per day - some are doable in patrol, some require a quick hop into a longer mission, and some are only achieved playing against other players.

Most don't need to be finished in one sitting, so they are easily interrupted if they do go long. 

• The Daily Story Mission (20-40 minutes): 

This takes a mission which they've played before, and makes it slightly harder and provides a small reward.

Weekly Events:

The weekly events are where the more difficult & time consuming content lies.  The rewards are limited to one time a week per character

• The Weekly Heroic Strike (20 - 50 minutes)

This is a slightly more difficult strike, hence the added time.  It rewards Xur-bucks, for the vendor mentioned above.

• The Weekly Nightfall Strike (25 - infinity minutes)

This is the content that separates the men from the boys. This content punishes the player for losing by making them start over from the beginning, losing being defined as all members of the team being killed.

Your partner will likely be intensely focused and hopefully working with his team to complete this objective.  Try and at least let him finish the mission if he's playing with buddies as Nightfalls are particularly nerve wracking to do by one's self.

The Nightfall Strike also basically gives the player a bonus "money" for the rest of the week for just about every other activity, so it's likely to be something your partner wants to do consistently if they plan to play more during the week.

• The Raids

Raids are the be-all-end-all of Destiny content, and are designed for a six-man team. 

• What's so different about Raids?

Raids are the one activity in Destiny that actually allow you to quit and resume progress, that being said a good group usually wants to finish in one sitting due to the hassle of finding five other people to do the activity with. The different save checkpoints are noted below - most also some with some sort of activity reward, with an exception or two, so finishing a checkpoint is preferable to abandoning it in the middle.

Raids often have, in addition to an overwhelming number of enemies, some sort of puzzle or unique mechanic that makes them more fun and interesting than the typical "shoot until you run out of bad guys" game play. 

Due to this factor thou', a section of a Raid can be "lost" long before the last player dies.  Resetting the encounter by committing suicide, i.e. "Wiping", is common, and makes it a challenge to gauge estimate a completion time, as any individual section of a raid shouldn't take more than 10-20 minutes to complete, but repeated failed attempts can make things last hours longer than they "should have" - particularly when the game bugs out through no fault of the player.

In addition, there is a special role in each Raid which takes additional skill as it requires the use of a special weapon, noted below.

The Raids come in two difficulties, easy and hard, and can be run on easy then hard for rewards.  Hard Raids penalize death by not allowing the player to be "revived" by his team mates, so "wipes" are more frequent as being down a player for the whole encounter can make some things impossible to complete. 

Honestly, a team that works well together and has a good "special weapon bearer" through a hard raid is a treasure, so please factor that in when you're contemplating whether to ask your partner to stop playing.

Conversely, if your partner is beating their head against a wall due to bad team mates, you could be doing them a favor by having them quit and try with better team mates at a future point in time. 

• Vault of Glass: (Normal - a hour and a half; Hard - two hours)

The Vault of Glass (VoG) is the longest, most challenging encounter in Destiny from a teamwork and mechanics standpoint.  It is also the most lengthy activity. 

The enemies are methodical and relentless, basically like the terminator, and there is a lot of defending a point from wave after wave of enemies until an invisible timer runs out, so many of the encounters are basically timed. 

The special weapon's bearer for the VoG is the "Relic Holder", though due to the mechanics of the "Boss Fight" at least 3/4 of the team could have to be a Relic Bearer.

There are several sections to it, and it is pretty common to get a checkpoint from another player so that one only has to play the sections they want, hence the list for your guidance as one can start in the middle and possibly only want one section.

Here are the sections/checkpoints for VoG:

• Opening the Vault (10 minutes)
• Confluxes (20 minutes - No Loot)
• Oracles (10 minutes)
• Templar - "The Sub Boss" (10 Minutes)
• Gorgon's Maze (5 minutes)
• The Jump Puzzle (<5 minutes)
• Gatekeepers (10 minutes)
• Atheon - "The Boss Fight" (10 minutes)

Please note that these are estimates, with a tiny amount of padding, that assume both a competent team with adequate equipment, a team lacking in either or both can effectively have the infinitely long experience alluded to in the "Nightfall" section.

