Today marks the return of Brother Vance and the Trials of Osiris, and you should play. No, really! You should. While the competition is fierce, there are several reasons why Trials of Osiris is worth your time this weekend. Whether you’ve ventured into the Trials many times before, or you’re a player who just started Destiny with The Taken King, the mode has been refined and the best features maintained to create a one-of-a-kind competitive experience.
By way of explanation for newcomers, Trials of Osiris is a weekend-only event in Destiny. You pick up a scorecard/passage from a vendor named Brother Vance, who hangs out in the Vestian Outpost of the Reef. You then need two teammates to join you and enter a special 3v3 Elimination game mode. Your passage ends if you ever reach three match losses. So you want to get as many wins as you can before that happens.
You can buy buffs/boons from him before your passage begins by using Passage Coins (which you may already have a good number of if you’ve been playing other Crucible modes). These boons make it easier to reach the higher reward tiers.
I outline the reasons to give the mode a try below, but let’s start out with a big caveat. While I think Trials of Osiris is thrilling, and you should definitely try it at some point, that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily ready to dive in right now. Specifically, if your level is below 40 and your light value is still below 251, you won’t even be able to enter the tournament. Even at 251, you’re at a disadvantage in the damage you give and take. Keep playing, and you’ll eliminate that inherent disadvantage and have a better time when you finally do dive in.
When your light level is competitive (let’s say around 280 or higher), consider the following.
The More the Merrier
One of the reasons I’ve heard cited by players about why they don’t attempt the Trials is that “all the best PvP players are in there, and they crush me.”
That’s a fair statement, and it’s often correct. Especially if you’re just starting out with the game mode, you will undoubtedly run into some excellent teams that will shut you out. While there’s something to be said for what you can learn from those defeats, it’s not fun to never make any progress.
That’s the biggest reason everyone should play. When only a few beginner teams are brave enough to enter Trials, the only teams they can potentially be matched against are experienced pros. But as more teams brave the waters, the chance for running into another beginner team goes up for everyone, and that means everyone has a higher chance to run into a competitive match rather than a blowout.
Improved Matchmaking
Matchmaking is a relative term when discussing Trials of Osiris. From the beginning, the idea of the mode was to not specifically match teams by skill, but rather present a pure system where the best teams would consistently win.
The spirit of that idea is still in place in the new version of Trials, but a new twist should make the experience better for newcomers and lead to more exciting matches for experienced teams. When matching teams, Trials now more closely examines how many wins your team already has, and tries to match you accordingly with another team at a similar tier.
If you think about this for a few minutes, you can see the positive effect it has. When you have zero wins, you are most likely to be matched with other teams that have zero wins. Yes, that means that as a champion-level team is just starting its passage, you may run into them. But very soon, that team will have a few wins under their belt, and move out to fight other teams that are already doing well.
For excellent teams, it means that the match you play after you’ve gone 8-0 is almost certainly going to be very challenging, since you’ll be facing other teams that are doing about as well as you. You’ll have to work for your win, which might be frustrating for some who were used to easier paths to the Lighthouse. But it does seem to be more fair for all players, and should lead to better more competitive matches overall.
In short, if you abandoned Trials of Osiris this summer because you were always overmatched, there’s reason to believe that at least some of the matches should be much more approachable now.
[Next Page: It's not all about the Lighthouse]
It’s About the Process, Not The Lighthouse (At Least At First)
If you’ve never played Trials, it’s a mistake to go in with the explicit purpose of getting to the Lighthouse. For those not in the know, the Lighthouse is a dedicated social space on Mercury that can only be accessed with a 9-0 Trials passage. Upon reaching the Lighthouse, in addition to being a cool place to visit, you also find a chest with excellent rewards, including 310+ Trials gear, emblems, and other goodies.
It’s a fun thing to shoot for, but don’t gauge your enjoyment of the event purely on whether you get there or not. Instead, aim your first week to try for three or five wins, regardless of whether you lose some matches along the way. Pick up all the new Trials bounties, and try to complete those. Work on learning the weekend’s map (it’s Bannerfall for this weekend of October 30), and how your team can control the playspace.
Expert teams will sometimes restart their passage as soon as they get one loss, but that’s a recipe for frustration for beginner teams. Instead, accept that you you’re going to get some losses, but by purchasing Trials Boons ahead of your tournament run, you can maximize your chance to get to some good loot.
Cool Rewards
We spoke with Bungie today about the rewards for Trials of Osiris, and it sounds like there’s a lot to look forward to attaining. Trials of Osiris also now has more paths to rewards than before, thanks to recently introduced bounties.
This week, you’ll get class-specific leg armor if you manage to get five wins before being eliminated for three losses. If you manage to reach seven wins, you’ll get the Trials scout rifle. As mentioned above, if you fight your way to the Lighthouse, you’ll be looking at gear that is just as good as what you can get from the hard mode raid.
But here’s the big change. New bounties allow for excellent rewards, even if you never manage to win enough consecutive matches for rewards along the more traditional path. Many of these bounties are highly attainable, like completing team revives, or defeating enemy players who have already been damaged by teammates. Bungie says the rewards for completing bounties range depending on their tier (bronze, silver, or gold), but you can expect a selection of legendary and even exotic drops, and include both Trials-specific items as well as other gear pieces.
Intensity
In a game like Destiny, people tend to fixate on the loot at the end of an activity, but that’s missing out on perceiving the inherent fun of what you’re doing.
In the case of Trials of Osiris, there are few game modes I’ve played, in Destiny or otherwise, that foster such concentration, teamwork, and strategy. The Elimination game mode values twitch skill, but it also rewards smart movement and player placement on the map, and includes strong strategic and psychological components as you try to outthink your opponents as heavy weapons spawn, supers become active, and individual players go down.
While it can be hard to recognize all those intricacies when the other team is destroying you, calm heads and hands, along with clear team communication, can carry you a long way. At the very least, even if you do lose the majority of your matches, there is absolutely no doubt that time spent in the intense Trials setting will make you a better Crucible combatant overall. Pull your team together, and get in there!