I seriously don't know how you do it. Two games and I have to take a break just to steady my nerves. My blood sugar starts to crash, my jaw aches, my tremors kick into overdrive (I'm being good and going back to edit everything just so you can read it) and I realize that, oh yeah, I'd forgotten to breathe again. That explains the tunnel vision nicely.

One would think that I'd do better now that I'm using The Last Word and my k/d ratio is now only sorta pathetic instead of completely abysmal. I mean, at my current rate, I should be able to finish A Request from Ikora's cruciable bounty in two more matches, maybe three, so I must be doing better, right?

In a way, surviving longer and playing better only makes it worse. I have fewer respawns to force myself to calm down and relax. The better that I do, the stronger the desire to mash that respawn button the moment it comes up. I'm actually contributing to the team instead of being the guy who really should not be playing at all, so now there's a drive that only makes things worse.

I don't get it. I didn't have these problems with Halo or Battlefield. At least, not for a long, long time. So why is Destiny's MP putting me through the wringer? I don't know, but I'll tell you one thing -- I have newfound respect for you people who rock it.

I can only speak for myself of course, but when I started playing Crucible I absolutely hated it. Kill times were too quick, everybody was bouncing all over the place, I couldn't learn the maps to, literally, save my digital life. I honestly don't know why I kept at it. Maybe for bounties and their xp rewards. Now that I've played a good deal of it though, it's one of my favourite things to do in Destiny. At some point the whole thing just clicked in my mind and I started coming out on top. Not just positive k/ds and high point totals, but leading my teams to victory.

Even so, there are times nowadays when I'll have a bad run of matches. It will be infuriating and I usually find I need to stop and take a break. Calm down by playing some simple patrol stuff, or even just turning off the game and doing something else.

Overall though, I find that Crucible is a lot of fun for me. And as with most things, the best way to do it is with friends.

I can only speak for myself of course, but when I started playing Crucible I absolutely hated it. Kill times were too quick, everybody was bouncing all over the place, I couldn't learn the maps to, literally, save my digital life. I honestly don't know why I kept at it. Maybe for bounties and their xp rewards. Now that I've played a good deal of it though, it's one of my favourite things to do in Destiny. At some point the whole thing just clicked in my mind and I started coming out on top. Not just positive k/ds and high point totals, but leading my teams to victory.

Even so, there are times nowadays when I'll have a bad run of matches. It will be infuriating and I usually find I need to stop and take a break. Calm down by playing some simple patrol stuff, or even just turning off the game and doing something else.

Overall though, I find that Crucible is a lot of fun for me. And as with most things, the best way to do it is with friends.

Yeah, there was a time, perhaps months long, where I thought Destiny's multiplayer wasn't for me. But then I passed over some hump like you describe, where you've just been brutally murdered so many times (and usually out of nowhere), and you start to see the subtleties and strategy and most importantly, the fun, through the chaos. Now I'm more eager and interested in Crucible then I had been in Halo's MP for many years, and it was only in the last couple of months where my K/D ratios became consistently decent.

There's still some great maps in the Halo library that I miss, and Destiny's vehicles leave a lot to be desired compared to Halo (at least in the Halo games where they could actually survive in them for more than a few seconds), but the heart of the gameplay -the gunplay- is a lot more interesting in Destiny for me.

Actually, what you describe Dragoonite, is something akin to what I often felt in Halo over the years. I'd sweat profusely and often be frustrated or on the verge of BLARGs. I'd actually have to play with a fan directly pointed at me because I would literally overheat. My nerves were wracked, and fun was only found in spots in between BLARGs or when I'd find friends to play with.

Perhaps Destiny was a little like that at first, but after said hump, I can play for hours relaxed and calm. Perhaps you should just... not care as much? ;) Seriously, I think that actually might be part of the hump. Unlike other games, you just have to embrace a big dose of chaos and expect death at every corner. Put less stock in living and dying and more about what's need to be done and it might get less nervous. Destiny is crazy. It's less tactical shooter and more the Avengers and the Justice League going at each other in a small room. You can try to be Batman and plan ahead but sometimes the Hulk just smashes down and knocks out everyone in a twenty foot radius!

