Review
The rhythm of Destiny is becoming a PvE section from Tuesday-Thursday, a Crucible section from Friday-Sunday, and a cleanup day on Monday. Trials is dominating the online discourse about Destiny, as I posted about late last week.
My main PvE activities were finishing up everything available in the Shattered Realm: Forest of Echoes, raiding with my team on Wednesday, and doing a set of pinnacle activities with friends on Thursday. The Shattered Realm continues to impress — it was fantastic to figure out how to find everything and trigger the Ascendant Mysteries. The best part is that it was all reasonably findable so I did actually do it myself rather than get frustrated and look up a youtube video. And there are three more mysteries for the next time around. This is my favorite seasonal activity so far.
On Wednesday my raid team did Vault of Glass then hopped in to do Deep Stone Crypt. Our organizer has us on a schedule to do all of the triumphs for everyone on the team. I already have them all except for the flawless runs but I am really having fun raiding with this crew and I’m glad that we’re still doing it
Thursday pinnacles are just a good way to spend time with friends. We may change it up once all of us are at the cap; the point is to touch base and play together.
Friday the focus switched to trials. There was interest in the raid team to go in together Friday night so I got my wish and got a team together. They couldn’t be on until later than me so I did 10 solo matches first. It was a bit of a weird experience. Five of the games were against solos or duos. My team won all of them. Five of the games were against trios. We lost all of them, and in four of the five we had absolutely no chance taking just 2 rounds total in the four games. So on the one hand I went 5-5. On the other the losses were matches in which I had no chance.
I then played 19 games with teammates from the raid team. The first team we had never played together and it took us a bit to get used to each other — we lost the first two games badly and the next two 5-4. We then won five out of the next seven, and switched teams. The next team it was with someone with whom I had played a lot last week plus one of the guys from the earlier team, so we had some chemistry right away and reeled off six wins in a row before running into a very good team on game seven and losing 3-5. We then had an easy game 8 for my first non-carry flawless ever.
I then played a few games post-flawless with one of the guys I had just played with and it was a stark change. We lost all four matches and didn’t have a chance in two of them. Our new teammate decided to leave and find some non-flawless people to go in with.
Saturday morning I played with my carry team. Despite being in the flawless pool, we cruised, winning all 17 matches and with our opponents never winning more than two rounds. The games were harder than last week but still much easier than last season, and I don’t see any team that was able to carry last season having any trouble whatsoever carrying this season.
Sunday evening I went back in intending to solo queue, and then got joined by one of the guys from the flawless team a couple of games in. And the experience was perfectly fine. I lost more than I won (1-1 solo, 4-8 Duo), but only three of the matches were matches in which we didn’t have a chance. Although my overall record on Sunday was 5-9 vs 5-5 solo-queuing on Friday, the games Sunday in the flawless pool felt better.
I played again solo queuing a few games during the workday and then more in the evening on Monday. The experience was generally ok but stomps against me were more prevalent. As I climbed the win ladder (I was working to complete a 7-win card to get one last Adept Reed’s Regret) matches seemed to get harder. And when I had one more win to go I unfortunately lost three 5-4 matches in a row and then got stomped for four matches, for a seven game loss streak before getting that seventh win. And that felt bad. But intellectually I know that if I had won any of those 5-4 games I would have stopped then and seen the experience entirely differently. Here are the final stats:
Post flawless seems to be about a one-third winning percentage solo-queue, which is not wonderful but is enough to keep me playing if the experience is otherwise good. There are still far too many stomp games — on both sides — for my taste. Out of the 83 matches I played, in only 18 — or less than 22% — did the losing team win at least three rounds. I don’t know if this is the nature of elimination or if this indicates that matches are imbalanced, but I wish there were more close games.
Preview
This coming week PvE wise is the next phase of Shattered Realm: Ruins of Wrath. I’ll do the seasonal content including that as well as my weekly pinnacle activity night with my friends, and Wednesday raid night. We are going to try for flawless Vault of Glass. On the weekend we will have a “Trials labs” with an objective and Bungie will be removing the display of the guardian count in the lobby to avoid people dodging teams. Plus, they may make matchmaking changes again — who knows? I plan on playing a lot of Trials again next week.
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