It happened to me: I was looking for groups on the Destiny 2 app to play Trials of Osiris joined one and found myself jumping off a cliff for the next few minutes in homage to how unpleasant the game’s competitive PVP loot can be.
Trials of Osiris was praised in the original game for its tense gunplay and powerful rewards. Last spring, Bungie finally added the mode to Destiny 2but the return was not flawless. Between player cheating peep exploits and unbalanced weapons, Trials of Osiris can be hellish, especially for anyone with just a passing interest in competing PVP. Tired of getting a Felwinter’s Lie shotgun in the face, but unable to return the favor because that quest is no longer in playYou are not alone! And so some players march down cliffs, lemming-style, to grind the loot as painlessly as possible.
While the best equipment from Trials of Osiris can only be earned by winning seven games in a row without a single loss, Trials of Osiris bounties leave players grilling for lesser versions of the coveted loot. One bounty in particular guarantees you the Trials item of the week, simply for completing matches, winning or losing. And since giving up and losing right away is faster than trying and losing in the end, many choose quick death over drawn-out death.
This is how I found myself a week ago as part of a group performing improvised cliff speed runs on the Mercury map Altar of Flame. The map floated in the air and was perfectly suited for players chewing the mode. The addition of new loot with the start of the season of the Chosen, meanwhile, provided an extra boost. The guaranteed reward for the week was The Messenger, an easy-to-handle wrist rifle with an incredible range that also had the ability to drop with the Desperado perk, which increases your rate of fire after killing someone with a precision shot. As a result, even when I really tried to play, I occasionally ran into teams that knocked themselves out within seconds of the start of the round.
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Last weekend’s reward was Astral Horizon, a super-high impact kinetic shotgun. While the map, Exodus Blue, is largely boxed in, I still occasionally ran into teams running to one open side to jump overboard rather than gamble on a slow defeat. “Kys [kill yourself] for bounty, ”read one of the Fireteams I joined over the weekend when I had 1% left to do my Trials engram bounty.
Like Shacknews and countless posts on the Destiny subreddit have pointed out, all of this goes to show how warped the mode and the players’ relationship with it has become. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one seems to be a skills gap. Players routinely complain about taking one win in a sea of losses, only to be compared to a team of pros who have already gone flawless (seven wins without a loss) and who have the Adept versions of Trials gear to make it. prove. “We don’t have matchmaking, so in fact no casuals will ever play it,” one player wrote in a post that blew on Reddit over the weekend“Speaking of matchmaking, why am I playing people with flawless gold plated titles in my second win?”
Then there’s the problem with how the rest of the Trials of Osiris economy is currently structured. Towards the end of the original Destiny, players could easily edit Trials gear by playing matches, as they earn, win or lose tokens after each match. These tokens can eventually be exchanged for the equipment other players obtained more quickly simply by winning multiple matches in a row. It was a nice solution for Trials of Osiris enthusiasts with moderate or negative KDAs. However, in the current iteration, you only get tokens to win, and even then, they are spent very sparingly.
Trials of Osiris is what Bungie calls an ambitious activity, meaning it has to be something players should work towards. I have no problem slogging through Trials, getting kicked in the butt for months on end, only to have a modest streak of five wins late in the season. But right now it doesn’t feel like a mountain that I can slowly climb, and certainly not one that I would like to. Like everything else in the game, it feels more like a mess, and with so many good things to do in the game, it’s no surprise right now that so many players prefer to spend as little time in Trials as possible.