Community Focus - Destiny Sets

Who are you? Where did you come from? Why are you here?

Josh: Hi, my name is Josh and I’ve been playing Destiny since back in the Destiny beta days. Originally from Sydney, Australia, but I moved to London at about the same time Destiny 2 came out. I make DestinySets.com, a website to help Guardians collect their gear.

When did you start exploring web development?

Josh: Back in school, I had a problem I wanted to solve and I learned programming to solve it myself. I’ve stuck at that for a bit, and now I work full time as a web developer, making a few Destiny sites on the side.

That’s the cool thing about having an API for games like Destiny - its a bit of a trigger to get people into programming. On the Destiny API Devs Discord (https://discord.gg/HU3Q4up), we see so many people coming in learning programming for the first time to build something with the Destiny APIs - whether it’s something for their clan, or a way to see Xur inventory, or to dive more into perks and stats. Destiny Sets is on Github (http://github.com/joshhunt/destinySets) as an open source project, and people of all sorts of experiences contribute, especially for the data to organise the gear pieces into their respective loot tables.

What brought about the creation of Destiny sets?

Josh: Actually I first created Destiny Sets back in Destiny, mainly for strike and raid loot, to help me figure out whether I needed to use a Skeleton Key or SIVA key for another chance at the loot I was missing.

When Destiny 2 came out, the game changed these things around (for the better, I think) and I saw the opportunity to create one giant checklist to help you track the gear that you have, what you’re missing, and where everything comes from. 

There’s so much gear in Destiny 2 from all sort of activities that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of. I like how, for me at least, looking at the items I don’t have yet on Destiny Sets will be a prompt for how I’ll play Destiny 2. I’ll go Crucible for a bit to work on my Season 3 objectives, or to try and work on that nightfall high score for a cool emblem.

What do you find yourself doing most in Destiny 2?

Josh: First and foremost I’m here for the friendgame. I really lucked out and found a wonderful clan, Bravo Company 30, that I love raiding with. I love the challenges, the teamwork, communication and banter that comes from the raids - it’s such a fun experience that you can’t really get anywhere else.

Other than that I love it when Iron Banner comes around and I like smashing through the Ornament objectives. Our clan runs “Iron Banner Disco” matches where we all head in with our most garish shaders and exclusively use weapons like Hard Light, Coldheart, or Prometheus Lens. It might not be the most effective, but it’s a load of fun.

Solstice of Heroes is just kicking off! What are you most excited to get your hands on?

Josh: Definitely the new armour!  I’m really digging the new Warlock gear and I can’t wait to see what it’ll look like with my shaders and the new armor Glows.

With Forsaken just around the corner, what announced feature has caught your eye so far?

Josh: I’m actually really looking forward to Collections, purely from a selfish point of view. The hardest part of working on Destiny Sets is all the manual curation that goes into the site - all the gear on the site has been organised by me or a community contributor into specific set or vendor. I’m hearing that maybe Collections in Forsaken will make some of that work easier, and allow me to work on more features for the site.

Josh: Massive props to Bungie API engineer vthorn (aka /u/EdgarVerona) and the Bungie.net team for all the hard work that’s put into the API and support they provide for us. 

Also to the whole Destiny Devs community, of which there’s far too many to name. On top of also providing invaluable support, both moral and technical, I’m constantly marbled by the variety of the cool things they all provide