When I'm not having a good time, these are the remedies I always find turn my game around when I've been choking down some beefy, cheesy nachos:

1. Bring some friends.
2. Use Blink.
3. Get a Pocket Infinity.

I always feel my nerves immediately calm after the first bladedancer nuke-down.

1. Bring some friends.
2. Use Blink.
3. Get a Pocket Infinity.

fasdf I have this quest but I'm growing very weary of popping synths every few kills. I am not a skilled man. Only 98 more fusion rifle kills to go!

To excel, I need to be Deadpool. Alright, I can do that.

Seriously, though, I'm glad that others have experienced the same thing. You and Chewbaccawakka have given me the courage to dive back in and finish the two epic quests I need. Heck, I won't even give you grief about my name; stupid Pokemon and Tohou are destroying everything I identify with. ;)

(Also, BLARGs. I'm stealing that.)

1. Bring some friends.
2. Use Blink.
3. Get a Pocket Infinity.

fasdf I have this quest but I'm growing very weary of popping synths every few kills. I am not a skilled man. Only 98 more fusion rifle kills to go!

I rarely use it anymore, on account of how dirty it makes me feel, but if I've had a rough couple games...it'll cure those ills.

It took me the thorn, invective, and bad juju bounties along with several weeks of bananas tutelage and I still barely go positive. But playing with others and getting to know your radar and maps make a huge difference. If I'm ever on and you want to melt faces invite me in.

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Thanks to everyone who saw me on and decided to help me along to Bad Juju. Wish I could have played longer, but I needed to do something more relaxing. Like glimmer farm. ;)

I have to say, I've never once played with someone from DBO where I didn't enjoy myself. You all are boss.

Your name? I always thought it was a Lovecraftian reference...?

Though I'm actually pleased that you thought that. It's closer than you'd think, in a way.

I have to fight when writing fiction not to name men David or Greg, and Muldoon is my go-to surname. In fact, in my first piece of "serious" (non-Sue) adult fiction a major character was named David Gregory Muldoon, who was a humaniod abomination that tended to drive people insane. I hadn't even read any Lovecraft at that point. 'twas a horrible story, 'twas a seriously hamfisted character, but I still read it once a year or so. When I need a reminder that I've grown as a writer, that I've moved past those vapid days. The "-ite" is a play on that; "-ite" as a follower, following, coming after, that which came after Dagoon. Hence the name.

Symbolism is complicated, and frequently only ever makes real sense on a personal level, yo.

I'm probably not the best person to tell you this, since I barely rock a 1.1 K/D despite my 3k+ PPG average, but the way to win at Crucible is to play to survive. If you're low on health, fall back. The single largest determinate in whether you win or lose a 1v1 fight is who has the most health. Spec your dude into maximum armor, always. Always assume they have the best possible weapons. Never level up your crap guns in Crucible (advice I should really take). Bring your A game, be a team player, and also let your teammates run in like morons so you can mop up afterwards. Do not limit yourself to guns you like. Use guns that are effective. That means that, the vast majority of the time, you should actually be using your "secondary" weapon as a first choice, and your "primary" weapon should be your fallback.

Think "Time to Kill." A Shotgun has a 0 TTK. A Fusion Rifle has a 0 TTK. A Sniper Rifle has between 0 and however long it takes you to fire a second shot TTK. Everything else in the game takes longer.

Then think about your gametype. In Clash, you want to move as a unit and stay with the group. Three people with a hand cannon will effectively 1-shot anyone they come across. In Control, you need to own the chokepoints that lead to the flags more than you need to own the flags.

