Review

This week was the first week of the caches being available in the Shattered Realm, and the first week that I gave up and looked up the location of an item.  One of the caches had a triumph that said it was in the shipyard, when it was in a different location, and after about 90 minutes of searching the shipyard fruitlessly I looked it up. It was a little frustrating because if the triumph hadn’t been misleading about the location I would have found it on my own.  But that’s a minor thing, I still love the Shattered Realm activity.

It was also the first week the catalyst for Ager’s Scepter was available and I was lucky enough to get it on my first run of Astral Alignment for the week.  I then played normally to complete it, finishing in a couple of days.  It’s another well-done exotic with a lot of character and utility.

Raid-wise, we did not complete a flawless Vog run and my teammate who is missing vex mythoclast still did not get it, and we tried and failed to complete the red rover challenge in Deep Stone Crypt.  It’s funny how even a good team with good players can struggle when doing something different — practice does make perfect.  Pinnacles with friends on Thursday was the usual good time.

Friday rolled around and it was Trials time.  With the flawless matchmaking pool pushed back to Sunday and having commitments Saturday morning I did my carry run early Friday.  It was harder that the past couple of weeks but still pretty routine.  The rest of the trials experience, though, was much more difficult this week, as I noted here.  

In the end I wasn’t having much fun solo queuing and even with a team we were struggling as compared to other weeks. Having already gone flawless and therefore having no chance of relief when flawless matchmaking turned on I just packed it in for the week and did not play trials anymore after Saturday night.  Here were my final stats for the week:

Sunday and Monday I exclusively played other crucible modes and had a pretty good time.  Next week is Iron Banner, which I plan on playing a lot of, and when trials returns if the matchmaking remains the same I am not going to go flawless until Monday at the earliest.

Preview

This week we should finish off all of the nodes of the Compass, and complete all of the triumphs for Shattered Realm:  Ruins of Wrath.  The raid team will take another run at flawless VoG.  And, as already mentioned, Iron Banner returns.  We are getting towards the end of the seasonal content before the “catch up” weeks and I am going to start paying more attention to the seasonal triumphs to be sure that I am on pace to complete them all.