I actually agree with all of that. (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Friday, October 30, 2015, 23:56 (3548 days ago) @ Kahzgul

You ONLY rank up the factions you're allied with. In Year 1, for me, that was ONLY Vanguard - because I didn't see anything useful come out of DO, or NM, or FWC. (If you didn't wear their marks, you didn't get rep for them.) Every level, I got motes and some crappy armor - not enough motes to care about, armor that became parts as fast as I could hold the button.

You... really?! You didn't look at the vendor armors or weapons from the various factions and see even 1 that you wanted enough to rank up to rank 3 with that faction? Really? Some of the vendor weapons were really, really good (Vanquisher VIII comes to mind). But even if you really did only vanguard and crucible rep, you're still getting the reward packages. There's still tangible evidence that ranking up your rep with a faction gets you something.

Did you ignore Eris rep? Or Queen's guard rep? Variks rep? All of these things lay out that at least up to rank 3 there are rewards to buy. Every faction but the gunsmith shows that, so inferring that maybe you get something at rank 3 of the gunsmith is a pretty easy step to take.

It's as though you're reading half of my posts, and ignoring the other half.

I NOTICED that you get stuff. I DECIDED, after a lot of experience (I'm over rank 40 in Vanguard now) that what they give you is crap - I sharded almost ALL of it.

The Gunsmith changed the paradigm. Earning rep with the Gunsmith allows you to earn Exotics - that's absolutely new, and no other vendor has matched that. (I suppose you could say that the PoE Elder Ciphers are technically 'Exotics you can earn through ranking up with Variks'... but there's so much more involved in getting those that Variks is almost an afterthought.)

There is no indication, anywhere, that the paradigm shifted. Why would I continue to work for things that bore me, if nobody says "well, the paradigm shifted, and now you can earn things that don't bore you - but only with this one new guy you didn't rank up with before"?

I NEVER got a godly roll on a gun - I don't think I even realized you could get non-standard rolls on rank-up packages.

You should have realized on your first gun that the roll wasn't standardized, and certainly by gun five. I'm genuinely surprised you never noticed.

::shrug::

Until TTK dropped, and I got to test out 'Old Guard', I NEVER (not once) saw a shader that made me say more than 'meh'. Ships? They're almost all the same. I use Green ships on my characters now, because they're the cleanest.

But you saw shaders. You saw ships. You knew there were rewards from those factions beyond simply what was shown on their vendor list.

But... once again, and more clearly... THOSE THINGS DON'T REALLY MATTER TO ME. (They clearly matter to you, and to others. But I couldn't care less what ship I'm flying in, and my idea of the perfect color scheme is no color at all.)

I'm no longer speaking for Mono - this is MY experience. I play way more than he does - I have over a thousand hours of playtime in on this game. And when TTK dropped, and I saw you could get Gunsmith rep by trying out guns there, I did that. And it sucked. So I didn't do it again. For WEEKS.

Again, I'm just really surprised that you didn't even hit rank 2 to get the very first weapon quest. One set of 5 guns is 1250 rep, plus 1000 rep from the four Dvalin drops... You'd only need 3 more test guns to hit rank 2.

Yep. They probably planned it that way. "Hey, if we make the second rank gettable just from doing the first week's stuff, things won't last long enough." I did a week's worth of stuff, saw no benefit, went out and did stuff that was fun, instead.

I only went back because someone said "hey, you're never going to be able to get these guns without ranking up with the Gunsmith."

It never occurred to me that the Gunsmith, unlike every other NPC vendor in the game, had actual EXOTICS I could get, by doing these boring tests. Nothing I'd done to that point suggested that might be a mechanic. Not sure why you think that's obvious - it wasn't, at all, to me.

Each faction rep has a quest for an exotic piece of faction armor which becomes available at rank 25, so it's not just the Gunsmith.

See? There's something I had no idea about UNTIL JUST NOW. Nobody ever told me that - including the faction rep guys I talk to regularly these days (I rank up now because DO's weapons are suddently fun for me, something that wasn't true in year 1.)

I'm 20 levels away from that, though, so who knows if I'll ever see it?

I'm just really surprised that after all that time in-game you seem to have missed one of the best paths to item upgrades available to you, and to have done so willfully. I really feel like the signposts are in the game to point you towards repping up as a means of garnering rewards.

And that just shows how easy it is to misunderstand how others see the game you're playing.