Review

This was a bifurcated week:  the beginning was all PvE and Gambit, from Friday on it was the Trials revamp and PvP until I returned to PVE on Sunday night to hang out with friends.  The hive-themed Shattered realm map (Ruins of Wrath) was revealed and along with it the last of our ‘buffs’ for the activity — Safe Passage, which eliminates the effects of the slow/suppression fields for a short time.  As has been usual I had a great time exploring the map and trying to find all of the secrets myself.  I don’t think I got everything — there was one building I couldn’t figure out how to get to yet — but I got a lot and doing all of the exploring myself was a lot of fun.  And the story that’s playing out over this season continues to be great.

I also raided twice, once with iLulu on her stream and then with my regular raid group.  Both were fun and efficient, though one of our team is still looking for Vex to drop and it didn’t happen.  After the raid the team went into Astral Alignment and knocked out all of the triumphs except the “destroy all ether” one, on the first try.  It’s great to play with such a cool team.

On Thursday I played many, many Gambit matches until I reached a Gambit reset.  It was surprisingly fun.  For some reason being invaded didn’t bother me that much and the games were usually pretty fast paced.  

Friday launched the revamped Trials, and I already posted my initial impressions.  After that I continued to play a little and ended up with a total of 51 matches played, pretty much evenly split between a team with very good players (a Carry team, 17 matches), a team of regular players (a Regular Team, 16 matches), and solo and duo queuing (9 matches each, total of 18 matches).  These were the results:

The difference between having a team and not is stark, and having a regular team was easily the most fun.  It may be that my solo queue experience was worse because I had already gone flawless, so I am going to try solo queue again this coming Friday to see.

Preview

This week we get back into the Forest of Echoes for the first time with all of the buffs.  I am looking forward to getting out to the platform off in the sky with the statue on it to see what is there, and to finding out if there are other secrets.  I am also looking forward to another fun week of Trials and am going to start to figure out how to get a regular team going.  Also, now that I’ve hit the pinnacle cap on all of my characters it is time to figure out what my weekly routine will be for the season.