After much anticipation, Destiny 2 developer Bungie has revealed their latest expansion, Witch Queen, and information about the future of the franchise in their latest showcase. The reveal included information about the latest season leading up to the expansion, Season of the Lost. The Season has bought a lot of changes to the sandbox and importantly the huge revamp to the Endgame PvP activity, Trials of Osiris. All these changes were elaborated on in a recent blog post made by the Destiny Dev team.
Trials of Osiris will be taking a short hiatus at the beginning of the Season and the scheduling of the game mode has been changed so that it does not divide the population between other endgame activities. Trials before used to be active every weekend of the game. From now Trials will be in Week 1 of an expansion, season, Iron Banner, or before Raid World First race. Trials of Osiris this season will return on September 10, 2021.
Accessing the Gamemode
The way to access the playlist is being completely changed in terms of game requirements. the changes are as follows;
- Reduced the requirements for the Trials of Osiris Access quest to use lifetime Valor ranks and kills replacing the quest which was required to participate in the game mode.
- Trials now allows queuing and matchmaking without a full fireteam. Before players required to have a fireteam of three to enter.
- Freelance Trials (No pre-made fireteams, solos only matchmade) will be available though Trials Labs.
- Trials of Osiris now requires the annual expansion to play. This is Destiny 2: Beyond Light for Season of the Lost, and will change to The Destiny 2: Witch Queen once it launches. Previously it was free to all players.
Changes to the Ruleset
Along with these, there have been more changes made to the base rulesets of the game mode to reduce stalling in the games. The changes are as the following;
- Round time is reduced to 90s (from 120s).
- Emotes stay in first-person camera, and Swords can’t be equipped unless you have ammo. (This change is in Elimination and Survival also). This is to stop third person peeking to have unfair advantage during the rounds.
- Special and Heavy ammo no longer carries over between rounds.
Rewards and Reputations
Saint-14, the Trials of Osiris vendor will be receiving a full Reputation overhaul similar to the playlist vendors in Destiny and be gaining the ability to focus Trials engrams to specific rewards. Adept weapons will continue to require a full Flawless passage to be earned.
- Saint-14 is getting new Trials ranks, reputation, and a rewards track.
- Reputation is gained at match complete, based on the number of rounds won on the players Ticket. Tickets track up to 20 round wins now.
- Ranking up gives the players a Trials engram. Powerful Trials engrams show up every three rank ups before your first reset of the Season. Trials ranks will have one of the unique Trials weapons at Rank 10 and Rank 16 for each of the first three resets of a Season.
Changes to Trials of Osiris Passages
Passages previously emphasized the player’s ongoing flawless for seven matches and discouraged players to continue their passages even after just one loss. The changes were made to mitigate that is the following;
- Passages no longer track losses – a Passage is either Flawless or not.
- Passages track up to 20 rounds won.
- Passages have been re-ordered and have all had their prices significantly reduced.
- Passages are now account-wide and are not restricted to a character.
- Each week, there are two pinnacle challenges for Trials of Osiris namely by Winning seven matches total on a given weekend and by Winning 50 rounds.
- 3/5/7 win challenges have been removed
- Once the player max out the reputation, you can reset and claim an Ascendant Shard or Exotic engram.
- Match wins on a seven-win card have a chance to drop extra Trials engrams, Masterworking materials, and high-stat Trials armor.
- The Lighthouse Flawless experience isn’t going to be changing and will still need seven wins without a loss.
- Flawless will be the only way to acquire a unique pinnacle Adept weapon each week the first time the player visit on your account. All of the flawless exclusive mods and cosmetics are available in the chest to reward return visits.
Trials Engrams and focusing
Trials engrams now decrypt to a random selection from current armor and non-Adept weapons.
Players can Focus their engrams at Saint-14 to decrypt specific items that they have already received. If a player has gone Flawless that week, they can Focus additional drops of the weekly Adept weapon but that will seemingly be expensive.
Matchmaking Changes
Previous in Trials of Osiris Matchmaking was based on the number of Wins a fireteam had on tier passage making it harder and harder to win at the later stages of the card. Also, the top tier players doing multiple cards encountered players still at the start of their cards making it harder for new teams to get in the mode. So the following changes have been made;
- Player now start matchmaking with players that have the same number of wins on the card and with similar Trials game performance of the given week.
- If matchmaking takes too long, it widens the ‘similarity’ check until it finds enough opponents for the match to start.
Security Update
In order to make the player experience in Trials of Osiris smooth and to decrease unfair encounters in the Gamemode, there have been updates for that;
- Addition of the BattlEye Anti-Cheat in order to combat the players who cheat.
- Banning and moderating Win Trading to combat uncontested victories in PvP.
- Banning Account recoveries. Account recoveries are when a player gives someone else access to their platform account and control of their Destiny characters. Starting this Season, participating as a buyer or seller of account recovery services could result in a ban on the player’s account.
The details on what constitutes recoveries along with the rest of the updates have been specified in a blog post by the Bungie Security Team.
Trials Labs
Trials labs are being reintroduced from Destiny 1 in order to try and beta tests new variations on the Trials game mode. Over the course of Season 15, there will be running a number of Trials of Osiris Labs weekends, where Bungie will test out targeted changes and collect analytics and feedback from the players. This will generally take over the entire mode for the weekend so that the Dev team can get as many players in as possible testing the game mode.
Three labs have been planned in Season of the Lost as of now:
- Capture/Elimination Hybrid: One capture point activates 30 seconds after each round starts, with an extended capture timer. The capture location changes each round, as do spawn locations. Capturing it wins the round, or you can always just eliminate the other team.
- Trials Freelance: A separate node from the main Trials of Osiris activity, where only solo players can queue. This is in order to test out how till effect the Trials of Osiris matchmaking.
- No Intro Quest: One weekend where players who have never played in the Crucible can play.
With all these changes Trials of Osiris have been made more accessible than ever to play. It will be interesting to see how all these changes play out once all these changes roll out on September 10th.