• Crota's End - (Normal - 45 minutes; Hard - an hour and a half)

Crota's End (CE) is two entirely different experiences between Normal and Hard for a fully geared up player.  Normal is almost a slightly longer strike, where Hard is a challenge.

Crota's End plays something like a zombie movie, with a mix of frentic running and gunning combined with some point defense while the gate unlocks itself. The special weapon's bearer for CE is the "Sword Bearer", and this position is 80% responsible for success or failure in the "Boss Fight".

Crota's End is so easily ran up to the Boss Battle, particularly on Normal, that its less common to use a check point, but some people will skip to the "Boss Fight" particularly on hard.

Here are the sections/checkpoints for CE:

• The Abyss (10 minutes)
• The Bridge (10 minutes)
• The "Thrallway" (5 minutes)
• The Deathsinger - "The Sub Boss" (10 minutes)
• Crota - "The Boss Fight" (10 minutes)Th

Crota the boss fight is particularly challenging on Hard Mode, as it is very dependent on the game playing "nice" while getting the Sword and it was very common for this to take upwards of an hour on Hard Mode due to repeated wipes.

• The Prison of Elders (an hour - with the right gear)

This is more of a mash-up of a Strike and a Raid, but since it is an "End Game" activity, it's getting put into the Raid category.  Basically, this is go into four rooms with random bad-guys and challenges, and kick ass. 

The main thing to note is that there is no checkpoint in this activity, so quitting in the middle leaves the player with nothing to show for it, so if you're going to ask your partner to stop, try and do so at the beginning as playing for no loot = sad panda.

Competitive Destiny - player versus player (PvP):

The main thing to know about PvP is that one "match" is about 10-15 minutes, including the time it takes for the game to find opponents.

There are two special events that are similar to Raids that are limited time only events, the Iron Banner and the Trials of Osiris.   

• The Crucible (12 - 15 minutes on average for a match)

This is the term for PvP in general for Destiny, and there are  different game types. 

Most of Destiny's PvP game types are team based, Rumble excluded, so again, it's best to let your partner finish playing if time allows as two to five other players are depending on them.

• The Iron Banner Tournament (50 odd matches)

The Iron Banner is a week long "tournament", from weekly reset to weekly reset, that basically tracks points earned for number of wins and special bounties completed in 6 vs. 6 matches. 

Individual match times are the same as The Crucible.

The reason to play is that the Iron Banner allows the player to "buy" Raid equivalent armor and unique weapons once their character has earned a certain number of points. 

Players are awarded 50 points a win, and 40 points up to five losses before their next win.  The special bounties are effectively two "free wins". 

The game has two additional "bonus point" systems that make the actual amount of time needed very difficult to estimate without a spreadsheet because one of these systems gives a bigger bonus later in the week.

There are five ranks to the Iron Banner:

Rank 1 - 100 points
Rank 2 - 1200 points / 1300 points total
Rank 3 - 2400 points / 3700 points total (A Gun & Armor!)
Rank 4 - 2400 points / 6100 points total (More Armor!)
Rank 5 - 2400 points / 8500 points total (Another Gun!)

To get one character to rank 5, it's generally estimated that it will take an hour a day Tuesday through Monday, or 2 hours a day Friday - Monday. 

This doesn't count the fact that the player will likely have to "glimmer farm" as mentioned above if they want to be able to buy anything.

• The Trials of Osiris (up to 20 minutes a match, up to 10 matches)

The Trials of Osiris is a mini-tournament that runs from Friday until Monday, and unlike the other PvP events, consists only of pre-made teams in a 3 vs. 3 match.   Each match consists of an up to 2.5 minute round, with the best of five winning the match meaning that match could go a total of eight rounds.

Each attempt at the Trials of Osiris allows a player up to three match losses before being reset, with the maximum number of wins being 10.

The fact that three losses ends the attempt makes this the "Hard Corps" tournament, with zero guarantee of success.