Haven't played it yet, but I AM a fan that the mode is going to rotate. Trials in D1 was fun, but there was never any variety aside from the map, even after more than 2 years. I know a lot of people loved the refinement of one mode being active every week, but I like the added variety.

I'm not very fond of the crucible in general, but I was a HUGE fan of Trials of Osiris in D1. It's obviously very early still, but my first impression of Trials in D2 was not good at all. For me, it has lost just about everything that made Trials so much fun for me in D1. I don't think 4v4 works for the mode very well, nor does the gametype. The pre-match intro was cool the first time I watched it, but by the 2nd game I was already wishing I could skip it.

I was a huge fan of D1 Crucible and Trials, and I have occasionally mentioned I haven't been very happy with the direction Bungie has been going with PvP.

My first impressions were not good at first, but after playing for a little longer (and having some more success), I'm a little happier. A couple of thoughts:

You have to consciously not do things that were successful in Destiny 1. D1 was often very rewarding to highly aggressive attacking moves, but D2 is not. It's much better to let the other team be the aggressor, and give some ground and then encircle (sort of a rope-a-dope). This means that...

Strategy is king. Especially with the Countdown gametype, your team needs a play, and you need to execute that play in a timely fashion, adjusting for what the other team does. Once our team actually figured out the map (having a new map for this is pretty annoying) and came up with a series of moves and countermoves, we were very successful. I'll try to post a description of what we were doing at some point - does anyone know of a good callout map yet?

I agree about the pre-match intro, it needs to be at least 2X speed, and doing a card now takes an incredibly long time with the length of the matches.

Played a few games of Trials of the Nine last night.
I'm not very fond of the crucible in general, but I was a HUGE fan of Trials of Osiris in D1. It's obviously very early still, but my first impression of Trials in D2 was not good at all. For me, it has lost just about everything that made Trials so much fun for me in D1. I don't think 4v4 works for the mode very well, nor does the gametype. The pre-match intro was cool the first time I watched it, but by the 2nd game I was already wishing I could skip it.

As I said, these are all very early impressions. I do want to spend some more time with it and see how it goes. But unless my opinion changes, I don't see Trials being something I'll want to go back to very often, which makes me a little sad.

How about everyone else? Impressions so far?

I haven't touched any d2 thing yet (waiting for pc version but my pc just got nuked in a power surge, hopefully homeowners insurance come through) so I won't post gameplay thoughts.

But I watched a vid of the spire and flawless reward. Kind of looks like a super hi res version of my first 3D 3ds max scene. "Holy shit I love this primitives tool!". Which all kind of works? I can't tell if the dialog is supposed to be "profound" or just kind of dumb.

Here's my quick run down:

- Games are too long. maybe cut down to 5 round wins instead of 6?
- Intro screen needs sped up. It was cool the first time. annoying on the 15th
- I like the revive mechanic.
- You have to run as a pack, lone wolfing it just is a bad idea now.
- Cards now take an extra 30 minutes or so which I'm not a fan of.
- The spire is really neat. I like that everyone gets to visit the space, even if you don't make it to the top.

I'm dead tired otherwise I'd post more.

My team went 3-3 tonight.

It was fun, but not nearly as tense as the previous trials was. The map is really interesting, and makes me wonder if there will be a different (and NEW) map each week? The volume of pvp maps in this game is really, really large.

I'll say that I like the game mode being bomb setting/defusing. This makes the games shorter with less cat and mouse since the tension to either plant or disarm is always present.

The new pvp in general, however, is great, and makes for far better combat than D1's one-shot-fest.

I also like that anyone with a win can go to the spire. That's nice. And boy is it a cool, alien landscape. I'm digging it so far!

I didn't dislike it the way that you do, but I could never get a group to play Trials 1.1 anyway so maybe I don't know what I was missing.

Seems like a simple fix is to cut your own team from the into video. boom. half the length, people still see gear / Emotes

I would like revive to go from 15 sec lock out to 10 sec. Too few revives ever happened. (12 sec, maybe?)

I like the style of the spaces and the lady that throws me into the pit

I haven't been bitten by the Trials bug for D2 yet, but the lore has me wanting to get through it, just for my own satisfaction. That's the stuff I find really compelling.

~m