Lastly, Own the Heavy Ammo. I don't care if your capturing a point or surrounded in hostile territory - you need to pick up that ammo before the baddies do. If you're not being threatened by enemies, WAIT until more of your team is nearby so you all get the ammo. The team that gets heavy ammo together wins together.

--

Aside: I got better after leveling all classes to 20 and playing them in crucible. I now know exactly what the enemy can do, and my K/D has improved as a result.

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I'm going to disagree on the part about max armor. The tests I've seen show maxing armor giving you maybe another bullet worth of health... if it's a very weak gun shooting at you... For instance I know that some of my guns can kill in two headshots, some in three, and some in four... and that's always true. No matter how much armor someone has. Instead, I'd suggest first maxing Recovery as this has a very noticeable effect. If you can get out of danger you can be back to full health a full two or more seconds faster... which is HUGE. After that take the option that does Recovery + Agility since armor doesn't do much of anything.

I'd also caution against running with a secondary weapon all the time. They are powerful. But they are also fairly specialized. If you're still learning the maps the last thing you want to do is face off against someone while using a weapon outside of its proper range. A good primary can cover a lot of range effectively and leave you free to switch to a secondary that combat's the enemy team's strengths.

My main advice would be to learn to dodge. Often you might feel that you have good aim and a good gun and that you can stay in a fight and pull out the win. Maybe... but probably not! One of the things that helps me a lot in Destiny is knowing when to break away from a battle. If I see a sniper scope light that I'm not prepared for I immediately double jump in the direction of the nearest cover. If I don't shoot first at an enemy and they're using a weapon in its correct range I'll often duck back around cover instead of trying to overcome their head start. Even if I do fire first I'll break contact if the other guy significantly throws off my aim either with unexpected movement or with a gun with a high knockback effect that I wasn't prepared for. One of my favorite things to do is to turn a conflict not going my way into a win. I'll duck to cover, run away until I'm healed (this is where that quick recovery comes in) then turn around and more often than not will get the drop on an enemy who has become lazy thinking they're chasing me.

I try to keep the Pocket Infinity stashed during Crucible matches because it feels so unfair to use it. But once in a while, a particular shotgunner makes me mad enough to teach a lesson.

I think different games just affect people in different ways. I have played a lot of multiplayer shooters over the years and none of them really affected my nerves in any way until the last half-dozen call of duty games. For some reason I can only play one or two rounds of those and then I will become so agitated and frustrated that I have to go away from it.

(In all fairness, because of that I didn't even buy the last one or two of them so maybe they got better with whatever it it that bothers me so)

Generally, each encounter with an opponent in PVP is like a aerial dogfight. You want to set it up such that the weapons you are using are at their optimum distance, you are facing your opponent, and he is not aware of you nor at his optimal distance.

Everything else is tactics. Strafe, use a particular weapon, etc is a tactic that adds to your setup. The basic theory though is to win quickly and decisively, or flee.

You can die very quickly. Shotguns, Fusion Rifles, and Snipers are all 1 shot kills at the right range. There is often not enough time to react to these weapons at their optimum range. Primaries are a different story, since they take 3-8 bullets to kill most of the time. So there will be some warning that you are under fire and a moment to act, but just a moment.

In PVP, you must get set up so that you are fighting in your optimum range. Shotguns in close quarters from surprise, fusion rifles charged just as you breach the door etc. That is where knowledge of the map, of people's most common paths and ambush points can be helpful.

Running down a big open area means you are exposed to fire from multiple angles that you can't watch all at once. Rushing a point can mean you face multiple people at once and that usually means you will loose.

As a rule of thumb then:

1. Stay out of the "middle" of areas, keep to the sides where you can cover half the approaches.
2. Conceal your position from the other team (crouch, have some other idiot dancing on the point while you sit off to the side etc)
3. Flee if you are in a bad match up (fighting at long range with an auto rifle, getting shot at by snipers)
4. When fighting do not stand still, move.

