Five Reasons You Should Try Destiny’s Trials Of Osiris

Today marks the return of Brother Vance and the Trials of Osiris, and you should play.

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.

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