There are lots of frustrating things in PVP. When your shotgun doesn't work but someone else's does, or you lose because the other person is rocking a Suros and your For the People can't compete, or your team is losing and feeding your opponents supers.
There isn't much you can do here, accept it will probably result in a loss and move on.

I suppose it depends on your playstyle then. I frequently come out of 1v1 fights with the tiniest of slivers of health, and I know I'd be dead if I didn't have max armor.

Of course, when I'm playing my hunter in Blinky McShotty mode, I'm running max agility, but that's more advanced (blink is freaking hard to learn. Once you do though... it's godly).

I feel like a player who isn't seeing great success in the crucible should focus on winning 1v1 fights before they spec into preparedness for stringing those kills together.

Another thing I didn't mention in my original post... use grenades! They're way good in PvP, unless you're a hunter. Well, non-hunter grenades are way good. Hunter Tripmine is great, and other grenades are a way to kill someone you've already wounded when they're around the corner trying to regen.

I've come to realize that I suck at Control, but am halfway decent at Clash, pulling a positive k/d ratio most of the time. I'm still learning my own playstyle in the Crucible, what works best for me.

That's why I'm loving all the advice that I'm getting here. Even if it doesn't work with my playstyle, I'm learning my options. If someone gives me a ton of advice that I can't use, and one piece that I can, then this was totally worth it.

That's a pretty awesome source for a name! Apologies for my mistake (I wonder how often I've read it that way over the years...)

I actually wasn't thinking Pokemon (not knowledgeable on that subject enough). More just combining 'dragoons' and 'knights' from military history (...and early Final Fantasy games).

...Don't feel bad. The halberd is my hands-down favorite weapon of all time, and the similarity is not lost on me. N-not that I've been known to claim that I was a high-jumping engine of destruction or anything!

...Yes, Titan is my favorite class, why do you ask?

At the start of Destiny I despised the Crucible and now I am singing a completely different tune.

This was my first experience with PVP in a game and I HATED it to start out with. I said right from the beginning that I refused to play in it. Every time I played I was slaughtered so badly and my KD's were always painful to see at the end of the match and it totally got me down.

BUT I did have a change of heart (after much practice and much death). It's now my absolute favorite part of the game. Whereas running strikes you memorize where each enemy is after a couple of runs, exactly what's going to take them out and muscle memory can take over after a while and it can become commonplace, I have found that sometimes in Crucible what I am expecting isn't always what I get which is nice and refreshing.

You never know how a team or your opponents are going to play a map or a game. Sure you can do pretty good betting but occasionally things will surprise you, and that can get pretty thrilling.

Playing against a game is completely different than playing against living people who learn and adapt.

I am a great example of this. I used to hate shotguns...I mean really hate them. But only because I couldn't figure them out. I was attempting to use them like a REAL shotgun not an in-game weapon specifically to be used for close range.

Rev would constantly say to me 'you're too far away, you can't hit them' and I just couldn't get it through my head because I was stuck IRL.

I can't tell you how many players must have come across me and thought to themselves 'what the hell is this girl doing?' as I fired wildly hitting nothing at all before they put me out of my misery.

So I started to learn, and I started to adapt. And now when a map pops up like Anomaly I almost feel bad when I pull out my shotgun and start to wreck havoc.

Tactic's are something I am still learning on the fly but the more I read the more I am able to put what I am learning into practice.

I mostly play with randoms, I don't usually run with a whole lot of people I know in Crucible so team strategy's are taking me longer to learn and adapt to. But I am getting there....I found myself rolling my eyes the other night as my team abandoned an important cruicible base and wandered to another.

Just don't give up on it, it's a total bear to learn at first but you'll get there. Hit me up if you ever want to play together, I am usually in there.

CC

(BTW thanks to iconicbanana for the Spawn Control guide awhile back that's a big part of what helped!)

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Conceal your position from the other team (crouch, have some other idiot dancing on the point while you sit off to the side etc)

That, my friend, would be me ;)

I'm going to disagree on the part about max armor. The tests I've seen show maxing armor giving you maybe another bullet worth of health... if it's a very weak gun shooting at you... For instance I know that some of my guns can kill in two headshots, some in three, and some in four... and that's always true. No matter how much armor someone has. Instead, I'd suggest first maxing Recovery as this has a very noticeable effect. If you can get out of danger you can be back to full health a full two or more seconds faster... which is HUGE. After that take the option that does Recovery + Agility since armor doesn't do much of anything.

Maybe this is more an effect of my playstyle than a condemnation of your advice, but I tried this yesterday... with unpleasant results. I'd been running with increased agility (Codex VI), and I switched it to max recovery (Codex V)... and I started dying a LOT. I simply couldn't move out of danger fast enough to heal.

I'm giving it more time - everything takes time to adjust to - but that was the INSTANT result. :)

Hunter (Gunslinger) - I use hand cannons, sniper rifles, and heavy machineguns with this build.
Hunter (Bladedancer) - I use (seriously) No Land Beyond, a shotgun, and a heavy machinegun with this build. But I play with the shotgun as my "primary" weapon. Once I get universal remote higher up, I may switch to that as primary with Praedith's Revenge secondary.
Titan (Striker) - Suros, Fusion Rifle, Heavy Machinegun.

I haven't maxed out my other classes yet, so I can't say for certain which specs I'd use, but the above are all very effective for me. Don't use blink-->shotgun as your class and expect good results until you're *super* comfortable with blinking all the time.

Heh. Probably just bad luck. I had a string crap games over the weekend where nothing I did went well. That said, I think what I'm saying should work. :p

I'm basing my theory on that Titan Defender video the other day where it was shown that out of the top ten guns used in the Crucible only one took any longer at all to kill a Titan at minimum armor vs max armor. And I believe that was with body shots so if it had been headshots, perhaps even mixing in even one headshot, the bonus damage would mean the change in armor had zero actual effect. I'm all for "I'll recover once they're dead and I'm not" as well but that video seemed pretty convincing.

3. Get a Pocket Infinity.

fasdf I have this quest but I'm growing very weary of popping synths every few kills. I am not a skilled man. Only 98 more fusion rifle kills to go!

I just finished off Pocket Infinity last night. Slycrel is about 1/2 way through the last step. We ended up starting the nightfall & instead of heading into the main battle we went off to the divide & killed level 30 guys back behind the fan room, then went & killed level 30 guys where you first get your ship (Dock 13), then killed more level 30s in the "That Wizard Came from the Moon" section, then we went through where you raise the satellite dish and killed more level 30s; we planned on going through the backdoor of the grottos & killing some more in there, but we found the hive had closed & locked their back door so we had to head back to the beginning in the Rocket Yard. IIRC the guys back behind the 'fan' in the Divide were back up... (or maybe I'm getting it confused with another run last night).

TL;DR. Anywhere you enter an instanced area you'll get enemies at the difficulty level you're playing at (30) and they will count if you're doing the Nightfall (and they're not darkness zones). Oh, and you can replenish your secondary ammo in between instanced areas.

Of course, playing as a titan is a dramatically different experience from playing as a warlock or hunter. I never appreciated how truly different the classes' base stats were until I leveled them all up. A hunter with minimum armor gets one-shot by a mosquito.

Maybe this is more an effect of my playstyle than a condemnation of your advice, but I tried this yesterday... with unpleasant results. I'd been running with increased agility (Codex VI), and I switched it to max recovery (Codex V)... and I started dying a LOT. I simply couldn't move out of danger fast enough to heal.

This could be placebo, since agility has very little effect on your move speed and sprint speed unless you are at the very high, or very low end of the spectrum. Switching your skill focus should do very little unless you were already maxed, and running with a MIDA multitool, or very low to begin with.

In my opinion recovery is the way to go in PvP by a wide margin.